Breaking silos through governance innovations: what is the role for the EU Cities Mission approach?

Cities and local governments are increasingly under pressure to do more to accelerate transformative change in energy and climate transitions. Many cities in the EU and in the neighborhood have committed to climate neutrality goals by 2030. There is much political expectation that cities deliver on these goals. However, cities in many ways are constrained by the EU and national regulations and limited in what they can control and change. One of the possible ways to address these limitations and accelerate transformation is through governance innovations and social experimentation as much as via technical break throughs. Literature argues that one of the main obstacles to governance innovations is rooted in sectoral division and silos. Intra-organizational challenges include cooperating and coordinating with actors both horizontally (across departments and with relevant stakeholders) and vertically (across governance levels) (Quitzau et al 2022). Related to this is a challenge of how to cooperate with communities that are under risk of potential adverse implications of energy transitions to ensure that no one is left behind (Ring et al 2022; Carley and Konisky 2020). In this paper, we develop a framework of ‘breaking silos’ drawing from the previous literature - what types of silos are described and how they are bridged. Then, we apply it to critically assessing the EU Cities Mission framework and NetZeroCities transition map in terms of their potential and possible gaps in addressing these silos. The EU Cities Mission aims to incentivize and support climate and energy innovations in cities. However, it is important to assess what kind of transformative path they are directing cities towards. We know that there are many roads to Paris for cities (Eisenack and Roggero 2022), thus we need to be critical whether new mechanisms are in fact enabling cities to achieve governance innovations, without locking them into the wrong pathways.