Scaling urban sustainability experiments: Contextualization as an innovation

Climate changed urban futures: environmental politics in the anthropocene city

“…For those writing in the transition studies tradition, experiments and the niche innovations they produce are fundamentally regarded as a stepping stone towards a form of system change that involves the breakdown or removal of existing regimes and their replacement with novel socio-technical configurations developed within niches. Experiments in this sense are regarded as spatially and temporally discrete moments that provide the testing, breeding, and learning grounds for widespread system change, and the central challenge that must be overcome is the scaling up of experiments (Karvonen 2018, Davidson et al 2019, Peng et al 2019. In contrast, research on urban experimentation as a mode of governing and a form of politics suggests instead that we may be witnessing the emergence of the 'city of permanent experiments', such that 'experiments might not simply serve as one-off trials to provide evidence and justification for new low-carbon policies, regulations, and service provision through existing circuits of policymaking and regulation.…”

Positive inertia and proactive influencing towards sustainability: systems analysis of a frontrunner city

“…Bai et al (2010) proposed a five-tier analytical framework of triggers, barriers, actors, linkages and pathways in examining urban sustainability experiments, which can help highlight bottlenecks as well as factors of success. Successful experiments that support transition require a variety of interlinked actors to realign themselves and coordinate financial and institutional resources (Peng et al 2019). Social networks crossing various levels and organisations are crucial to utilizing knowledge to adapt to events (Peng and Bai 2018;Laakso et al 2017).…”

“…This is problematic as rapid urbanisation is taking place in Asia and polycentric urban environmental governance, which has been presented as the key to transition, has been studied only in a few cities, with little exploration of this approach in the Asian region (van der Heijden 2018). More recently, some studies focusing on Asia have highlighted conservative development pathways, with challenges in systems thinking and sustainability foresight, and demonstrated an important role for urban sustainability experimentation (Bai et al 2010;Peng and Bai 2018;Peng et al 2019;Wolfram 2019). While these studies have advanced our understanding on the importance of experimentations at city level, they emphasise the need for better insight into transition in the Asian region and the system level dynamics and mechanisms underlying the many urban sustainability experiments and their linkages across cities.…”

“…In terms of researching such linkages, most of the existing studies looking at the influence of frontrunner cities on others have focused on passive influencing, i.e. how others can learn from the innovative practices, and how the practice has been adopted and mainstreamed by others (see for example, Bai et al 2010;Peng et al 2019;Gerlak et al 2018). The internal dynamics and mechanisms through which a frontrunner city can proactively influence others remain unclear.…”

“…Furthermore, cross-city learning is complex and innovative practices are often not being transferred to the majority of cities (Campbell 2009)with challenges including a lack of openness and unclear social learning processes (Wolfram et al 2018). In a recent study exploring the scaling process of urban sustainability experiments, Peng et al (2019) found that contextualization often requires distinctive configurations to be formed, which is an innovation in itself. To fully understand the role of frontrunner cities in cross-city learning, it is important to examine the cross-city linkages through both the frontrunner city perspective as well as through the perspectives of partner cities.…”