Green transition and voluntary planning: an integrated approach for a climate-responsive territorial governance

Large European cities, over the years have been the driving force for the development of tools and policies for reducing CO2 emissions and the promotion of climate adaptation and mitigation actions. Leading cities that are paving the way for this "green revolution" and that represent the best examples of integration of climate and energy policies into urban planning in Europe can be identified among some of the major cities of Northern Europe, such as Malmö, Stockholm, Antwerp, Amsterdam or Rotterdam. Additionally, the EU urban agenda specialized the climate and energy transition policies on the target of medium and large cities, which are considered as a major leverage to achieve climate targets. The main focus of this research is to identify the role and the contribution that smaller cities (i.e. with less than 5,000 inhabitants) can provide to the EU climate and energy commitments. The research hypothesis is that the current approach defines an imbalance between large cities and metropolitan areas, ignoring the larger part of the EU territory characterised by small and fragmented settlements. In this scenario, tools and monitoring campaign still not refer to clearly identify the relevant contribution coming from small municipalities, characterized by weaknesses in terms of technical capacity, capacity of attracting private investments for implementing actions. This class of municipalities, became the subject of this PhD project, considering that they account for 84% of all Local Administrative Units (LAUs) and cover 68% of the total area of LAUs among EU27 countries. The European Union (EU) policy framework on energy, climate, and environment, currently enshrined in the European Green Deal [5], and supported by the new Leipzig Charter on sustainable cities, sets a comprehensive reference for implementing interventions aimed at reducing carbon emissions and driving the "green" transition. Since 2008, the Covenant of Mayors initiative in Europe (CoM) has been supporting local authorities willing to take local action against climate change through a bottom-up voluntary approach. CoM signatories commit to developing and implementing a Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plan (SECAP) to meet their energy and climate targets, and to report key information and figures from SECAPs. The CoM played a pioneering role in dealing with energy and climate considerations at local level, which were neglected for long by urban planning. Analyzing the role of city networks within the climate-responsive processes, the CoM initiative was selected due to the voluntary approach and the relevant engagement of small municipalities (5653, as of December 2023). Specifically, the CoM among the other city networks, it is well defined to translate in practice the commitments of its signatories with a plan, the SECAP. Against this background, the aim of this research is to define, within the CoM initiative, a reference framework oriented to direct the implementation of sectoral policies (urban development, mitigation of natural risks, social inclusion, economic development and employment, etc.) through the “engineering of the complexity”, i.e. the principles of sustainable development posed on regional planning and the governance of territorial transformations. In particular, this framework has to refer to territorial and urban development policies (at EU and international level), understood as tools capable of directing and governing the transformations of the territory at the appropriate scales. The proposal aims to implement a holistic approach, enabling a context-based systemic view by providing robust decision support systems (DSS) for the implementation of sustainable and climate-responsive actions. In the development of the methodological framework, a fundamental role must be assigned to the monitoring phase, which represents the "weak bond" of territorial planning processes, as it is often ineffective in describing a system of actions that explicitly states coherence with the desired scenarios and is accompanied by indicators capable of describing progress and objectives achieved. Such a methodological framework also provides an operational perspective in order to address the issue of unsolved dualism between mitigation and adaptation measures, which are sometimes contradictory to each other. The organic approach to which this research looks at would make it possible to identify any conflict situations in order to resolve them at an operational level. This may be achieved through intervention strategies that ensure adequate complementarity since, on a theoretical level, it can be argued that the more effective the mitigation activities are, the less costly the adaptation measures will be. The PhD thesis is structured according to the model of a collection of four published papers, that detail the contents described above. Conclusions include the final discussion of the overall results achieved in the four studies described in the relevant chapters. The perspective of the main research objectives is highlighted, proposing a comprehensive overview of the specific findings of each published paper. The doctoral conclusions include the limitations and future perspectives emerging from this research experience.