Catalyzing sustainability pathways: Navigating urban nature based solutions in Europe

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2022.102521Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Forging sustainability pathways depends on catalyzing change rather than scaling up.

  • We conceptualize how sustainability transition pathways emerge from catalytic change.

  • We argue aligning clusters of interventions builds momentum that generates sustainability pathways.

  • Accelerating uptake of urban nature-based solutions in Europe can be supported by 20 interventions.

  • Normalizing experiments is key to mainstreaming these responses to sustainability challenges.

Abstract

The notion that pathways can be identified and followed towards more sustainable futures has become an increasingly prevalent idea across the science and policy of global environmental change. Focusing on the debate within literatures on socio-technical systems, we find that pathways are often tied to the concept of scaling up such that they are dependent on trajectories which extend from the geographically small to large scale or from singular incidences to widespread adoption. Building on relational approaches to scaling, in this paper we argue that sustainability pathways need to be conceived as emerging from the catalytic interaction of multiple and overlapping efforts to change the status quo. We suggest that pathways can be conceptualized as being composed of ‘stepping stones’: bundles of related interventions that seize or create opportunities to build momentum for the implementation of innovations, the form of which is not predetermined. Drawing on 243 interviews, participant observation, and document analysis examining urban nature-based solutions across six European countries and the EU, we identify 20 stepping stones that can be used to accelerate the uptake of urban NBS in European cities. In the case of urban NBS in Europe, we find that the capacity of stepping stones to generate catalytic change strongly depends on how they interact with one another. We illustrate that pathways are not given but rather assembled through key interventions that collectively generate the capacities and momentum needed to overcome inertia and generate new socio-material orders in which such interventions are normalized as mainstream responses to sustainability challenges.

Introduction

As scientists and policymakers search for solutions to sustainability challenges, there has been increasing talk of pathways – either those to which we must stick to remain within planetary boundaries (Leach et al., 2013) or the ways in which they can be forged to realise sustainability transitions (Geels et al., 2016, Geels and Schot, 2007). While in general the notion of pathways has been used “to conceptualise evolving trajectories of effects moving from the present towards (or away from) qualitatively more sustainable futures (however defined)” (Patterson et al., 2021, p. 4), distinctions can be made between approaches which focus on biophysical, socio-economic or socio-technical pathways both in terms of their intended focus and the extent to which they are portrayed as predetermined or unfolding over time (Rosenbloom, 2017).

Pathways often appear as smooth arcs towards future goals, where the key challenge is either to stay within the safe landing zone or to bend the curve away from undesirable outcomes (Foxon et al., 2010, Söderholm et al., 2011, Wiseman et al., 2013). However, such a vision of pathways as a coherent trajectory tends to overlook how they arise through “unfolding series of moments requiring interpretation and decision-making under uncertainty, often without guarantee of clear or satisfactory outcomes” (Patterson et al., 2021, p. 4). Equally popular is the portrayal of pathways in the plural, as a set of different ‘routes’ a transition can take based on the timing and nature of interactions between niches, regimes, and landscapes (Geels and Schot, 2007). Yet as Rosenbloom (2017) identifies in a recent systematic review of the pathways concept, the nature of these junctures and the choices they entail has received relatively limited attention to date. For all their merit in providing more hopeful directions for sustainable futures, the notion of sustainability pathways is often used in a relatively deterministic way, such that reaching particular goals becomes just a matter of following the pathway set ahead or making the right decisions at key branching points in the system.

It has been within literatures on socio-ecological and socio-technical systems that approaches to pathways which are concerned with understanding their unfolding, co-evolutionary dynamics over time have emerged (Leach et al., 2010, Rosenbloom, 2017). Such perspectives point to “the multiple and interlocking causal processes involved in transitions” as well as the “tendency of powerful actors and institutions” (Rosenbloom, 2017, p. 43) to narrow down the range of possible pathways, “as particular forms of knowledge and system-framing, knowledge, professions, political interests, goals and values, organizational arrangements and bureaucratic routines mutually reinforce each other, creating particular pathways and marginalising others” (Leach et al., 2010, p. 376; see also Runhaar et al., 2020).

While the dynamics of socio-ecological and socio-technical change receive increasingly sophisticated attention, the notion of pathways itself remains relatively unexplored. Stripple and Bulkeley (2019, p. 53) suggest that within this body of work, the term pathway can be interpreted both as “an entity (the route or chain that is followed) and as a process (the way in which the path is forged)” with the consequence that its analytical value is limited. Implicitly, within both the multilevel perspective (MLP) and transition management approaches, pathways are tied to the idea of scaling up – transition pathways involve moving from niche-level innovations to regime-level change (Geels et al., 2017, Geels and Schot, 2007). Sustainability pathways are then perhaps best understood within this body of literature as those which enable the scaling of various sustainability innovations to take place. Though there is intuitive appeal to the concept of scaling up, at its root are a set of assumptions that call into question its robustness and practical potential. This approach assumes that innovations are separate from their context rather than intertwined and co-evolving, that transitioning is a process that can be deliberately steered, and that sustainability pathways depend on upscaling more or less homogenous innovations without tailoring them to specific contexts.

