Positive inertia and proactive influencing towards sustainability: systems analysis of a frontrunner city

Abstract

With an increasingly urban population, cities have an important role to play in global environmental sustainability. Cities engaged in pioneering and ongoing sustainability experimentation-the frontrunners-can lead the way towards sustainability transition, and often become the beacon for others to follow. However, the nature and the internal dynamics that make a city a frontrunner, or the role of frontrunner cities in sustainability transition beyond their boundary, remain unclear. In addition, most studies on the influence of these frontrunners are limited to passive influencing, i.e. how the practice has been duplicated by others, or how the practice is adopted and mainstreamed into system level. Based on in-depth case studies on a frontrunner city and two other cities influenced by it, this paper examines how momentum for positive changes has been initiated, built, and sustained towards changing the status quo of practice through a succession of actors and a series of reinforcing feedback loops. We argue that creating a positive inertia through sustained momentum and embedding the frontrunner identity in a city is essential for it to continue the process of sustainability transition. Frontrunners can create flow-on benefits for other cities through a proactive influencing. Supported by multiple two-way benefits, such proactive influencing is a new mechanism of mainstreaming and up-scaling urban sustainability experiments in system innovation and transition.

Operationalising positive tipping points towards global sustainability

“…Key to this approach is the recognition that we can never fully predict the consequence of intervening in a complex adaptive system, but we can experiment and learn by doing, in ‘transformative spaces’ (Pereira et al, 2020b) or ‘real world laboratories’ (Schäpke et al, 2018). This is already occurring widely with cities' experiments to tackle climate change (Castán Broto & Bulkeley, 2013, 2018), where frontrunners have triggered reinforcing feedbacks across networks of cities (Irvine & Bai, 2019). This suggests a systemic strategy to initiate positive tipping points in niches using public investment and policy levers, and thus retain an option to reverse the tipping (if it proves undesirable) by rapidly withdrawing those levers.…”

The Development of Spatial Circularity Discourse in Japan: Ecomodernist, Territorialised, or Both? The Story of Onomichi’s Wastescapes

“…In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the links between different health impacts and industrial activities became clearer. For example, the itai-itai disease was the consequence of cadmium pollution of waters through mining activities in Toyama prefecture [78], and there was air and water pollution in heavily industrial areas and cities, such as Kitakyushu in Fukuoka Prefecture [79]. Additionally, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the satoyama landscapes started to decay as a result of imports of external foods, energy sources, and fertilizers that broke their cyclical use of local bioresources and of depopulation [80,81].…”

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