Susie Moloney

Activity centre planning in Melbourne revisited

She Victorian Government has recently introduced a new strategic planning policy for Melbourne designed to cluster activities around public transport nodes as part of its metropolitan strategy Melbourne 2030. This is not a totally new concept for Melbourne but a renewal and reinterpretation of a policy previously introduced and then abandoned, and is a form of policy now common in many countries around the world. This paper looks at this most recent policy for what are called activity centres and compares it to both the previously abandoned District Centre Policy of Melbourne in the 1980s and some leading international examples of such policies. The paper concludes that some key lessons from the past have not been heeded, most significantly the importance of including local government in the process of selecting centres for designation and future growth, the value of enforceable guidelines and regulation to support the policy and the critical necessity of appropriate funding to enable implementation. Selected international examples ABOUT THE AUTHOR

'Transitions in the making': The role of regional boundary organisations in mobilising sustainability transitions under a changing climate

Sustainability under a changing climate requires transitioning away from institutionalised processes, norms and cultures that underpin and reproduce unsustainable practices and development. The volume and diversity of actors, and the closeness and density of interactions and interrelationships, make urban transitions complex, contested and dynamic, challenging established management practices, institutions and governance. Therefore, enabling sustainability transitions requires social processes of adaptive, if not transformative, change and learning, facilitated by improved capacities for working across diverse forms of jurisdiction, scale, knowledge, organisations, landscapes and institutions. Recognition of the challenges inherent in these issues has led to arguments for new forms of governance, such as Transition Management. The dynamic relations between niche and regime have been identified as requiring further analytical attention. In our research, we have identified ‘boundary organisations’ as operating in this space as they work to enable energy and natural resource transitions in Victoria. This paper explores what we are learning about and from these organisations in enabling some of the conditions considered important in the governance of transitions, such as experimentation, long-term thinking and learning by doing across multiple boundaries.

Designing a ‘Fit-for-Purpose’ Approach to Tracking Progress on Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience: Learning from Local Governments in Australia

Local governments are at the forefront of responding to climate change in developing risk assessments and mitigation and adaptation strategies. In the Australian context, local government plans and strategies are emerging, however the extent to which municipalities are planning effectively for climate change and whether they are delivering on outcomes is difficult to assess. While there are a number of frameworks for monitoring, evaluating and reporting climate change adaptation and urban resilience, very few have been implemented at the local scale. This paper will present a case study from a group of councils in metropolitan Melbourne who have collaborated to develop a ‘fit-for-purpose’ framework to track how well they are adapting to climate change and to improve their resilience. The project process, framework design, indicators and pilot implementation phase will be outlined including an analysis of the challenges and issues that emerged in developing and implementing an approach to monitoring and evaluation. We seek to contribute to the gap in knowledge around ‘doing adaptation’ in particular how we can monitor and evaluate progress. In the post Paris climate policy context, much more attention is needed on how we can better understand the “actual experience of adaptation” which broadly asks “are we adapting”? (Ford and King in Mitig Adapt Strat Glob Change 20:505–526, 2015) and in the case of the particular Australian case study presented in this paper, the focus is on how can we assess ‘How Well Are We Adapting?’

Strategic spatial planning and urban transition: Revaluing planning and locating sustainability trajectories

Despite often stated sustainability goals, much of traditional planning practice remains concerned with facilitating the market and maintaining the status quo rather than challenging and transforming it. In this chapter, the planning system is the focus of a sociotechnical systems perspective analysis. This chapter examines strategic spatial planning at regional and city scales through the lens of sociotechnical transitions concepts to provide insight into the role and capacity of spatial plans and planning processes to challenge the status quo and achieve sustainable urban transitions. We present two cases of strategic planning during the first decade of the 2000s at a national and metropolitan scale in Ireland and Melbourne (Australia), respectively – two cases where strategic spatial plans aimed to achieve sustainable land-use outcomes but where planning failed to act as a brake on booming housing markets and related urban sprawl. This chapter also reflects on the lessons from spatial planning processes to inform sociotechnical systems research pointing to the need to incorporate conceptualisations of space, place and context-specific governance in problem framing particularly in considering the challenges of long-term sustainable land-use transitions. We query whether the prevailing planning system common in most developed contexts can be treated as a stable regime, and if so, what benefit this perspective may provide to planning practitioners.

Urban low carbon transitions: institution-building and prospects for interventions in social practice

ABSTRACT As we witness increasing numbers and range of low carbon experiments, attention inevitably turns to how they are sustained and whether they can generate more systemic change in carbon-related consumption. This paper responds to the ‘spatial turn’ in socio-technical transitions, and the ‘practice turn’ in social theory to consider the role of intermediary organizations in potential shifts from experiments to institutional arrangements favouring transitions. Through the example of Climate Change Alliances in Victoria, Australia, the paper examines how such intermediary organizations seek to experiment and in so doing contribute towards institution building. With a focus on the interstitial spaces between local authorities, regional firms, agencies, and state governments we speculate on the prospects for systemic change given the resources, positioning and social strategies of the Alliances as intermediary institution builders.

Shifting practices: How the rise of rooftop solar PV has changed local government community engagement

Abstract Australian local governments develop and deliver a range of community engagement programmes designed to reduce household-based greenhouse gas emissions. This article draws on practice theory to analyse how these programmes have changed over time in response to the rapid deployment of a domestic renewable energy technology: rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV). After outlining the practice “lens” used to analyse these practices, we draw on empirical research to examine traditional forms of climate change community engagement practice including meanings of leadership adopted by local governments. We note how these play out in the form of ambitious community-based greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets that favour technological responses to climate change which in turn has favoured the rise of rooftop solar PV, and how community engagement practices have changed as a result. We find that Australian local government climate change community engagement practices have experienced three distinct forms of performance. The first, what might be termed “traditional” climate change community engagement practices, rely upon individuals acting out of adherence to pro-social environmental values. The second highlights the technology of rooftop solar PV with its associated pro-individual motivations, such as financial benefit. The third form, which is currently emerging, positions local governments as “disruptors” of centralised energy systems mobilising rooftop solar PV amongst actors currently excluded from the solar revolution, such as renters, low income households and community energy groups. In extending the meanings of rooftop solar PV uptake beyond financial benefits to a shared response to climate change, local governments become active agents in mobilising community energy transitions.