City-Level Decoupling-Full Report

international associations such as the International Council for Local Enviornmental Initiatives, major development institutions such as the World Bank and UN agencies, formalised urban development agencies (constituted either by the municipal government or the private sector, or both as a partnership), or even

resources from outside the regime) represent a transformative view of the relationship between cities and socio-technical regimes. Both urban governance networks and socio- technical regimes are relatively stable. Purposive urban socio-technical transitions aim

relatively autonomous internal strategy units. Interestingly, technology providers are also becoming intermediaries – from Cisco systems and Siemens to providers of solar or wind power, like General Electric, technology providers are intervening to reshape markets to favour their new product lines. Intermediaries, excluding now the technology providers, can be characterised in terms of three aspects of their mediating function.

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to mutually transform both urban governance arrangements and socio-technical regimes, no simple task. The production of a vision provides a framework for a purposive urban socio-technical transition but it says little about how this will be done. It needs to be followed up by building an effective capacity to convert vision into action. Coordinating and mobilising capability requires the creation of new intermediary organisations that constitute a space outside of the vested interests of both existing urban governance regimes and existing socio-technical regimes. 121 This creates a context for the discussion of competing priorities, helps to access fresh external knowledge into a particular regime, and either provides capacity that is lacking or helps mobilise untapped internal capacity. Intermediaries encompass a wide variety of different organisational priorities and motivations, funding streams and organisational capabilities which are predicated on the pursuit of different political priorities aligned with interventions. Institutions acting as intermediaries in cities include consulting companies, university-based research units, NGOs, citizen-based coalitions (often with strong political links), international lobby groups such as the Clinton C40 league,

• First, intermediaries often mediate between production and consumption rather than focusing solely on production or consumption issues. 122 • Second, they can also mediate the different priorities and levels of different funders, ’stakeholders', policy interests, social interests and regulators. • Third, they mediate between different priorities in the production of a vision and in their application. 'Smart cities' are a battle ground where many different actors try to impose their view of what a 'true' green city should look like, some of which may not be appropriate to the context.

6.1.6. Intermediaries: developing capacity and capabilities for action

The different types of intermediaries are of such critical importance because they are usually brought into change processes by key players to provide knowledge and/or capacity. Knowledge services involve a wide spectrum of activities, including purely descriptive or rapid short-term scoping analyses, through to in-depth research,

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