Best practices that shape sustainable urban futures: beyond ‘examples which are to hand’
Sofie Bouteligier, Wageningen University; Han Vandevyvere, KU Leuven; Bart Vercoutere, Royal Haskoning; Hans Bruyninckx, HIVA – KU Leuven
In the search for more sustainable ways of living, policymakers look for initiatives that have fruitfully contributed to achieving this goal elsewhere. This has led to a proliferation of databases with so-called best practices. In the domain of urban environmental governance, both international organisations (e.g. UN-Habitat) and city networks (e.g. the C40 Climate Leadership Group) have gathered information on successful policies with the aim that will be replicated elsewhere. Also private actors (e.g. multinational environmental consultancies) make play with achievements in other cities around the world to persuade city governments to chose a particular path towards urban environmental sustainability.
Yet, best practices are rarely critically evaluated before translating them to other contexts. Bulkeley (2006) already suggested that the selection criteria behind best practices are obscure and that best practices often simply reflect the ‘examples which are to hand’. Furthermore, in an era in which information and knowledge have become strategic resources (Borja & Castells, 1997; Ergazakis et al., 2006; Gertler, 2003), the identification and spread of best practices contains an act of power: those who determine which best practices are spread and replicated around the globe have power (Bulkeley, 2006; Mol, 2008).
The open discussion will be held between researchers and practitioners (involved in city networks and in the environmental consultancy industry) and aims at answering the following questions: (i) What are the major challenges with regard to the identification and replication of best practices? (ii) Could more transparency on the criteria behind the identification of best practices increase these practices’ legitimacy? (iii) Could a more critical evaluation make best practices more appropriate means for guiding policy initiatives? (iv) What criteria should be at the basis of such an evaluation?
