Local climate policy and eco-social integration

Climate change and social justice are major challenges for cities around the world and it is increasingly clear that these two issues are interconnected in various ways. Climate change is associated with a double injustice as climate impacts often hit poor and marginalised households and individuals harder, while richer people contribute to a larger extent to emissions. In addition, policies and measures to mitigate climate change can have negative distributive effects. Scholars have started to study these connections by using the concept of sustainable welfare, which refers to the challenge to provide social welfare for all while staying within the ecological planetary boundaries, i.e., in between the social foundations and ecological ceiling visualised in Raworth´s doughnut model. Cities also face this double challenge of climate change and social justice, and local governments are experimenting with methods, measures and organisational models that seek to strengthen the capacity for eco-social integration and tackle climate change as a nested societal challenge rather than a narrow environmental one. In this paper, we present results from an ongoing project about the capacity for eco-social integration in the city of Lund, Sweden. The project is a joint co-operation between Lund University and the City of Lund and aims for co-production of knowledge. In a case study – based on text analysis of policy and planning documents and qualitative interviews with city officials and urban planners – we study how ecological and social welfare concerns are being addressed and integrated in urban planning in Lund. Theoretically, the paper draws on conceptualizations of sustainable welfare, social and ecological dimensions of urban sustainability, and policy integration. Comparing our results to previous studies, our analysis contributes with a better understanding of the capacity for eco-social integration in local government, including mechanisms preventing integrated approaches and generating inertia such as fragmentation and silo-organisation.