Urban resilience conceptualisations and policies: A review of the literature

Not long ago, we published an extensive review of the academic literature on urban resilience conceptualisations and policies in Nature's open-access journal Palgrave Communications: Adriana Sanchez, Jeroen van der Heijden, and Paul Osmond (2018) “The City Politics of the Urban Age: A Literature Review of Urban Resilience Conceptualisations and Policies”, Palgrave Communications, 4(The Politics of an Urban Age collection),...

C40 Membership in Amsterdam: Who benefits?

  City-networks such as ICLEI, the Covenant of Mayors, and the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group have rapidly gained traction in the international climate governance regime. Scholars, practitioners and policymakers often discuss these networks in highly positive terms. To somewhat exaggerate two decades of city-network research: City-networks are said to hold the potential to accelerate...

Lost and found in translation

One of the most valuable things of research trips is that it makes me reflect on my earlier work. And it makes that have I to sharpen and polish the narrative about the key findings of that work.   In my previous blog post I have shared the presentation that I gave at the International...

Sejong, Korea: the pleasures and perils of a planned city

And so I find myself in Sejong Metropolitan Autonomous City. ‘Where?’, you may ask. For those who never heard of Sejong: it’s the de facto administrative capital city of the Republic of Korea (South Korea). The USA has Washington DC, Australia has Canberra, Brazil has Brasília, and the Republic of Korea has Sejong. Or better,...

Governments are too conservative in using innovative governance tools

In comparing how governments exactly participate in innovative governance tools for urban sustainability and resilience I realised that their involvement is very conservative. This, I argue, leaves opportunities of such innovative governance tools unexplored. I discuss this insight in a recent paper (currently under review). The paper seeks to better understand why and how governments...

Voluntary programmes for building retrofits: opportunities, performance and challenges

With apologies for the major gap between the last blog post and this one. I have literally been all over the place since, and am now back in Norwich at UEA (see the July 4 post). But only for one day. Next week it’s Cambridge and then Amsterdam. Quite a lot has happened since the...

New insights on voluntary environmental programmes

  I’m getting more and more excited about the possibilities of fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). Last week I have analysed a set of 35 cases that I have studied in Australia, the Netherlands, and the United States. All these are examples of voluntary environmental programmes that seek to improve the environmental and resource...

Governance for Urban Sustainability and Resilience: A brief update

The last couple of weeks have been truly exciting. Edward Elgar Publishing has been working really hard to get my book published in October this year. The title of the book will be: Governance for Urban Sustainability and Resilience: Responding to Climate Change and the Relevance of the Built Environment. I have already received very...

Why we should not expect too much from voluntary programmes

Over the last weeks I have analysed my data in further depth. That was pretty exciting to do because it was the first time that I could contrast all the theoretical expectations that underlie my research with the data collected over the last three years. It was further exciting to carry out these analyses because...

Benchmarking building environmental performance: What can we learn from LEED?

    In my last post I questioned whether Green Star has caused the green building revolution the GBCA claims it has. I conclude that the ‘revolution’ is very much contained to the high-end of the office market in Australia’s central business districts. In this contribution I will look at Green Star’s big sister in the...