Diversity and Cultural Challenges
The COPE network partners are very divers coming from seven different countries having very different cultures and norms. The way our societies have developed through history play a huge role in how we interact with our neighbours, with authorities and the way we think about different responsibilities regarding our public institutions, public spaces and social interactions. Some countries have been under regimes with very little individual freedom and these societies have a recent and still very conscious awareness about new privileges and individual needs. This makes it difficult to go in direction of more restriction in for example buying things and driving cars. Another cultural and historical difference is the way citizens and local authorities interact. A society with a long history of citizens being allowed and able to unite in demanding change in legislation, governance procedures, framing of the labour market etc. seem to be acting differently than a society with less experience in uniting and working together across sectors.
In short this means that when the COPE partners as an authority reach out to their neighbourhoods they engage with very different stories and narratives. Relation building between municipality and citizens is a very complex and locally dependent exercise. When public servants in a project like COPE take these steps, they are not seen as individuals but as part of the municipality and all the history and current actions the municipality as such is part of and responsible for. And some citizens might have a relation with the municipality already that is working against the intention and purpose of COPE. So, the COPE partners have a big task in both working with their colleagues to engage them in the new way of working and meeting the citizens on the street with a new narrative. Finally, the COPE partners themselves have very different experience in engaging with citizens and are themselves part of the local history and norm setting, which is the actual starting point for the change.
Adaptive Leadership and governance
COPE work in the middle of three levels of change: the structural, the individual and the societal. The structural changes work through policymaking and governance procedures and can be seen as a traditional top-down process. Individual change can be overwhelming and very difficult for the individual citizens meeting structural barriers and social norms. So, we aim to make changes at a societal level being an interactive membrane between the structural and individual level.
Societal challenges are getting more and more complicated and the traditional processes of finding solutions falls short looking at our challenges as something technical easy to fix with a simple technological solution. Looking at our challenges as so-called wicked problems there is no clear single definition of what the problem is and hence of course no clear solution and the risk is that we evoke opposition and conflict in the society if we do not address this.
Participatory Effect and Social Tipping Points
In the process of policy making, we need to create People's acceptance of inconvenience or cost and link this to their understanding of the importance and share the experience of ownership. We as human beings care more about the decisions and things we have contributed to or created ourselves. We call this the participatory effect. It can be fuelled not only through information, but also through conversations, involvement, and co-ownership. We also use the term social tipping point when talking about this societal level, where the change is becoming a norm that people start to follow.
The typical top-down development of urban policies works on a structural level planning and targeting centrally on a political level and realised by administrations. This bypasses the important strategic scope close to the citizens and other local stakeholders to reach the positive social tipping point for example through a bottom-up co-creative approach to initiatives or activities to be embedded locally.
This top-down process furthermore introduces a strong social bias in the type of local citizens that are involved, where the less resourceful citizens are seldomly engaged to play an active role in city governance. Thus, local needs are not directly addressed by the central policy and are often overlooked since they have not been considered during the policy design phase. This potentially poses a serious social bias problem to the type of transformation and solutions that are developed in cities, particularly regarding the ability to develop a just green transition.
Involving the Role of Municipalities
Involving citizens and local action groups will ask for a change in working procedures. This change entails a development of governance procedures from being an authority and planner into facilitating open approaches and implementing place-based policies.
Read more about the participatory effect, social tipping points and the new role of municipalities as facilitator in the white paper Omstilling på vippen.
In the City of Copenhagen they are currently describing the municipality from three angles: as an authority, as a company and as a facilitator. Øystein Leonardsen, Lead Partner of COPE says: “To me, this is a good way to separate our roles, as it becomes clearer both to ourselves and to the outside world, which typically only sees us as an authority.”
COPE is working on changing mindsets – internally and externally.
Being a year into the process of working with our municipalities and our local citizens and stakeholders reveal the difficulties in making this change on different levels but also and not least the joy when change is in sight and status quo is challenged.
