Governing Urban and Regional Transformations through Sustainability

Dear Colleagues,

Years of practice and experiments in urban and regional governance guided by sustainability principles have been crucial to enlarging the options and possibilities for imagining and implementing policies and projects to effectively contrast the current socio-ecological crisis. New forms of governance, such as adaptive or based on coproduction, have enriched the well-established framework of action and emphasized the need to construct a productive bond between sustainability and governance through social innovation or new institutional design. Climate change, with its focus on adaptation and resilience, has enlarged the spectrum of thoughts and actions required to cope with this specific issue. Nevertheless, several forms of criticism have accompanied the implementation and evolution of these different theories and practices of governance, problematizing their efficacy in activating effective processes of urban and regional sustainability. The ambiguous character of sustainability has raised questions concerning its validity as a conceptual framework, enabling the adoption of transformative approaches in governing further socio-environmental urban and regional transformations. Governing for sustainability requires innovations both in theory and in practice that could highlight the uneven distribution of knowledge and power, a depoliticised use of concepts, the instrumental use of democracy while undergirding genuine attentiveness to the environment, as well as social sustainability.

This seems to be particularly relevant in a context in which politics and policies promoting the transformation of cities and regions aimed at contrasting environmental crises orient towards technological green solutions that show signs of indifference to sustainability.

What is the role played by the wide interpretation landscape that operationalizes the sustainability of urban and regional interventions and policies?

Notwithstanding the clear vision regarding the availability of resources for future generations, the prevailing technological approaches responding to socio-environmental crises seem to jeopardize the path towards sustainability, making the concept itself somehow weaker and empty. The soundness of the vision appears substituted by the large and even conflictual debate on the “ways to”, thus causing critical delays in the global response. 

What is the optimum governance scale to deal effectively with the sustainability challenge?

An challenge is posed regarding the scale of the governance and the growing need for synergic efforts at a global scale. The many and different governance models developed to enhance the response to the socio-environmental crises are not homogeneous among different sectors and decision-making levels, giving rise to diverging pathways of transformations towards sustainability.

What and whose vision, if any, is governing the transition? The role of visions is returning to the core of debates with regard decisions, actions, and policies. Visions may play enable synergies, and activate “trading zones” as opportunity spaces for synergic actions and more effective actions. Visions are needed at different scales to reshape, or activate, dialogues between the global and local, between the collective and individual, and between here and there. Visions currently governing the transition do not appear deeply and widely shared. They appear to be shaped by approaches oriented to solutions, which are very often technical solutions; therefore, they appear to be very weak regarding the principles of time and equity.

We look forward to receiving your contributions addressing these or other challenges through both theoretical and empirical research.

Prof. Dr. Valeria Monno
Dr. Grazia Concilio
Prof. Dr. Francesco Musco
Guest Editors

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• governance
• transition
• innovation
• transformative capacity
• climate change
• urban and environmental regeneration
• policy making and planning ontologies and ecologies