Local climate strategies and eco-social integration: The case of Lund

Climate change and social justice are major challenges for cities that are interconnected in various ways. Climate change is associated with a double, or triple, injustice as climate impacts often hit poor and marginalised groups harder, while richer people to a larger extent contribute to carbon 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 of providing social welfare and wellbeing for all while staying within ecological limits or planetary boundaries, i.e., in between the social foundations and ecological ceiling as visualised in Raworth´s doughnut model. Cities also face this double challenge of climate change and social justice, and local governments are experimenting with 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 study the integration of ecological sustainability and social welfare concerns in urban governance, what we term eco-social integration. Our aim is to improve our understanding of the capacity for city administrations to integrate ecological and social dimensions of sustainability in urban governance and planning, and the organisational challenges associated with such integrated approaches. Theoretically, we develop the conceptualization of urban eco-social integration by building on and further developing our previous work on sustainable welfare and policy integration in local climate policy and urban governance. Empirically, we present results from a case study conducted as part of an ongoing project about the capacity for eco-social integration in the municipality of Lund, Sweden, a collaborative endeavour part of the city’s local climate strategy aimed at climate neutrality by 2030. In the case study, we analyse the organisational and administrative capacities and conditions for integrating ecological and social justice concerns in practice, and identify instances of local eco-social policy measures. The case study is based on analyses of relevant policy and planning documents and interviews with city officials and administrators involved in the implementation of local climate and sustainability strategies. This is supplemented with co-creative workshops and other forms of policy interactions with responsible city officials and administrators. Key words: urban sustainability, eco-social integration, climate governance, urban governance