Kateryna Pereverza

To steer transitions to sustainability in cities, municipalities need to adopt more systemic approaches for organising activities and interventions, going beyond disconnected transition experiments and projects. Transformative portfolios (TPs) refer to coherent sets of interventions that have the potential to trigger system transformations in cities. To explore TPs, we approach them as a 'relational infrastructure''-'soft' and 'hard' mechanisms that enable interconnections across interventions along different dimensions. In this paper, we explore what kind of mechanisms need to be strengthened or created in cities to enable TPs. We are also interested in identifying the challenges that municipalities face when attempting to establish such mechanisms in practice. Our study is based on empirical research within the Climate Neutral Cities network (CNC2030) in Sweden created by the strategic innovation programme "Viable Cities" in 2019. Currently, within the network new instruments are considered to achieve an integration of activities at a more systemic level, including climate city contracts, climate investment plans, and system demonstrators. The preliminary findings of this study suggest that cities even in their current practice develop ways to improve coherence and integration across interventions, but rarely in a systematic and reflexive way. Transition intermediaries like Viable Cities play an important role in supporting cities in more strategically deploying their efforts for climate transition governance. And the CNC2030 network enables the exchange of learnings and good practices across Swedish municipalities.

The role of cities in addressing the challenge of climate change is growing and becoming more noticeable in global debates and actions on the ground. However, transformative innovations needed for addressing complex and wicked societal challenges cannot be achieved by cities alone and require concerted efforts also at national and international levels. In addition to multi‐level governance collaborations between cities, regions and the state or horizontal networks between cities, unconventional polycentric governance arrangements are emerging that still need to be explored and understood better. This study analyses the case of the Swedish Strategic Innovation programme ‘Viable Cities’ and its ‘Climate‐neutral Cities 2030’ (CNC2030) initiative over the period of 6 years. Our analysis shows how during this time, Viable Cities successfully mediated the design and implementation across governance levels (urban, national and European) of a number of governance instruments that influenced the work of Swedish municipalities towards the goals of climate‐neutrality in their cities. Through mutual commitments, learning platforms and an alignment of instruments, this governance innovation increases the collective capacity of Swedish cities to act in the climate transition. Our study shows how intermediaries can facilitate innovative arrangements grounded in multi‐level governance alignments and inter‐urban interactions to enact and shape transformative innovation policy for urban climate transition.

Transdisciplinary courses aimed at advancing competencies and skills for dealing with complex sustainability transition challenges are an important part of sustainability education. Such courses are critically important, as they prepare students for addressing complex and intertwined challenges our society is facing. Core qualities such courses often strive for are interactions between students and stakeholders, the collaboration of students from a variety of backgrounds, peer learning through activating interactions on different layers: in project groups and the entire class, and reflexive and exploratory learning when addressing open-ended transition challenges in iterative processes. Already now and even more in the future, the design and facilitation of such transdisciplinary courses will be happening in various remote digital and hybrid formats. This chapter describes ten design principles that can be used by teachers and facilitators of transdisciplinary courses in the ever-evolving hybrid environments. We illustrate how these design principles can be operationalised with the help of different facilitation techniques. The facilitation technique examples are taken from the university course “Transdisciplinary Approaches for System Innovations”, run at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. With the inevitable evolution of hybrid learning environments in the future, the proposed principles can serve as the basis for reimagining transdisciplinary courses. As digital tools provide new opportunities, these principles can also be taken forward with more radical ideas to efficiently foster collaborative and reflexive learning.

Fostering sustainability transitions in the heating and cooling sector is a necessary and urgent issue. Steering mechanisms can enable coordination of actions by different actors towards common sus ...

Purpose: – This paper aims at identifying factors that could contribute to the motivation of students in sustainable development (SD) education. The underlying idea of the paper is that SD education is not always as attractive among students and lecturers as many would like it to be.Design/methodology/approach: – The paper briefly reviews literature regarding behavioral change for long-term benefits. It identifies four motivators that could be effective to make people pursue longer-term objectives. It identifies if these motivators were present in five cases of successful SD education.Findings: – The four motivators for students that were identified in the literature review (a sense of autonomy, a challenge of reflection on the future role, connection with others, self-fulfillment, focus on the individual learning need) could be observed in the cases of successful SD education, although to various degrees. Individual autonomy in learning was not observed, but group autonomy was present in all cases.Research limitations/implications: – The case studies were all electives. It is unclear how the motivators could work out in mandatory courses. Moreover, the curriculum as a whole will affect the success of single courses. Successful courses being “the exception” of the curriculum might be judged differently if they would be part of the curriculum in which such courses would be the main stream. Further research is required to check if the motivators are effective in mandatory and not specifically SD-targeted courses. It is also not clear how various motivators could be applied most effectively in a curriculum.Practical implications: – The paper gives guidance to lecturers and educational managers to design attractive and effective SD education.Originality/value: – The paper treats SD education from a novel perspective: how to convey a credible behavioral message, and how to motivate students for education for SD.