New municipalism and the governance of urban transitions to sustainability

Abstract

Cities play increasingly recognised roles in global climate change responses: as change laboratories, spaces of opportunity, and as administrative and economic hubs that concentrate human and financial resources and needs. They host high climate mitigation potential and acute climate adaptation vulnerabilities. Scholarship flags conventional urban planning approaches to limit global warming to 1.5°C as inadequate. Yet urban sustainability transitions literature features few examples of functioning alternative governance and planning paradigms. This paper assesses one such approach, new municipalism: social movements centred on a democratic transformation of the local economy and state. We combine attention to urban sustainability transitions and new municipalism research to interrogate whether and how the latter can facilitate the provision of leadership and institutional arrangements that enable urban transformation to sustainability. Our desk study considers two prominent examples of new municipalism in Spain, where Barcelona en Comú and Ahora Madrid arose as anti-austerity movements to combat neoliberal urban agendas during the 2010s. We find that the praxis of collective decision-making associated with new municipalism does offer inclusive, innovative policy pathways and the potential to implement experimental knowledge and learning in complex real-world settings at the urban scale. We argue, however, that powerful neoliberal mechanisms impose structural constraints on the very push for deep political change that new municipalist movements embody. By linking transformative climate governance needs with new municipalism movements and wider political economic structuring forces, we explicate the tensions and contested dynamics of institutionalising progressive social movements in the multi-scalar governance of urban sustainability transformation.

Politicising proximity: Radical municipalism as a strategy in crisis

“…Joubert’s (2023) is the only case study of historical practice in this issue, a gap for future research to explore. A third of the papers, however, compare two distinct cases – one compares four (Béal et al, 2023) – to begin to tease out differences and generate new theory (Bianchi, 2023; Bua and Davies, 2023; Milan, 2023; Sareen and Waagsaether, 2023; Sarnow and Tiedermann, 2023; Toro and Orozco, 2023). Nonetheless, connections between cases remain relatively under-analysed in relation to the policy mobilities, assemblage and mobile urbanism methodologies of urban studies (Leitner et al, 2019) – a major oversight of this special issue, especially considering municipalism’s transnationalism and translocal movement-building.…”

“…Indeed, radical municipalist movements are deeply conscious of their power to reconfigure the shape of human settlements in ecologically reparative ways. In this special issue, Sareen and Waagsaether (2023) evaluate municipalist interventions in Barcelona and Madrid in terms of urban transitions to sustainability – bringing these two fields into conversation for the first time. They find a number of flagship policies – such as Barcelona en Comú’s signature ‘Superblock’ masterplanning, creating car-free green micro-neighbourhoods (see also Kussy et al, 2023), its remunicipalisation of energy services for 100% localised renewable energy (Angel, 2021), and Ahora Madrid’s Low Emission Zone, including electric bus routes – all contributing towards addressing the challenge of transitioning to low-carbon sustainable urban metabolisms.…”

“…First, radical municipalist interventions are in some sense reactive ‘contestations’ to crises, made possible by a conjunctural opening in politics, which in the contemporary European context is often traced back to the 2008 global financial crash (Featherstone et al, 2015). These are contestations to crises across multiple domains – from the ‘financial’ crisis of asset devaluations, escalating debts, mortgage defaults and foreclosures and the ‘urban’ crisis of austerity, privatisations of the urban commons and accumulation-by-dispossession (Russell et al, 2023), through the ‘social reproduction’ crisis of care (Kussy et al, 2023), the ‘governability’ crisis of ‘the public’ (Bianchi, 2023) or of urban regimes (Bua and Davies, 2023, Milan, 2023, Sarnow and Tiedemann, 2023) and the ‘political’ crises of representation and of ‘legitimation’, in which traditional social-democratic parties are in freefall and party politics in radical realignment (Béal et al, 2023; van Outryve d’Ydewalle, 2019, 2023) to the ‘ecological’ crises of climate breakdown, resource exhaustion, environmental pollution, and ecosystem degradation (Sareen and Waagsaether, 2023, Schmid, 2023).…”

When Bookchin faces Bourdieu. French ‘weak’ municipalism, legitimation crisis and zombie political parties

“…In concrete terms, this translates into a desire to revive citizens’ assemblies or, at least, to multiply the forms of direct participation to produce alternatives to urban neoliberal agendas. In the end, this movement seeks to become international by setting up networks to organise the resistance against austerity regimes and to prefigure alternative forms of economic exchange (Sareen and Waagsaether, 2023). It has taken up the torch of a municipalist tradition born at the end of the 19th century and adapted it to the contemporary urban condition (Guionnet, 2005).…”

The Durban Climate Change Strategy: Lessons learnt from the 2021 strategy review and implementation plan

“…Since the year 2000, urban local governments have become increasingly concerned with developing climate change adaptation plans. Indeed, there is now well-established literature on the challenges and opportunities to successful climate adaptation in cities across diverse contexts in the Global North and the Global South (Bulkeley & Broto, 2013;Ziervogel, Cowen & Ziniades, 2016;Sareen & Waagsaether, 2022;Berrang-Ford & Paterson, 2011). Despite this burgeoning literature, there is a lack of empirical studies that assess how local climate strategies and actions emerge in practice in the Global South, with consequent limited systematic knowledge on the evolution of urban climate agendas.…”