Transforming cities into low-carbon, resilient, and sustainable places will require action encompassing most segments of society. However, local governments struggle to overview and assess all ongoing climate activities in a city, constraining well-informed decision-making and transformative capacity. This paper proposes and tests an assessment framework developed to visualize the implementation of urban climate transition (UCT). Integrating key transition activities and process progression, the framework was applied to three Swedish cities. Climate coordinators and municipal councillors evaluated the visual UCT representations. Results indicate that their understanding of UCT actions and implementation bottlenecks became clearer, making transition more governable. To facilitate UCT, involving external actors and shifting priorities between areas were found to be key. The visual UCT representations improved system awareness and memory, building local transformative capacity. The study recommends systematic assessment and visualization of process progression as a promising method to facilitate UCT governance, but potentially also broader sustainability transitions.

While strengthening public–private interplay is expected to improve the climate profile of urban planning in terms of mitigation and adaptation, less is known about the practice of such new interactive modes of governing. The paper critically examines the role, benefits and limitations of extended public–private interplay in developing a new housing district in Sweden. The developer dialogue between municipal officials and property developers confirms mutual interests, shared understandings and the added value of interacting. However, the closer the dialogue comes to settling agreements, the more difficult it gets for municipal officials to steer the process and its outcomes in favor of climate proofing. Complications with adapting to the new interactive setting means that municipal officials balance between acting as facilitators and/or regulators and property developers between acting as partners, competitors and/or defenders. Refining steering-strategies for sustaining commitments and securing formal agreements are pertinent for using public–private interplay to climate-proof urban planning.

Strategy-making is key for realizing sustainable urban water management. Though general barriers and factors for change have been identified, fewer studies have assessed how different conditions influence municipalities’ strategy-making ability and, thus, how to plan strategically given these conditions. Healey’s strategy-making notion was applied to delimit a study of how size, finances, development path, and water organization influence Swedish municipalities’ strategy-making ability for urban water. Three municipalities, Laxå, Norrköping, and Skellefteå, with different, yet overlapping, institutional and socio-economic conditions were analyzed using semi-structured interviews, a stakeholder workshop, and document analyses. The study finds that even though key events have filtered urban water issues into the political agenda, this has not induced systemic change, except where the role of water management in urban development has been specified, i.e., has aligned dispersed planning processes. Organizational setup influences the strategy-making ability by prescribing not only when water issues are raised, but also what system perspective should be applied and what actors that should be enrolled. Judging from the three cases, size, finances, and development path do matter for strategy-making ability, but they appear to be less important than the organizational setup. Departures for improving strategy-making under different conditions are discussed.

How to organize citizen participation in planning is continuously debated. The amount of Online Participatory Tools (OPTs) to facilitate inclusive and efficient participation has increased. While studies have assessed their functionality, usability and effectiveness in planning, they have rarely analyzed OPTs beyond single-cases, targeted tools that are widely used or assessed how OPTs affect broader values of participation. Targeting this absence, this study analyzes how ten applications of a widely used OPT, CityPlanner™, affect the normative, substantive and instrumental values of citizen participatory planning in Swedish cities. By analyzing 1,354 citizen proposals and interviewing urban planners, we find that citizens more extensively submit proposals and initiate debates on planning when using the OPT. Results suggest a more even age and gender distribution among proposal users than with conventional methods, facilitating normative values of participation. The OPT was generally applied early in planning and generated high-quality inputs. Our results, however, nuance previous analyses by also emphasizing the importance of place-specificity of OPT applications and of joint participation strategies among departments. Key for OPT development includes the need to improve their ability to analyze overarching trends among inputs.

The role of governmental actors in the management and development of destinations has been the topic of many previous studies. In short, local governmental actors are widely recognised as principal and influential stakeholders in processes of tourism development. This paper seeks to add to these studies, and to increase understanding of the governance of tourism destinations, by elucidating what expectations destination management professionals (DMPs) in five different destinations in Sweden have of local governments. Empirically, the paper gives an account of what DMPs understand as the main challenges in destination management, and how they conceptualise the role of local governments in relation to these challenges. The study suggests that DMPs hope that local governments will have the capacity to institutionalise the destination, to promote cluster initiatives, to integrate destination development in processes of strategic planning, and to ensure the provision and development of relevant knowledge. By way of conclusion, it is argued that that local governments meet with somewhat paradoxical expectations from DMPs, and that these expectations constitute an important precondition for the governance of tourism destinations.

It is increasingly expected that private actors play the role as entrepreneurs and front-runners in implementing climate measures, whereas empirical studies of the position, role and engagement of private actors are scarce. Situated in the context of urban planning, a critical arena for triggering climate transitions, the aim of this paper is to explore how Swedish property developers respond to climate change. Qualitative analyses of corporate policy documents and semi-structured interviews with property developers reveal a vast divergence between the written policies, where leadership ambitions are high, and how the practice of property development is discussed in interviews. In the latter, there is little evidence of property developers pursuing a forward-looking or cutting-edge climate change agenda. Instead, they are critical of increased public regulation for climate-oriented measures. Explanations both confirm previous studies, highlighting lack of perceived customer demand, uncertainty of financial returns and limited innovations, and add new elements of place-dependency suggesting that innovative and front-runner practices can only be realized in the larger urban areas. Municipalities seeking to improve their climate-oriented profile in urban planning by involving private property developers need to develop strategies to maneuver the variance in responses to increase the effectiveness of implementation.

