Constance Carr

Discourse Yes, Implementation Maybe: An Immobility and Paralysis of Sustainable Development Policy

Abstract Sustainable development policies are on the move. Cities the world over are repositioning, repackaging and remarketing themselves as green and sustainable, and sustainable development is the moniker imported to spark the process. At the same time, sustainable development, as a normative point of departure, is itself going through cycles of reinterpretation and re-composition. The research in this article aims to understand this process by mapping the trajectories of sustainable development policies, and understanding sustainable development as a contextually grounded policy in motion. In Luxembourg, as planners are confronted with finding ways to manage growth, sustainable development has come to permeate all levels of the planning system. To understand how this came into being, research methods were employed that included document screening and a series of conversational interviews that were later transcribed and coded. In so doing, the discourse around sustainable development policy could be reconstructed and analysed. The results showed that the multi-scalar, cross-national, and simultaneously micro-level governance structures pose many obstructions to the implementation of sustainable development policies that are imported from abroad. Thus, policy is ultimately immobile, and a policy paralysis can be considered.

Blending Scales of Governance: Land‐Use Policies and Practices in the Small State of Luxembourg

Affolderbach J. and Carr C. Blending scales of governance: land-use policies and practices in the small state of Luxembourg, Regional Studies. While multilevel governance is helpful in understanding the logics behind integrated sustainable development policies, this paper argues that relational multi-scalar approaches more accurately explain actual land-use transformations in the small state of Luxembourg. These conclusions are based on surveys of planning policies and observations of land-use patterns related to housing and retail. Additionally, over 60 interviews were performed with local actors. The results reveal how actors blend scales of governance to override national directives to exert changes in land use. Blending scales is not always strategic or advantageous, but is an unavoidable process that characterizes interactions in a small state.

Rescaling sustainability? Local opportunities and scalar contradictions

We need a better world: That’s the goal, in fact. At a time when sociopolitical environmental problems seem overwhelming in magnitude and ever increasing in severity, this objective can hardly be overstated. As the urban and local scale have often been postulated as most appropriate site of intervention to respond to sustainability problems, this journal aims to bring into conversation how local practices can contribute to wider sustainability transitions in ways that higher levels of authority cannot, and further, to provide a platform for research that understands the necessity of justice and equality among ourselves as a prerequisite for sustainability (Agyeman and Evans 2012). The papers presented in this Special Issue show that there is still some way to go in achieving these goals, highlighting the scalar opportunities and limitations to current emerging sustainability endeavours. Along with an upcoming Special Issue of Regional Studies edited by Gibbs and Lintz (currently in review), this issue is the result of a series of scholarly venues. The first was a series of workshops organised by the Regional Studies Association (2013) Research Network on Ecological Regional Development, where researchers met to explore regional environmental constraints and opportunities, and to identify key research fields and points of orientation for research (Affolderbach et al. 2013). Second was the series of sessions on urban sustainability at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, in New York (Carr et al. 2012). Together, these venues brought together a strong cohort of scholars and expertise that addressed and analysed the role of actor constellations, associated patterns of governance, and respective spatial dimensions in sustainability transitions. While a rich diversity of initiatives were brought to light at these conferences – and some of that variety will be exposed here as well – what also came out of these meetings was the recognition that local initiatives must be viewed in association to the wider multi-scalar contexts that enable them. What we present here are a series of papers that, together, offer conceptually anchored critical case studies that expose the potential, but also limited reach of, networks, the spatial unevenness, and social externalities that unfold and diverge at wider scales of analysis. This collection of papers thus underscores the need to think beyond Born and Purcell’s (2006) “local trap”, which refers to the faulty assumption that the local scale is inherently better and more just than a national-scale or global-scale, and that, for this reason, the local is always more desirable and preferable to larger scales. By getting beyond this trap, the object is not to refute any good intentions, but to refocus the lens away from proclaimed local triumphs and the plethora of good ideas that are surfacing in local contexts towards the multi-scalar relations that embed, support, and define them. Cross-cutting all of these papers is the notion of place as the site of intervention and locus of change: Ideas emerge and are transformed in spatial arrangements bound to local places. However,

Sustainability in Small States: Luxembourg as a Post-suburban Space Under Growth Pressure in Need of a Cross-National Sustainability

A vast literature on urban sustainable development and sustainability recounts local place-based actions as best practices, and not seldom rests on examples in Europe. Not seldom, however, these recipe-oriented instructions overlook specific sociopolitical and economic conditions that would hinder policy transfer of sustainability initiatives. Also, while the maxim small is beautiful is repeated, rarely are the network of spaces and flows that constitute those small places considered. Small states exemplify this situation and contradiction. This chapter presents the case of post-suburban Luxembourg—a small sovereign state—that under growth pressure has developed an urban morphology that is profoundly dependent on international, cross-borders flows. It is a place where policy-makers need to rethink the orthodoxies of sustainability and find new ways to address these challenges.

Examining Regional Competitiveness and the Pressures of Rapid Growth: An interpretive institutionalist account of policy responses in three city regions

This paper is premised on the notion that actors play a central role in shaping their institutional contexts. The paper adds to scholarship in this area by bringing together three disparate cases with a common analytical entry point: the city region. Despite their multiple scales and different sites of governance, these cases are united by a common theme, exemplified in each city region: addressing the contradictions of rapid development, in particular rapid growth and competitiveness. Using the conceptual framework of interpretive institutionalism, we examine how dilemmas, in this case the pressure of rapid growth in regions, are informed by the different traditions for understanding the role of the market in delivering project outcomes. Our findings show this difference in institutional norms and the variance among the different paradigms.