Abstract
The past two decades have seen an impressive expansion of municipal engagement with climate change. Yet while interest has broadened, actions remain shallow. This is in part because climate policies fit uneasily into existing bureaucratic structures and practices. Effective climate programmes require adaptive and innovative responses that span departmental divisions. This challenges siloised municipal offices that are embedded in their own organisational cultures and technical practices. Understanding those challenges is crucial to understanding urban responses to climate change, but they remain critically understudied. This paper helps to fill that gap by looking at the experiences of two cities, Durban (KZN, South Africa) and Portland (OR, USA) as they attempt to put in place integrated responses to climate change. To do so, it brings together complementary critical perspectives drawn from the study of bureaucracies and complex institutions in sociology and geography. This hybrid critical framework is used to elaborate on both the organisational barriers that inhibit effective responses to climate change, and approaches that can be used to enable change and innovation.
1. Introduction
Successful responses to climate change involve networks of governance that link multiple actors. To make that possible, it is important to understand the interactions between certain key players. This paper focuses on one such player—the municipal bureaucracy—to ask two questions. First, what institutional barriers block the integrated municipal responses to climate change needed for a low carbon transition? Secondly, what reforms are necessary to create departments that are able to maintain sustained innovation in the context of changing circumstances? The discussion is based on case studies of two cities, Durban (KZN, South Africa) and Portland (OR, USA).
Although different in many ways, Durban and Portland are both centres of regional and national climate policy. Durban houses Africa’s largest UN Clean Development Mechanism project, was the convener of South Africa’s municipal climate change efforts and hosted the 2011 UN climate negotiations. Portland is one of only two American cities to have reduced its emissions below 1990 levels, and has been the driving force behind green reforms to state-level regulations. It is also a founding member of the US ICLEI “Cities For Climate Protection” programme.
To date, the hallmark of municipal sustainability programmes has been high-profile but largely symbolic changes to municipal operations. These projects range from high-efficiency traffic signals to LEED-certified municipal buildings. Both Portland and Durban are attempting to go further. Their aim is to achieve broad scale change by integrating climate considerations into official development planning processes and linking them to broader sustainable development goals (an effort that is itself an important area of research, see Robinson et al., 2006).
Recent work on climate change in both cities has taken place in the context of devastating economic and environmental stresses. In Portland much of the case study material was collected before, during and after the financial collapse of 2008. At the same time, devastating wildfires and droughts elsewhere in the US ignited local concerns over the impact that future internal ‘climate refugees’ could have on the Pacific North West (Lang, 2008).
During the same period, Durban was hit by a triple crisis of energy shortages, food price increases and extreme weather. Poor management of the national electricity supply plunged the entire country into uncontrolled blackouts for much of early 2008, costing the national economy thousands of jobs and billions of US dollars. A coastal storm and record-breaking rainstorms damaged infrastructure, washed out roads and destroyed homes (see Aylett, 2010). These stresses make both cities ideal vantage-points to study how complex socio-political and technological systems respond to the threat of climate change in the context of present crisis, and how those responses can be improved.
To begin this study, I first bring together complementary critical perspectives drawn from the study of bureaucracies and complex institutions in sociology and geography. This hybrid analytical foundation helps to clarify both the inertia of complex bureaucratic agencies and what can be done to counteract it. This is followed by a short summary of my research methodology. I then discuss two comparative sets of short case studies. The first set looks at how organisational inertia can hold back climate-relevant projects and policy. The second details how cities can open up the creative potential of their employees by rethinking the principles that govern how they are organised. This analysis operates at two distinct scales: I focus both on the internal workings of individual departments (in the case studies of Durban) and on the interagency dynamics that play out at the level of the municipality as a whole (in the case studies of Portland). I then conclude by summarising some key lessons that emerge from this comparative analysis, and by arguing more generally that this kind of socio-institutional analysis is critical to understanding (and enacting) effective urban responses to climate change.
2. From Trained Incapacity to Institutionalising Innovation: Critical Tools for Understanding Shifts in Municipal Systems
We are accustomed to talking about ‘cities’ or how ‘cities work’. However, underneath the unity and coherence that those words imply is a reality that is much more diverse. Rather than a single purposeful actor, cities are composed of numerous entities: political leaders, community groups, businesses, and citizens of all sorts. Each of these constituents is motivated and limited by different factors. Some seek profits, others schools. Some are influential, others are marginalised.
Even within the more narrow scope of municipal bureaucracies, we see this same uneven reality of power and purpose. It is impossible to understand municipal climate policies and approaches to climate governance without understanding—even if only partially and imperfectly—the complex internal context of municipal bureaucracies.
