Towards a Climate-Resilient City: Collaborative Innovation for a ‘Green Shift’ in Oslo

Abstract

The starting point of this chapter is climate change as a wicked and unruly problem that requires collaborative innovation to create local climate solutions. We pay special attention to the role of institutional design and public leadership and management in facilitating collaboration and spurring innovation. The chapter provides an analytical framework that aims to combine a process perspective on networked collaboration and creative problem solving with an institutional and management perspective to enable and sustain processes of collaborative innovation. The city of Oslo, with its highly ambitious climate goals and its dependence on innovation in governance systems to spur new solutions contributing to goal attainment, forms the empirical basis of the chapter. Our analysis of the Oslo case shows that the city’s strategy for reaching these ambitious goals tends to cohere with ideas and principles of collaborative innovation. The city of Oslo is currently making a huge effort to design and lead collaborative arenas that may spur the development of innovative solutions. However, our analysis reveals that, at this early point in the process, there is still a long way to go before the city government can begin to reap the fruits of cross-sector collaboration. So far, the city government’s in-house focus has overshadowed attempts to build society-wide arenas for collaborative innovation that can mobilize the knowledge, resources and energies of all the relevant and affected actors in the pursuit of innovative climate solutions. Hence, future research should concentrate on formulating and testing hypotheses about the conditions, drivers, barriers and impact of collaborative innovation as a promising new approach to public policy-making.