Transforming urban climate governance

 
In her PhD research, DRIFTer Katharina Hölscher studied and compared how climate change is being addressed in two so-called ‘frontrunner’ cities: Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and New York City, USA. She derived critical lessons about how to develop new capacities for transformative climate governance to systematically and holistically address the challenges posed by climate change while also contributing to creating better cities overall. Her key proposition is to fundamentally transform urban governance so as to facilitate integrative, inclusive and learning-based responses.  
 
Climate change will alter the face of cities in a dramatic way. On the one hand, climate change exemplifies the unsustainability of current urban development pathways: activities and behaviours in cities are key contributors to high levels of greenhouse gas emissions, propelling the urgency for radical and sustainable change. On the other hand, urban hazards brought about by climate change – including changing temperature patterns, heat waves, drought, sea-level rise and heavy storms – will increase in severity and frequency, and they will fundamentally challenge urban infrastructures, the built environment, ecosystems and living patterns. To make things worse, besides climate change, people in cities struggle with a number of other challenges, including pollution, waste and poverty, which interact with and are amplified by climate change.
 

‘In other words: Climate action is largely ineffective, because existing urban governance is not able to address complex problems like climate change.’

 
In my PhD research, I developed a transformative perspective on urban climate governance. My main aim was to contribute to an understanding about what transformative climate governance could look like and how it can be strengthened vis-à-vis existing urban governance regimes. My starting point was that cities need to develop new capacities for transformative climate governance overcome the current disconnect between the narrated opportunities and on-the-ground practice in cities. This disconnect signifies a mismatch between historically grown urban governance systems and contemporary and complex problems such as climate change. In other words: Climate action is largely ineffective, because existing urban governance is not able to address complex problems like climate change.
 
I argue that in order to address climate change systematically and effectively, climate change needs to be linked to other sustainability priorities in cities. I propose transformative climate governance as a normative vision that is not any more about ‘climate change’ as add-on priority. It means that urban governance overall is able to contribute to the transformation required for dealing with climate change and unsustainability in cities. I developed a framework of four capacities for transformative climate governance and traced whether, how and by whom capacities of transformative climate governance have been created in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and New York City, USA.
 
The challenge: steering urban transformations under climate change
Climate change and cities are inextricably linked: the majority of global GHG emissions is produced by activities, behaviours and resource demands in, or driven by, cities, while urban populations, infrastructures and ecosystems (already) face severe risks as a result of climate change impacts. Climate action in cities is therefore an imperative, but the drivers and impacts of climate change in cities cannot be viewed in isolation from other stresses and pressures today’s cities face. Cities increasingly have to grapple with a variety of interrelated challenges, including pollution, waste, poverty and inequality, inadequate or ageing infrastructure, poor water quality, access to and high quality service delivery and social tensions.
 
This makes clear that we cannot fight climate change without considering other sustainability challenges. Vulnerabilities to climate change impacts in cities result from and are reinforced by residential choices, infrastructure policies, structural inequalities and land and real estate markets. For example, many cities are located on flood-plains, in dry areas or on coasts, but existing water management systems are not able to store excessive storm water. Economically disadvantaged groups and minorities tend to live in more hazard-prone parts of cities, while having less resources to prepare for impacts. Addressing climate change thus demands attention to synergies and trade-offs across different priorities, risks and social groups. Even measures to adapt to climate change can have negative impacts on other challenges. The High Line in New York City – an old train track, which has been transformed into an urban park – has also contributed to the gentrification of the neighbourhood and made housing unaffordable for many former residents.
 
Against this background, a new narrative of sustainable and resilient urban transformations has been gaining ground in scientific and policy discourses. From this perspective, climate action can create opportunities to re-think how we plan and live in cities, for example by changing how we design buildings and by introducing green spaces that are accessible to everyone. Rather than succumbing to a pessimistic view on cities as culprits and victims of unsustainability and climate change, this narrative epitomises the hope that cities provide rich opportunities for delivering radical and integrative climate action that directly acts on the sources of emissions and climate-related vulnerabilities and delivers the profound changes in urban energy, transportation, water use, land use, consumption patterns and lifestyles that are needed to ensure wellbeing in cities and beyond. For example, nature-based solutions can next to facilitating climate adaptation through storm water retention and heat mitigation also strengthen local communities, polish recreation spaces, and enhance biodiversity and mental health.
 
