Climate City Contracting for Humane Thriving
By: Viable Cities
Tags: Climate Action, Governance, Agenda 2030, Climate City Contract, Democracy

Investing in relationship abilities

Investments in transitions that redistribute relation-capabilities [13] with others, ourselves, and our future is familiar for countries with deep democracies [14], like Scandinavian countries. During the 18th century, the Scandinavian context included some of the poorest nations in the world [15]. However, beginning in the mid-1800s, a series of investments in human development infrastructures, created some of the most equitable transitions and societies today.

The Folk high school movement [16] offered a unique educational setting, supporting self-fulfilment, fellowship with others, practical knowledge and active democratic participation, to a large part of the population for free. Students would develop the technical and philosophical agency, as well as the self-authorship capacity for constructing their future. Across Scandinavia, the cooperative movement [17] has been particularly strong and influential, forming an extraordinary process of self-organization, institutionalized in the form of commonly agreed upon written rules, and establishing democratic processes that ultimately led to trust and the development of valuable social capital. Similarly, the Swedish government introduced a loan (Egnahemslån [18]) to support workers in building a house on the outskirts of cities, with the aim of creating better living standards and establishing a connection with nature. As mentioned in the book The Nordic Secret [13], these and other measures allowed Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland to undergo major technological, economic and structural changes peacefully, developing everybody’s potential and changing their fate.

Figure 1: A contracting process that builds collective intelligence, agency and legitimacy for constructing transition conscious choices to enable the climate transition.

Climate City Contracting

Today, cities in Scandinavia, along with other urban areas in the world, are facing a number of challenges — high debt levels, heat island effects, catastrophic fires, unequal mental wellbeing. Since 2015 municipality debts in Sweden have grown by 276 billion SEK [19]; larger cities in Fennoscandia are experiencing 3–5 °C warming due to urban heat island effects [20]; Norway’s fire season in 2019 was the worst for several years with 35 fires burning 4,654ha [21]; while reduced mental wellbeing amongst school girls in Sweden with low socioeconomic status is met at 83% compared to 49% amongst girls living in higher socioeconomic conditions [22]. These risks demand a transition parallel to the historic investments of the Scandinavian context more than a century ago.

Contemporary risk management approaches focus on outputs and contract for outcomes. But linear cause and effect strategies no longer work, as wicked problems, like climate change, are relational and therefore continually mutating and evolving. When operating under the realities of uncertainty and complexity, we need to think about building capacities and capabilities, rather than directly focusing on results. Such a transition would require thinking through

(1) multiple domains, incorporating both social and environmental concerns (technological, urban, psychological, biological, institutional, cultural, and deep code [23] domains);

(2) integrating the perspectives of multiple actors [24], while creating the capacity for other-centering [25]; and

3) considering multiple scales/ layers of democracy (European/ National/ City/ Citizen), each self-sovereign with respect and awareness of interdependence.

Climate City Contracting is an opportunity to move towards a plurality of publics [8], each aware of their interdependencies, by addressing: how can deep democracies [14] contract a just climate transition in an age of uncertainty and complexity, while building legitimacy for large-scale transformations?

Figure 2: In order to make a legitimate and just transition we need to build distributed capacity and capabilities, by connecting demand for and supply of transition conscious choices, while enabling every actor by developing a new humane development stack, e.g. a stack improving the settings affecting society’s learning ability, wellbeing, socioeconomic status, environmental quality, justice and equity, work conditions, connectivity and security [26].

In such a thesis (and investigating alongside outputs or outcomes) Climate City Contracting would focus on the means to strengthen democracies’ capacity to do deep change while tackling the frictions and lock-ins [27] preventing a democratically-desired change. The Contract would become a ten-year iterative process through which governments would build the capacity and capabilities to run, feedback, learn from and iterate civic deliberative processes [28] (at multiple scales). This iterative process would then create a Demand for transition conscious choices and open pathways to Supply society with transition conscious choices.

Figure 3: The contracting process would be an evolving process aiming to build shared sense-making and innovation as well as democratic fitness.

On the one hand, we need to build the capacity and capabilities within governments [29] to construct the Demand for transition conscious choices — choices that emerge from collective intelligence, a sense of collectivism and interdependent agencies.

Demand can be generated through civic sensemaking [30], discovery labs [31] and commitments [32]; at multiple scales from street collectives (e.g. cooperatives, land trusts, local organisations), associations (e.g. housing, sport, arts), anchor institutions (e.g. schools, universities, care homes) to business consortiums and multi-stakeholder networks. Civic sensemaking [33] would be a co-constructive process involving multiple stakeholders who identify and create opportunities for contextual challenges. This tool would help identify strategic risks created by both individual and collective behaviours, allowing the actors involved to participate in developing a vision towards a particular future (whether that be a safer, healthier, more prosperous neighbourhood or a more sustainable place for us all). Civic discovery labs [34] would empower individuals with the ability to provoke and challenge possible solutions by building portfolios of potential experiments [36] to address their strategic risks. Civic commitments [35] would allow multiple partners to commit to specific portfolio experiments, through pledging or participatory budgeting, set in a social setting; becoming a mechanism to hold partners accountable to the transition. A feedback loop can be formed through all three components, with the use of spatial information (e.g. mission dashboards or art installations) to continually share progress and engage citizens.

On the other hand, we need to build the Supply for transition conscious choices, with the aim of reducing the frictions and lock-ins in our current systems that hinder a democratic transition.

In this realm, the role of governments would include the adoption of measures to shift incentives and biases. This could be done by investing in innovation ecosystems [37]; by creating new fiscal incentives [38] that advance civic commitments [32]; and by securing lead procurement [39] to create direct support for commitments. Informed by experimentation, local as well as national in the long-term governments can start introducing new regulations and policies [40] to open pathways for scaling the transition.

Figure 4: Suggested principles of the contracting process.

To nurture an iterative and transparent process of development, Climate City Contracting would be designed under a set of principles: