Abstract
Steering towards a path of sustainability and resilience in urban environments depends greatly on effective institutions, governance and strategic planning. National governments are increasingly expanding municipal institutions’ mandates by delegating decision making on land-use planning and urban development to local and regional levels. This trend poses municipalities with a complex challenge of setting clear sustainability targets and lifting the institutional barriers inside and outside of their organisation. Based on the business motivation model (BMM), this study presents the results of a thematic analysis identifying barriers and enablers characterizing the institutional capacity base of a municipal organisation in the context of sustainability at an urban level. The results show that the most relevant barrier is the lack of standardisation in sustainability-related working practices, whereas the main institutional enablers relate to flexible working directives that promote the development of innovative projects. This points towards a strong need for a more integrated, dynamic and powerful development approach for sustainable urban areas on a local level.
Highlights
IntroductionIn general terms institutions can be regarded as the “rules of the game”
To address the shortcomings of existing institutional characterisation frameworks to support municipalities in moving towards sustainable urban planning, the work presented in this paper aims to provide an inclusive characterisation of the institutional capacity base of a municipality for promoting a transition towards sustainable urban development
The first two subsections point out respectively the relevant barriers and enablers which were found to determine the municipal capabilities for implementing sustainable urban planning practices
Summary
In general terms institutions can be regarded as the “rules of the game”. This means a set of stable, abstract and impersonal rules governing the relationships between separate social constituents [22]. Organisations act as governance structures, which operationalise and implement the rules of the game as defined by the institutional environment in which they operate [22]. This paper understands institutional capacity as the capacity of organisations to fulfil their objective of effectively implementing and operationalising the rules of the game in the context of urban sustainability. Previous research has recognized the importance of including an institutional dimension in the context of urban sustainability assessment [13,23,24]
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