Governance of Urban Sustainability Transitions

My research group is involved in collaborations with the dynamic ‘Amsterdam Metropolitan Region (MRA)’ and ‘Rotterdam-The Hague Metropolitan Region (MRDH)’, with the objective to investigate the complex governance challenges and opportunities related to urban sustainability transitions, mainly through transdisciplinary collaboration. The resulting knowledge and skills are used to support and engage with Transformative Social-Ecological Innovation (TSEI) in-the-making, which in turn will generate new knowledge and skills (i.e. in iterative learning cycles). This chapter starts with a brief overview of urban sustainability challenges (Sect. 7.1). Research activities are centred around the transition to climate-resilient and healthy cities (Sect. 7.2), feeding and greening megacities (Sect. 7.3), as well as the transition from linear to circular and regenerative economies and cultures in (mega) cities (Sect. 7.4). In parallel, a new transdisciplinary Minor is developed, called ‘Collaboration for the City of the Future’ (Sect. 7.4).

Introduction

The nature of the social, environmental, and economic problems we face today requires a new social contract, a Natural Social Contract. A Natural Social Contract does justice to a human being’s natural state (human life is group life) and to the natural position of humankind and society within a larger ecosystem, that of planet Earth. The Natural Social Contract regards society as a social-ecological system, focusing on people as members of a community and as part of a natural ecosystem. It emphasizes long-term sustainability and general welfare by combining human and nature, and recalibrating our unfettered approach to unlimited economic growth, overconsumption, and over-individualization. The end result, I argue, is for the benefit of ourselves, our planet, and future generations.If you are concerned about our society and our planet, and keeping both healthy for future generations, then this book is written for you. And if you have an interest in the systemic changes required to fundamentally shift our social, economic, ecological, and institutional perspectives, this book is for you too. Together, we can promote a sustainable, healthy, and just society and achieve change on the ground. This book offers a way forward.

Conclusion

In this book, I argue that the societal fault lines of our times are deeply intertwined and that they confront us with challenges affecting the security, fairness, and sustainability of our societies. Overcoming these existential challenges will require a fundamental shift from our current anthropocentric and economic growth-oriented approach to a more ecocentric and regenerative approach. The outline of a Natural Social Contract presented in this book serves as a counter-proposal to existing social contracts. A Natural Social Contract implies an existential change in the way humankind lives in and interacts with its social and natural environment, and emphasizes long-term sustainability and the general welfare of both humankind and planet Earth. Achieving this crucial balance calls for an end to unlimited economic growth, overconsumption, and overindividualization for the benefit of ourselves, our planet, and future generations. To this end, sustainability, health, and justice in all social-ecological systems will require systemic innovation and prioritizing a collective effort. The Transformative Social-Ecological Innovation (TSEI) framework presented in this book serves that cause. It helps to diagnose and advance innovation and spur change across sectors, disciplines, and at different levels of governance. Altogether, TSEI identifies intervention points and formulates jointly developed and shared solutions to inform policy- and lawmakers, administrators, concerned citizens, and professionals dedicated towards a more sustainable, healthy, and just society.

Towards a Natural Social Contract

In this chapter I will explain why and how the sustainability transition is humankind’s search for a new social contract: a Natural Social Contract (conceptualization by author). I will start with a brief introduction on the origins of the social contract (Sect. 3.1), followed by a debate on the question whether there can be human progress without economic growth (Sect. 3.2) and a section on redesigning economics based on ecology, including circular and regenerative economies and cultures (Sect. 3.3). This chapter includes a debate on the role and scope of the free market (Sect. 3.4), as well as an examination of how the Anglo-Saxon and Rhineland models fare in this debate (Sect. 3.5). This chapter will also describe why we need a new social contract and what it should entail (Sect. 3.6). In doing so, I will embark on a quest for a Natural Social Contract (Sect. 3.7) and its theoretical foundations with multiple dimensions and crossovers (Sect. 3.8). This section concludes with an overview of fundamentals and design principles for a societal transformation towards a Natural Social Contract (see Table 3.4), which is a summary of Sect. 3.8 shaped as a course of action and is intended to help readers to grasp the core rationale of this book. For a better understanding of, and advancing the process towards, a Natural Social Contract this chapter presents a conceptual framework for Transformative Social-Ecological Innovation (Sect. 3.9), and how this will play out at various governance levels (Sect. 3.10).