Putting climate change policy-integration into practice is challenged by problems of institutional misfit, due to, inter alia, deficient vertical administrative interplay. While most focus within the field of climate change research has targeted the national-local interplay, less is known about the interface of regional and local perspectives. Here, the aim is to study that interface with a specific focus on the relation between regional and local spatial planning actors, through a case-study of transport and coastal zone management in a Swedish municipality. The article is based on interviews (focus group and single in-depth) and official planning documents. The material reveals a tricky planning situation, replete with conflict. In practice, various institutional frameworks, claims and ambitions collide. The attempts to steer the local spatial planning initiatives from the regional level led to conflicts, which in turn seems to have hampered the overall work for climate change management through spatial planning. Furthermore, there are few traces of prospects of a smooth vertical institutional interplay able to support the overall aims related to integrating climate change mitigation and adaptation in spatial planning. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The participation of non-state actors in multilateral institutions is often portrayed as one way of decreasing the perceived legitimacy deficit in global governance. The literature on non-state actors has identified several ways in which these actors can enhance the legitimacy of intergovernmental organisations and global governance arrangements. Three partially competing normative arguments, or rationales, for the inclusion of non-state actors in international policymaking ￜ functionalism, neocorporatism and democratic pluralism ￜ have been identified. Whereas functionalism highlights the contribution of non-state actors to output legitimacy in terms of expertise, neocorporatism emphasises the inclusion of affected interests, and democratic pluralism claims that non-state actors increase input legitimacy through procedural values. These three normative arguments thus offer different understandings of the motives for the inclusion and representation of non-state actors in international negotiations and diplomacy. Through a single case study of United Nations climate diplomacy, we analyse the extent to which the three rationales for non-state actor inclusion are found in views held by state and non-state actors participating in the annual United Nations climate change conferences. Our results show that different actor groups place varying degrees of emphasis on the different rationales for non-state actor inclusion, even though the neocorporatist rationale remains most favoured overall. We discuss the implications of our findings for the democratic legitimacy of increasing participation of non-state actors in intergovernmental affairs and recent trends in the participation of non-state actors in the international climate change policymaking process.

Globalization processes have rendered non-state actors an integral part of global governance. The body of literature that has examined non-state actor involvement in global governance has focused mainly on whether and how non-state actors can influence states. Less attention has been paid to the comparative advantages of non-state actors to answer questions about agency across categories of non-state actors, and more precisely what governance activities non-state actors are perceived to fulfil. Using unique survey material from two climate change conferences, we propose that different categories of non-state actors have distinct governance profiles. We further suggest that the different governance profiles are derived from particular power sources and that agency is a function of these profiles. The study thereby contributes to a strand in the literature focusing on the authority of non-state actors in climate governance and broadens the methodological toolkit for studying the “governors” of global governance.

Studies have shown that societal change related to economic growth and development policies can affect the adaptive capacity of communities to a multitude of stressors including climate variability and change. Concerns have recently been raised about the consequences of climate mitigation and adaptation on vulnerable groups and the impacts of large-scale globalization processes on the adaptive capacities of local communities. This chapter addresses how side effects of technological and socioeconomic changes, which we refer to as spinoffs have potential to strengthen climate adaptation strategies. The spinoff examples fall under a two-dimensional framework according to whether they arise from orchestrated or opportunity-driven initiatives and technological or socio-economic changes. Three cases in developing countries undergoing rapid economic growth have been chosen as examples of different types of spinoffs and how they can positively influence climate adaptation and more particularly adaptive capacity. They are: information and communication technology (ICT) in South Africa, changing lifestyles in China and empowerment in India. The cases illustrate that new objects, inventions and trends constantly emerge which have potential to help people improve their livelihoods in ways that can be climate smart. People working as development workers and policy makers need to be observant and engage in open-minded dialogue with communities in order to recognize emergent technologies, lifestyles and trends to facilitate the use and development of on-going or potential spinoffs that positively affect adaptation to climate change.

Olika studier har visat att samhällsförändringar kopplade till ekonomiskt tillväxt eller policy-utveckling kan påverka lokalbefolkningens förmåga att anpassa sig till klimatförändringar och -variation. Många risker och negativa konsekvenser har diskuterats. Detta kapitel lyfter fram hur sidoeffekter av teknologiska eller samhällsförändringar, så kallade spinoff-effekter, kan ha positiv påverkan på anpassningsförmågan i lokalsamhället. Tre exempel ges i kapitlet. Spinoff-effekterna analyseras mot bakgrund av om förändringarna är planerade eller spontana, och om de gäller teknologiska eller socioekonmiska förändringar. Det första exemplet, spontan teknologisk utveckling, handlar om hur IT i Sydafrika kan användas för att skapa nätverk som motverkar skogsbränder vid torka. Det andra, spontan socioekonomisk förändring, handlar om hur efterfrågan på lokal turism och ekologiska livsmedel på landsbygden i Kina har bidragit till differentiering av försörjningen och ökat lantbrukarnas inkomster. Det tredje, planerad socioeknomisk förändring, handlar om hur stärkta kvinnogrupper i Indien lättare hanterar vattenförsörjning och tar ökat ledarskap. Dessa exempel vill visa för utvecklingsarbetare och politiker att det är viktigt att vara uppmärksam på, och föra en öppen dialog med lokalsamhällen för att få syn på hur ny teknologi, livsstilsförändringar och trender kan samverka och nyttjas i arbetetet med klimatanpassning.