City-Level Decoupling-Full Report

but landscapes need to be considered as the setting where they function. 107

From this perspective, cities can be understood as energetic societies comprised of potentially articulate individuals, communities and companies with actual or potential fast learning curves “...who themselves form a source of energy. It is up to the government to create the right conditions to make this possible...” 103 Third, heterogenous urbanisation patterns and complex interactive flows between rural, urban and peri-urban regions will persist. Urban development patterns could well result in new settlement patterns, resource flows and social dynamics that could shape and influence the viability of particular infrastructure investments and systems. These may not always serve human wellbeing. For example, the converging peri-urbanisation of urban poverty, waste flows and food production must avoid creating divisions and exclusions that infrastructure investments may unintentionally exacerbate and reinforce. Interventions such as Medellin’s cable cars that link the urban poor to the city should be favoured over the exclusionary impacts of costly public transit systems such as those found in Bangkok, Thailand and Gauteng, South Africa. The multi-level perspective (MLP) provides an ambitious attempt to develop an understanding of ’system innovation' 104 or ’sustainability- oriented innovations' (SOIs), based on an interrelated three-level framework of landscape (macro), regime (meso) and niche (micro). The concept of 'landscape' in the MLP helps understand the broader conditions, environment and pressures for transitions. Landscapes operate at the macro level, focusing on issues such as political cultures, economic growth, macro-economic trends, land use, utility infrastructures and so on 105 and apply pressures on existing socio-technical regimes creating windows of opportunities for responses. 106 Landscapes have the potential to affect the constitution of regimes (meso) and niches (micro) by providing an external context that makes some actions easier than others. They do not determine niches and regimes, 6.1.1. Socio-technical infrastructure transitions and cities

'Regimes' are seen as socio-technical because technologies and technological functions co-evolve with social functions and social interests. Technological development is potentially shaped by a broad constituency of engineers, policymakers, business interests, NGOs, consumers and so on. Regulations, policy priorities, consumption patterns and investment decisions, among other things, hold these inerests together to stabilise socio-technical regimes and their existing trajectories. 108 The emphasis on regimes – the meso level - therefore, highlights the challenge that “...reconfiguration processes do not occur easily, because the elements in a socio- technical configuration are linked and aligned to each other. Radically new technologies have a hard time to break through, because regulations, infrastructure, user practices, maintenance networks are aligned to the existing technology....” 109 Adrian Smith and colleagues 110 characterise regime change as being driven by shifting pressures impinging on a regime and the extent to which responses to these pressures are coordinated, both from inside and outside the regime. They see governance interventions (rather than government interventions) facilitating regime transformation. Landscape pressures can be articulated either in very general terms (e.g. demographic change) or in relation to specific regimes (e.g. impact of climate change on the fossil fuels industry). The articulation of these pressures and the adaptive capacity of the regime (its relationships, resources and their levels of coordination) constitute a response to these pressures. Creating space for the ‘energetic society' to take its course can be seen as the governance of regime transformation. This can be the outcome of historical processes (e.g. a gradual shift in consumer choices or evolution of new technologies) or driven by a strategic coalition with a shared vision and capacity to implement. The combination of regime transitions, the governance processes and adaptive capacity leads to the great variety of possible transition pathways.

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