Urban climate governance to date: between innovation…
In the last decades, as national progress continues to lag, climate action in cities has become formally recognised as a vital part of the global response to climate change and pressing sustainability challenges. Governance initiatives in cities to address climate change have started to proliferate in the 1990s and often go above and beyond the ambitions set by their respective nation states. For example, the city of Sydney seeks to cut emissions by 70 percent from 2006 levels by 2030. New York City aims to cut by 80 percent below 2005 levels by 2050. Both ambitions are more than double than those of their respective countries. The New Urban Agenda, which was adopted in Quito in October 2016 at Habitat III, envisions the creation of sustainable and equitable cities by changing how cities are planned, managed and inhabited. It symbolises the UN’s recognition of urbanisation as a permanent driver of development and expresses the ambition to harness the opportunities provided by cities for living sustainable in an increasingly urban future.
 

‘Resilience has become a key lens to approach climate change adaptation, which broadens the scope of action from ‘climate-proofing’ to protect valuable assets to enhancing wellbeing and social cohesion.’

 
To identify sources of emissions and opportunities for reductions, many cities have created baseline GHG emissions inventories and sustainability portfolios. Measures to reduce municipal and residential emissions include initiatives to improve energy efficiencies in built infrastructures, encourage alternative modes of transportation, lifestyles and urban food production, and integrate green infrastructure into the urban landscape for carbon sequestration. Urban climate adaptation has received more recent, yet significantly growing attention in response to more frequent and often more severe occurrences of extreme events, including intense rains and floods, hurricanes, storm surges and heat waves. Adaptation measures include soft or hard infrastructure changes. For example, cool pavements and roofs are installed, urban vegetation is increased, electricity installations in flood areas are heightened and sea walls or levees are constructed to reduce the risk of floods and heat waves. Nature-based solutions or ecosystem-based adaptation, including natural wetlands restoration or river re-naturalisation, become increasingly popular as more cost-efficient, multifunctional and flexible approaches than ‘hard adaptation’. Resilience has become a key lens to approach climate change adaptation, which broadens the scope of action from ‘climate-proofing’ to protect valuable assets to enhancing wellbeing and social cohesion.
 
… and deadlock due to urban governance barriers
However, even when all these efforts manifest in new solutions, narratives, practices and institutions, so far they are only little drops in a bucket compared to the ongoing negative impacts of unsustainable city planning, infrastructures and lifestyles. For example, continued investments in maladaptive infrastructures such as new housing developments in flood-prone areas are at odds with the implementation of climate-resilient building codes and flood zones. Similarly, many climate adaptation measures are technological interventions to reduce hazard exposure and vulnerability of buildings and infrastructures without accounting for the social, cultural, economic, political and institutional characteristics of cities. Such measures fail to address issues related to the long-term uncertainties as well as unequal burdens of climate impacts.
 
The shortcomings of urban climate governance to date are symptoms of a deeper running problem: they are symptoms of urban governance that is out-of-step with contemporary problems and demands for systemic, long-term and flexible solutions and responses. Because mainstream governance arrangements have hardly changed, urban climate governance efforts run against a complex web of diverse responsibilities, ill-suited national policies and paradigms of economic efficiency. The majority of existing incentive structures and regulations still favour short-term economic interests and investments, pre-empting co-beneficial protection from long-term risks and decisive phase-out of the root causes of emissions and sustainability. As a result, action for climate change frequently draws the short straw when competing with ‘pressing’ urban needs and it relies on easy investments in low-hanging fruits that do not fundamentally question existing behaviours and interests.
 
In summary, climate action is largely ineffective, because existing urban governance is not able to address complex problems like climate change:
 

• Firstly, existing governance approaches opt to maximise efficiency and economic wins in the short-term for politicians to be re-elected and for companies to make profit, rather than promoting radical change in the long-term. This hinders mainstreaming the ambitious strategic goals, and reinforces unsustainable investments – e.g. in building developments in flood-prone areas.
• Secondly, knowledge and expertise are often compartmentalised and separated into different issue areas and sectors such as energy, buildings and water. This makes it hard to exchange knowledge, develop collaborations and to pool resources for synergies e.g. across different sectors beyond the coalitions of the willing that is currently driving climate action.
• The third barrier is the rigid procedures and rules that pre-determine problems and solutions in a narrow way. This leaves no room for experimenting with and learning about innovative solutions that have by definition more open ended results. Innovations often remain stand-alone initiatives, while most urban development processes continue business-as-usual.

