City-Level Decoupling-Full Report

City-Level Decoupling: Urban resource flows and the governance of infrastructure transitions

global consulting industry. Most major cities regularly engage consultants – and/or use their own internal strategy units – to review and set the 'vision' for the city. These activities can include city-wide multi-stakeholder initiatives, strategy formulation processes led by top city politicians and their officials, and departmental or even neighbourhood levels. In South Africa, for example, national legislation prescribes that every town and city sets a vision and drafts an 'Integrated Development Plan' on an annual basis. In this case, all these processes – stakeholders, top leadership, departments – take place separately and then merge into the final integrated plan. Many cities around the world follow this format to some extent, with major multi-national donors funding some of these processes, such as the World Bank’s City Alliance initiative which promotes ‘city development strategies' for every city, though without providing the funding to enable them to do so. In terms of urban infrastructure, a vision- building process may involve representatives of utilities, municipal government, regulators, developers, business, citizens, 'users' and so on. Visions and the goals they outline provide a reference point through which networks can be built, gaining commitments to participate, orienting the actions of potential participants and constituencies, and persuading potential participants of the desirability of transition. 120 Although visions are not fixed and will change over time with the variety of social interests who become involved, the ideal outcome often stems from a vision-building process that procures new external knowledge into socio- technical regimes that have the internal capacity to manage a transition. Low capacity and dependence on institutionally internal knowledge is often the worst combination from a transition perspective.

and who is claiming to speak on behalf of cities. Priorities at the scale of the city – such as economic growth targets, carbon emissions reduction aspirations, resource security – are becoming strategically intertwined with the new socio-technical infrastructure systems that may or may not be organised at the scale of the city. In other words, urban social interests (municipal and local policymakers and officials in particular) may sit outside of socio- technical infrastructure regimes, but still need to gain degrees of influence and control over these regimes in order to achieve their city’s objectives. The issue here is the degree to which policy agendas are separated or aligned with the power to manage urban infrastructure regimes. To use the language of the MLP, it is the extent to which the priorities of an urban governance network – and the social interests that produce them – are able to actively manage socio- technical regime change. Urban responses to these pressures will vary. Cities will experience these challenges differently and have historically organised infrastructures that may differ as well as variable capacity to respond to the emerging pressures. The key issues are the degree of regime change required, the leadership capability to enact such changes, and the ways of building common understanding of the outcomes. Urban transitions depend on a shared understanding between a wide range of urban policy-makers and those who manage the energy, water, waste and transport infrastructure regimes. 'Visions' form a central part of prospective transitions management approaches 119 and offer the potential to present a shared understanding of city-wide and regime interests (without implying in advance that everyone must reach consensus). The need to consider the 'vision' for a city arises from the fact that cities have become major consumers of organisational change that is packaged and delivered by the strategies of the 6.1.4. Shared visions of urban infrastructure transitions

6.1.5. Translating visions: intermediary organisation

Visions of 'purposive' urban transitions (i.e. those that demonstrate a strong degree of intention in pursuing regime transition by largely involving coordinating actors and

57