Capacitating urban governance and planning systems to drive transformative resilience

Abstract

Urban governance and planning systems are central cornerstones of international research and policy initiatives to advance sustainable development, climate change adaptation, and disaster risk reduction in the context of increasing global environmental change. Yet, the inherent processes and components of conventional governance and planning systems, such as discourses, structures, tools, and practices, must be revised to drive a transition to fundamentally new governance arrangements and planning mechanisms. We present a framework featuring four characteristics for capacitating urban governance and planning systems to accelerate the shift toward transformative resilience: foresight and path-shifting, collaboration and leadership, creativity and agility, and experimentation and embeddedness. The framework addresses the components and processes of present governance and planning systems that must be transformed and highlights the mechanisms required to drive the transformation. These include discourse reorientation, structure reorganization, tool innovation, and practice expansion. The framework also underlines eight significant functional, social, political, institutional, ecological, technological, legal, and financial dimensions that will be used to operationalize the framework in the next step in order to evaluate the associated opportunities and constraints of current planning systems toward transformative change.