Municipalities’ ambitions and practices: At risk of hypocritical sustainability transitions?

Astract

In contemporary planning discourse and practice, different planning ideas co-exists. How this affects the transition towards a sustainable development is an important question for both research and practice. The aim of this study is to explore potential conflicts between planning goals caught between growth-led planning and sustainability commitments in a case study of Fredericia, Denmark. The paper discusses the underlying, framing and controlling conditions for transition dynamics. The analysis builds largely on the formulated policies, strategies or national goal achievements towards sustainable futures. These are put in the context of planning and political practices, which are interpreted from a sustainability rationale. Here this study introduces hypocrisy as a theoretical-analytical perspective to dispute actual sustainability practices to respond to continuous ambivalent planning measures. The author concludes that disregarding the inherently different internal logics of growths and sustainability leads to planning paradoxes and impedes sustainable transitions pursued.

Key Words:

• Urban sustainability transitions
• sustainable mobility
• ambivalence in planning
• ecological modernization
• green growth
• token sustainability efforts
• hypocrisy

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the valuable comments of the peer reviewers of this journal and its editor, who offered sophisticated critique that led to profound improvement of this manuscript. Moreover, I would like to thank Petter Næss for critical discussions and comments underlying the thoughts presented here This paper builds partially on research conducted in my former PhD project at Aalborg University, Department of Development and Planning, Skibbrogade 5, DK-9000 Aalborg, Denmark.

Notes

1 Reverse efficiency effect, also known as Jevons’ Paradox (1871) or termed a rebound effect. The notion refers to the effect of, e.g., increasing the energy efficiency of something, with the consequence of cheaper prices, less emissions, etc., leading to increased demand and increased consumption in total. In the transport sector, rebound effects are often described as induced traffic (Litman, 2012).