[WEBINAR] Climate Governance: Anticipatory steering of the green transition at a city level

As cities navigate the uncharted waters of the green transition, climate governance emerges as a beacon of hope, illuminating pathways towards a sustainable future where cities thrive, ecosystems flourish, and communities prosper.

This conversation deep dives into foresight and climate governance through practical examples at a city level. Allying theory and practice, Demos Helsinki’s Foresight Expert Vera Djakonoff and Climate Governance Expert Lilybell Evergreen, two experts working hands-on around the world on these topics, introduce concepts and case studies. 

Facilitator Lejla Sadiku, Innovation Team Lead at UNDP Europe and Central Asia, opens the conversation by articulating key challenges cities around the world are facing to accelerate urban transformation: Accelerating Net Zero Transition, supporting multi-level governance, and unlocking financing at city level. Facilitator Mikael Sokero, Lead, Capacity Building at Demos Helsinki, then takes over to emphasizes how timely it is to address these issues in a world crippled by overlapping crises, how complex and multifaceted those topics are, and stresses the importance of hope to tackle such fascinating themes and explore lasting practical solutions.

Lilybell Evergreen kickstarts the keynote presentation by addressing how, between the crises of energy, democracy, climate and COVID-19, cities face pressures from all directions, and highlights the barriers on how to coherently connect and lead actions to efficiently tackle those themes. Transforming governance needs to evolve globally, to proactively cater to issues pertaining to current times. She then dives into the purpose of climate governance: Equip governments at all levels with the means to navigate a highly uncertain future and highly challenging present, building resilience and driving positive transformation. Climate governance is about anticipation, i.e. connecting the future to the now. It requires experimenting with new structures, approaches, and capabilities. In short, the “how”. She provides two practical examples as case studies. First, the city of Tallinn in Estonia, where the local government successfully channeled its efforts and how it thinks towards sustainability. Second, the NetZeroCities project, which focuses on not just domains but also culture, mindset, leadership, and city ecosystem. 

Vera Djakonoff continues with an exploration of Foresight – a systematic way of examining future(s) with a view to influence its course of development – and how short-term bias can hinder the path to innovation, prioritizing short-term pressures and familiar short-sighted solutions. She articulates how anticipatory governance can provide governments with the means to address unexpected shifts and immediate needs within the scope of long-term goals, securing a persistent focus on the future. Moving from theory to practice, she describes the example of senior civil servants in South Sudan, who played a key role in leading institutions, and how people are at the core of shifting mindsets. Vera then walks the audience through the 5 steps of the anticipatory governance journey: (1) Initiation, (2) Visioning, (3) Strategy, (4) Capabilities for futures steering, and (5) Integration of anticipation with the institutional fabric. 

Following the speaker presentations, participants take part in an interactive exercise: They are asked to pick between four interlinked modalities of governance, and select which they believe local interventions can be focus on: (1) Cultural change, (2) Domain-specific governance, (3) Capacity for city ecosystem leadership, (4) Multi-level governance. Ensues a snapshot portraying participants’ most urgent needs in skills and competencies, as well as what they think are the most important barriers and most promising opportunities towards anticipatory climate governance. 

This event closes with an open Q&A from the audience, where we address the difficulty for non-foresight practitioners to grasp those concepts and implement them in practice, how to manage signals and participation from local stakeholders, and the standardization of creating intentional spaces to take the time to “rethink” the future amid daily pressures and crises. 

Find the speaker presentations here.