Public service innovation is common in planning and urban policy, but the long-term sustainability of new policy instruments depends on the development of new administrative practices in local government to maintain continual progress. This article analyses the case of a large-scale experiment on organisational change that was conducted in collaboration between two separate municipal departments of the city of Copenhagen. Experience with emerging new patterns of intra-and inter-organisational interaction documents suggests that service innovation and organisational change in this case mutually reinforce each other in a virtuous circle of innovation.

A wider extension of employee-managed firms in Western marketa economies is assumed to be limited by three financially related internal obstacles. Employees are: relatively poor, risk-averse and opportunistic. Thus a wider extension implies outside financing (some combination of outside equity and debt). But asymmetric information and opportunism in relation to outside financing lead to agency problems. It is concluded that a wider extension especially to capital-intensive industries implies the building up of separate financial institutions to supply outside financing, some risk-taking by employees to restore incentives and some violation of the employeemanaged firms' autonomy to protect outside financing against default.

In the United States, the absence of federal leadership on climate change and a strong tradition of localism has created a system in which many greenhouse gas reduction efforts fall to the discretion of municipalities. This often leads to uncoordinated action across jurisdictional boundaries. Despite the widespread notion that cities can lead on climate policy from the bottom-up, I find, using a logistic regression analysis of data from 1837 municipalities, that local governments are more likely to enact climate change policies in an environment where higher levels of government have acted rather than in a decentralized one. Smaller municipalities, in particular, have increased odds of action when their states act. Using existing regional, state-based initiatives, I present options for a coordination and capacity building framework.

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The City of Copenhagen aims to become the first carbon neutral capital in the world by 2025. Ten per cent of the total CO2-reduction target is to be achieved through energy retrofitting of existing buildings in the city. This article reports from an action research study in the urban renewal section in Copenhagen City Council where planners struggle to promote more and better energy retrofitting projects in the urban renewal scheme. The study finds that planners in fact approach green retrofitting as a ‘wicked problem’ that requires new solution strategies targeting the complexity of developing new retrofitting standards and solutions in the existing urban renewal framework. The analysis shows how planners’ strategic responses are challenged by competing worldviews concerning the role of urban renewal and the problems and potentials of green retrofitting in practice.