Urban labs beyond Europe: the formation and contextualization of experimental climate governance in five Latin American cities

Endorsement, member identification and engagement

Following up on the informal endorsement process, a collaboration agreement with the city agency in charge of the PIRU process, the Instituto de Vivienda de la Ciudad (IVC), was signed in September 2021. Because of IIED-América Latina’s history with V20, identifying UL members, and engaging new ones with a climate focus, was straightforward.⁽³⁷⁾ The biggest challenge was to convince people that climate change was a relevant topic to integrate into the urban upgrading agenda where, until then, climate and environmental issues had not been priorities. In 2021, IIED-América Latina presented the TUC project with its UL approach to the V20 Mesa Ambiental, the local participatory roundtable for environmental issues. They generally presented the project in a way that supported and complemented the ongoing upgrading process, ensuring that the respective actors all found something there of value. In particular, they linked abstract climate issues such as mitigation and adaptation with the everyday problems of V20 inhabitants and prioritized potential interventions that offered solutions to multiple problems at the same time. In other words, IIED-América Latina developed a locally customized approach for integrating a climate action-focused UL into existing participatory urban governance structures and processes. After the Mesa Ambiental agreed that IIED-América Latina could implement the TUC project in V20, the UL meetings started in March 2022.

Groundwork and trust-building

Because of the established participatory structures and working relations between local government and community organizations in V20, little groundwork or trust-building was required. IIED-América Latina and IVC, which coordinated the lab meetings together with other stakeholders, could immediately focus on linking climate change with the concrete problems that families faced in V20 such as relocations, cuts in sanitation services and electricity, and a lack of employment and income. In the early weeks, IIED-América Latina used what they call a ‘double strategy’ to support this process and generate a common understanding of key concepts, approaches, climate-relevant data and the climate gap in the upgrading process in V20. Apart from the presentations and discussions in the lab, they held multiple separate, individual and small-group bilateral meetings with various actors to discuss specific elements of the project and resolve potentially contentious issues.⁽³⁸⁾ They also continued to support activities that were particularly meaningful to UL members, even if these fell outside the project’s scope. Gradually, through a back-and-forth dialogue in the lab and the frequent side-meetings, community leaders and city officials began to link climate change and urban development and to see the need for a more integrated perspective.⁽³⁹⁾

Lab consolidation and experimentation

During the discussions, training session and experiment design, lab members exchanged perspectives and learned together and from each other. The implementation of the experiments strengthened the group’s confidence because neighbours began to notice the benefits.⁽⁴⁰⁾ Lab excursions facilitated learning and helped to further consolidate the group.⁽⁴¹⁾ Apart from the problem of linking climate change and local priorities, there were other challenges during lab formation. Different logics and hierarchies of knowledge frequently clashed with each other in lab discussions. Architects, for example, often had different logics and priorities than community leaders. When necessary, IIED-América Latina held separate meetings to manage these conflicts, sometimes with IVC support. A third challenge was that bureaucratic norms and restrictions sometimes delayed the implementation of experiments or made it necessary to change project sites or designs. Fourth, the increasing number of activities and meeting formats had the potential to overburden local actors. In response, the UL was integrated into the V20 Mesa Ambiental in May 2023.

Endorsement, member identification and engagement

The project began with the engagement of the municipalities in Recife and Teresina, which endorsed the project without needing formal agreements.⁽⁴⁸⁾ An initial actor mapping for the ULs was facilitated by the municipalities while other potential members were identified by WRI Brasil through partner networks and through recommendations at the first UL meeting. A key challenge was the inclusion of residents, which was addressed by inviting neighbourhood associations and grassroots organizations from both communities to separate, bilateral in-person meetings on the project, followed by invitations to the UL. To reinforce the invitation, confirmations of attendance were requested before the first meeting. Another early challenge was that many of the actors were used to a traditional project implementation logic with predefined goals, activities and outputs, and were initially sceptical about the idea of “co-creating” experimental projects in the UL.

Groundwork and trust-building

The Recife UL met for the first time in December 2021 and members decided to call themselves Aliança pelo Centro do Recife. They initially focused on the whole city centre but soon realized that the area was too big, and that Porto Digital already had many investments and projects. Focusing on vulnerability, feasibility and replicability, the group analysed smaller areas within the city centre and decided to work with the Pilar community. The composition of the UL then changed accordingly and in early 2023, working groups were formed to implement local experiments on four different topics defined by the lab members.⁽⁴⁹⁾

