| 1. |
- Burch, Sarah, et al.
(författare)
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Building urban resilience through sustainability-oriented small- and medium-sized enterprises
- 2022
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Ingår i: Urban Transformations. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2524-8162. ; 4:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The unfolding COVID-19 pandemic, and the unprecedented social and economic costs it has inflicted, provide an important opportunity to scrutinize the interplay between the resilience of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and the resilience of the communities they are embedded in. In this article, we articulate the specific ways that SMEs play a crucial, and underappreciated role in building resilience to human and natural hazards, and provide new opportunities to accelerate the adoption of sustainability practices through the configuration of 'enabling ecosystems' geared towards promoting sustainability in the private sector. We argue that capacity-building and experimentation are not only required within companies, but also throughout this emerging supportive ecosystem of policies, resources (i.e. finance, materials, skills), governance actors, and intermediaries to adequately focus investment, technical capabilities and innovation. Ultimately, we call for a new transdisciplinary action research agenda that centers on SMEs as pivotal actors and amplifiers of community resilience; while recognizing that these firms are themselves in need of support to secure their own capacity to respond to, and transform in light of, crises. This research program calls for recognizing and applying the lessons that the pandemic presents to the urgent need for accelerated climate action. This will be enabled by developing more targeted approaches to collaborative capacity-building activities in SMEs that feed into experimentation and allow for the accelerated adoption of deliberate and strategic resilient business practices and models.
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| 2. |
- Hoffmann, Sabine, et al.
(författare)
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A Research Agenda for the Future of Urban Water Management : Exploring the Potential of Nongrid, Small-Grid, and Hybrid Solutions
- 2020
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Ingår i: Environmental Science and Technology. - : American Chemical Society (ACS). - 0013-936X .- 1520-5851. ; 54:9, s. 5312-5322
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Recent developments in high- and middle-income countries have exhibited a shift from conventional urban water systems to alternative solutions that are more diverse in source separation, decentralization, and modularization. These solutions include nongrid, small-grid, and hybrid systems to address such pressing global challenges as climate change, eutrophication, and rapid urbanization. They close loops, recover valuable resources, and adapt quickly to changing boundary conditions such as population size. Moving to such alternative solutions requires both technical and social innovations to coevolve over time into integrated socio-technical urban water systems. Current implementations of alternative systems in high- and middle-income countries are promising, but they also underline the need for research questions to be addressed from technical, social, and transformative perspectives. Future research should pursue a transdisciplinary research approach to generating evidence through socio-technical "lighthouse" projects that apply alternative urban water systems at scale. Such research should leverage experiences from these projects in diverse socio-economic contexts, identify their potentials and limitations from an integrated perspective, and share their successes and failures across the urban water sector.
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| 3. |
- Luederitz, Christopher, et al.
(författare)
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Learning through Evaluation: A Tentative Evaluative Scheme for Sustainability Transition Experiments
- 2017
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Ingår i: Journal of Cleaner Production. - 0959-6526. ; 169, s. 61-76
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Transitions towards sustainability are urgently needed to address the interconnected challenges of economic development, ecological integrity, and social justice, from local to global scales. Around the world, collaborative science-society initiatives are forming to conduct experiments in support of sustainability transitions. Such experiments, if carefully designed, provide significant learning opportunities for making progress on transition efforts. Yet, there is no broadly applicable evaluative scheme available to capture this critical information across a large number of cases, and to guide the design of transition experiments. To address this gap, the article develops such a scheme, in a tentative form, drawing on evaluative research and sustainability transitions scholarship, alongside insights from empirical cases. We critically discuss the scheme's key features of being generic, comprehensive, operational, and formative. Furthermore, we invite scholars and practitioners to apply, reflect and further develop the proposed tentative scheme – making evaluation and experiments objects of learning.
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| 4. |
- Pakizer, Katrin, et al.
(författare)
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Policy sequencing for early-stage transition dynamics – A process model and comparative case study in the water sector
- 2023
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Ingår i: Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions. - 2210-4224. ; 48
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Sustainability scholars increasingly recognize that policy mixes can positively impact socio-technical transitions. However, the temporal dimension of policy interventions remains under-researched, especially in the context of early transition dynamics that typically emerge in niche contexts. In this article, we explore how policy sequencing can play a key role in supporting the scaling-up of early-stage transition dynamics to drive wider system change. We contribute to transition research by proposing a process model for analyzing policy sequences by focusing on the interplay between policy instruments and institutional barriers. We conceptualize two ideal-type policy sequencing patterns - strategic and reactive - which we illustrate with empirical examples from early transition dynamics in the urban water sector of San Francisco (United States) and Sant Cugat del Vallès (Spain). Applying the process model to these case studies reveals how different sequences of policy (instrument) mixes can assist in overcoming institutional barriers, thus supporting transition trajectories.
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| 5. |
- Wolfram, Marc, et al.
(författare)
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Urban transformative capacity : From concept to practice
- 2019
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Ingår i: Ambio. - : Springer Nature. - 0044-7447 .- 1654-7209. ; 48:5, s. 437-448
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Urban transformations form a central challenge for enabling global pathways towards sustainability and resilience. However, it remains unclear what kind of capacity is needed to deliver urban change that is actually transformative. Against a backdrop of current claims and efforts to achieve urban transformations, this special issue reviews the relational concept of urban transformative capacity and how it can inform novel approaches in research, policy, and practice. Drawing on seven papers analyzing diverse empirical contexts, we identify four requirements that should guide future action: (1) foster inclusion and empowerment as prerequisites, (2) close the intermediation gap and strengthen the role of local academia, (3) challenge and reinvent urban planning as a key arena, and (4) enhance reflexivity through novel self-assessment techniques. Overall, current levels of urban transformative capacity are assessed as very low, making its development a high-priority objective for all stakeholders, but for planning and research policy in particular.
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