Lead partner of COPE Øystein Leonardsen, Program Director Green Transition in the City of Copenhagen recognises and acknowledges both the difficulties and the joy working with a place-based approach engaging citizens in both defining problems and solutions. The city of Copenhagen is in some ways in a very advanced level in this approach and have many years of organisational practise through their work with area renewal and a unit called Climate Taskforce. In this unit the methodology has been refined and advanced through many years and Climate Taskforce are rewarded the URBACT Good Practice award for their Transversal governance model empowering citizens for local green transition. Despite all the organisational and methodological experiences, it is still not easy to develop plans through place-based citizen engagement.
Øystein Leonardsen, Lead Partner in COPE says: “Working place-based with people can go in many directions. It is very much depending on the people participating and the people leading the processes. Fortunately, we still have the human factor present in our work!”
The human factor will always be a part of the equation, but an organisational set-up and a deliberate focus on methodological capacity building will raise the bar.
Examples of Tested Actions
Actions in Copenhagen
In COPE the 8 partners are working on changing mindsets inside and outside their organisations. And they are working on taking the right next methodological steps. These 8 very different journeys have very different outsets, different contexts, different resources and therefore they should be compared. Here you can see some examples of the tested actions taken.
In the City of Copenhagen the organisation is already set with 6 employees dedicated to creating a more positive development in the area for 5 years and prioritised and financed politically with 11 million Euros. This means that Copenhagen can focus on engaging with the local citizens and stakeholders and on acting on the input in many levels at the same time. They have methodology for how to work like this with a steering group consisting of a mix of citizens and stakeholders and a lot of inhouse capacity and experience with engagement. In COPE they have conducted a row of different visible actions like meetings, swapmarket, guided talk, community dinners, panel discussions, art projects and more invisible actions working guidance on energy consumption and production in apartment buildings.
Actions in Kavala
In the Municipality of Kavala they gathered local citizens and stakeholders and identified a park in a densely built area that was unused, overgrown, dirty, and felt unsafe. The municipality tested the approach of being a facilitator in this project, where they let go of the role of authority and focused on collaborating on the common project with very little budget, but lots of engagement from all sides. Together with the citizens they managed to clear the area, lay some simple paths, install a few benches and lighting, and construct temporary seating using pallets. The materials are recycled; the paths are made from leftover tiles from another project, the benches were refurbished, and the pallet seating was constructed from waste materials obtained from a local business and painted. One of the big changes in this process was to give more power of decision and development to the citizens and have a bigger focus on facilitating the process.
Municipality of Kavala have in excellent manor thrown themselves into these new processes.
They have now shown themselves that this is possible but even more valuable they have empowered their citizens and hopefully this is the beginning of a mutual local engagement in developing their city.
Actions in Município de Pombal
In Município de Pombal in Portugal they engaged citizens and local stakeholders in discussions about the state of the historical city center. Based on these discussions they tested an action of closing the historical city center for hard mobility for a week. At the same time, they invited everyone to give their opinion on specific questions. In this action they worked in different levels of engagement. They gave information to the city and the local citizens and stakeholders about the state of the historical city center and the need for action discussed with the local group. They invited people to share their opinion with the municipality and started a broader discussion on the street among the local citizens and stakeholders. They showed people that the municipality are ready to act and invited people to join. This has been a huge step towards defining problems and solution together.
Actions in Vilnius
In Vilnius municipality they experience a huge interest and activity on citizen level in doing green actions together; especially is urban gardening and avoiding foodwaste through a shared fridge actions that gather the citizens.
In order to catch all the engagement and not letting anyone down they are working on finding and developing governance structures to facilitate the citizen engagement within the limits of the available resources.
One successful action on governance level is how they adopted a community support financial instrument, prioritizing climate-neutral activities for funding. Their aim is to establish an ongoing tradition, enabling communities to secure funding annually for their climate-neutral initiatives in the city. This approach ensures continuous support for sustainable local projects.
Actions in Korydallos
A final example of engagement approaches in COPE is the step taken in Korydallos municipality. They made a new move by engaging students from the 1st Vocational High-School of Korydallos. Through their classes and teachers they learned about the old school building in focus of the project and created a visual identity and gave it a name The Nest. This approach has built more engagement than what the municipality usually experience when inviting citizens to meetings. It has given them a good basis for further engagement and have several meetings with local citizens and stakeholders building on the work done with the students.
The change starts with someone who is willing to try and fail. In COPE we do our best to be these someones.
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