Cities pilot low-carbon initiatives (LCIs) such as building-retrofit programs and renewable-energy projects to learn how to accelerate urban decarbonization. An exploratory case study of the City of Copenhagen (van Doren, Driessen, Runhaar and Giezen, 2020) produced a framework in which local governments derive two types of knowledge from LCIs — instrumental knowledge (what makes projects succeed) and transformative knowledge (which institutional barriers block wider uptake) — through four categories of learning practice (experience accumulation, knowledge articulation, knowledge codification, knowledge distribution), with learning capacity explained by motivation, resources, and skills. Because the evidence comes from a single high-capacity, climate-leading city, the authors explicitly flag limited generalizability. The open problem is twofold: (1) whether and how this learning framework holds for municipalities with different political contexts, administrative capacities, and lower climate leadership, and (2) whether and how lessons learned from LCIs can be empirically traced to actual scaling-up outcomes — horizontal replication of initiatives and durable vertical institutional change — which the study found challenging to establish and which later reviews confirm remains empirically unresolved.

Background

Local governments experiment with low-carbon initiatives (LCIs) — pilot projects such as energy retrofits of municipal buildings, district-energy schemes, and renewable-energy demonstration projects — as a way to learn how the transition to low-carbon cities can be advanced. In the sustainability-transitions literature this experimentation is usually described with the multi-level perspective, in which protected 'niches' (spaces such as pilot projects where innovations develop away from mainstream selection pressure) generate lessons that may diffuse to and transform the 'regime' (the dominant institutional and technological setting, here including municipal rules, budgets, and national regulation). Scaling-up is commonly split into horizontal scaling-up (replicating or growing the initiative itself, e.g. retrofitting more buildings) and vertical scaling-up (changing the institutional conditions, e.g. regulation, mandates, or budget structures, so that the whole class of initiatives can proceed). Van Doren, Driessen, Runhaar, and Giezen (2020) studied how the municipal organization of Copenhagen — widely regarded as a sustainability frontrunner with an ambitious 2025 carbon-neutrality climate plan — learns from its LCIs. Drawing on organizational-learning theory (in particular the distinction between knowledge that improves performance within existing rules and knowledge that questions the rules themselves), they distinguish instrumental knowledge (about innovation features and success strategies, feeding horizontal scaling-up) from transformative knowledge (about institutional barriers, feeding vertical scaling-up), and describe four categories of practice by which the local government converts project experience into usable knowledge: experience accumulation (piloting, prototyping, and long-term monitoring), knowledge articulation (project evaluations, team meetings, stakeholder dialogues), knowledge codification (project reports, program evaluations, issue papers that externalize tacit knowledge), and knowledge distribution (meetings, workshops, conferences, partnerships, and issue networks that carry knowledge to wider audiences). They further explain a local government's capacity to learn by factors of motivation (political climate leadership, evaluation mandates, institutional entrepreneurs — actors who actively push institutional change), resources (structural budgets and permanent, knowledgeable staff), and skills (negotiation, communication, cooperation). The study documented that in Copenhagen horizontal replication proceeds, but vertical scaling-up occurs ad hoc, dependent on strategically exploited 'policy windows' (moments of public and political attention), advocacy coalitions, and resource availability; that project financing typically runs one to two years, leaving no funds for the long-term monitoring the authors deem essential for learning; that codified project reports 'often end up on a shelf'; and that the authors 'found it challenging to establish what and how lessons are re-used'. Because the evidence base is a single explorative case study of a frontrunner city, the authors explicitly state a limitation in generalizability and call for future studies of whether and how learning practices differ across local governments. Later reviews confirm the wider gap: Neij and Heiskanen (2021) find only sporadic scientific evidence of systematically successful policy learning and capacity building in municipal climate mitigation, and Stam, van Ewijk, and Chan (2023), in a systematic review of learning in sustainability transitions, conclude that studies routinely conflate learning processes with learning outcomes and have not convincingly demonstrated how learning produces change, that learning by incumbent organizations such as municipal administrations is still understudied, and that the longitudinal designs needed to settle this are rare. Beukers and Bertolini (2023) similarly report that urban experiments lack the means to transfer lessons beyond their boundaries and fail to monitor whether and how learning took place. An adjacent comparative study of upscaling barriers in two other Dutch cities (Giezen and Pellerey, 2021, on green schoolyards in Amsterdam and The Hague) shows combinations of barriers — lacking awareness, funds, time, expertise, bureaucratic complexity, and political will — blocking upscaling outside the frontrunner context, but does not test the Copenhagen learning framework itself.

Problem Statement

For local governments experimenting with low-carbon initiatives, determine whether and how the Copenhagen-derived learning framework generalizes beyond the frontrunner case: (1) do the four categories of learning practice (experience accumulation, knowledge articulation, knowledge codification, knowledge distribution), the instrumental-versus-transformative knowledge distinction, and the explanatory weight of motivation, resources, and skills hold for municipalities with different political contexts, administrative capacities, and lower climate leadership — i.e. an empirical comparative test of the framework across contrasted municipal contexts; and (2) can the translation of learned lessons into actual scaling-up — measurable horizontal replication of initiatives and durable vertical institutional change, as opposed to ad hoc exploitation of policy windows — be traced and explained empirically, including which learning practices, dissemination channels (codified reports versus person-to-person transfer), advocacy configurations, and resourcing arrangements (notably structural funding for long-term monitoring rather than 1–2 year project financing) make that translation succeed or fail?

In part (1), treat the four learning-practice categories, the instrumental-versus-transformative knowledge distinction, and the explanatory weight of motivation, resources, and skills as three separately reportable components, and state for each whether it holds across the contrasted municipalities: a partial-transfer finding, in which some components generalize and others do not, is itself a valid resolution of part (1) rather than a failure to resolve it. Parts (1) and (2) are each required for the task as a whole, and a finding that lessons can be traced to scaling-up outcomes only partially, or cannot be traced at all, is likewise a valid resolution of part (2).

References

  1. Didi van Doren, Peter P.J. Driessen, Hens A.C. Runhaar, Mendel Giezen (2020). Learning within local government to promote the scaling-up of low-carbon initiatives: A case study in the City of Copenhagen. Energy Policy 136, 111030. DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2019.111030. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2019.111030
  2. Kees Stam, Edith van Ewijk, Paul W. Chan (2023). How does learning drive sustainability transitions? Perspectives, problems and prospects from a systematic literature review. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 48, 100734. DOI: 10.1016/j.eist.2023.100734. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2023.100734
  3. Els Beukers, Luca Bertolini (2023). Fostering learning beyond urban experiment boundaries. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 46, 100684. DOI: 10.1016/j.eist.2022.100684. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2022.100684
  4. Lena Neij, Eva Heiskanen (2021). Municipal climate mitigation policy and policy learning - A review. Journal of Cleaner Production 317, 128348. DOI: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.128348. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.128348
  5. Didi van Doren, Hens Runhaar, Rob P.J.M. Raven, Mendel Giezen, Peter P.J. Driessen (2020). Institutional work in diverse niche contexts: The case of low-carbon housing in the Netherlands. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 35, 116-134. DOI: 10.1016/j.eist.2020.03.001. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2020.03.001
  6. Mendel Giezen, Virginia Pellerey (2021). Renaturing the city: Factors contributing to upscaling green schoolyards in Amsterdam and The Hague. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening 63, 127190. DOI: 10.1016/j.ufug.2021.127190. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2021.127190