To engage with that complexity, I am going to draw together complementary critical perspectives from the sociological works of Weber (1922), Veblen (1898, 1914, 1918), Burke (1935) and Merton (1940), as well as Schoenberger’s (1997) more recent work on complex institutions in geography. Collectively, these works provide a theoretical tool kit able to explain:
the principles and goals which have guided the structure and logic of modern bureaucracies;
how these structures steer institutional responses to changed conditions; and
the tactics used by specific actors to challenge the inertia of established departmental practices and (attempt to) put the municipality on a new course.
This critical framework isolates key aspects of the processes behind Durban and Portland’s responses to climate change, and may also prove useful in analyses of climate action in other cities.
2.1 Weberian Roots of the Modern Bureaucracy
Writing in the early years of the 20th century, German sociologist Max Weber argued that bureaucracy was the only administrative form capable of managing the complex social, economic and territorial responsibilities of modern states. Weber (1922) defined an ideal bureaucratic structure composed of a cascading hierarchy of expert bureaucrats (produced by programmes of technical training), who work within clearly bounded areas of authority rationally implementing written rules and pre-established procedures. Information flows up the hierarchy and directives flow down (see Figure 1).
A hierarchical, siloised and closed organisation.
Inherently, this structure is a fragmentation of the world into isolated and supposedly manageable areas of activity. Problems are reduced to their component parts and organisational units created to address them. This division of labour and its rationally determined system of rules ensures stable and predictable behaviour across all levels of an organisation.
2.2 Critiquing Bureaucracies: Trained Incapacity and Organisational Culture
Although celebratory of the ability of bureaucracies to govern modern societies, Weber was critical of the associated loss of individuality, autonomy and freedom (Weber, 1905). Bureaucrats, he argued, came to pursue bureaucratic efficiency as an end in itself and to lose sight of its intended objectives. Similar arguments occur in a progression of work that stretches from the late-19th-century writing of economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen through to Edmund Burke (1935), Robert K. Merton (1940) and, more recently, the work of Erica Schoenberger (1997). This conversation coalesces around the terms ‘trained incapacity’ and ‘organisational culture’.
‘Trained incapacity’ makes a simple argument: through our training and subsequent professionalisation, we learn to use specific tools and analytical systems to define and accomplish our goals. This training also produces blind spots that incapacitate us when solutions, or even problems themselves, fall outside our professional limits (Veblen, 1898, 1914, 1918). Specialised training results in what Veblen (1918, p. 152) called a “widening … field of ignorance”. The more expert one becomes, the less able one is to respond to, or even perceive, issues which fall outside one’s area of expertise.
For Veblen this was the natural side-effect of specialised training reinforcing what he saw as an innate human tendency to develop habitual patterns of thought and action. Explicitly expanding Veblen’s analysis, Merton (1940) goes a step further. He argues that large organisations in fact intentionally encourage this type of trained incapacity. They instrumentalise it as a way of creating the high degree of consistency and social conformity necessary for large organisations to function dependably and uniformly.
The creation of a larger organisational culture is central to establishing this type of coehesion. Organisational cultures anchor established epistemologies and practices within a system of attitudes and values infused into members of the group. This broader worldview reinforces the correctness of established practices, shapes individual thoughts, actions and identities. People make organisations, but organisations also—quite directly—make people. The end result, Merton argued, was organisations that were highly resistant to change.
2.3 Dynamism and Power in Bureaucratic Path Dependency
Picking up this thread in 1997, Schoenberger uses it to explore Xerox and Lockheed Martin’s failure to recognise and respond to the new competitive strategies of their Asian competitors. She highlights how the inertia of organisational culture makes adjusting effectively to changing conditions all but impossible, and can endanger the very existence of an organisation. To do this, she addresses two key variables that were missing from earlier accounts of trained incapacity and organisational culture: dynamism and power.
First, Schoenberger questions the fixed vision of organisational culture central to her predecessors’ arguments. She argues that the type of organisational culture that encourages trained incapacity is dynamic, not static. When organisations fail to adapt successfully to serious threats, it is not because they do not adapt at all. Rather, threats are interpreted to fit within the structures and procedures already in place. Managers and employees respond in ways that preserve the value of specific material infrastructure and also the “social and cultural assets” (Schoenberger 1997, p. 128) embodied in specialised skills and procedures. Going beyond Merton’s narrow focus on resistance to change, Schoenberger details how existing organisational cultures shape change and drive it down certain pathways but not others.
On the issue of power, Schoenberger shows that the drive to preserve established socio-technical assets is particularly strong among the most powerful (see also DiMaggio, 1988). Executives and directors create the dominant organisational culture through which change is evaluated and within which other actors must operate. As a short-hand, I will call this exclusive prerogative to determine the goals and culture of an organisation the monopoly over ‘empowered creativity’. This makes the powerful particularly resistant to change.
