Urban Sustainability: Learning from Best Practice?

Abstract

In the promotion of urban sustainability in national and international arenas, numerous initiatives and programmes have been put into place to facilitate the creation and dissemination of`best practice' (1) through which to promote policy transfer and learning. However, despite the vast array of available best practices, little is known about the ways in which best practice is constructed, used, and contested, or of its implications for urban sustainability. In this paper I argue that, rather than consider the importance of best practice in terms of the extent to which it promotes the transfer of initiatives, or processes of lesson drawing, the creation, dissemination, and use of best practice can be better understood as a discursive process, in which not only is new knowledge created about a policy problem, but the nature and interpretation of the policy problem itself are challenged and reframed (Hajer, 1995;Owens and Cowell, 2002;Owens and Rayner, 1999). Drawing on insights from literatures on governmentality, I argue that best practice represents at once a political rationality and a governmental technology through which networks and coalitions seek to promote particular urban futures. However, in practice, the abstractions of best practice become enmeshed in the particularities of the places from which they are derived, and in political struggles over urban sustainability in the locales where best practice is deployed. Although such processes impede the translation and incorporation of local knowledges into political rationalities shaping the norms and rules of urban sustainability (Murdoch, 2000), they point to the

Social Capital and Longitudinal Change in Sustainability Plans and Policies: U.S. Cities from 2000 to 2010

“…6, 26). It is clear that there are numerous best practice models [88] after which an uncertain or inexperienced city could model its sustainability initiatives, such as the International City/County Management Association, and the National Association of Counties [89,90]. A normative isomorphic force -…stems primarily from professionalization‖ ( [12], p. 152).…”

La gouvernance multiniveau et la nouvelle gestion publique : des idées nouvelles à intégrer aux approches traditionnelles du fédéralisme dans le contexte de l’étude des relations intergouvernementales

“…La littérature récente portant sur les politiques comparatives en matière d'environnement John, 2004 ;Scheberle, 2004aScheberle, et 2004bSchlager, 2004), de nouvelle gestion publique et d'organismes publics (Newig et Fritsch, 2009) et de droit de l'environnement et des ressources naturelles (Karkkainen, 2004) est plus ouverte qu'avant à prendre en considération de nouvelles initiatives en matière de GMN. De plus, des chercheurs d'autres domaines, comme la géographie (Bulkeley, 2006 ;Bulkeley et Moser, 2007) et l'urbanisme (Gore et Robinson, 2009) ont publié des études à « petit n » sur la gestion locale environnementale et ont analysé de nouveaux processus dans la gouvernance urbaine à partir de points de vue qui ressemblent à ceux de l'approche GMN 12 .…”

Zwischenstadt as a travelling concept: towards a critical discussion of mobile ideas in transnational planning discourses on urban sprawl

“…We use both here as close synonyms since they are used interchangeably in policy documents and programmes (Bulkeley, 2006(Bulkeley, , p. 1029, even if a semantic difference might be noted with a 'more rationalistic and prescriptive bias in the best practice discourse than in that of the good practice' (Vettoretto, 2009(Vettoretto, , p. 1069. In the context of landscape and urban planning, best practice refers to the process of reviewing and learning from policy or planning alternatives that have been effective at addressing similar issues elsewhere or in the past and that could be applied to a current problem and context.…”

“…They become 'deracinated' (Healey, 2011, p. 193) from the context on which they depend and from the situation out of which they have emerged. The 'practice of best practice' (Bulkeley, 2006(Bulkeley, , p. 1029) has thus been criticized for its blindness to its economic, political, social and cultural context and its a-or post-political nature (Bulkeley, 2006;Healey, 2011;Moore, 2013;Stead, 2012;Vettoretto, 2009). …”