 
A vision for transformative climate governance
One of the key challenges for addressing climate change and achieving sustainability and resilience in cities is the transformation of urban governance itself. I put forth a vision for transformative climate governance as an ideal-type and normative approach for addressing climate change in the context of urban transformations towards sustainability and resilience. My main aim was to contribute to an understanding about what transformative climate governance could look like and how it can be developed and strengthened vis-à-vis existing urban governance institutions and practices.
 
The perspective of urban transformations makes clear that climate mitigation and adaptation cannot be approached any more as isolated objectives. Instead, climate mitigation and adaptation should be considered part of the quest for broader urban transformations towards sustainability and resilience. This embedding opens up opportunities for integrating mitigation and adaptation with other goals associated with societal and environmental wellbeing and to contribute to the radical changes needed to achieve these goals. This is what I termed transformative climate governance: transformative climate governance allows actors to develop climate mitigation and adaptation actions that achieve deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, facilitate adaptation to the impacts of climate change and increase social and environmental wellbeing within planetary boundaries.
 
Therefore, achieving the transformation of urban governance to enable transformative climate governance requires the better understanding and strengthening of the type of governance capacities that are needed for facilitating those actions that can purposefully contribute to the transformation required for dealing with climate change and unsustainability in cities.
 
I developed a framework that identifies four capacities for transformative climate governance. Rather than controlling change, the capacities facilitate responses that mobilise and respond to the dynamics influencing change, inertia and risks in cities.
 

• Stewarding capacity facilitates flexible responses to deal with uncertainty and protect and recover from risks and surprises such as heavy storms or heat waves.
• Unlocking capacity removes the root causes, including existing infrastructures, values, behaviours and power relations, that drive high emissions and unsustainability.
• Transformative capacity enables the development and spreading of new narratives, solutions and practices that provide alternatives for creating sustainable and resilient cities.
• Orchestrating capacity is about the coordination of actors to ensure that all their activities are aligned towards shared long-term goals and in this way create stepping stones and synergies for transformations.

 
My framework of capacities for transformative climate governance re-defines purposes, conditions, and processes of governance that is attuned to urban transformations. By explaining what the governance capacities look like and how they are came to be, it is possible to identify, evaluate and strengthen the conditions that need to be put in place for enabling transformative climate governance in cities. The capacities framework thus aids governance learning: how do actors drive urban climate governance, which conditions result from their activities, and how can capacities for transformative climate governance be strengthened further?
 
Capacities for transformative climate governance
 

 
Towards transformative climate governance in Rotterdam and New York City?
Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and New York City, USA, are examples of cities providing global leadership and setting a standard for climate change adaptation and mitigation with ambitious and cross-cutting climate, sustainability and resilience goals and agendas and a portfolio of innovative and systemic solutions for climate mitigation and adaptation. I traced climate governance in both cities to generate empirical insights on how urban climate governance is developing and to derive recommendations on how to strengthen capacities for transformative climate governance. I could identify the successful conditions and activities that supported the cities’ innovative approaches. I could also reveal capacity gaps, which are visible in the little on-the-ground effect so far.
 
In Rotterdam, climate change was introduced in the city government’s agenda in 2007 with the Mayor’s goal to reduce CO₂-emissions by 50% in 2025 compared to 1990 and the launch of the Rotterdam Climate Initiative. Concomitantly, the goal to become climate-proof by 2025 was formulated. This involved reframing the perception of water as a threat towards recognising climate adaptation as opportunity for improving the city’s social and economic attractiveness. Until today, the climate change focus was successively expanded towards sustainability, liveability and, most recently, resilience. This strategic approach was institutionalised in the city government’s cross-cutting Sustainability and Climate Adaptation Offices that coordinate and develop climate, resilience and sustainability-related actions. The city gained international recognition particularly through its high-profile proof-of-concept experiments such as  the Benthemplein water square, which combines rainwater management with area development, the multifunctional underground water storage facility at Museumplein car park and the Floating Pavilion in the City Ports area.
 

