Meta-governing the Co-creation of a Green and Just Transition in Urban Areas
The Role of Facilitative Leadership, Institutional Design, and Collaborative Platforms
Eva Sørensen (Roskilde University) and Jacob Torfing (Roskilde University)
The accelerating climate and nature crisis and the political ambition to ensure distributed socio-economic prosperity call for swift action to create a sustainable future while leaving nobody behind. While global and national efforts to promote green and just transitions in contemporary societies are indeed crucial, they rarely consider the challenges that such transitions entail for local communities—and not least for those living in poor and devastated urban areas. For example, national targets and initiatives for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, mitigating pollution, and protecting pristine nature and habitats rarely take local socio-political conditions and challenges into account. Therefore, one of the key questions of our time is how to strengthen the governance of green and just transitions in society and the economy at the local level, where social and environmental problems are highly visible and a plethora of social and political actors must be mobilized in the pursuit of socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable transitions.
The challenging task for local leaders is to overcome collective action problems, institutional inertia, and local capacity gaps to achieve bold sustainability objectives through the involvement of relevant and affected actors in the co-creation of green and just transition. The embeddedness of urban neighborhoods in larger regional, national, and global political economies provides clear constraints on local leaders’ attempts to pull up a devastated locality by the bootstraps. Hence, it is comparatively more difficult to spark much-needed change in governance systems with weak sub-national governments lacking the authority and resources to adapt policy goals and adjust initiatives to serve local purposes. Nevertheless, there is growing evidence of how local leadership matters for the green and just transition, perhaps due to a combination of local interconnectedness, pragmatic reasoning, creative entrepreneurialism, and a strong sense of urgency.
Urban planning theory suggests that a key task for local community leaders is to facilitate and provide favorable institutional conditions for constructive collaboration between local actors. Theories of public governance and administration take a further step by highlighting the importance of processes facilitation, institutional incentives, and the establishment of supportive platforms for promoting collaborative governance and co-creation. The latter set of theories conceptualizes collaborative leadership as meta-governance, defined as the attempt to influence the process and outcomes of collaborative governance in networks and partnerships without reverting too much to classical forms of hierarchical steering based on command and control. In respect of the self-governing ambition of collaborative arenas, metagovernance aims to replace the ‘iron fist’ of hierarchical government with the ‘velvet glove’ of metagovernors. In this connection, a distinction is made between hands-off and hands-on meta-governance. The former refers to leadership efforts to establish institutional structures that encourage and guide local collaboration, while the latter refers to on-site facilitation of conversations between local actors for the purpose of promoting mutual understanding and joint action. Both of these metagovernance strategies aim to avoid the dual pitfall of metagoverning too much and metagoverning too little.
Metagovernance is attractive as it allows public leaders to slack the reins and reap the fruits of collaborative governance without losing control. While meta-governance theory tends to view the relationship between meta-governing leaders and those involved in collaborative processes as one-directional, recent contributions highlight the interactive dynamics at play between metagovernors and network participants. Based on this new literature, we propose that the successful leadership of green and just transitions in local urban neighborhoods requires both “leadership of interaction” and “interactive leadership.” The former refers to process facilitation and the creation of institutional conditions that incentivize and support local collaboration on green and just transition projects, while the latter involves purposeful efforts to qualify the exercise of metagovernance by collecting input in the form of knowledge, ideas, and experiences from a diverse set of actors engaged in local green co-creation.
Both network-based collaboration and efforts to meta-govern the co-creation process will tend to benefit from the presence and/or construction of collaborative platforms that can help to lower the transaction costs of collaborating and to provide channels for two-way communication between metagovernors and network participants. The growing interest in collaborative platforms and other soft infrastructures supporting and scaffolding the co-creation of innovative public-value solutions prompt new research on generative governance that aims to support the engagement of distributed actors in emerging forms of collaboration, learning, and innovation without predetermining the contents of their solutions.
Out of this research emerges a vision for the future development not only of leadership in urban areas but also of the role of the public sector in governing society. Hence, it recasts the public sector from being an almighty authority, sovereign regulator, and monopolist service provider to being a catalyst and orchestrator of collaborative arenas that allows outputs and outcomes to be co-created through interactions between distributed actors. This would provide favorable conditions for public and private actors to exercise leadership not only of a green transformation of urban areas but also of a more economically and socially sustainable world.
Eva Sørensen is MA, PhD and full professor in Democracy and Public Administration at Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University, Denmark. Her research interests include interactive political leadership, political polarization, democratic network governance, and public innovation. She has published numerous articles and books on these topics.
Jacob Torfing is MA, PhD and professor in Politics and Institutions at Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University, Denmark. He is founder of The Roskilde School of Governance at Roskilde University. His research interests include public administration reforms, robust governance, collaborative innovation, and co-creation of sustainability transition. He has published several books and scores of articles on these topics.