Exploring the Emergence of Innovative Multi-Actor Collaborations toward a Progressive Urban Regime in Madrid (2015–2019)

Abstract

For the last decade, urban actors around the globe have been struggling to adapt to a post-crisis and austerity context through increasing social mobilization and experimentation, calling for an urban democracy renewal and challenging established neoliberal urban regimes and governance systems. This has triggered social innovations, in which novel collaborative formulas have been envisioned and implemented. In particular, civil-public collaborations (CPCs) have come to the fore as an empowering alternative to the well-established private–public partnerships (PPP). This article examines the conditions of possibility, enabling mechanisms and constraints for the emergence of innovative multi-actor collaborations (IMACs). For this aim, we developed a three-fold analytical framework combining social innovation, public governance, and urban regime theory. We applied this framework to the case of the so-called “government of change” in Madrid between 2015 and 2019. After exploring the pre-2015 context, the institutional innovations implemented once Ahora Madrid accessed the local government, and the post-2019 context, it points to the preconditions that allowed experimentation with IMAC, identifies the institutional mechanisms and governance innovations that support their emergence, and assesses to what extent and how power to act was created and used to accomplish urban regime change.

Innovative Multi-Actor Collaborations as Collective Actors and Institutionalized Spaces. The Case of Food Governance Transformation in Leuven (Belgium)

“…Fourth, the development and consolidation of Leuven2030 and the governance of the Food Strategy as IMACs and their achievements in Leuven can only be understood with regards to the trajectory of more than 25 years of local experimentation in multi-actor collaboration and building an AFN, catalyzed by specific compromises or impulses from local politicians in particular "crisis" moments. This reinforces the premise that the consolidation of IMACs builds on previous sedimentations of experimentation and benefits from the impulse of political will in specific windows of opportunity (Medina-García et al, 2021).…”

“…The tension between independence and creativity and the institutionalization of socially innovative initiatives is widely discussed in literature and focuses on the relevance of public actors and their relation to civil society actors (Vicari Haddock and Tornaghi, 2013). In this line, Medina-García et al (2021) find that the emergence of IMACs is facilitated when (1) previous sedimentation of civilpublic experimentation, (2) political will, and (3) champions within the local administration combine in specific "conflict" or "opportunity" moments around specific agendas. Supporting this premise, Martinelli (2013) defends that social innovation requires institutional(ized) spaces for experimentation and some level of public support for socially innovative initiatives that address issues related to public services and social justice.…”

“…Network governance, collaborative governance, and multi-actor experiments are gaining momentum, being promoted as the route to collectively addressing complex issues by mobilizing and integrating perspectives, efforts, and resources from different urban actors (Ansell and Gash, 2008;Ansell et al, 2020;Torfing et al, 2020). In this context, more and more IMACs are triggered and/or hosted by public administrations aiming to collectively build urban agendas and address complex urban challenges (Holemans et al, 2018;Puerari et al, 2018;Medina-García et al, 2021). Our objective is to explore how IMACs are established for the transformation of food systems, how collaboration is enacted within them and how food governance innovations affect and are affected by broader governance innovations at the urban level.…”

Global and Local Agendas: The Milan Urban Food Policy Pact and Innovative Sustainable Food Policies in Euro-Latin American Cities

“…The economic crisis of 2008 had a deep impact in the city, even more than the Spanish average, because the real estate sector had a lot of weight in the local economy [32]. Moreover, the agriculture sector had been engulfed in a deep crisis, due to the decline of aging farmers, the fall in the prices of agricultural products, and the loss of more than 45% of agricultural soils since 2009 due to urban pressure [37]. Therefore, as much as in Madrid, the influence of the "Letter for the Sovereignty of our Municipalities" was important.…”

“…Some of those previous actions had been developed by the innovative action of social activists and associations, such as community green gardens and school green gardens, which were later supported by the town hall (MI3, MI4). New innovative mechanisms were introduced to change food dynamics; for example, innovative public procurement was used to include ecological and local food at nursery schools, and social economy was introduced in the local food distribution in two peripherical neighborhoods thanks to the financial support of the MARES project selected as an Urban Innovative Action by the European Commission (MI4) [37][38][39].…”