Figure: The Benthemplein water square in Rotterdam in use as a community square during a church service in May 2015 (source: private 2015)
 
What does transformative climate governance look like in Rotterdam and New York City?
Both cities have developed an integrated governance approach to climate mitigation and adaptation within long-term sustainability and resilience goals and strategies, which crosses multiple policy sectors and domains (e.g. transport, energy, health, justice), involves a variety of actors and facilitates innovative solutions. This integration reflects the recognition that climate mitigation and adaptation need to be approached as opportunities for improving liveability and wellbeing and that they are long-term concerns, thus requiring long-term perspectives. It facilitates systemic, long-term, learning-based and co-creative initiatives to address climate change, sustainability and resilience.
 
The following overarching features mark the climate governance approaches in both cities. They signify shifts in governance and indicate opportunities for transforming urban (climate) governance:
 

• Integrated actions to reduce emissions, adapt to climate impacts and improve overall sustainability and resilience in line with long-term and systemic goals: In both cities, actions and interventions are developed and implemented in an integrated way, which means relations between climate and other policy priorities and goals are identified to create synergies and avoid trade-offs.
• Experimental approach to co-create innovative, multi-functional and long-term solutions: In Rotterdam and NYC, (institutional, regulatory etc.) space outside of conventional governance practice has been created to bring various actors together and co-create and trial novel practices, approaches and solutions. This has facilitated the development and implementation of multi-functional innovations that depart from control-style policies and interventions and deliver on long-term benefits and emphasise learning.
• New coordinating roles and structures within local governments: The integrated approaches to climate change, sustainability and resilience – also including for example health, equity and biodiversity regeneration – have been embedded within new institutional and organisational structures of the city government. Particularly the cross-departmental Climate and Sustainability Offices in Rotterdam and the Mayor’s Office for Recovery and Resiliency and the Mayor’s Office for Sustainability in NYC are the main actors responsible for ensuring and overseeing integrated measures. They establish and collaborate with diverse networks and partnerships to enable cross-boundary and cross-sectoral implementation.
• Multi-actor involvement and coordination in defining and implementing climate mitigation, climate adaptation, sustainability and resilience goals and agendas: A diversity of cross-sectoral, cross-scale and public-private partnerships and networks, including regional and national knowledge programmes, research partnerships, research-industry collaborations and private stakeholder platforms, advance the generation of knowledge, the formulation of strategies and agendas and the development of innovative solutions.
• New role for systemic and multifaceted knowledge to enable knowledge-based decision-making and planning: Decision-making and planning in both cities builds on a vast knowledge base about long-term risks, uncertainty and historical, present and future drivers of unsustainability and climate change risks and vulnerabilities. The type of knowledge that is generated builds on integrating multiple perspectives (e.g. from actors across sectors and scales as well as from diverse societal spheres).
• Fit-to-context and fit-for-purpose approaches to make decisions and plan in line with context and issue-specific needs: Rather than taking sectoral approaches to planning and decision-making, fit-to-context and fit-for-purpose are adopted that put problem-based and systemic approaches into practice: e.g. in specific neighbourhoods, related to specific issues (e.g. buildings) and taking cross-scale dynamics into account.

 
So what? Lessons on and recommendations for transforming urban (climate) governance
Both Rotterdam and New York City have developed an integrated governance approach to climate mitigation and adaptation within long-term sustainability and resilience goals and strategies, which crosses multiple policy sectors and domains (e.g. transport, energy, health, justice), involves a variety of actors and facilitates innovative solutions. This approach has created opportunities for improving liveability and wellbeing in the long-term and in line with local needs.  
 
However, it is obvious that even in cities that have become recognised internationally as frontrunners in addressing climate change, sustainability and resilience, these types of integrated and experimental approaches still only take place at the fringes of urban governance. In Rotterdam and NYC, an initial momentum has been created by envisioning long-term and integrated strategies and goals and by experimenting with novel solutions and approaches. Yet, there seems to be a disconnect between the novel type of urban climate governance activities and the existing urban governance systems. In both cities, the capacities for transformative climate governance have been largely developed in ad hoc and often informal way next to existing urban governance. As a result, the capacities still represent niches within the overall governance architecture in both cities and the emerging transformative approaches tend to be still subordinate to business-as-usual interests and policy and planning approaches, which favour isolated, incremental and short-term responses. The majority of existing incentive structures and regulations still favour short-term economic interests and investments, pre-empting co-beneficial protection from long-term risks and decisive phase-out of the root causes of emissions and sustainability. This perpetuates counteracting investments (e.g. building developments in flood-prone areas) and undermines the contribution of innovative solutions into the policy mix as they remain disconnected from mainstream policy and planning. For example, this becomes visible in the challenge to instigate truly political discussions about sensitive issues such as planned retreat, stranded assets and lifestyle changes, which affect powerful economic interests (e.g. of building developers) as well as the intrinsic values and identities of local communities.
 
