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The cities of Graz in Austria and Freiburg in Germany have been perceived as ecological model cities since the late 1980s.This is shown by various international awards, press coverage and many visitors from other municipal administrations. Both cities have been well known for their attempts to bring about transitions towards more sustainable and low-carbon energy systems. The comparison of Graz and Freiburg over a period of two decades enables us to study how differing contexts, actor constellations and historic developments shape the transformation of energy systems towards greater sustainability. It is argued that understanding the role of cities for energy transitions requires a detailed examination of the coupled dynamics of socio-technical interactions across the levels of niches, regimes and landscapes on the one hand, and multilevel systems of governance on the other. At these intersections new, although spatially confined, socio-technical constellations of sustainable energy provision may emerge and be stabilised. Nevertheless, empirical evidence shows that it is misleading to conclude that true socio-technical transitions are taking place in these cities, even though a number of foundations for long-term change processes have been laid.

International negotiations for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and the enhancement of forest carbon stocks (REDD+) under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) were finally concluded in 2015. However, due to the complex design and implementation processes of REDD+ policies and measures, including benefit sharing at national and subnational levels, several challenges exist for sustainably reducing emissions while simultaneously managing the provision of social and environmental side-objectives. We review the realities of REDD+ implementation in 13 REDD+ candidate countries and the risks related to REDD+ policies and benefit sharing based upon a synthesis of the findings presented in ‘country profiles’ that were developed between 2009 and 2013 as part of the Center for International Forestry Research's (CIFOR) Global Comparative Study on REDD+. We find that REDD+ policies in all countries studied are at high risk of ineffectiveness, inequity and inefficiency. By classifying these risks and understanding not only their impacts on different stakeholder groups, but also the consequences for achieving specific objectives, countries can identify solutions in order to address these shortcomings in their implementation of REDD+.

Sweden represents an intriguing paradox regarding EU migrant integration. Its welfare state institutions are highly developed; its integration policies have a solid record. Still, a substantial proportion of EU migrants are facing poor working conditions, unemployment and homelessness. This article highlights the ongoing difficulties, both for EU migrants to Sweden, as well as for a broad range of Swedish public actors seeking to devise governance solutions in a frequently ad hoc manner. We argue that while EU migrant integration is a policy challenge reflecting a multilevel setting, there is little evidence that multilevel governance has emerged thus. Rather, actors at all levels seek instead to shift the responsibilities associated with EU migrant integration to other levels, maintaining that EU migrant integration is beyond their competencies and resource levels. The analysis draws upon public documents and interviews with the key national and local stakeholders.

Resource management boundaries seldom align with environmental systems, which can lead to social and ecological problems. Mapping and analyzing how resource management organizations in different areas collaborate can provide vital information to help overcome such misalignment. Few quantitative approaches exist, however, to analyze social collaborations alongside environmental patterns, especially among local and regional organizations (i.e., in multilevel governance settings). This paper develops and applies such an approach using social–ecological network analysis (SENA), which considers relationships among and between social and ecological units. The framework and methods are shown using an estuary restoration case from Puget Sound, United States. Collaboration patterns and quality are analyzed among local and regional organizations working in hydrologically connected areas. These patterns are correlated with restoration practitioners’ assessments of the productivity of their collaborations to inform network theories for natural resource governance. The SENA is also combined with existing ecological data to jointly consider social and ecological restoration concerns. Results show potentially problematic areas in nearshore environments, where collaboration networks measured by density (percentage of possible network connections) and productivity are weakest. Many areas also have high centralization (a few nodes hold the network together), making network cohesion dependent on key organizations. Although centralization and productivity are inversely related, no clear relationship between density and productivity is observed. This research can help practitioners to identify where governance capacity needs strengthening and jointly consider social and ecological concerns. It advances SENA by developing a multilevel approach to assess social–ecological (or social–environmental) misalignments, also known as scale mismatches.

The reception of asylum seekers in Italy has become an increasingly contentious issue: many actors, public and private, are involved at various levels of government, and cooperative behaviour cannot be taken for granted. The multi-level governance approach sheds light on the possible patterns in vertical relations, while it does not effectively explore the horizontal relations, which are however crucial, especially at the local level. Moreover, we argue that the definition of multilevel governance as negotiated order among public and non-public actors is too rigid and normative. Local policies of reception are instead a playing field where different actors come together with different interests, values and frames. This paper discusses the implementation of asylum seekers’ reception in Italy, looking at both the multilevel and the horizontal dynamics, and it uses the concept of ‘battleground’ in order better to grasp the complexities of the interaction between actors. The article discloses conflicting and competing frames between different tiers of governance, since municipalities try to resist government imposition related to asylum seekers’ reception in their areas. As for the horizontal dynamics, this paper argues that four possible patterns emerge in the relation between state and state actors: a) closure vs. civil society activism; b) tolerance; c) institutional activism vs. anti-immigrant mobilizations; d) cooperation. Overall, the paper aims at addressing the limits of the MLG approach by means of a conceptual tool (the “battleground”) which yields a more vivid understanding of implementation dynamics.

