Governance and Policy for Sustainability, GAPS

A comparative review of challenges and transition pathways

What do different policies for sustainable urban development look like in different countries? How do different stakeholders and communities influence policy formulation? This project will study this in Gothenburg, Cape Town and Greater Manchester and is the first comparative project between Mistra Urban Futures' Local Interaction Platforms.

By looking at polices and governance, the project maps what challenges cities are facing, what solutions are used and how policies can be more effective through the inclusion of local and other forms of knowledge. The work is coordinated by the Urban Futures Arena and the project has four key aims which represent the distinctive approach of Mistra Urban Futures: bringing together the ’what’ of knowledge with the ’how’ of formulating and implementing urban policies for sustainable futures:

• To provide improved understandings of the relationship between governance and sustainable urban development policies in cities.
• To understand how particular knowledge’s of different stakeholders and communities influence policy formulation.
• To identify more effective forms of policy formulation through the inclusion of varying types of knowledge from different community groups and academic disciplines and finally
• To produce a framework for understanding how the challenges of Sustainable urban development are shaped in different contexts and what steps cities can take to enhance the effectiveness of policy-making and implementation