I summarise four key lessons that need further attention to proactively develop capacities for transformative climate governance.
 
Lesson #1: Not (only) about climate change: shared visions for sustainable and resilient cities
Given that climate change is a cross-cutting issue it requires problem-based and fit-to-context approaches that address multiple interacting and interfering dynamics and goals. The strategic visions for sustainability and resilience that were formulated in Rotterdam and New York City are special. They give new narratives and orientations for what is important for the cities in the long-term. They fit climate action like lego stones within that bigger picture.
 
This enables to start from specific and systemic problems and promote collaboration for synergies to create stepping stones for transformative change. In other words, successful urban governance that navigates urban sustainability and resilience transformations under climate change is not about prioritising rigid goals, but focuses on negotiation and synergies. Co-creation and social learning are shown to be key mechanisms for achieving shared alignment towards common goals.
 
But the problem is not the lack of visions and ambitions. These strategic agendas and visions need be clearly prioritised to put words into action. This also means that tough decisions need to be made to dis-incentivise unsustainable practices and behaviours that favour short-term interests and siloed decision-making. This represents a major gap in research and practice: so far, governance action shies away from making hard choices and ‘taking away’ what is there, which might cause considerable opposition and conflict. Eroding existing incentive structures to make novel and sustainable technologies more (financially) viable and attractive, opening up dominant actor networks towards new actors, and building political and societal support networks have shown to be critical mechanisms for unlocking.
 
Lesson #2: Acting in concert: orchestrating collaboration towards shared visions
Transforming cities requires everyone to act in line with the long-term goals. The city governments in Rotterdam and New York City put in place Sustainability and Climate Adaptation Offices that sit across all departments, to ensure and oversee progress and impacts of climate initiatives, develop new partnerships and collect and distribute knowledge. Chief Resilience Officers have the formal mandate to ensure that climate change and resilience are integrated into policy and planning processes.
 
These are examples of orchestrating mechanisms for enhancing coordination and collaboration towards the shared vision. Orchestration is critical for initiating, mobilising, overseeing and integrating urban (climate) governance processes, decisions and investments in line with long-term, systemic and inclusive objectives and across scales and sectors.
 
But orchestrating takes time and requires new skills. To ensure outreach and alignment, cities need to invest more in organisational resources, such as staff, time and skills, for communicating and trust-building to ensure continuity and outreach. It also means relying on intermediaries, such as knowledge institutes and non-governmental organisations. For example, in New York City, the Science and Resilience Institute @ Jamaica Bay (SRI@JB) mediates scientific and community knowledge between universities, local communities and public agencies by creating an informal space that is not politicised to share ideas and concerns, doing transdisciplinary research and introducing research results into the discussion.
 
Lesson #3: Attention to the process: mainstreaming experimentation & reflexive learning
Dealing with complex problems requires new processes to generate innovative and inclusive solutions and practices. In Rotterdam and NYC, (institutional, regulatory etc.) space outside of conventional governance practice has been created to bring various actors together and co-create and trial novel practices, approaches and solutions. This has facilitated the development and implementation of multi-functional innovations that depart from control-style policies and interventions and deliver on long-term benefits and emphasise learning.
 
For example, the Benthenplein water square in Rotterdam was designed in an open-ended process that involved the local community to ensure that the design of the square would meet their needs next to managing rainwater. The square is indeed used as a community space during an open-air church service.
 
However, innovations often remain stand-alone initiatives, while most urban development processes continue business-as-usual. To move beyond isolated innovations, cities need to nurture an inclusive and reflexive learning culture and skills to strengthen experimentation, and especially learning from experimentation to connect the innovations to other urban development processes.
 
Lesson #4: Partnering up: partnerships with local communities
There are a lot of new partnerships and networks that participate in climate action. What makes these collaborations special is that they involve diverse actors – different city departments, regional and national governments, research institutes, community groups and business associations, to name only a few.
 