Halting forest loss and achieving sustainable development in an equitable manner require state, non-state actors, and entire societies in the Global North and South to tackle deeply established patterns of inequality and power relations embedded in forest frontiers. Forest and climate governance in the Global South can provide an avenue for the transformational change needed—yet, does it? We analyse the politics and power in four cases of mitigation, adaptation, and development arenas. We use a political economy lens to explore the transformations taking place when climate policy meets specific forest frontiers in the Global South, where international, national and local institutions, interests, ideas, and information are at play. We argue that lasting and equitable outcomes will require a strong discursive shift within dominant institutions and among policy actors to redress policies that place responsibilities and burdens on local people in the Global South, while benefits from deforestation and maladaptation are taken elsewhere. What is missing is a shared transformational objective and priority to keep forests standing among all those involved from afar in the major forest frontiers in the tropics.

The acceleration of changes in global water resource systems is exacerbating the ability of governance institutions to adapt, particularly in developing world regions. We highlight one of the key challenges to resilience in environmental governance- coordinating governance processes within and across multiple interacting geographic levels-and investigate structures of local, regional, and multilevel water governance networks using empirical data from Central America. We examined hypotheses of multilevel governance network structure and function using descriptive statistics and exponential random graph models, and found that closed and open network structures are more prevalent at the local and regional levels, respectively, and that cross-level ties impart smallworld structures upon the multilevel network. Small-world networks are theorized to provide joint benefits on cooperation, policy learning, and resource distribution, all of which are necessary for effective water resources governance.

We provide a systematic review of the adaptive comanagement (ACM) literature to (i) investigate how the concept of governance is considered and (ii) examine what insights ACM offers with reference to six key concerns in environmental governance literature: accountability and legitimacy; actors and roles; fit, interplay, and scale; adaptiveness, flexibility, and learning; evaluation and monitoring; and, knowledge. Findings from the systematic review uncover a complicated relationship with evidence of conceptual closeness as well as relational ambiguities. The findings also reveal several specific contributions from the ACM literature to each of the six key environmental governance concerns, including applied strategies for sharing power and responsibility and value of systems approaches in understanding problems of fit. More broadly, the research suggests a dissolving or fuzzy boundary between ACM and governance, with implications for understanding emerging approaches to navigate social-ecological system change. Future research opportunities may be found at the confluence of ACM and environmental governance scholarship, such as identifying ways to build adaptive capacity and encouraging the development of more flexible governance arrangements.

Policy learning plays a significant role in shaping policy during crises. While scholarship has explored many of the mechanisms and outcomes of such learning, little is known about how policy learning takes place across different levels of a multilevel governance architecture. This is despite their prevalence and influence on crisis responses. Using a case of the Belgian COVID-19 policy response, we explore how policy learning takes place across different levels of multilevel governance within creeping crises, focusing on epistemic policy learning (learning from experts) as one of the most pronounced learning types within such contexts. By means of document analysis, supplemented by primary source data from expert and senior official interviews, we offer an exploratory account of how learning took place at the national and subnational levels. Our findings reveal how the inherent features of the COVID-19 crisis, and the existing multilevel governance architecture broke the policy learning process into smaller heterogenous learning processes at different levels. We find that decentralised approaches to learning provided the space for customised, yet often fragmented policy responses. We also find that institutional legacies, varying degrees of policymaker control over learning, and absence of common approaches to structuring and designing learning processes led policymakers in different jurisdictions to engage in varying policy learning processes. We take stock of these different learning processes and highlight their key features. We conclude by highlighting the implications of these findings for policy learning theory and practice.

The question of how to govern the multiscale problems in today’s network society is an important topic in the fields of public administration, political sciences, and environmental sciences. How scales are defined, studied, and dealt with varies substantially within and across these fields. This paper aims to reduce the existing conceptual confusion regarding scales by disentangling three representative approaches that address both governance and scaling: monocentric governance, multilevel governance, and adaptive governance. It does so by analyzing the differences in (1) underlying views on governing, (2) assumptions about scales, (3) dominant problem definitions regarding scales, and (4) preferred responses for dealing with multiple scales. Finally, this paper identifies research opportunities within and across these approaches.