The first meeting of the Teresina UL, or Aliança pelo Residencial Edgar Gayoso, also took place in December 2021 and members decided that the first lab activity would be a collective community effort or mutirão. After a participatory assessment in early 2022, lab members worked with residents and the municipality to co-design and collectively build what they called a “square of dreams”. They transformed a public space close to the central avenue by building an outdoor gym, a playground, a pergola at the bus stop, by planting plants and painting murals, and by providing children’s toys, benches, tables and waste bins, so that this could become a space for the whole community. Since January 2023 the group has split into working groups to work separately on the experimental projects.⁽⁵⁰⁾

Three early challenges for both labs were the diversity of lab members, the diversity of their interests and low attendance. In both locations, UL members ranged from waste collectors to university professors and senior government officials. Creating an environment where everyone felt comfortable expressing themselves became the first objective. Icebreakers and small-group discussions helped people to get to know each other and, over time, put them at ease. It remains a challenge to reassure the more marginalized and low-income individuals in the lab and encourage them to actively participate.

The lab members also had diverse ideas of which types of experiments to implement, especially in Recife where goals for the city centre were highly contested, and the distrust of Pilar community residents towards outsider interventions was strong. The lab moderation by WRI Brasil and their local consultants dealt with these debates early on by redirecting the focus from potential solutions to members’ motivations for joining the lab, and by referring to the shared vision they would develop at a later stage. During this phase, WRI Brasil’s local consultants were constantly liaising with UL members to address their concerns and secure their continued engagement.

In the beginning, the WRI Brasil team was sometimes frustrated by the low turnout in the labs. Choosing meeting locations where people lived and setting convenient meeting times improved attendance. Mentored by an organization with extensive experience with capacity-building in vulnerable settings, WRI Brasil also learned about the importance of moving forward with those who were present and committed, hoping that others would see the progress and join the lab, which is what happened. The understanding of the lab subsequently changed from a fixed group to a space in which participation fluctuates and changes over time.

Lab consolidation and experimentation

While there were no major dropouts or increases in UL membership, throughout the process some members left while others joined or became more involved as new activities began, especially residents. Once the experimental projects were defined, the labs were divided into working groups based on the projects.⁽⁵¹⁾ Working groups meet every one or two weeks, while full UL meetings are only held every two months for working groups to present and discuss achievements and challenges. The biggest challenge of UL formation in the two cities was mobilizing actors, particularly government actors and residents. Engaging the former became a lot easier when WRI Brasil won the support of “government sponsors” for each UL – the deputy-mayor in Recife and the Agenda 2030 coordinator in Teresina.⁽⁵²⁾ These sponsors facilitated the UL work, especially the participation of other government departments. Engaging residents was challenging in the two locations for different reasons. The history of failed urban upgrading initiatives in the historic city centre made Pilar community members suspicious of external interventions and difficult to engage. In peripheral Teresina, by contrast, residents had never received much attention. Engagement was initially challenging but became easier as the project continued. In both labs, community workdays for the collective construction of public spaces contributed to members’ engagement.

Endorsement, member identification and engagement

During the project proposal development visit, the respective state and municipal governments authorized the project. When the project started, the local governments endorsed it informally and later signed official agreements.⁽⁵³⁾ The initial identification and engagement of lab members was carried out in meetings of WRI México with their official project counterparts in ministries and municipalities and through actor mappings of local organizations.⁽⁵⁴⁾ In Naucalpan, a challenge in this first phase was the small number of local organizations with an environmental or climate focus. In response, neighbourhood associations were invited which hold considerable decision-making power in the municipality.

A more serious challenge was the political hostility between social and political factions in both cities and the strong politicization of public debates. In Naucalpan, for example, it became clear that some organizations had been co-opted by political interest groups, while in León, civil society organizations previously in conflict with the municipality or involved in failed participation schemes were reluctant to join the UL. While some declined, others who also feared the political capture of a participatory space like a UL were convinced to come. However, to achieve this, several bilateral meetings with these organizations were necessary in which WRI México stressed that the UL was a novel approach for dialogue and collaborative experimentation despite unequal power relations. They affirmed that they would do their best to moderate power relations and create an open participatory space, while remaining neutral themselves.

Groundwork and trust-building

Based on bilateral conversations with individual lab members, WRI México saw the need to provide exclusive spaces for exchange prior to the first UL meeting. They organized two sectoral meetings in each of the cities, one for municipal and state officials, and one for community and civil society representatives. In these meetings, WRI México emphasized the importance of bringing together different perspectives in ULs and the iterative, collaborative and compromise- and consensus-oriented nature of the approach.⁽⁵⁵⁾ In these separate meetings, participants were also asked to identify what they regarded as the main urban and climate-related problems in the respective cities and to prioritize them. The results from the two sectors were not very different, which provided a good starting point for discussions in the first lab meetings and for identifying agreements.