Knowledge partnerships include collaborations and programmes that bring together actors from local, regional and national governments, academia, businesses and local communities to generate issue-specific knowledge at different scales (e.g. regional, communities). For example, the Dutch Knowledge for Climate supported knowledge generation on water safety risks in unembanked areas in Rotterdam. The NYC Panel on Climate Change (NPCC) is a collaboration of research institutes in NYC to report on climate risks and adaptation needs.
 
Public-private partnerships have diverse contributions to climate governance in Rotterdam and NYC; they serve to mediate interests between diverse actors, pool resources and develop and implement interventions, and lobby for political and societal support. In the NYC Green Codes Task Force, for example, allowing for the involvement of key actor groups (e.g. large homeowner associations) to make recommendations for the building and construction code changes was critical for the buy-in to the adaptation of building codes in the Greener Greater Buildings Plan.In Rotterdam, the Floating Pavilion Partnership brought together actors from knowledge institutes, the local government, private companies and local communities to create knowledge on floating developments and implement the Floating Pavilion pilot project.
 
I want to especially highlight strategic community partnerships. Community engagement and participatory planning processes are increasingly employed to access local knowledge, gain support and foster resilient neighbourhoods. Awareness raising activities increase knowledge about risks and support for innovation and changing practices. However, despite the promise of the diversity of actors and networks, the interactions among actors and the effectiveness of their actions continue to be constrained by conflicts, organisational culture and structure and limited experience with, resources for and knowledge about devising effective participatory climate governance mechanisms.
 
Strategically building alliances between local communities and local governments could be a powerful way for ensuring that local knowledge and needs are accounted for, and for empowering citizens to participate in the creation of better cities – for example by taking care of street trees. The role played by this type of organisations was especially illustrated in NYC, where neighbourhoods with strong community organisations, such as Redhook, benefited from their substantial support in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy when local, state and federal agencies struggled with providing relief. The Rotterdam Resilience Strategy has identified community initiatives that could be connected to the city’s resilience efforts. The NYC Parks Department engages communities in maintaining the city’s green, for example through the GreenThumb programme. However, despite these starting collaborations, overall community-based organisations feel insufficiently included by the local governments in Rotterdam and NYC.
 
Transforming urban (climate) governance?
My thesis ultimately presents a normative governance vision and a future research agenda for radically re-building urban governance to tackle the urgent climate change challenge within the next decade and build a better future that opens up new opportunities for human and environmental wellbeing. The lessons I discussed provide ways forward also for other cities about how to develop capacities for transformative climate governance.
 
The main future challenge I want to emphasise is moving beyond the sort of ‘popcorn innovation’. The new capacities were developed in very ad hoc and informal ways: they pop up like popcorn and, its tasty, but if you don’t pay attention they kind of jump everywhere, creating a mess. Because the capacities are not yet formalised – or actually even recognised – in mainstream governance practice, they are not able to provide continuity to counter the tendency to favour short-term wins and keep what we have.
 
My capacities framework provides a tool to explain, evaluate and support the transformation of urban governance. Transforming urban governance will help to make the visions for sustainable and resilient cities a reality. Whether a (governance) vision for sustainable and resilient urban and global futures can be achieved, and more specifically whether the capacities for doing so will be created, depends to a large degree on the existing political system and the attitudes of people choosing political leaders. What I hope the capacities framework and the generated empirical insights bring to this vision is to guide concrete reflection on how to co-create the conditions for collectively developing and actively working towards shared visions.
 
Citation
Hölscher, K. (2019, September 6). Transforming urban climate governance : Capacities for transformative climate governance. Erasmus University Rotterdam. 
 
Read more
You can access the full PhD thesis of Katharina Hölscher here. 
 
The following peer-reviewed paper publications are enclosed in the thesis:

• [OPEN ACCESS] Hölscher K, Frantzeskaki F, McPhearson T, Loorbach D (2019) Tales of transforming cities: Transformative climate governance capacities in New York City, U.S. and Rotterdam, Netherlands. Journal of Environmental Management 231: 843-857. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2018.10.043.
• Hölscher K, Frantzeskaki F, McPhearson T, Loorbach D (2019) Capacities for urban transformations governance and the case of New York City. Cities, 94: 186-199. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2019.05.037
• [OPEN ACCESS] Hölscher, K., Frantzeskaki, N., Loorbach, D. (2019) Steering transformations under climate change: capacities for transformative climate governance and the case of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Regional Environmental Change, 19: 791-805. Doi: 10.1007/s10113-018-1329-3

Date
October 28, 2019