Transition to a Sustainable and Healthy Agri-Food System

This chapter highlights various challenges and developments related to our current global food production and consumption systems, followed by a number of research and innovation activities that actively support a transition to a sustainable, healthy, and just agri-food system. The first section identifies several important trends that may either limit, support, or influence such a transition (Sect. 6.1). Following this, I will provide an overview of several research and innovation activities that our research group is currently involved in, such as the Dutch national research programme (NWA) ‘Transition to a Sustainable Food System’ (Sect. 6.2), nature-inclusive and regenerative agriculture (Sect. 6.3), closing the gaps between citizens, farmers, and nature (Sect. 6.4), measuring sustainability and health aspects of our food supply chains (Sect. 6.5), and the South Holland Food Family, an open innovation and food transition network (Sect. 6.6). This last section also provides an example of TSEI-framework application to analyze institutional change during initiation, development, and implementation of the South Holland Food Family innovation network (Sect. 6.6).

Analytical Instruments for Studying TSEI

The findings from literature in the previous chapters have been brought together in a conceptual framework (see Sect. 10.1007/978-3-030-67130-3_3#Sec13) and an analytical framework for Transformative Social-Ecological Innovation (Sect. 5.1). It’s main purpose is to study the dynamic interplay between actors and institutional structures influencing and inducing institutional change. This chapter furthermore provides a further operationalization of the TSEI analytical framework for analysing shifts in power dynamics (Sect. 5.2), by investigating a series or cluster of closely related action situations and mapping how power dynamics change. An example of TSEI-framework application is provided in Sect. 6.6. Finally, Sect. 5.3 provides a framework for analysing different levels of collective learning, which is considered as one of the key variables for studying the outputs of TSEI. Finally, this chapter highlights some important insights on collaborative action research and related methods (Sect. 5.4).

Sustainability Transition: Quest for a New Social Contract

This chapter will provide an overview of the necessity and nature of the sustainability transition, starting with the paradox of prosperity (Sect. 2.1), the ecological boundaries of our planet (Sect. 2.2) and how this relates to a broad range of security and justice issues (Sect. 2.3). Following this, the chapter provides a brief description of the nature of the sustainability transition (Sect. 2.4), and concludes with an argumentation to be more explicit on what comes after the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the UN 2030 Agenda (Sect. 2.5).

Conceptual Background of Transformative Social-Ecological Innovation

In this chapter I survey key theories and concepts that provide substance to the workings of Transformative Social-Ecological Innovation (TSEI). A number of relevant theories and concept have already been mentioned in the previous chapters, such as Social Contract theory (Sect. 10.1007/978-3-030-67130-3_3#Sec1), and in Sects. 10.1007/978-3-030-67130-3_3#Sec8 and 10.1007/978-3-030-67130-3_3#Sec13, including resilience theory and social-ecological systems (Sect. 10.1007/978-3-030-67130-3_3#Sec8), quintuple helix innovation model (Sect. 10.1007/978-3-030-67130-3_3#Sec13), as well as institutional change and the structure-agency debate (Sect. 10.1007/978-3-030-67130-3_3#Sec13), and several economic theories (Sects. 10.1007/978-3-030-67130-3_3#Sec2 and 10.1007/978-3-030-67130-3_3#Sec3). In this chapter I will start with providing a conceptual discussion and definition on Transformative Social-Ecological Innovation (Sect. 4.1), and devote more attention to various theories and approaches that are relevant for TSEI, such as transition studies (Sect. 4.2), institutional design principles for governing the commons (Sect. 4.3), design principles from nature (Sect. 4.4), complex adaptive systems (Sect. 4.5), adaptive, reflexive, and deliberative approaches to governance, management, and planning (Sect. 4.6), social learning, policy learning, and transformational learning (Sect. 4.7), shared value, multiple value creation, and mutual gains approach (Sect. 4.8), effective cooperation (Sect. 4.9), transdisciplinary cooperation, living labs, and citizen science (Sect. 4.10), and the art of co-creation: approaches, principles and pitfalls (Sect. 4.11).

Correction to: Conceptual Background of Transformative Social-Ecological Innovation

Inadvertently, the book was published with an incorrect citation of Fig. 4.5 in page 100. The citation has been now corrected to read as below,