The role of cities in addressing the challenge of climate change is growing and becoming more noticeable in global debates and actions on the ground. However, transformative innovations needed for addressing complex and wicked societal challenges cannot be achieved by cities alone and require concerted efforts also at national and international levels. In addition to multi-level governance collaborations between cities, regions and the state or horizontal networks between cities, unconventional polycentric governance arrangements are emerging that still need to be explored and understood better. This study analyses the case of the Swedish Strategic Innovation programme ‘Viable Cities’ and its ‘Climate-neutral Cities 2030’ (CNC2030) initiative over the period of 6 years. Our analysis shows how during this time, Viable Cities successfully mediated the design and implementation across governance levels (urban, national and European) of a number of governance instruments that influenced the work of Swedish municipalities towards the goals of climate-neutrality in their cities. Through mutual commitments, learning platforms and an alignment of instruments, this governance innovation increases the collective capacity of Swedish cities to act in the climate transition. Our study shows how intermediaries can facilitate innovative arrangements grounded in multi-level governance alignments and inter-urban interactions to enact and shape transformative innovation policy for urban climate transition.

Transdisciplinary courses aimed at advancing competencies and skills for dealing with complex sustainability transition challenges are an important part of sustainability education. Such courses are critically important, as they prepare students for addressing complex and intertwined challenges our society is facing. Core qualities such courses often strive for are interactions between students and stakeholders, the collaboration of students from a variety of backgrounds, peer learning through activating interactions on different layers: in project groups and the entire class, and reflexive and exploratory learning when addressing open-ended transition challenges in iterative processes. Already now and even more in the future, the design and facilitation of such transdisciplinary courses will be happening in various remote digital and hybrid formats. This chapter describes ten design principles that can be used by teachers and facilitators of transdisciplinary courses in the ever-evolving hybrid environments. We illustrate how these design principles can be operationalised with the help of different facilitation techniques. The facilitation technique examples are taken from the university course “Transdisciplinary Approaches for System Innovations”, run at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. With the inevitable evolution of hybrid learning environments in the future, the proposed principles can serve as the basis for reimagining transdisciplinary courses. As digital tools provide new opportunities, these principles can also be taken forward with more radical ideas to efficiently foster collaborative and reflexive learning.

This Visual Toolkit is developed in 2024 within the “Climate-neutral and inclusive communities - Skellefteå” project. With it, we aim to provide visual prototypes of a mobility hub that is context-driven and specific to Nordic ‘winter cities’ - cities that experience winter conditions for a large part of the year.  We begin with proposing three guiding principles for the design of mobility hubs: intermodality and sustainability, safety and quality of waiting time, and integration of community needs. We then elaborate on essential services such as bike-sharing and design choices such as illumination to exemplify how to ensure those principles in the design of mobility hubs. The mobility modes and services provided by a mobility hub are context-specific and are subject to continuous improvement e.g. with regard to their sustainability. In this Toolkit, the scale and location of the visual prototypes remain generic while the purpose is to showcase a variety of adaptive elements that can be scaled and combined depending on the specific needs of a place where a mobility hub will be located.

This article aims to contribute to the discussion about the future of sustainable mobility in Nordic winter cities. We share outcomes of an exploratory study of expert-based imaginaries and contrast them with context-driven imaginaries we found in Skellefteå, a quickly growing municipality in the north of Sweden. Such imaginaries reflect collectively held visions and expectations about the future, blending technological, social, cultural and economic dimensions. They are not individual perceptions of the future but rather are those shared collectively. On the way to sustainable and just mobility systems, it is important to identify and highlight diverse imaginaries coming from a variety of places and from different actor groups, especially those that are still overlooked and underrepresented in the mainstream debate. In this article, we draw attention to two context-driven imaginaries and show how they differ from those held by transport and mobility experts. By paying attention to diverse imaginaries, the current debate about future mobility systems can become more vibrant and inclusive. And, eventually, lead to the discovery of context-sensitive solutions for future mobility systems in the Northern regions and pathways towards them.

While the role of agency is widely acknowledged in socio-technical transition research, there remains a research gap on agency in transitions and a call for studies using an actor-centred approach to transition studies. In response to this call, this paper addresses the role of actors and, particularly, organisations in transitions. It examines the role of organisational change in socio-technical sustainability transitions and, more specifically, how transition initiatives may trigger and support these changes in organisations and systems. For this purpose, the paper draws on literature from both transition studies and organisational change management (OCM) to build a multi-scale, integrative theoretical heuristic. This addresses drivers and barriers for organisational change as an integral part of transition processes, connecting the micro level of the individual, the meso level of the organisation and the macro level of the broader system in which the organisation is located. With the goal of illustrating the links between OCM and transition studies, this paper empirically examines the impact of Region 2050, a large, multi-organisation transition initiative in Sweden, in terms of creating change within the organisations involved. The main focus is on how the organisations acquire the new knowledge and capabilities required for improving regional planning for sustainability. The empirical study identifies leverage points at the micro-, meso- and macro-levels, which may be used in order to change strategic planning processes. Three different theoretical concepts from transition studies and OCM that could help to foster long-term planning are also identified: (1) the macro-level of institutional plurality and its connection to the meso- (organisational) level; (2) collaboration as a key success factor on the organisational level; and (3) at the micro-level, the roles of individuals as change agents and boundary spanners. Overall, the case highlights the merits of the OCM literature for transition studies and their emphasis on understanding interacting processes operating at multiple scales.

