Urban Governance Labs, Social Cohesion and Sustainability Transformations

In the Global South in particular, cities are often characterised by great inequality and mistrust. This is problematic in itself, but it also poses a significant challenge to governance, especially to transformative governance in response to climate change. A minimum degree of social trust and cohesion is necessary for governing urban sustainability transformations. However, both top-down and bottom-up governance approaches rarely address this. In this paper, we present the results of a project that used a collaborative, transversal governance approach to foster social cohesion for sustainability transformations in five cities and urban neighbourhoods in three Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. From 2021 to 2024, representatives of local government, organised civil society, academia, the private sector and citizens worked together in what we call ‘Urban Governance Labs’. The Labs comprised two complementary components. The social cohesion component aimed to facilitate the social preconditions for collaborative governance, such as inclusion, trust, social ties and empowerment, which are rare in communities where poverty rates and inequality are high. The sustainability futures component sought to support the integration of different community goals, types of knowledge and the development of a common narrative linking local priorities with broader sustainability goals. In addition to the Urban Governance Lab meetings, members implemented pilot projects designed to further strengthen social cohesion further internally and encourage replication and scaling externally. In this paper, we analyse data focusing on how the promotion of social cohesion worked and how this contributed to early sustainability transformations. We draw on three sources of data for our analysis: an annual survey of Lab members in all five cities; continuous participant observation in each Lab over four years; and more than 60 interviews with Lab members and other relevant actors. Using a comparative perspective, we analyse the data from this mixed-methods research. We find that the Urban Governance Lab approach was able to complement the limitations of previously existing governance approaches and facilitate initial sustainability transformations. However, the approach was more successful in some cities than in others. We discuss the factors that are most likely to explain this variation and draw conclusions about the potential of collaborative, transversal governance approaches to address inequality, increase social cohesion and facilitate sustainability transformations in other cities.