Designing a gender-just energy policy: Mapping the mindsets of Dutch municipal policy workers on mitigating energy poverty

Citizens’ participation in the energy transition seems mostly available for households with disposable incomes to invest in energy efficiency, renewable energy sources and retrofitting. Those who cannot afford the upfront costs might not benefit from the policy interventions, like tax benefits and subsidies. The energy crisis made energy poverty...

Multi-Level and Multi-Actor Governance: Why it matters for spatial planning

This chapter sheds light on how planning is affected by multi-level (vertical) governance relations that shape an enabling environment for planning decisions and multi-actor (horizontal) governance aspects which are crucial for integrating planning with other policy agendas and effectively engaging citizens and other stakeholders in decision...

Economic City Branding in China: the Multi-Level Governance of Municipal Self-Promotion in the Greater Pearl River Delta

In the urban development policy in China, city brands play an important role in setting targets for Chinese cities. These economic city brands, however, are not produced in an institutional vacuum: they are embedded in the visions national, provincial and municipal governments have for these cities, i.e., on multi-level governance. In this paper...

Boundary spanning for governance of climate change adaptation in cities: Insights from a Dutch urban region

Adapting to climate change in the urban setting requires cooperation across scales, levels of government, organisational boundaries and policy sectors. The study presented in the paper explores governance of urban adaptation policies through the conceptual lens of multi-level governance and boundary spanning. It focuses on the South Wing of the...

Challenges of adaptation to the increasing flood risk in cities: lessons from the Pearl River Delta

In some of the delta cities which are the most exposed to flooding caused by climate change - like Shenzhen and Guangzhou investigated in this paper - there is surprisingly little recognition of this problem and hardly any action is taken to address it. This paper draws on the insights from these two cases to address the following research...

Stimulating European rail freight transport: Towards a new governance approach

Developing rail freight sector in the EU is desirable from both a political-social point of view and from a market business point of view. Fragmentation in the national railway systems impedes, in many ways, social and economic benefits in the liberalised EU railway market. The need for innovative governance to deal with the fragmentation...