For senior management, change can both devalue current assets and practices and challenge the continued relevance of the expertise, values, and strategies which they themselves embody. Because of this, information about alternative courses of action may be available but remain unusable. Fighting to preserve their own power, as well as the social order which they have created, senior management may block fundamental change or innovation (Schoenberger 1997).
2.4 Decentralising Empowered Creativity
But this is not inevitable. Rather than fostering trained incapacity, bureaucratic structures can be used facilitate innovation and change. To do so, rather than maintaining senior management’s monopoly on power, Schoenberger advocates for a broader diffusion of empowered creativity throughout an organisation. Echoing arguments made by Haraway (1991), she argues that corporate knowledge is always situated knowledge. This manifests itself in specific ways of seeing the world, reading (or misreading) evidence and systematically ignoring information that falls outside your interpretive framework. Given the limits that this places on all of us, strategies for responding to radically changing conditions can best be built on the input from multiple actors with varied types of expertise. For Schoenberger, this is a radical project that “implies a profound reordering of power relations within the firm and between the firm and other social actors” (Schoenberger, 1997, p. 229).
However, Schoenberger does not discuss how this redistribution could take place, or the impact that it would have on institutional structures or management practices. Her argument begs the question of how much power can be devolved and to how many people before the organisation’s ability to produce co-ordinated action in complex environments is put in jeopardy. There needs to be some balance between centralised leadership and decentralised innovation. How this balance is struck is something that needs to be examined in practice.
As I will explore in the case studies, this dilemma was apparent in both Durban and Portland. In both cities, the impact of trained incapacity, and senior management’s defence of established assets and organisational cultures, left a profound mark on climate-related initiatives. In response, certain municipal officials developed strategies to counteract the inertia of the socio-technical systems that surrounded them. These ranged from ambitious cultural changes that redistributed empowered creativity, to more incremental ones that gradually built acceptance for climate and sustainability policies across multiple departments.
3. Methodology
The four case studies that follow are built from interview material gathered as part of a larger comparative study focused, in part, on the institutional dynamics that affect a municipality’s capacities to design and implement ambitious climate policies (Aylett, 2011a).
In total, I conducted 125 semi-structured qualitative interviews (63 in Portland, 62 in Durban) spread across two field seasons in each city during the period from autumn 2008, to Spring 2010. These interviews (lasting between 45 minutes and 1 hour 15 minutes) were conducted with expert and elite respondents from the municipal, civil society, research and private sectors. These included high-ranking municipal officials and the heads of local NGOs, community groups and businesses. A selection of relevant middle management and project-level staff and community members were also interviewed. In preparation for these interviews, I read extensively within the municipal reports, best-practice notes and other publications produced by municipal staff (for a complete list of interviewees, see Aylett, 2011a).
This broad sample allowed me to triangulate responses and attempt to correct for any biases in individual accounts. Conducting two distinct field seasons also allowed me to capture the evolution of climate initiatives in motion, rather than a snapshot of a single moment in time. This gave me the opportunity to conduct follow-up interviews with key informants and to monitor the progress of specific programmes through what was a tumultuous period politically, economically and environmentally.
The municipal officials selected for the first round of interviews were from the departments most engaged with climate policies and programmes: the Office of Sustainable Development (OSD) in Portland and the Environmental Management Department (EMD) in Durban. Subsequently, I pursued respondents in municipal departments that, while not tasked with climate policy, controlled key portfolios related to urban form, energy use and emissions. Specifically, this meant the heads, middle and project-level managers from the departments dealing with the Planning, Water, Transport, Housing, Development and Permitting, Economic Development, and Treasury portfolios.
Interviews often centred around specific projects, ranging from campaigns to reduce industrial emissions, to large residential green energy projects. (I will cover a selection of these projects in the case studies that follow.) These individual projects were used as concrete examples around which to structure questions covering the institutional dynamics that surrounded attempts to create far-reaching climate policies.
4. Organisational Trained Incapacity: Two Examples
In her work, Schoenberger focused on private corporations; Merton focused on large bureaucracies; and Veblen on business people and industrial workers. Municipalities are not so different from other large highly systematised organisations. Their hierarchical and siloised structures are based on a Weberian model that gathers power at the top of the organisation (see Figure 1 above). Responsibility for fulfilling specific functions cascades down through increasingly specialised and isolated units. The boundaries of the organisation are also relatively solid, offering little chance for collaboration with outside actors. Both Durban and Portland provide examples of the impacts of this structure on the creation and implementation of climate-related policies and programmes.
4.1 Durban: “It Just Isn’t What We Do!”
South Africa’s electricity crisis put Durban’s local utility eThekwini Electricity (EE) in a delicate position. An energy reseller, it was a middleman between ESKOM (the national public electricity utility) and local residential, commercial and industrial customers. It was also responsible for managing, and maintaining the local electricity grid and extending infrastructure to serve new clients. After the onset of the crisis, EE was responsible for decreasing the load on the national grid by co-ordinating blackouts to whole sections of the city, often with only minutes notice (a practice known as “Load-Shedding”). They did this using a switching system built into the grid that controlled the flow of power down to the neighbourhood level.
