CoGovernance: A map for how climate change can be done in a city
The municipality of Lund is largely fossil-free in its own operations. The entire city's electricity, heating and cooling systems are fossil-free, and innovative solutions are constantly being incorporated into the whole. Still, the city needs to do more to reach climate neutrality, and the municipality's own calculations show that only a very small fraction of the measures seen as necessary fall under the municipality's decision-making power. Therefore, work is being done to establish a new approach, in which private stakeholders and households can be involved in the transition. The municipality is working out together with universities, Future by Lund and the city's stakeholders in the EU-funded project CoGovernance.
Finanisär
Experience from previous pilot projects shows that collaboration between various stakeholders on implementation, scaling and financing solutions is critical to enabling a citywide transition to climate neutrality. For most cities in Europe, it is estimated that 15-20% of the necessary measures are within and 80-85% are outside the direct control of local authorities. In Lund, recent calculations show that the figures are 5%/95%. For Lund, cooperation is necessary and an important challenge is how to manage such cooperation. *
CoGovernance enables climate change to be done together with several actors in the private sector, where the dominant part of decisions, actions and investments need to come. The work will be complemented by a new type of local climate contract, allowing for increased commitments over time. This will be combined with the portfolio management of climate projects and the impact monitoring work used by CoPilot.
The Municipality of Lund uses the Future by Lund model for managing innovation collaboration with three distinct zones, depending on the stage of maturity and extent of cooperation — firstly to explore new ideas and opportunities, secondly to create strong projects and finally to scale up and implement new solutions within each organisation. Each step requires different basic logics of cooperation and different ways of working. The model creates a strategic development process to analyze opportunities as well as build portfolios of stakeholders and climate actions that can be used to create and implement roadmaps to achieve climate neutrality.
The model aims to be a forward-looking, practical and operational tool for the city's climate change teams to structure new collaborations, develop future roadmaps and portfolios of efforts, involving a variety of stakeholders, including the financial sector, drawing on the collective competencies of the ecosystem of stakeholders, to move from the early stages of exploring future opportunities, all the way to broad implementation, implementation and investment.
The idea is to develop the model in collaboration with a number of interested European cities through peer-to-peer events and exchange of experience, where Lund can learn how to adapt the model to other successful local management initiatives and the use of local climate contracts in cities. This could improve the existing model into a more easily understood model for citywide expansion, well suited for use in cities with different maturities in their climate change cooperation.
Partners in CoGovernance are in addition to the project manager Lund Municipality the innovation platform Future by Lund Environmental Strategy AB and Lund University. They are also partners in the Pilot City project CoPilot, making it easy to work on synergies between the two projects. There is also a long list of stakeholders to be involved and it is also possible for other stakeholders to get involved.
*The text is based on the project application.
