Suchergebnisse

The ways in which institutions are reconfigured to change mainstream selection pressures to favour sustainability is central to research on sustainability transitions but has only recently begun to receive more attention. Of this existing work, empirical attention has mainly focused on the national level with less attention to local dynamics. Attending to this gap, we mobilise theory on institutionalisation processes and insights from the politics of transitions literature and take an actor perspective to investigate the agency of local sustainability initiatives to navigate local governance processes and reconfigure selection environments at the urban scale. Our work subsequently demonstrates the importance of diverse actor tactics, of networking for advocacy and of networking for the creation of informal, ad hoc governance arenas.

City-regions as sites of sustainability transitions have remained under-explored so far. With our comparative analysis of five diverse European city-regions, we offer new insights on contemporary sustainability transitions at the urban level. In a similar vein, the pre-development and the take-off phase of sustainability transitions have been studied in depth while the acceleration phase remains a research gap. We address this research gap by exploring how transitions can move beyond the seeding of alternative experiments and the activation of civil society initiatives. This raises the question of what commonalities and differences can be found between urban sustainability transitions. In our explorative study, we employ a newly developed framework of the acceleration mechanisms of sustainability transitions. We offer new insights on the multi-phase model of sustainability transitions. Our findings illustrate that there are no clear demarcations between the phases of transitions. From the perspective of city-regions, we rather found dynamics of acceleration, deceleration, and stagnation to unfold in parallel. We observed several transitions—transitions towards both sustainability and un-sustainability—to co-evolve. This suggests that the politics of persistence—the inertia and path dependencies of un-sustainability—should be considered in the study of urban sustainability transitions

City-regions as sites of sustainability transitions have remained under-explored so far. With our comparative analysis of five diverse European city-regions, we offer new insights on contemporary sustainability transitions at the urban level. In a similar vein, the pre-development and the take-off phase of sustainability transitions have been studied in depth while the acceleration phase remains a research gap. We address this research gap by exploring how transitions can move beyond the seeding of alternative experiments and the activation of civil society initiatives. This raises the question of what commonalities and differences can be found between urban sustainability transitions. In our explorative study, we employ a newly developed framework of the acceleration mechanisms of sustainability transitions. We offer new insights on the multi-phase model of sustainability transitions. Our findings illustrate that there are no clear demarcations between the phases of transitions. From the perspective of city-regions, we rather found dynamics of acceleration, deceleration, and stagnation to unfold in parallel. We observed several transitions-transitions towards both sustainability and un-sustainability-to co-evolve. This suggests that the politics of persistence-the inertia and path dependencies of un-sustainability-should be considered in the study of urban sustainability transitions.

Understanding the diversifying role of civil society in Europe's sustainability pathway is a valid proposition both scientifically and socially. Civil society organisations already play a significant role in the reality of cities, what remains to be explored is the question: what is the role of civil society in the future sustainability of European cities? We first examine the novelty of new forms of civil society organization based on a thorough review of recent case studies of civil society initiatives for sustainable transitions across a diversity of European projects and an extensive literature review. We conceptualize a series of roles that civil society plays and the tensions they entail. We argue that, civil society initiatives can pioneer new social relations and practices therefore be an integral part of urban transformations and can fill the void left by a retreating welfare state, thereby safeguarding and servicing social needs but also backing up such a rolling back of the welfare state. It can act as a hidden innovator—contributing to sustainability but remaining disconnected from the wider society. Assuming each of these roles can have unintended effects, such as being proliferated by political agendas, which endanger its role and social mission, and can be peeled off to serve political agendas resulting in its disempowerment and over-exposure. We conclude with a series of implications for future research on the roles of civil society in urban sustainability transitions.