Deena Govender, Manager of Commercial Engineering and Marketing, was effectively second in charge within EE. He was tasked with developing the response to the energy crisis. When we spoke, one month into the crisis, he explained that EE’s plan was to use smart switching technology to increase the reach of their switching control down to the level of major household appliances like pool pumps and air conditioners (interview, Govender, 12 March 2008). The city also later pursued a large public energy efficiency campaign, and considered time-of-use (TOU) metering as a way reducing peak time electricity consumption.
Smart switching and TOU metering have been used by other states and municipalities to synchronise and create incentives for the introduction of local renewables. In Durban’s case, as well as reducing carbon emissions, local renewables would have provided a partial alternative to the volatile national grid, relieved strain on conventional power and increased resilience to climate-related power disruptions. Despite this potential, Govender and others within EE were adamant that it was not their place to encourage the development of local renewables.
EE’s response to the crisis is a succinct example of the way senior management act to defend established assets and practices (Merton, 1940; Schoenberger, 1997). During interviews with upper and middle management representatives of EE (interviews, Govender, 12 March 2008 and 13 March 2009; Singh, 24 March 2009; Anonymous), all showed a strong attachment to a specific vision of the utility’s role both locally and nationally. Their responses to the crisis rested firmly on assets and practices already well established within the utility (see also Aylett, 2011b).
Although the cost of the proposed smart-switching programme, both financially and in terms of staff time, would have been considerable, it was accepted as a clear extension of EE’s current use of switching technologies. Its promotion of energy efficiency was also familiar territory; before the crisis, increasing customer efficiency was used as a cost-savings tool to lure large clients away from other energy sources like coal and gas. By repurposing and expanding practices already in use, EE protected the value of its social and technical assets, and the identities of those who controlled them. As in Schoenberger’s (1997) study of American companies, EE responded to the energy crisis by adopting strategies that fit with established corporate values but ignored options (such as renewables) that challenged existing relationships with its workers and clients, or with ESKOM.
One year later, the global economic crisis had significantly reduced industrial demand for electricity. Load-shedding had stopped. Fundamentally, though, the nation’s electricity supply remained the same. To fund the construction of more coal-fired power plants, ESKOM applied for annual tariff increases of 35 per cent every year following the 2008 energy crisis. This sparked widespread public outrage and a co-ordinated protest movement that also advocated for a shift to renewable energy.
Despite these growing external pressures, EE’s position on renewables in 2009 remained the same. An insistence on the limits imposed by their ‘core mandate’ persisted
How much can we do? Our core business is to not generate electricity, it is to distribute and to transmit electricity. From that perspective how much can we contribute to reducing our carbon footprint? (interview, Anonymous eThekwini Electricity official).
It was not that EE lacked the capacity to act; the utility was in fact ideally placed. With jurisdiction over the local grid, tariffs and billing, EE controlled key levers for enabling the growth of local renewable energy generation.
The blockage was also not caused by a lack of information. In fact, the city’s Environmental Management Department (EMD) had produced a detailed municipal energy strategy. However, in discussion with EE employees, the then manager of the EMD’s energy programme found little interest: “‘You don’t understand’, they would tell me, ‘renewables just isn’t what we do!’ “(interview, Rich, 30 March 2009). As Schoenberger argued, established habits of thought and action—particularly among upper level management—made it impossible to accept new information and transform it into a strategy for the organisation.
4.2 Portland: Green Streets vs Big Pipes
Just as these dynamics happen within individual departments, they can also affect entire municipal bureaucracies. As well as innovation within departments, integrating climate change responses into municipal operations requires communication and collaboration between departments. A short example from Portland shows how relationships between departments can suffer from the same siloised and defensive management practices that are the hallmark of institutionalised trained incapacity.
In Portland, the cost of maintaining the storm water sewers was increasing at above the rate of inflation year on year. The system also needed to be expanded to meet increased load from current and future development. Traditional development and infrastructure provisions models were locked in a cycle of continually expanding paved surface, which generated increasing amounts of runoff that then needed expanded sewer infrastructure. Reprocessing rain water on site using engineered natural systems like rain gardens (technically known as bio-swales) is a cost-effective alternative with a variety of benefits. Swales also reduce the urban heat island effect, increase air quality, capture carbon and provide wildlife habitat.
