Florian Koch

Mainstreaming adaptation: a content analysis of political agendas in Colombian cities

This paper investigates how climate adaptation measures are mainstreamed in the larger political agenda of cities in the Global South. Based on a content analysis of the development plans of the 10 biggest cities in Colombia the paper presents a typology of how climate adaptation is addressed in the political agendas. It is shown that institutional constraints and the complex character of adaptation are challenges for mainstreaming adaptation and lead to implementation difficulties. In order to get a clear picture of the reasons why mainstreaming adaptation is not a problem-free, linear process but rather a winding road, climate adaptation has to be understood as a contested policy field which stands in competition to other political goals.

Participation without Power: The Failure of Citizen Participation in Barranquilla

Citizen participation has become an important political strategy. A case study of the Barranquilla land-use plan employing Fung and Wright’s theories on countervailing power reveals that the citizen participation promoted to comply with legal requirements was a failure because it was manipulated by the dominant public actor. In societies such as that of Barranquilla, which employs traditional modes of politics, there is little chance of fostering successful participatory processes because there is no countervailing power to offset the established one. The violent context that surrounds the political sphere, low confidence in state institutions, and the convergence of economic and political power prevent the creation of strong and independent countervailing powers. La participación ciudadana se ha convertido en una importante estrategia política. El estudio de caso del plan de usos de terrenos de Barranquilla a través del prisma de las teorías de Fung y Wright sobre el poder compensatorio revela que la participación ciudadana promovida para cumplir con los requisitos legales fue un fracaso porque fue manipulada por el actor público dominante. En sociedades como la de Barranquilla, con sus modos tradicionales de la política, hay pocas posibilidades de fomentar procesos de participación exitosos porque no hay un poder compensatorio que contrarreste el poder establecido. El contexto violento que envuelve la esfera política, la poca confianza en las instituciones estatales y la convergencia del poder económico con el poder social impiden la creación de poderes compensatorios fuertes e independientes.

Exploring the Extent, Selected Topics and Governance Modes of Urban Sustainability Transformations

With cities acknowledged as key players for active involvement towards more sustainability (Parnell 2016), the city – or the urban scale – is seen as a, or even the, decisive field that can make transformations towards sustainability work (WBGU 2011; UBA 2015b). And, there is “general agreement that effective and integrated solutions can only be found and efficiently implemented through cities and urban areas” (McCormick et al. 2013, p. 2). Cities are, today, assigned a role as pioneers or frontrunners of sustainability transformations (Wolfram 2014; Wolfram and Frantzeskaki 2016). Nevertheless, it still needs to be seen whether these aspirations and expectations about the role of cities is only born out of desperation about slow progress toward sustainability or if they can actually become the real focal point of transformation. The increasingly important notion of “transformation” in policy and research, when talking about changes that need to be undertaken, provokes the question about possible differences between the terms transformation and sustainable development. In this regard, Brand (2016, p. 24) has argued that the term transformation is “more radical and more attractive than the term sustainable development” and stresses both the urgent need for action and the “how to come to” the implementation of sustainability. For Brand (2016, p. 24), transformation is the “new critical orthodoxy”, characterized by a radical problem diagnosis, promising far-reaching change, but also involving a relatively incremental understanding of the processes and steps of social change, in order to cope with the problems. Loorbach concludes that “Sustainable Development itself has become part of the problem” because it has become part of the established regime and has primarily served to make it a little less unsustainable (Loorbach 2014, p. 32). According to this ambitious target, we explore three aspects of urban transformations: extent, topics, and governance (UBA 2015b).

How to Measure Progress Towards an Inclusive, Safe, Resilient and Sustainable City? Reflections on Applying the Indicators of Sustainable Development Goal 11 in Germany and India

Cities seem to be keystones within global policies towards sustainability. Urban areas are hot spots that drive environmental change at multiple scales (Grimm et al. 2008) and a large share of CO2 emissions has urban origins (Sethi and Puppim de Oliveira 2015). At the same time, a global urbanization process that increases the total number, and also the share of urban dwellers worldwide, is taking place. Therefore, ambitious global goals for sustainability that do not consider urban areas seem to be predestined to fail and documents such as the UN’s New Urban Agenda (UN Habitat 2016) highlight the need for profound changes in current urban developmental paths. These paradigm changes, also labeled urban transformations towards sustainability, demonstrate the normative dimension of urban transformations (see Rink et al., Chap. 2 in this volume). Urban transformations receive increasing political recognition, as demonstrated by the much-cited statement of UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, that “our struggle for sustainability will be won or lost in cities” (UNESCAP 2014, p. 1) (Rudd 2015 later complemented, rightly, that this struggle “will be won or lost by cities”). That is why one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, also known as Global Goals, UN 2015), which, together, form the 2030 Agenda, has an explicit urban focus (Goal 11: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable). Cities are also important for the implementation of other SDGs. Goals such as “End poverty in all its forms everywhere” (Goal 1) or “Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” (Goal 4) also need to encompass the urban dimension of poverty and learning opportunities in cities, in order to be realized. Estimates based on the wording of the SDG zero draft indicate that 21% of the 169 targets of all 17 SDGs can only be implemented with urban stakeholders, 24% should be implemented with urban stakeholders, and a further 20% should have a much clearer orientation towards urban stakeholders, although current wording does not suggest this (Misselwitz et al. 2015). Nevertheless, this chapter focuses only on Goal 11, acknowledging the crosscutting character of cities for the other SDGs as well.