City-Level Decoupling-Full Report

7 Assessing progress toward decoupling in cities

assumed emblematic and exemplary status without rigorous evaluation.

This section reflects on the lessons learned from the case studies regarding the role of cities in decoupling economic growth rates from rates of finite resource use. It considers what progress is being made in a very diverse set of initiatives and experiments operating at a range of different scales and what they can and cannot show about the future role of cities in decoupling.

Considerable experimentation and demonstration needs to be assessed to define the limits and opportunities for systemically reshaping resource flows. The main gaps for further research include: • First, to place cities' resources flows in an existing context requires an understanding of the current status of material flows, the social and technical organisation of utilities and infrastructures, the pressures and drivers in individual cities, and finally an assessment of the existing or potential socio-technical capability to shape resource flows. • Second, while the evaluation of specific initiatives needs to be placed in the wider context of their impacts on resource flows, more research is needed on how the existing social relations, institutions and regulations affect the up-scaling of initiatives. • Third, research across different experiments within the same city (as well as comparisons with other cities) in terms of what second-order social learning from experimentation can help inform the development of intermediary capability. This would contribute to the up-scaling of initiatives and help understand how research results can then be used to reshape the organisation and priorities of infrastructure regimes

7.1 Existing research

on decoupling in cities, and areas requiring more attention

Generally the role of cities in shaping systemic changes in the organisation of infrastructure and the level of resource flows is not well understood or researched in an interdisciplinary and comparative manner. In particular, as argued in Section 1, studies of urban resource flows using Material Flow Analysis are poorly linked to studies on more socio-technical analyses of the social organisation and urban political dynamics of resource flows. These two sets of issues need to be brought together in a more comparative and systematic manner. At present the many different initiatives, experiments and demonstrations described here have not been subject to formal evaluation of their efficiency and effectiveness. Instead they provide a partial picture with some understanding of how selected initiatives may shape resource flows but in many cases success is asserted and initiatives have

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