Abstract
Enhancing legitimacy and effectiveness of climate policy requires improved interactions between and within administrative levels, the latter including horizontal public–private coordination. In the heavily decentralized Swedish urban planning process, developer dialogues are used to enhance collaboration and thereby increase the climate-proofing of new housing districts. In practice, municipalities struggle with identifying what types of collaborative arrangements best support the realization of climate goals, in light of strong property developer interests and bargaining. Based on qualitative interviews with coordinating planners, this paper illustrates lessons from repeated collaborative practices in six Swedish municipalities. We analytically characterize a shift between first- and second-generation developer dialogues. In first-generation dialogues, coordinators attempted to ensure jointly agreed upon principles, priorities and commitments, which instead resulted in troublesome negotiations. In second-generation dialogues, coordinators used mixed approaches to ensure more competitive and climate-proof urban development by mechanisms of indirect command and control. Principles of collaborative interaction were abandoned to regain control over urban planning. This documented shift contrasts heavily with theoretical assumptions from the climate governance literature, where enhanced collaboration assumedly increase effectiveness of climate policy implementation. Acknowledging the practical implications of using developer dialogues to climate-proof urban planning in different settings is critical for improved policy implementation.
Highlights
Effective multilevel responses are required for societies to address our ongoing climate crisis and be able to integrate climate considerations in key decision-making practices
We instead make a comparison between six municipalities that have a history of using developer dialogues as a collaborative approach to climate-proof urban development
Lessons drawn of the practical challenges of achieving the goals for collaborative interaction in all municipalities have led the municipal coordinators to gradually revise their approach to public–private interaction
Summary
Investing in public–private interaction is expected to enhance legitimacy and effectiveness of governing climate change [2,3,4,5,6]. Urban planning becomes a key arena for managing both the causes and effects of climate change in cities [12,13,14]. In this context, improving interaction between public and private actors is deemed critical [15,16]. While Swedish urban planning is heavily decentralized, with municipalities having “monopoly on planning”, the starting-point for enhanced public–private interaction comes from the national level
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