Urban contractual agreements as an adaptive governance strategy: under what conditions do they work in multi-level cooperation?

ABSTRACT

The Norwegian urban growth agreement (UGA) is a governance platform combining transport-infrastructure development with land-use and transport policy. It is a policy package of measures involving network cooperation between national, regional and local government levels established to coordinate transport and land-use development. Shared responsibility for goal achievement, autonomy and learning and adaptation as new knowledge and experience arise are clear prerequisites for the UGAs. This makes it relevant to investigate the conditions for the UGAs to work as an adaptive governance strategy because their central features are in line with the attributes of adaptive governance. Further, adaptive governance is an approach to handle complex problems like transport development issues. The study shows that UGAs have several strengths in terms of autonomy and learning. However, the multi-level cooperation in the UGAs is framed by complex underlying structures of roles and powers, which challenge the working and legitimacy of the governance structures. Multi-level adaptive governance processes like the UGAs require attention to issues of power and legitimacy. Securing transparency and democratic anchorage is paramount in bringing such processes in line with the intended benefits of adaptive governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Transport-reward schemes
• adaptive governance
• multi-level governance
• urban growth agreement

Acknowledgements

Funding from the Norwegian Research Council (project no. 258979) is highly appreciated. We are grateful to Gro Sandkjær Hanssen and Hege Hofstad for interesting discussions throughout the project and joint fieldwork, Karolina Isaksson for insightful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of the manuscript and Kristine Kern for discussions and suggestions related to the paper topic. We thank the project’s reference group members for their active contributions to this research. We would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers and the editor for insightful suggestions and comments on the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Hege Westskog is economist and senior researcher at CICERO – Center for International Climate Research, Oslo. Her research addresses policies and measures to transform towards a low emission society with a focus on the local level.

Helene Amundsen is human geographer and senior researcher at CICERO – Center for International Climate Research, Oslo. Her research focus is on transformation towards a low-emission society at the local level.

Petter Christiansen is political scientist and senior researcher at Institute of Transport Economics. His research focuses on policy processes, as well as acceptance and effects of environmental policy instruments.

Anders Tønnesen is human geographer and senior researcher at the Institute of Transport Economics, Oslo. His research focuses on environmental policy-making and climate-friendly urban development. Recent years he has paid particular attention to multilevel cooperation urban contractual agreements.

Notes

1 To facilitate reading, all three agreements described in this paper are labelled UGAs.

2 The adaptive governance concept is often used interchangeably with adaptive co-management in the literature (Plummer & Baird, 2013). We use adaptive governance to highlight the UGAs’ governance aspects.

3 To preserve the anonymity of the state informants, given their limited number, no further descriptions are given.

4 To preserve anonymity, the informant’s city region is omitted.

Additional information

Funding

Funding from the Norwegian Research Council (project no. 258979) is highly appreciated; Norges Forskningsråd.