Bureaucratic Governance of Sustainable Urban Development

Sustainable urban development is a typical cross-sectoral policy problem for local administrations, posing challenges of policy integration similar to other wicked problems, such as refugee integration or climate change mitigation. In recent years, increasing numbers of local authorities have begun to demonstrate commitment to sustainability in urban development policies, as provided for by goal no. 11 of the United Nations' sustainable development goals. Still, it is far from obvious, how local administrations effectively master the challenges of policy integration that come with such policies. In particular, sustainability is usually conceptualized to be divisible in three dimensions –ecological, economic and social – that at least partially conflict with each other. Those conflicts need to be acknowledged and balanced. Taking into account the serious difficulties that local public administrations face in putting sustainable urban development policies into practice, the proposed paper pursues the twin research questions of, first, why cities commit to sustainability policies at all, and second, if they do, how they can successfully coordinate them. We treat policy coordination in public administrations as a governance problem, thereby approaching it from a perspective of actor-centered institutionalism. And we choose Germany as an illustrative case for empirical analysis. To begin with, we question the motivation of local governments to commit to sustainable urban development strategies. Local political decision makers find themselves in a situation of 'cross-pressures' between expectations of citizens and local parties, personal ambitions and limited resources. Those cross-pressures are passed on to local administrations and urban developers. Are the motives 'honest' in the sense that local decision-makers are committed to the normative aim of sustainability or are they rather 'strategic' in the sense that paying lip-service to sustainability sells well? We develop empirical indicators for distinguishing those two motivations in empirical cases and outline a possible research strategy. Next, we conduct an actor and situation analysis, outlining structural and procedural options for policy coordination. We therefore outline the challenges that the complex policy problem of sustainable urban development poses to local governments: Various policy fields need to be taken into account (housing, mobility, environment, integration ...). Conflicts of interest between economic, ecological and social goals need to be balanced. And it is an issue of high public salience and intense scrutiny, while resources (time, personnel, money) are limited. Under those conditions, local public administrations need to pursue a multiple governance strategy, combining: communication to the public; involvement of various actors in participatory processes to elicit enduring acceptance; establishing internal processes and structures to process the complexity of the issue; and finally, setting up processes of monitoring and enforcement to secure sustainability of their sustainability policies. From this analysis follows a research design of how to investigate real-life governance processes and structures in empirical case studies.