Recognising the need for alternatives to storm water sewers, the Bureau of Environmental Services (BES), which managed Portland’s sewer system, developed a Green Streets programme built around swales and other bio-remediation approaches. However, the Green Streets programme diverged significantly from traditional storm water treatment practices. Implementing it required collaboration between BES, the Water Bureau and the Portland Department of Transportation (PDOT). The Water Bureau had its pipes under the streets; BES managed and built sewers; and PDOT controlled road construction standards. All were hesitant to make the needed changes, but PDOT in particular resisted revising standards to allow for new materials and techniques. Lana Danaher, a long-time manager in BES, described initial encounters with PDOT as a confrontation with a rigidly traditional organisational culture. Their position, in brief was “you can’t mess with our standards.” (interview, Danaher, 11 June 2008). Their chief engineer was particularly resistant, almost perfectly echoing what Schoenberger observed about situated knowledges marginalising new information that runs counter to established interpretive frameworks
The chief engineer at the time simply would not accept that there was evidence that a vegetated swale was as good as standard technology. He simply would not accept it (interview, Danaher, 11 June 2008).
As in Durban, the problem was not a lack of information, but the difficulty of valuing new information that went against the established training of senior officials and the culture of the organisations that they controlled.
Other municipal employees, such as OSD’s Mike Obrien, reported a similar resistance to environmental action in departments across the municipality. He described how senior municipal officials clung to their core mandates: putting pipes in the ground or building streets. Environmental initiatives were someone else’s responsibility (interview, Obrien, 11 April 2008). This created a ‘catch 22’ when climate-related programmes required collaboration between agencies whose organisational cultures distanced them from anything perceived as too ‘green’. In the case of Portland’s storm water system, it was only after the unexpected death of the senior engineer and a push from city council that Green Streets became a reality (interviews, Danaher, 11 June 2008; Obrien, 11 April 2008).
5. Untraining Incapacity and Institutionalising Innovation
Besides storm water management and renewable energy, the intradepartmental and interdepartmental impacts of trained incapacity affect urban sustainability portfolios like integrated land use and transit planning, and sustainable economic development. Beyond environmental issues, holistic approaches to crime prevention, health, and poverty reduction all require collaboration between multiple departments and a break with established practices. All these areas provide examples of how the uncoupling of interrelated issues within a Weberian bureaucracy and the instrumentalisation of trained incapacity block innovation and effective action.
However institutional path dependency is not inevitable. The case studies that follow show that organisational practices can be created to promote innovation and collaboration. This is particularly so when senior management’s monopoly on empowered creativity is broken and multiple actors participate in defining organisational priorities and practices. In Durban, some municipal departments have established a profoundly different organisational culture that distributes empowered creativity. Something similar can be seen in Portland’s attempts to mainstream sustainability and climate considerations across municipal departments. In a fractal fashion, the patterns that facilitate innovation and collaboration have a remarkably similar shape at both the scale of the individual department and the scale of the municipality as a whole.
5.1 Durban: Beyond Departmental ‘Business as Usual’
Notwithstanding EE’s path dependency, a variety of municipal alternative energy projects were being run elsewhere in Durban. These ranged from hydro and micro-hydro generation in the city’s water distribution system, to efforts to produce biodiesel generated from algae and methane capture at two municipal landfills. All but the last were being run by the department of Water and Sanitation (EWS).
In terms of energy yield, EWS’ flagship programme was the integration of hydro-electric turbines directly into the city’s freshwater distribution system. These transformed excess pressure in the system (produced as water descended from inland reservoirs) into electricity. Once completed, they would yield enough power for between 10 000 and 30 000 low-cost houses (7–22 megawatts) depending on the extent of the roll-out.
EWS also planned to expand existing generation plants powered by gas captured at sewage treatment facilities. While still powering the treatment works themselves, the plants would store biogas and then sell power to the grid at peak times. In partnership with AGAMA Energy (a South African consulting firm), smaller versions of this system were being installed in peri-urban communities. These provided low-cost waterborne sewage, treated effluent on site, produced gas for cooking and generated high-grade fertiliser for local agriculture.
These projects were interesting, but more interesting was how a department with no mandate to generate energy came to see these opportunities and act on them (see also Aylett, 2011b). Many of the officials in the city, not only those within EE, explained to me that engaging with climate change was not part of their job description. In EWS, the answers were different. Employees and senior management perceived their core mandate as the beginning of their work, not a limiting factor. Speedy Moodliar, EWS’s Manager of Planning, told me laughing
I can design a water main with my eyes closed. There is nothing more anyone can teach me about infrastructure planning in terms of water or designing for water. In life you need more than that, you need something that is going to interest you and stop you from yawning (interview, Moodliar, 26 March 2009).
What accounts for this difference? There are a few relevant contextual facts. Unlike EE, EWS was not tied into business relationships with other powerful agencies. EWS was also not caught in the type of national-level crisis that hit EE. Yet beyond those differences, something else was at work.
Neil McLoed (head of EWS) made it clear that the organisation was managed differently from other municipal departments. Encouraging innovation and fighting trained incapacity were explicit goals of a culture that rewarded innovation and risk-taking.
