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In Flanders, social rental housing serves as the primary policy instrument to address housing affordability issues. However, the current supply of social housing falls significantly short of meeting all needs. Despite broad political consensus and increased government budgets for social housing since 2013, it has become increasingly difficult to allocate the budget to new investment projects. By the end of 2021, only a fraction of the annual credit had been allocated, sparking discussions. This article explores two key questions: How can we explain the delay in the supply of social housing when the need is acknowledged and the funds are available? How can this problem be resolved? To answer both questions, we use administrative data, survey data, and insights from group interviews with social housing associations and municipalities. Behind the answer is a multitude of reasons at various points throughout the planning process. Many problems stem from coordination challenges in a socio-economic environment that grows ever more complex. The notion of multi-level governance provides insights into the intricate web of interactions and negotiations. Based on this analysis, we offer recommendations for Flemish policy, local governments, and social housing associations.

The provision of housing plays a decisive role in segregation processes. In a European context increasingly influenced by variegated neo-liberal housing policies, Vienna’s approach is characterised by generous access to social housing. This inclusive strategy aims at actively preventing segregation and the isolation of certain groups. Over the last 30 years, however, reconfigured multi-level arrangements and wider contextual changes have transformed Vienna’s housing governance. This article explores how. In particular, it aims at disentangling the relationship between housing policy reforms at multiple policy levels and the changes of the mechanisms shaping the access to tenure segments and residential segregation in Vienna. Through the use of process tracing, we identify critical junctures of housing governance and relate them to housing segmentation and segregation measures over a period of approximately 30 years. Our findings show that reforms on multiple levels produce an increasingly deregulated private rental market and an increasingly fragmented access to a diversified provision of social housing. From a spatial point of view, persistent patterns of segregation blend with new ones, leading to decreasing segregation characterised by a more even spatial distribution of low and high-status groups. At the same time, both groups show very low, but slightly increased levels of isolation. Tenant profiles in social housing are, however, generally still very mixed. Balancing the trade-off between a social mix and social targeting without excluding residents in need will remain the main challenge for Vienna’s social housing model.

This article focuses on the conflictual relations at the heart of what we call ‘municipal contestation’. This global phenomenon sees cities and other local governments – sometimes together with non-governmental players – contest policies proposed or implemented by higher governmental authorities, which they perceive as threats to their policy positions or local communities. Bridging public policy studies and social movement theory, we develop a new typology identifying conservative, moderate and radical ideal types of municipal contestation. In addition, we explore the dynamics of contestation, with municipalities ‘moving away’ from the institutional status quo when they shift from conservative to more moderate and radical forms of contestation, or ‘moving towards’ the status quo when they find it difficult to sustain such action. The article illustrates this typology and contestation dynamics by drawing on case studies involving resistance to central COVID-19 restrictions in England; municipal opposition to carbon capture and storage in the Netherlands; and a European campaign against a proposed European Union-United States trade agreement. We conclude how this general framework can be applied, refined, and adapted for further comparative and longitudinal studies.

Against the background of more than a decade of crises in the EU and an increasing inflationary use of the term, this article contributes to the crisis literature in two ways. First, by presenting the state of the art in broader academic research on crises and crisis management, it explores how the more recent EU literature can benefit from this earlier work. At the same time, it also pays attention to the EU specificities and the implications in terms of research, especially with regard to studying actors and perceived threats. Here the unpacking of the well-established crisis definition of Boin et al. (2013), which builds on the work of Rosenthal et al. (1989), serves as a helpful starting point. Second, the contribution argues that one crisis is not like another and that crises can take different gradations. By distinguishing between mild, severe, and existential crises, it makes a first attempt to propose the key analytical dimensions that impact the gradation of a crisis. Building on the findings in EU crisis research, it distils the dimensions of severity, symmetry, and speed as defining characteristics. Depending on the crisis, the gradation of each of these dimensions ranges along a spectrum. In other words, there are different shades of crises. By being more explicit about the gradation, scholars can identify what type of crisis is at stake (i.e., whether the crisis under study is mild, severe, or existential in nature). This in turn has implications for questions such as by whom, how, and when a crisis needs to be addressed. As a final step, the article also identifies a series of avenues for further research.

A major challenge for many researchers and practitioners relates to how to recognize and address cross-scale dynamics in space and over time in order to design and implement effective governance arrangements. This editorial provides an overview of the concept of multi-level governance (MLG). In particular we highlight definitional issues, why the concept matters as well as more practical concerns related to the processes and structure of multi-level governance. It is increasingly clear that multi-level governance of forest resources involves complex interactions of state, private and civil society actors at various levels, and institutions linking higher levels of social and political organization. Local communities are increasingly connected to global networks and influences. This creates new opportunities to learn and address problems but may also introduce new pressures and risks. We conclude by stressing the need for a much complex approach to the varieties of MLG to better understand how policies work as instruments of governance and to organize communities within systems of power and authority.

