“Lund's strength is to build a culture of collaboration”
The call for Enabling City Transformation within the framework of the EU Net Zero Cities aims to create reproducible solutions that support sustainable urban development and promote climate neutrality in European cities. Lund's project is called CoGovernance and is about how the city is partnering with the business community to make a transition.
- For almost all cities, it is the case that the public sector is responsible for a small part of the investments that need to be made to cope with a transition, says Mikael Edelstam at Miljöstrategi AB. Lund expects that businesses and households need to account for a large part, totalling up to 80 to 90% of what needs to be done.
Lund Municipality has worked for a long time to create climate solutions together with the business community, partly for example through the entire work with climate-neutral Lund, perhaps especially with CoAction where 25 partners work together in the fields of energy and mobility, partly through the innovation platform Future by Lund, which for the first ten years had the municipality of Lund as principal.
- Lund is at the forefront when it comes to creating systems of actors that will work together, says Mikael Edelstam of CoGovernAce. By showing how we build a culture of cooperation, we can contribute to European development and ensure that more action is created in the work.
In order to develop a good model, Lund is in contact with nine other cities interested in cooperation on this issue. In addition to Lund, it is Malmö, Trondheim, Stavanger, Mannheim, Pécs, Leuven, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Bristol and Budapest. During the project, four joint workshops and digital meetings will be held in order to learn from each other.
Lund is leading the work and has also taken responsibility for summarizing what was concluded. In the summary there will be a description of the Zone model, Future by Lund's explanatory model for when to do what in a collaboration and how to collect common challenges in portfolios.
- It is a quick project and after we all meet in May 2026, we will deliver a model with advice, tips and instructions that other cities in Europe can benefit from, says Mikael Edelstam.
In September, an initial meeting was held in Spain where Vitoria-Gasteiz, the Green Building Council España and Valencia presented how they are mapping the stakeholders important for working on the energy renovation of the Spanish housing sector. Subsequently, Mikael Edelstam and Peter Kisch from Lund held a workshop on practical mapping and categorization of stakeholders and a presentation of the Zone model.
- We need to understand how to interact with the actors in the ecosystem based on who they are. We press the need to get to know them and hear what they can, want and need, explains Mikael Edelstam.
It's also about how to act after the project ends.
- It is important to understand which actors can scale different types of results from the projects in order to truly create a climate transition.
How can this project accelerate climate change?
- Private actors need to take responsibility and it is necessary to involve them, because it does not happen by itself and, above all, not as fast as we would like. If we can help build synergies between the private and the public, action and investment can come faster and transition faster. Therefore, I think CoGovernance is one of the most interesting projects done in this context. The result will be made available to the other 112 mission cities for climate neutrality - and everyone else who wants to take part in what we come up with,” concludes Mikael Edelstam.