Real-Time Evaluation of City–University Partnerships for Sustainability and Resilience

Liliana Caughman,Lauren Withycombe Keeler,Fletcher Beaudoin

doi:10.3390/su12218796

Abstract

Cities face many challenges in their efforts to create more sustainable and resilient urban environments for their residents. Among these challenges is the structure of city administrations themselves. Partnerships between cities and universities are one way that cities can address some of the internal structural barriers to transformation. However, city–university partnerships do not necessarily generate transformative outcomes, and relationships between cities and universities are complicated by history, politics, and the structures the partnerships are attempting to overcome. In this paper, focus groups and trial evaluations from five city–university partnerships in three countries are used to develop a formative evaluation tool for city–university partnerships working on challenges of urban sustainability and resilience. The result is an evaluative tool that can be used in real-time by city–university partnerships in various stages of maturity to inform and improve collaborative efforts. The paper concludes with recommendations for creating partnerships between cities and universities capable of contributing to long-term sustainability transformations in cities.

Highlights

The future of global sustainability and the future of cities are tightly connected
The focus group sessions and iterative process of evaluation development, deployment, and refinement resulted in a scheme that can be used to assess city–university partnerships (CUPs) for their capacity to contribute to long-term sustainability and resilience transformation
The Foundation, Actions, Impacts and Interpersonal Context and Empowering Supports (FAIICES) evaluation tool is useful for CUPs of all types but is vital for CUPS that aim to be transformative and attain transformational outcomes

Summary

Introduction

The future of global sustainability and the future of cities are tightly connected. Cities are home to more than half of the world’s population and must play a critical role in mitigating climate change and adapting to its impacts to allow residents to thrive. Establishing and maintaining tight urban carbon budgets is key to meeting emissions and warming goals set out by the Paris agreement, the International Panel and Climate Change (IPCC), and UN Sustainable Development Goals [3]. Extreme wildfires have become a global phenomenon and cities from California to Australia are facing compounding struggles from the fires that seem to worsen every year [3,4,5,6]. In 2019, utility companies throughout California chose to preemptively shut off electricity for over 500,000 residents for fear of devastating fires. This urgency is echoed in calls to focus sustainability research and practice on the sustainability transformation of cities and regions [7]

Objectives

Results

Conclusion