To explain the fatal efficiency and relative stability of the Nazi dictatorship, it is necessary to analyze how governmental institutions and society at various levels of the political system interacted. Contrary to the expectation that polycratic structures hampered administrative efficiency and tended to undermine well-established political structures it turns out that new models of governance evolved from the chaotic competition and short-lived cooperation of traditional administrations, party structures and newly created special institutions. While key players on the national level claimed to control lines of command from top to bottom the adaptability of the whole system to new challenges depended to a large extent on complex and often improvised arrangements of multi-level governance. During the war these arrangements served to integrate and to mobilize all political, administrative, military, economic and social forces whose resources were essential to sustain the war effort of the Nazi leadership.

Many African countries have shown renewed interest in strengthening their local governance systems, processes and praxes. Particularly in Zimbabwe, frantic efforts to renew local governance underline decentralisation and devolution as avenues to bring government closer to people to address racially skewed regional disparities. This paper seeks to establish the relationship between devolution of power and public service delivery in Zimbabwe. The study attempts to examine the implementation of devolution on governance and public service delivery in Zimbabwe. Therefore, existing challenges, threats and opportunities related to devolution are explored to determine the contribution of the government’s decentralisation agenda in promoting public engagement, accountability, and improved public service delivery. Due to the qualitative nature of the study, an exploratory research design was adopted. Key informant interviews and documentary searches were utilised as data collection techniques. The data was analysed through thematic analysis and content analysis approaches. The study revealed that the efficacy of devolution of power in service delivery is premised on respecting the constitutional fundamentals that empower local government in exercising their jurisdictional power and authority. Therefore, there is an imperative for political, fiscal, legislative, and institutional reforms critical for the successful implementation of devolution. This study contributes significantly to the ongoing policy and scholarly debates regarding the theoretical and practical benefits of devolution in Zimbabwe; and provides practical alternative solutions for achieving its full capacity to close extant gaps in public service delivery across the country.

Urban transformations form a central challenge for enabling global pathways towards sustainability and resilience. However, it remains unclear what kind of capacity is needed to deliver urban change that is actually transformative. Against a backdrop of current claims and efforts to achieve urban transformations, this special issue reviews the relational concept of urban transformative capacity and how it can inform novel approaches in research, policy, and practice. Drawing on seven papers analyzing diverse empirical contexts, we identify four requirements that should guide future action: (1) foster inclusion and empowerment as prerequisites, (2) close the intermediation gap and strengthen the role of local academia, (3) challenge and reinvent urban planning as a key arena, and (4) enhance reflexivity through novel self-assessment techniques. Overall, current levels of urban transformative capacity are assessed as very low, making its development a high-priority objective for all stakeholders, but for planning and research policy in particular.

This paper analyzes the local-level impacts of cross-scale linkages in Mexican community forestry by evaluating the operation of four inter-community forest associations (FAs). Based on 1 year of fieldwork in Durango, Mexico, the paper focuses on two inter-related issues: (1) the services that each association provides to their member communities and how they impact forest management and the development of communities’ forestry enterprises, and (2) the differences in services and impacts between top-down and bottom-up FAs. The findings show that FAs, as a form of cross-scale linkage, can be crucial for the provision of services, goods and infrastructure related to the protection and enhancement of community forests, the economic development of community enterprises, and the political representation of these communities. At the same time, the study finds important differences between top-down and bottom-up FAs, while pointing to some of the disadvantages of each type of linkage.

In most regions in West Africa, livelihoods depend heavily on forest ecosystem goods and services, often in interplay with agricultural and livestock production systems. Numerous drivers of change are creating a range of fundamental economic, ecological, social and political challenges for the governance of forest commons. Climate change and its impacts on countries’ and regions’ development add a new dimension to an already challenging situation. Governance systems are challenged to set a frame for formulating, financing and implementing adaptation strategies at multiple layers, often in a context of ongoing institutional changes such as decentralisation. A deeper understanding of actors, institutions and networks is needed to overcome barriers in socio-ecological systems to adaptation and enable or enhance adaptive capacity. In this paper, we explore the relationship between governance and adaptive capacity, and characterise and assess the effects of a set of variables and indicators related to two core variables: Institutional flexibility, and individual and organisational understandings and perceptions. We present a comparative analysis with multiple methods based on a number of case studies undertaken at different levels in Burkina Faso and Mali. One of the key findings indicates the importance and influence of discourses and narratives, and how they affect adaptive capacity at different levels. Revealing the ideological character of discourses can help to enable adaptive capacity, as it would break the influence of the actors that employ these narratives to pursuit their own interests.