1
The organisational culture McLoed set for the department encouraged employees to think critically and creatively
You are expected to take responsibility and to challenge everything about your job. If you see an opportunity for innovation but can’t initiate it yourself then come and talk to me and let’s find a way to break down the walls that are stopping you (interview, McLoed, 27 March 2009).
There was still strong pressure on employees to conform to certain norms, but innovation had become one of them.
At the level of the organisation as a whole, cross-level meetings brought staff together to share challenges and brainstorm solutions: “We get everyone from clerical right up to senior management in the same room looking at the same problem and bringing their own perspectives in” (interview, McLoed, 27 March 2009) EWS also held a monthly sustainability lecture series where speakers covered a wide range of topics. 2 Space for discussion at the forums was open and informal, and brainstorming here was the starting point for EWS’s biodiesel projects.
These initiatives created a unique structure within EWS. On paper, EWS maintained Weberian hierarchial and siloised bureaucratic divisions; however, if the interactions that take place within the department are mapped out a very different structure emerges (see Figure 2).
A hierarchical, integrated and open organisation.
EWS created an internal structure that was both integrated and open. Inclusive intradepartmental forums facilitated exchanges between units. Encouragement to form partnerships and think creatively extended individual influence beyond the confines of official divisions. This made it possible to identify synergies with other actors both inside and outside the organisation. A more permeable organisational border brought in outside information and helped to create a strategic vision that incorporated a variety of situated knowledges. These exchanges also brought increased resources and expertise to the organisation. This model had its costs in terms of staff time, the risk of failure and wasted resources. However, those costs seemed more than justified by the results.
By decentralising empowered creativity, EWS distanced itself from the way that municipal departments are traditionally run. Although it stopped short of the radical dissemination of “the power to envision and construct the social order” (Schoenberger, 1997, p. 229), EWS’ story illustrates the profound influence that leadership can have if they adopt a more open management style. By creating an organisational culture that encouraged decentralised collaborative experimentation, EWS positioned itself as a uniquely innovative department within the municipality. It did so while reducing its own costs, linking itself to other non-governmental agencies and supporting the municipality’s broader development goals.
5.2 The Limits on Intradeparmental Innovation
In context, however, EWS’ energy projects represented only a small portion (1.4 per cent) of Durban’s total electricity use (a maximum of 154.2 GWh out of 11 000 GWh). As innovative as EWS’s projects were, the department had neither the position nor the ambition to co-ordinate a larger shift towards renewable energy. McLoed was guarded about his perception of other municipal departments. When asked about the uptake on renewable energy elsewhere in the municipality, he said simply, “I don’t go there” (interview, McLoed, 27 March 2009).
At the level of the city as a whole, Durban provides an instructive example of the impacts of bureaucratic siloisation and the limits of innovation that occurs only within single departments. As discussed, EE was uniquely well positioned to promote a shift to renewable energy, but the protection of established assets and organisational culture by senior management prevented the utility from engaging with the issue.
The EMD, which had produced the municipal energy strategy was the department with the best understanding of the local potential for renewable energy, but it lacked the resources and the mandate to act on that knowledge. Their attempts to facilitate EE’s engagement had been repeatedly rebuffed.
EWS had been the most active up until that point. Senior management had effectively created an organisational culture that enabled creativity and fought against trained incapacity and path dependency, but they wanted no part in attempting to create a broader movement towards renewable energy within the municipality. There was therefore debilitating division between those with the understanding of the issue, those with the ability to innovate and those with the capacity to support large systemic shifts.
5.3 Portland: Mainstreaming Climate Action across a Municipality
How to facilitate broad-based and creative engagement with climate change across a municipality as a whole became the underlying goal of Portland’s Office of Sustainable Development (OSD). Susan Anderson, the founder and head of OSD, explained that
Over time, you want this just to be a taken-for-granted part of the way the world is. Something so normal that you don’t even need to think about it (interview, Anderson, 29 October 2008).
The challenge for OSD when it began in 1998 was how a small office with two staff and $25 000 in funding could have that kind of impact.
Their initial approach was simple: “We worked with everybody” (interview, Anderson, 29 October 2008). Anderson met with the heads of all the municipal bureaus early on to figure out ways that OSD could help them with their own mandates while beginning to integrate climate change and sustainability considerations
One of the first things that I learnt [was that] we were nothing unless someone wanted us. So I went around to each Bureau Head and got an hour or a half-hour of their time and said: “What do you need? What are your aspirations. Not from us, but what are you trying to get done?”. And then we would go and try to figure out how we could help them get their mission done. It has nothing to do with our missions, necessarily, but say they care about affordable housing. Well, we can work on that. Well they care about transport modal splits, well we can work on that too (interview, Anderson, 29 October 2008).
