Enhancing Urban Brownfield Regeneration to Pursue Sustainable Community Outcomes through Dynamic Performance Governance

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the case of Puerto Madero (Buenos Aires, Argentina) to illustrate how the “Dynamic Performance Governance” framework is able to support policy networks to pursue sustainable community outcomes in urban brownfield regeneration. The case is an example of successful implementation of urban renewal carried out through a significant involvement of the private sector. It portrays a “financially-driven” governance mode which entails balancing the advantage of cash flow reinvestment for public services and infrastructure capacity development, with potential shortcomings in terms of social inclusion. Findings reveal two main trade-offs associated with policy design and implementation. A first trade-off is between pursuing a fast and intensive renovation pace in the short run, and the possibility to earn future capital gains that might be enabled by a high local area attractiveness. Another trade-off is related to the allocation of space. Even though an intensive business presence may contribute to increase the attractiveness of the place, a too high growth in the number of companies located in the area may saturate urban space, which would reduce the attractiveness for further business investments. Through the analyzed case, the paper illustrates how Dynamic Performance Governance may enables a policy network to assess the outcomes of designed and implemented strategies aimed at generating public value. This is possible by bridging three fields of research and practice that have been traditionally kept separated: performance management, governance, and system dynamics. The use of systems approaches in outcome-based performance management improves the quality of performance reports, accountability, governance, and policy design.

KEYWORDS:

• Dynamic performance governance
• urban brownfield regeneration
• sustainable community outcomes
• Puerto Madero

Notes

1. Policy networks are sets of formal institutional and informal linkages between governmental and other actors structured around shared if endlessly negotiated beliefs and interests in public policy-making and implementation (Rhodes, 2017, p. 37). A similar concept is implicit in the definition of “governance network” provided by Klijn (2008, p. 511), as “public policy making and implementation between a web of relationships between government, business and civil society actors.”

2. Collaboration has been remarked as an important lever to manage policy networks. In fact, “opposing stakeholders can work together in a collaborative way” (Rhodes, 2017, p. 84). This requires that forums are initiated and carried out by the public sector (Ansell & Gash, 2007) through the collaborative leadership of “local entrepreneurs” (Rhodes, 2017, p. 84), so to foster consensus among stakeholders in policy design and implementation.

3. This practice is related to different strands, such as: (1) organizational relationships within and beyond the public sector (networks, partnerships, coordination mechanisms); (2) participation and citizen engagement in performance feedback; (3) focus on outcomes, public value, trust in government, and social capital, (4) information sharing, and (5) joint responsibility/shared accountability.

4. The term “outside-in” is here used with a different meaning from that which is used in: Ansell and Gash (2007), as one of the classical explanations of implementation failure.

5. In the field of system dynamics, positive and negative feedback processes are often described via causal loop diagrams that are maps of the cause and effect relationship between individual system variables that, when linked, form closed loops. The overall polarity of a feedback loop – that is, whether the loop itself is positive or negative – in a causal loop diagram is indicated by a symbol in its center. An “R” indicates a reinforcing loop and defines a self-reinforcing process; a “B” indicates a balancing loop and represents goal-seeking behavior (see: Sterman, 2000, p. 12–14).

6. As illustrated in section 2, performance drivers are gauged through ratios, whose denominator is the benchmark against which the current endowment of relevant strategic resources is compared.