Scope

Cities are leading the response to a range of societal challenges, with new forms of governance emerging to address sustainability challenges in more innovative, inclusive and effective ways. Governance shapes processes of urbanisation and is critical to instigating and managing change by bringing new combinations of public, private, third sector and community actors together, but both governance and cities are changing rapidly.

The mission of Governance and Cities is to host innovative research that addresses, debates and shapes the cutting edge of this trend in both the Global North and Global South. In particular, the section focuses on:

• Innovative forms of governance involving new groups, roles or forms of steering
• Informal governance and governance beyond the state, where state actors are largely absent
• Understanding how governance is shaped by longer trajectories of urban change
• Urban experiments and living labs, including the challenges of rescaling
• The ways in which cities learn and how knowledge flows among them
• The politics of knowledge production in cities and how sustainability concerns become embedded in policy and decision-making
• The role of urban publics and citizens in shaping sustainable cities
• Theories and concepts of transformation and their relation to practices of governance
• Post-structural theorisations of urbanisation and their implications for urban governance
• The role of governance in enabling cities to deliver the SDGs, especially relating to SDG 17
• Social justice and new forms of governance
• Resilience, adaptation and ecologically inspired approaches to governance for sustainability
• Politics and governance, including decision-making and post-political critiques
• The way in which co-benefits, progressive valuation methods and innovative finance can be incorporated into urban governance
• Multiple perspectives, including those of practitioners, citizens, policy makers and so forth
• Innovative methods and research designs that focus on different aspects of governance, ranging from ethnographic approaches and network analysis to the use of big data and global datasets

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