This study proposes a novel framework, modular participatory backcasting (mPB), for long-term planning in the heating sector. The mPB framework is based on participatory backcasting (PB) and integrates principles of modularity, participatory modelling, and transdisciplinarity. We discerned for mPB 13 modules that can be arranged according to the purpose and specifics of each planning process. The design of the mPB framework and its implementation are presented for the cases of participatory strategic planning processes to achieve sustainable heat provision by 2050 in a Ukrainian city (Bila Tserkva) and a Serbian city (Nis). The results show that mPB allows adaptability to local contexts and limitations through exclusion, augmentation, substitution, splitting and inverting properties of modularity; decreases the learning time for applying the framework in a novel context; increases the reproducibility and transparency of long-term energy planning processes; enables efficient integration of quantitative methods into the participatory process; and advances collaboration between academia and society. The proposed framework is beneficial for advancement of local planning and policy-making practices by creating strategies with a wider support of stakeholders. It could also be useful for further research through cross-case analysis.

The transition to more sustainable heating systems requires socio-technical approaches to strategic planning. Scenario development plays a key role in strategic planning, as the process supports the development of future visions and actions required for their realisation. However, new approaches to scenario development are required to address the limitations of conventional scenario development methods, such as the cognitive barriers of ‘groupthink’, reluctance to consider ‘outside-the-box’ options, handling of complexity, and ad hoc scenario selection and general non-transparency of scenario development processes. This paper describes the development and implementation of a novel method for scenario development and selection in the context of participatory strategic planning for sustainable heating in cities. The method is based on the morphological approach and a number of scenario criteria including transparency,reliability, coverage, completeness, relevance/density, creativity, interpretability, consistency, differentiation and plausibility. It integrates creativity workshops and interdisciplinary stakeholder participation to enhance the ownership and legitimacy of the scenarios. The approach entails the generation of a complete space of scenarios for heating systems and reduction of this space using cross-consistency analysis and project-specific requirements. Iterative development and implementation of the method is illustrated using two participatory backcasting projects focused on strategic planning for providing a comfortable indoor climate for Bila Tserkva, Ukraine, and Niš, Serbia by the year 2030. The results demonstrate that the method helps overcome the limitations of conventional approaches to scenario development and supports rigorous and transparent selection of a scenario set for participatory analysis. The method fostered the elicitation of consensus-based scenarios for more sustainable heating systems in both cities with regard to the quality of indoor comfort, environmental impact, resource efficiency and energy security.

Social learning is an important element of the reflexive governance approaches needed to enable sustainability transitions. One such approach is participatory backcasting (PB), which involves development of a desirable future vision and a pathway towards this vision. Social learning has been reported as an outcome of different PB projects, including those performed in the infrastructure sector. This study examined the importance of sharing and transferring knowledge and new perceptions developed during PB projects among the individuals directly involved in these projects to and within their formal and informal groups and organisations (e.g. local authorities, DH companies, equipment producers, consumer associations). Mechanisms that need to be incorporated into PB processes to support knowledge sharing/transfer were identified as: (1) use of actor role profiles to identify individuals with bridging/connecting/change agent capability for inclusion in a PB process; (2) strong participant engagement in co-creation activities during the PB project; and (3) PB process design to achieve the multiplier effect (e.g. capacity-building workshops for local researchers and authorities). These mechanisms were successfully tested using the case of two PB-based projects seeking sustainability in the heating sector of the Ukrainian city Bila Tserkva and the Serbian city Niš. It was concluded that further investigation of mechanisms for knowledge sharing/transfer and experimentation within PB processes is a promising research area for enabling sustainability transitions in the heating sector.

Sustainability transformation of the heating sector is recognised as being essential for reaching climate and environmental targets while improving the quality of life in cities worldwide. Participatory strategic planning enabled by scenario methods can be an important tool to guide this transformation, but methods for qualitative scenario analysis supporting stakeholder participation must be further developed and tested in the context of different cities. This paper presents results from integration of urban energy system modelling into the participatory strategic planning process implemented in the city of NE, which suffers problems typical of the heating sector in Serbia and the Western Balkans. The aim was to explore how the scenarios developed by local stakeholders could transform the NB heating system by 2030. Five scenarios developed within participatory backcasting project and a BAU scenario were analysed in terms of decarbonisation, energy security and energy efficiency using Long-range Energy Alternatives Planning System (LEAP). A final scenario "Efficiency for the green future" designed by the stakeholders for implementation in the city included high standards of energy efficiency in buildings, increased share of renewables in the heating energy mix, expanding the district heating system, deploying smart technologies and green architecture. The LEAP model demonstrated that this final scenario could lead to achievement of the desirable future vision developed by stakeholders for NB, through substantial improvements in energy efficiency and energy security, and to considerable emissions decreases by 2030 in comparison with the base year (2010) and the BAU scenario.