In the process, they established themselves as a common meeting-place for all the bureaus. Small collaborative projects established communication between departments in a relatively risk-free environment. It also ran successful energy efficiency and building retrofit programmes within the other municipal bureaus. These gave the bureaus hands-on experience with sustainability projects that had tangible economic benefits. Importantly, OSD avoided claiming ownership of the projects. They acted as a facilitator guiding creation and implementation, but the departments themselves did much of the work, provided funding and received most of the public credit. This developed skills within the departments themselves and slowly began to change their organisational culture. Mike Obrien, of OSD’s Green Building Program, described this shift
Once they have to start thinking about sustainability as part of their job, it starts to change the culture of the agency. It starts to be OK to be concerned about sustainability. I think that that is really helping to open doors for the champions. But you always have people in bureaus who are more effective, and you have a lot of variation within bureaus (interview, Obrien, 11 April 2008).
OSD staff and senior officials describe the department as a “facilitator” or a “convener”, even a “concierge”. This supportive role positioned OSD as a hub within the municipal bureaucracy. It had partners in all the city’s major bureaus and worked hard to maintain open communication and collaborative relationships between them. In exchange, OSD began to see its own objectives of promoting energy efficiency and emissions reductions finding their way into other departments’ work.
This approach opened the door to introducing the more complex synergies and overlaps between environmental objectives and other municipal priorities. In turn, these helped to establish climate change as a bridge issue that brought together various departments on the ground of common interest. It managed, at least partially, to lift the issue out of a narrowly environmental category and establish its broader relevance.
By 2008, the result of OSD’s work was that engagement with climate change extended across the city as a whole. Tom Osdoba, who worked as a consultant for OSD, summarised his view of this shift
It is all very delicate, and it is all about relationships. I think Susan [Anderson] has a lot of success in figuring out those relationships and navigating that water from a position of relative weakness from an organisational perspective, to be able to put [ideas and policies] forward. And now we are reaching a point where even the most recalcitrant bureaucrats are realising that they have to figure this out. So they are far less “I don’t even want to talk to you”. [We have moved on to] “Yes, yes, yes we have got to figure it out” to “Oh, we have these three ideas, isn’t that great?” to “What else can we do?”. So you can see the kinds of ways that cultural change is starting to take root (interview, Osdoba, 22 October 2008).
Projects run the spectrum from single individuals (like Tom Ullman in the Maintenance Bureau, who converted first his own maintenance van and then the entire fleet to solar PV power systems) to large collaborative projects (like the Clean Energy Works energy retrofit and job creation programme that involves OSD, the Portland Development Commission and 12 other public, private and non-profit partners).
Mike Armstrong, the principal author of Portland’s Climate Change Action Plan and an OSD employee, describes sustainability initiatives in the city as being in a state of “creative chaos”. He spoke highly of the type of diversity and creativity promoted by this decentralised approach. Yet, as we saw at a more local level in Durban’s DWS, the challenge was how to co-ordinate and lead decentralised innovation. This type of open and unconstrained approach, that OSD fostered by feeding departments with a variety of sustainability options, comes at the expense of administrative efficiency and the rapid integration of successful practices uniformly across the municipality (see Hodson et al., 2013, on this tension between top–down co-ordination and broad-based innovation). Although falling short of Schoenberger’s (1997) call to redistribute control over organisational culture, this diverse and often disorganised body of projects is one possible example of what her vision of decentralised empowered creativity looks like in practice. Innovation is bought at the price of centralised co-ordination and efficiency.
5.4 The Limits of Opportunistic Incrementalism
Despite OSD’s successes, there was a sense that the usefulness of its facilitative approach was coming to an end and something more strategic was needed. Rather than ‘strategic planning’, OSD’s head Susan Anderson called the department’s approach to date ‘strategic grabbing’: finding ideas and projects that at specific moments have traction with specific politicians or departments and facilitating their implementation. Tom Osdoba referred to this approach as “opportunistic incrementalism”. He worried that it created a false sense of achievement that blocked critical conversations about what was possible and necessary for the city truly to reduce its environmental impacts. Mike Armstrong was even more explicit
Portland is a cautionary tale of how you can do the right things for 10 years, and still be nowhere near where you need to be. We are only just barely making our 1990 targets and that is a joke compared with where we really need to be (interview, Armstrong, 11 June 2008).
Unexpectedly in 2009, shortly before my second field season, an incoming mayor merged OSD with the Bureau of Planning and put Susan Anderson in charge of the new Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (BPS). This was designed to integrate sustainability into the heart of the city’s spatial development planning. It was also a recognition of OSD’s success at bridging multiple departments and balancing their goals with the municipality’s larger sustainability targets. This kind of organisational transformation may be one way to increase the weight given to climate change in key portfolios, while still leaving room for decentralised innovation to take place. It remains to be seen what its impact will be in Portland.
Conclusions: What Kind of Problem is Urban Sustainability?
