Co-production of urban climate planning: Insights from the Barcelona Climate Plan

Mar Satorras,Isabel Ruiz-Mallén,Arnau Monterde,Hug March

doi:10.1016/j.cities.2020.102887

Abstract

Climate policy co-production represents an emerging institutional arrangement promising to better and fairly involve societal actors in resilience policy-making. Little evidence exists, however, on how climate policy co-production is understood, planned and performed in cities. This article sheds light on these co-production processes through an in-depth analysis of the case study of the Barcelona Climate Plan. While traditional forms of public engagement such as face-to-face workshops served to collect most proposals from organizations, new tools such as the digital platform resulted in increased lay citizen involvement and process transparency. Participants, including organizers of the co-production process, did not share a clear understanding of what co-production was about, which can endanger the fulfilment of the goals. These findings shed light over effective and limiting procedural and conceptual aspects for co-production of urban climate policies and guide a critical discussion over the added value and the transformative potential of the co-production approach to reframe urban climate resilience planning in cities.

Highlights

Against the backdrop of impending climate emergency, urban cli mate change mitigation and adaptation strategies, and more generally, urban climate resilience planning have intensively been embraced by local and metropolitan authorities worldwide
This paper aims to understand who is involved in the co-production process behind the Barcelona Climate Plan and how it is oper ationalized, what impact it has in the final plan, and what expectations and understandings emerge around this co-production process
The results of this paper are organized revolving around the un derstanding of: 1) the operationalization of the co-production process in terms of engagement tools and who were the stakeholders engaged; 2) the impact of the co-production process in the final plan; and 3) how involved stakeholders understand climate policy co-production and what were their expectations with the process

Summary

Introduction

Against the backdrop of impending climate emergency, urban cli mate change mitigation and adaptation strategies, and more generally, urban climate resilience planning have intensively been embraced by local and metropolitan authorities worldwide. While this shift has been widely welcomed, previous literature has identified several gaps be tween theory and practice of urban resilience (e.g., Archer et al, 2014; Stumpp, 2013) that lead to problematic urban resilience interventions such as socially unjust outcomes (Ziervogel et al, 2017) or the prior itization of higher-income groups rather than low-income residents (Anguelovski et al, 2016). Introducing novel approaches to deeply involve citizens in the process of develop ment and implementation of urban climate resilience planning is a promising pathway for exploration

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