Based on extensive pre-lab formation discussions with potential members, WRI México knew what to expect in the first UL meetings, which it coordinated together with an external facilitator and designed to address and counteract some of these anticipated dynamics. In León, for example, which held its first UL meeting in May 2022, the lab coordinators expected that participants would mainly try to impose their sectoral interests, that government and civil society would perceive each other as adversaries, and that members would find it difficult to imagine a sustainability-focused urban model. The main objective of the first meetings was thus to generate a climate of cordiality and avoid debates on current issues that could stir up controversies. WRI México employed four strategies to achieve this. First, they used icebreakers to distance members from their institutional roles, so that they could get to know each other more personally. This may sound trivial but turned out to be an effective tool for changing how people perceived and interacted with each other, enabling more constructive collaboration. Second, to break up hierarchies and facilitate the expression of personal opinions, members who belonged to the same sector were separated in small groups. Third, a session was held to agree on basic rules for open and respectful dialogue. Finally, discussions about visions for a future city were moderated to focus initially on broader goals, such as socially just, green and child-friendly outcomes, rather than more tangible and potentially conflictive aspects. In the second lab meeting, these initial discussions were followed with an agreement on long-term transformation goals rather than short-term agendas. In Naucalpan, far more lab members came from state and local government than from civil society in the first meetings, starting in April 2022. Because local and state governments belonged to different political parties, the lab coordinators expected them to try to impose their respective agendas, which might have led to conflicts. As in León, the first lab was therefore designed to build an atmosphere of cordiality by using the same strategies with an even stronger focus on depoliticizing the discussion.

Most members were guardedly positive after the first UL meetings. At the same time, non-governmental members openly raised concerns about how the results of this project were going to be different from others and how to regain trust in the government. There were also conflicts with some senior government representatives who demanded a greater role in the lab process. The lab coordinators dealt with these challenges by setting up an elaborate lab member liaison, communication and monitoring scheme. After each meeting, WRI México contacted all members to resolve doubts and concerns in separate conversations with each of them and to motivate them to attend the following meeting. While the intensity of these liaison activities subsided somewhat, even by mid-2023 a large part of WRI México’s UL work consisted of regularly and individually communicating with many lab members via multiple channels, mostly direct messaging apps, social media and phone. These constant liaison activities to retain existing members and recruit new ones were essential for the lab’s survival, particularly in the first few months.

Lab consolidation and experimentation

One challenge of UL formation and consolidation in both cities was limited or discontinuous private sector participation. After several failed attempts to convince representatives to join, WRI México set up a parallel structure of regular meetings with business representatives in both cities to inform them about project progress and identify common interests.

The consolidation process of the UL in León was disrupted twice. The first time, several members left the lab after the first few meetings because they were more interested in quick results than in dialogue. The second disruption soon thereafter was a reaction of some civil society representatives to local government actions outside the project that they perceived as demonstrating a lack of commitment to climate issues.⁽⁵⁶⁾ In response, other members also expressed discomfort in collaborating with public officials in the lab and their views of each other have subsequently become more polarized. Despite these challenges, the UL process continued, and working groups were formed to implement four experimental projects that the León UL had co-designed.⁽⁵⁷⁾ The increased personal investment of time and work for the experiments strengthened the commitment of the most active lab participants. At the same time, some civil society organizations argued that their role was to hold the government accountable. Therefore, they were initially hesitant to collaborate with representatives of these very governments in the UL by implementing experimental projects. It took, and still takes, these organizations time and the involvement of WRI México as a facilitating agent, to accept and perform this co-productive lab role.

UL consolidation in Naucalpan has been relatively smooth because of the continuous participation of public officials and civil society members. Officials quickly discovered that the lab process was useful for inter-departmental coordination.⁽⁵⁸⁾ Working together in small groups in the lab helped break down departmental silos and fostered inter-departmental exchange. The local government’s designation of a liaison person from the mayor’s office also helped to streamline the process and especially the collaboration with the municipality. Civil society members attended continuously, although, in some cases, short-term interests challenged the co-creation process in the lab. Getting used to this required time but the civil society members who stayed became progressively more involved in the process. In Naucalpan as in León, when the hands-on working group involvement in experimental project implementation started, the active participation of many lab members increased, while those who were primarily interested in exploiting the lab politically were discouraged.⁽⁵⁹⁾ Experimental project implementation validated the engagement of lab members and generated greater trust and stronger links between them.

Overall, the biggest challenge of UL formation in León and to a lesser degree in Naucalpan remains the protection of the process and the experiments from political capture. By carefully managing potential conflicts, both ULs have been established as neutral spaces where actors with different urban visions and power interact and co-produce experimental projects.