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.

With the overarching need for deep urban transformations worldwide, national platforms for cities have been emerging over the past few years in several European countries as a useful framework to support and unify the work that cities have been doing individually. In particular, Sweden and Spain have been two of the first countries where a National Cities Mission Platform has emerged, namely Viable Cities and citiES 2030. This chapter explores the emergence of these convening and intermediary vehicles, the key enablers that allowed its formation, and the rationale that consolidates it. It also delves into the distinctive value proposition of these platforms and their role in reinforcing multi-level and multi-stakeholder collaborations, facing silos in a national context, promoting cross-city stable interactions, aligning national and European initiatives toward the Cities Mission, and co-creating and consolidating the "next practices" of climate urban transitions.

In the fields of partnership research and social innovation, there has been an increasing number of calls for evidence regarding the kind of collaborative multi-level governance structures that might support large-scale transformation processes, especially in regard to climate-neutral cities. This paper conceptualizes a new type of intermediary actor, the Systemic Collaborative Platform (SCP). Using the example of a multi-stakeholder arrangement set up to design and implement Madrid’s Climate Neutrality Roadmap, the key features of an SCP include a focus on multi-stakeholder and cross-sectoral collaboration for public policy development, in this case operating at both a systemic level and a city scale, and a strong link to a key actor within this regime (a city council). Our study reveals how an SCP can contribute to articulation of a shared mandate among city actors and enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of a targeted transition by attracting, aligning and managing a wide and diverse organizational ecosystem through distributed facilitation, collaborative leadership, and continuous learning.

In this chapter, the authors present an argument and illustrations for how transdisciplinary research and education in close collaboration between universities and non-academic partners in municipalities can contribute to building transformative capacities in cities to tackle grand societal challenges such as climate change. Governing transformative change requires new types of capacities and capabilities of the public sector such as new organizational structures, competencies, and administrative rules and processes. Current urban governance structures often are not adequate to deal with the type of challenges urban sustainability transitions pose: the systemic nature of the problems, the absence of clearly defined solutions in combination with a high level of uncertainty about goals and pathways to reach them, the long-time-perspective and complexity of change processes which need to involve a broad range of actors and stakeholders, or the need to work across different sectors and policy fields. Boundary-crossing research and education activities between universities and the public sector can simultaneously enhance our understanding of new governance strategies for transformative change and our joint capacity to implement them. In this chapter, the authors draw on examples of such collaborations which are dealing with key elements of urban transformative capacities such as a better understanding of systemic dimensions of change, a shift to experimental governance approaches, and at the same time systemic integration of experiments and initiatives, the development of processes for reflexive monitoring and learning, or the need to integrate policy areas such as climate and social policy.

Positive energy district (PED) is a novel idea aimed to have an annual surplus of renewable energy and net zero greenhouse gas emissions within an area. However, it is still an ambiguous concept, which might be due to the complexity of city district projects with interconnected infrastructures and numerous stakeholders involved. This study discusses various aspects of PED implementation and presents practitioners' experiences with the PED concept, challenges, and facilitators they have faced with real projects. The study is based on interviews with ten Swedish professionals. The major challenges reported for PED implementation were local energy production and energy flexibility, sub-optimization, legislation, suitable system boundaries, and involvement of stakeholders. Most of the interviewees mentioned improved collaboration, integrated innovative technology, political support, and climate change mitigation goals as important facilitators. The interviewees highlighted the importance of a local perspective and considered each city's preconditions when developing a PED project. The study emphasizes that to facilitate PED implementation and replication in cities, more knowledge and clarity is required about PED such as on the definition and system boundaries.

Research and innovation policies (IPs) across Europe, particularly in Sweden, are increasingly framed by an orientation towards societal challenges, missions, and transformative change. Innovation-funding agencies are adapting to these new approaches but struggle with a host of new questions and challenges on how to re-structure public policy interventions and develop new structures for monitoring, learning, and evaluation. In this article, we investigate how this IP paradigm shift is dealt with in the IP discourse and practice in Sweden and how an incomplete shift creates mismatches and tensions with existing structures for programme evaluation and monitoring. Despite the new paradigm, the implementation of evaluation strategies mostly follows a traditional 'summative' framing. The ongoing discussions in Swedish IP demonstrate that a paradigm shift towards transformative innovation cannot unfold its potential unless it is also followed by a shift in the practices of programme implementation and evaluation.

