Governance factors driving the co-creation of green solutions in different politico-administrative systems

Sustainable development challenges include issues such as the consequences of climate change, inequalities in access to health and education, integration of immigrants and refugees, and several others which embody the ‘wicked problems’ (Sørensen & Torfing, 2017; Torfing & Ansell, 2017) that are best addressed through forms of governance involving partnerships and multi-actors’ networks (Hofstad & Torfing, 2016; Koppenjan & Klijn, 2004; Sørensen & Torfing, 2011; Van Huijstee et al., 2007). The role to be played by multi-stakeholder and cross-sector partnerships in addressing such ‘wicked problems’ of sustainable development is also made explicit by the seventeenth Sustainable Development Goal, ‘Partnerships for the Goals’. Within this context, this paper focuses on the challenges that pertain to environmental sustainability, where it is also widely acknowledged that the complexity and uncertainty of the problems to be addressed require multiple actors to collaborate in collective decision-making and problem-solving (Folke et al. 2002, 2005; Armitage et al. 2009; Butler et al. 2015; Imperial et al. 2016). Drawing on a pool of case studies of local co-creation of green solutions in 29 countries, this paper will look at the impact of different sets of governance factors in countries with different politico-administrative regimes. More specifically, the paper will explore how these local co-creation partnerships are supported by a selection of structural and institutional factors, and how such factors are linked to different politico-administrative systems (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011). We expect that governance factors may take a certain shape or another in relation to specific features of the local politico-administrative systems, for instance the structure of the state, the dominant administrative culture, or the shape of relations between political executives and civil servants. We will rely on Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) (Rihoux and Ragin 2009; Schneider and Wagemann 2012) to explore which alternative configurations of selected governance factors may concurrently lead to the same outcome. The availability of in-depth information for each case study will also allow us to reflect on how certain configurations appear to be more suited to one country or another based on the predominant features of its politic-administrative system.