When looking at specific successes, it is important to put them back in the context of the larger goals they are intended to support. GHG emissions are at historical highs and are increasing rapidly (Anderson and Bows, 2008; IEA, 2010, 2011). Average warming by 2100 is likely to be far higher than the much discussed target of 2°C. Even to limit it to 4°C would entail reductions for OECD countries (which account for over 50 per cent of global emissions) that surpass even those that resulted from the collapse of the former Soviet economy in the 1990s (Anderson and Bows, 2008). As Armstrong pointed out, it is important not to celebrate success at the margins when what is needed is a fundamental shift.
A future that is 4°C hotter than today will hold many surprises. If we knew precisely what climate change had in store, we would know the kind of transition to strive for to adapt the practices of existing organisations to new conditions in the best ways. But rather than a shift from one relatively steady state to another, climate change holds the promise of a prolonged period of instability and change. To face that, we need to foster organisations that are able to maintain sustained periods of learning and creative action. This is also the approach most likely to enable more profound and rapid emissions reductions.
In this context, if we ask “what kind of a problem is urban sustainability?” we see that it is primarily a socio-institutional one. The complex internal dynamics of municipal institutions are rarely addressed in accounts of urban climate governance (or urban governance more generally). Yet understanding them is essential to any accurate analysis of urban responses to climate change that avoids the local trap of idealising the urban scale (see Born and Purcell, 2006). My aim in this article has in part been to assemble a set of analytical tools that allow us to go inside the black box of the municipal bureaucracy and begin to build institutions that are responsive, adaptive and collaborative.
As shown in the case studies presented here, adopting an analytical approach attentive to the hierarchical social processes through which institutional rationality and identity are constructed provides important insights into how institutions adapt to changing circumstances. The concepts of trained incapacity, organisational culture and the elite monopoly over empowered creativity are powerful tools for understanding how the recursive relationship between departmental practices and world-views influences the course of specific climate initiatives. They also help to explain the strategies used by key actors to enable innovation and change.
It is clear that neither Durban nor Portland, despite being leaders in municipal climate policy, are achieving results that are on the scale needed to help significantly to alter our emissions pathway. That said, their successes in promoting communication and innovation are valuable examples of how municipalities can overcome the inertia of trained incapacity that is built in the culture of municipal departments. Comparing the two case studies brings to light a common list of organisational and conceptual approaches:
— The internal dynamics of Durban’s EWS and OSD’s influence over Portland as a whole rest on the use of an open network structure to break old routines, bring in new ideas and promote learning, experimentation and creative problem-solving.
— In service of this, both organisations positioned themselves as hubs that facilitated communication and collaboration between multiple partners across the institutional divisions and hierarchies of the existing bureaucracy.
— They helped to change existing organisational cultures and to put in place structures that developed skills at multiple levels and rewarded people who identified and pursued opportunities outside a department’s ‘business-as-usual’ procedures.
— Both EWS and OSD increased the conceptual linkages around the issues of alternative energy and climate change. By emphasising synergies and co-benefits, EWS and OSD transformed these issues themselves into hubs that connected multiple other areas of interest.
— In both cases, the creation and implementation of innovative projects depended on a fine balance between a staff that was given the freedom to go beyond their job descriptions, and a senior management that encouraged them to do so, while maintaining sufficient control to guide innovation in a coherent direction and ensure that appropriate levels of performance are maintained.
Of all of these, the final point seems to be the most difficult. This delicate balance between control and freedom described by Durban’s Neil McLoed and Portland’s Mike Armstrong is a significant shift away from traditional bureaucratic management practices. At a departmental level, DWS’s experience shows that it is possible to create an organisational culture that encourages learning and innovation. They have been successful at a project level, but there are no clear targets or objectives for their overall environmental impact.
Portland’s experience shows that it is possible to encourage similar innovation across multiple agencies. However, at this wider scale, an important challenge becomes visible. How can this type of decentralised network of innovation and action be guided and co-ordinated to ensure that it is producing results that are proportional to the true size of the challenge? What is the right balance between centralised control and decentralised innovation to make the leap from creativity at the margins to more fundamental changes? In short, what type of municipal governance is necessary to channel multiple complementary efforts to the same larger goal?
Intentionally and organically, future developments will propose answers to these questions. Despite nearly two decades of action, we are still in the early days of a process that is refashioning the patterns and practices that define human habitat on our planet. As we move past modest and incremental beginnings, attention to the governance of sustainable urban transition is replacing a narrow technological focus on efficiency gains and emissions reductions. This is a significant shift. The aim of this article has been to provide analytical tools and examples that are able to help guide this next phase of the theory and practice of urban sustainability.
Footnotes
Funding
The author would like to thank the Trudeau Foundation, SSHRC and the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship programme for their support during the preparation of this article.