Learning in urban climate governance: concepts, key issues and challenges

ABSTRACT

Over the past decade, diverse urban governance innovations and experiments have emerged with the declared aim to foster climate change mitigation and adaptation, involving actors at multiple levels and scales. This urban turn in environmental governance has been accompanied by normative claims and high expectations regarding a leading role of cities in coping with climate change. However, while time pressures for effective action are growing, little is known about the social learning processes involved in such urban climate governance innovations, and what they actually contribute to achieve the required transformations in urban systems. Therefore, this special issue presents eight selected papers that explore learning in urban climate governance practices in a variety of local, national and international contexts. Their findings point to a more ambiguous role of these practices as they tend to support incremental adjustments rather than deeper social learning for radical systemic change. Against this backdrop we propose a heuristic distinguishing basic modes and sources in governance learning that aims to facilitate future empirical research and comparison, thus filling a critical theory gap. Using this framework for interpretation illustrates that urban climate governance learning urgently requires more openness, parallel processes, exogenous sources, as well as novel meta-learning practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban governance
• climate change
• learning
• mitigation
• adaptation

Acknowledgements

On behalf of all participants at the INOGOV workshop we wish to thank Rob Imrie (Goldsmits, University of London), Kristine Kern (University of Potsdam), and Jonathan Davies (De Montfoort University) for their engagement during the workshop and for providing essential feedback to earlier versions of the papers included in this special section. We also thank the INOGOV organization for support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Marc Wolfram is Associate Professor for Urban Sustainability Transformations at the Department of Architecture, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon (South Korea). His research focus is on innovations in urban governance, policy, planning and design that enable and guide social-ecological-technological system change. Previously he held positions as a consultant and as a senior researcher on urban sustainability issues in Germany, collaborating closely with city networks and local governments from across Europe.

Jeroen van der Heijden is the inaugural Chair of Regulatory Practice at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He works at the intersection of regulation and governance, with a specific interest in regulatory stewardship and dynamic governance regimes. He previously held positions at the Australian National University (School of Regulation and Global Governance), the University of Amsterdam (College of Law), Delft University of Technology (Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management), and Wageningen University (Environmental Policy Group).

Sirkku Juhola is professor of urban environmental policy in the Ecosystems and Environment Research Programme at the University of Helsinki and leads the Urban Environmental Policy Research Group. She is also a guest professor at the Centre for Climate Science and Policy Research, Linköping University in Sweden. Her area of expertise is environmental and adaptation policy, in cities in particular and has led research projects in both developed and developing countries.

James Patterson is an Assistant Professor at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University, in the field of institutions and sustainability transformations. His work is situated at the intersection of political science, environmental studies, and institutional analysis, and focuses on urban climate change governance. This contributes to understanding institutions and their dynamics within changing social and environmental contexts.

ORCID

Marc Wolfram http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3070-0836

Notes

1 Followed by experiential (17%), organizational/loop (15%), collaborative (14%), policy/political (12%), transformative/adaptive (9%), and instrumental learning (7%).

2 The ‘Darwinian’ mode of experimentation (based on variation and selection) identified by Ansell and Bartenberger (2016) can also be understood as a combination of a parallel learning process with controlled and/or open learning.