Building on the dynamics of sustainability pathways identified in socio-technical and socio-ecological perspectives, in this paper we problematize the implicit dependence on ‘scaling’ as the central means through which pathways can be forged and instead offer an alternative means focused on ‘catalyzing’ sustainable pathways. We argue that sustainability pathways need to be conceived as emerging from the catalytic interaction of multiple and overlapping efforts to change the status quo. Pathways are not given, predetermined routes, but instead are assembled through the alignment and coherence of key interventions. Key interventions take advantage of opportunities to destabilize urban infrastructure regimes and cohere elements (technical, social, political, legal etc.) to generate capacity for new ways of doing things (McGuirk and Dowling, 2021).

We take as our empirical setting the development of urban nature-based solutions (NBS) in European cities, drawing on research conducted in six countries (Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom (UK)) as well as at the level of the European Union (EU). Scientists and policy-makers consider urban NBS to be promising innovations based on their ability to simultaneously support economic, social and ecological outcomes (Dorst et al., 2019, Maes and Jacobs, 2017). We examine bundles of related interventions – which we call stepping stones – that enable the uptake of urban NBS. We find that where stepping stones are clustered in particular ways, momentum builds which enables NBS to become mainstream responses to urban sustainability challenges. In contrast, we observe that where individual interventions are implemented to support NBS without additional steps in place, they are often less effective. Our analysis points to the critical work of navigating and forging pathways for urban sustainability, recognizing that transitioning towards sustainability goals is a process of seizing multiple parallel, consecutive, and/or spontaneously arising opportunities rather than engineering deterministic pathways.

Section snippets

Theoretical framework: From scaling up to catalytic pathways for transition

For much of the literature on socio-technical and socio-ecological sustainability pathways, scaling up is an inherent, if often implicit, component. Particularly when it comes to questions of urban sustainability, where experimentation is now recognized as a significant response to societal challenges (Bulkeley et al., 2015, Evans et al., 2016, Karvonen, 2018), pathways that are able to generate transformative change are those capable of carrying (niche) innovations to scale, including ‘scaling

Methodology

We build our argument upon qualitative case studies of the development of urban nature-based solutions (NBS) in Europe. Defined as “solutions that are inspired and supported by nature, which are cost-effective, simultaneously provide environmental, social and economic benefits and help build resilience” (European Commission, 2020), urban NBS are the focus of increasing attention from research and policy circles. For their advocates, NBS are multifunctional, capable of delivering a wide range of

Stepping stones that promote urban NBS uptake

A key finding of our research is the identification of 20 stepping stones (Table 1), each of which represents a bundle of similar interventions that seize or create opportunities to build momentum for the implementation of urban NBS. Each stepping stone can generate positive change towards the uptake of NBS, but we expect that the potential effect of each individual stepping stone can be significantly reinforced when they are aligned with others to overcome barriers or allow the full range of

Discussion: Assembling stepping stones that catalyze momentum

The examples of SuDS and green roofs show how particular combinations of stepping stones can build momentum for urban NBS to become mainstream responses to urban sustainability challenges. They reveal that different stepping stone combinations seem effective at promoting similar types of NBS in different contexts. Also, a stepping stone (or combination thereof) can destabilize socio-material constellations comprising urban infrastructure regimes, creating an opening and an opportunity to do

Conclusion

In this paper, we argue that the often linear way in which pathways for sustainability transitions are conceived in terms of scaling up is problematic because of the deterministic assumptions made about space, scale, and the socio-material dynamics that constitute change. Our case of urban NBS in Europe shows that the degree to which urban NBS are mainstreamed strongly depends on the alignment of interventions that collectively generate momentum to overcome inertia in specific socio-material

Funding

Research funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union under grant agreement number 730243.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

We thank Hade Dorst, Christiane Gerstetter, McKenna Davis, Sandra Naumann, Alexandru Matei, Judit Boros, Andrea Lituma-Sanchez, Ewa Iwaszuk, Lisa-Fee Meinecke, Linda Juhasz-Horvath, Sydney Kaiser, Rebeka Devenyi, Elisa Terragno Bogliaccini, and Rebecca Pearl-Martinez for their work on the case studies and working papers on which this study is based. We are also grateful to two anonymous reviewers and all of the interviewees and placement organisations across Europe who participated in this

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      Urban NBS mainstreaming, then, means intervening in these configurations to reinforce pathways that support urban NBS and to avoid others that unravel urban NBS mainstreaming. This implies that change in dominant regime practices towards improved urban NBS mainstreaming could come from multiple, potentially synergistic, sources developing relatively independently from each other at different geographical locations and scales (Tozer et al., 2022). Consequently, the impact of, for example, a new technological innovation supporting urban NBS mainstreaming is potentially higher if coinciding with processes such as interdisciplinary partnerships experimenting with NBS, increased support for grassroots community initiatives, green investment instruments unlocking finance for sustainable investment, and regulations supporting biodiversity and climate action (Xie et al., 2020).

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