Households can provide demand-side flexibility by changing their consumption behaviour and shifting energy-intensive activities - such as vacuuming, cooking or charging electric cars - to off-peak hours. Such behaviour-based demand response management could balance out consumption peaks without the need for costly smart home devices or automation technologies. However, existing research has struggled to motivate consumers to adapt their behaviour or maintain behaviour change over extended periods of time. This field study explored a scalable and cost-effective behavioural demand response tool and investigated its short-and long-term impacts on average and peak hour electricity consumption under realistic conditions: A smartphone app provided users with social comparison feedback on their electricity consumption and invited them to participate in "pause hours" by avoiding energy-intensive activities during peak hours. To appeal even to hard-to-reach energy users and elicit longer-term engagement, the app also contained a neighbourhood newsfeed and was framed as a local social network. In a 15-month trial with 550 student apartments in Sweden, more than half of the residents voluntarily installed the app, many app users stayed engaged over an extended period of time and pause hour participants achieved substantial peak-load consumption reductions of 46% on average. These results indicate that smartphone apps can achieve peak load consumption reduction and long-term engagement, although they may be particularly attractive to already energy efficient households. Avenues for future research are discussed.

Transition management literature acknowledges that urban transitions are influenced by the interplay between a wide variety of actors operating under network governance. This means that municipalities must move from the traditional roles of commanders or implementers to those of initiators and facilitators of transition initiatives involving multiple actors and sectors. However, the structural and cultural challenges in municipalities hinder their ability to collaborate in network environments. Through a case study, this study analyses the role of transition intermediaries as expert organizations in building collaborations that support municipalities in developing their relational collaboration potential. The results show that besides building successful collaborations, intermediation work should focus on creating inter-organizational spaces where municipalities can learn how to collaborate relationally. However, transition intermediaries do not replace municipalities in their facilitation role in the transition but support them until they are ready to assume that role.

Despite the extensive literature on learning in urban transitions, we still have a limited understanding on how higher-order learning takes place in transition management and is spread within the transition arena. In this paper we analyze the efforts of transferring such embedded knowledge and its interrelation with learning through the examples of three Swedish municipalities engaged in urban transition management. To do so, we developed a framework of learning ripples that conceptualizes learning across social boundaries as an active and two-way process that goes beyond transferring and receiving knowledge, but also requires higher order learning that includes knowledge integration in the form of defining and formulating one's role and contributions to transitions. We found that higher order learning is largely influenced by the quality and frequency of interactions between the transferer and receivers. The further a stakeholder was located from the center of the transition arena in terms of direct interactions, the less chance occurred for higher order learning that resulted in tensions and conflicts in the collaboration. Our results show the problem as a lack of knowledge integration or a lack of conditions which allow stakeholders to articulate their views or develop an idea about their own role in the whole process.

Households can provide demand-side flexibility by changing their consumption behaviour and shifting energy-intensive activities – such as vacuuming, cooking or charging electric cars – to off-peak hours. Such behaviour-based demand response management could balance out consumption peaks without the need for costly smart home devices or automation technologies. However, existing research has struggled to motivate consumers to adapt their behaviour or maintain behaviour change over extended periods of time. This field study explored a scalable and cost-effective behavioural demand response tool and investigated its short- and long-term impacts on average and peak hour electricity consumption under realistic conditions: A smartphone app provided users with social comparison feedback on their electricity consumption and invited them to participate in “pause hours” by avoiding energy- intensive activities during peak hours. To appeal even to hard-to-reach energy users and elicit longer-term engagement, the app also contained a neighbourhood newsfeed and was framed as a local social network. In a 15-month trial with 550 student apartments in Sweden, more than half of the residents voluntarily installed the app, many app users stayed engaged over an extended period of time and pause hour participants achieved substantial peak-load consumption reductions of 46% on average. These results indicate that smartphone apps can achieve peak load consumption reduction and long-term engagement, although they may be particularly attractive to already energy efficient households. Avenues for future research are discussed.