Evaluating Innovative Urban Climate Governance. Mikael Hildén, prof. Climate Change Programme Finnish Environment Institute

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1 Evaluating Innovative Urban Climate Governance Mikael Hildén, prof. Climate Change Programme Finnish Environment Institute

2 Governance comprises the complex mechanisms, processes, and institutions through which citizens and groups articulate their interests, mediate their differences, and exercise their legal rights and obligations. [UNDP Internet Conference Forum on Public Private Interface in Urban Environmental Management ]

3 What is an (urban) governance innovation? Governance innovations are novel or disruptive solutions in the function, institutional structures, and organisational processes that structure policy. alter (or promise to alter) the lives of people in substantial and fairly permanent ways leading to original, disruptive, and fundamental transformation of core tasks. Innovations change deep structures permanently. Lynn 1997, p. 96, Polsby 1984, p. 8 3

4 Challenges for urban climate governance Cities are highly dynamic, yet very path dependent and decisions have far reaching consequences. Issues of democracy, equity and trade-offs between choices become very concrete. Mitigation and adaptation are intimately linked: Transport and mobility Urban form Green infrastructure Extreme events Use of energy

5 Structuring innovative urban climate governance Procedures and responsibilities Knowledge for decisions, practice and actions Incremental improvement Novel systems, data and information Incremental Environmental Management Systems with climate component added Calculators for carbon footprint and accounting Radical change: new actors Privatisation of utilities Community production: Consumers becoming producers; private cars become taxis 5

6 Examples of governance innovations Procedures and responsibilities Knowledge + *** + *** City of Turku, Finland: Climate and sustainability checklist for budget planning SYKE: Greenhouse gas emission calculation models for municipalities; JUHILAS Carbon Footprint tool for public procurement Privatisation of energy production: From Australia to UK, to Finland Germany: Policies and regulations supporting community energy produced from renewables. 6

7 Politics of innovation and evaluation Evaluation can raise wide-ranging issues, such as contribution to longer-term problem solving, efficiency, as well as distributional effects Process vs Outcome Who should conduct monitoring and evaluation, how much effort should be invested, and how should available evidence be framed? Triangulation, transparency, democracy [Hildén, Jordan & Rayner (2014): Climate policy innovation: developing an evaluation perspective, Environmental Politics, DOI: / ] 7

8 Evaluating innovations: who or what made things happen? Innovation Process Outcome Aggregate available data streams and process them in real time through an opensource framework Whose data are used, who gets access and what can she do with the data? Better and more detailed information on energy use; Actual change in energy consumption Energy use per m2 corrected for weather Average Construction year [Helsinki Energy Utility HELEN, unpublished] 8

9 Extend the feed-in tariff to include joint ownership models Process Outcome Example Reframing the renewable production challenge: the changing roles of incumbents and new actors Share of renewables in energy production/ consumption; Absolute amount of renewable energy and the pattern of its use In Germany, community energy accounts for 46% of all energy produced from renewables, in the UK 0.3%. In the UK community owned energy could grow 89 times its current size with change of national and local policies. [The Community Renewables Economy: Starting up, scaling up and spinning out ResPublica Green Paper 9

10 Enhancing entrepreneurial experimentation to reduce transport demand and promote seamless intermodal transport Process Outcome Examples Policy change: removal of barriers for entrepreneurial experimentatio n: insurance & tax policy; land use planning; transport monopolies Modal shift in transport (reduced share of private cars); reduction of peak transport volumes City of Helsinki: Dedicated parking for car sharing; creation of space for entrepreneurial activities at transport nodes Temmes et al

11 But evaluation cannot be just cherry picking of success evaluation is about politics Neo-liberal governmentality private economic agents and vocal civil-societybased groups. Democratisation vs nonrepresentational forms of autocratic élite technocracy; The rise of new social actors, the exclusion or diminished power position of others; Governance-beyond-the-state based on responsibilisation, individuation, calculation and pluralist fragmentation. [Swyngedouw, E Governance Innovation and the Citizen: The Janus Face of Governance-beyond-the-State. Urban Studies 42: ] 11

12 Governance innovations raise challenges Neo-liberal governmentality Democratication vs élite technocracy Change of actors Autocratic technology based governing Open access to data Privatisation of utilities Extend the feed-in tariff to include joint ownership models Not a priori Clearly Partly Partly Basically democratication Potentially significant Potential, but transparency checks Towards technocracy Towards democratication Definitively Definitively Partly Potential Some, but checks if sufficiently inclusive Entrepreneurial experimentation for reduced transport Direction dependent on context Some, but checks if sufficiently inclusive 12

13 The elements of evaluation of urban climate governance innovations The programme theory of the innovation: why and how does it make a change? Evaluating the processes associated with the innovation how do we know when it is implemented? Evaluating the outcomes of the innovation which are the immediate and ultimate outcomes, the side-effects? Taking politics and democracy seriously (equity issues, who evaluates, what is evaluated?) 13

14 Where next? Call for papers: Climate Change Policy and Governance: Initiation, Experimentation and Evaluation March 2015, Helsinki Submission of Abstracts November Development/Support_for_climate_policy/Projects 14

15 Thank You! mikael.hilden[at]ymparisto.fi 15