The use of City-Deals for sustainable innovation: What can the Netherlands learn from UK experiences?

Abstract

The Netherlands is developing a policy agenda around the future of Dutch cities, known as ‘Agenda-Stad’. This policy program is founded on the perception that governance is more efficient and has greater impact in urban environments, than a one-size-fits-all implementation at the national level. In particular a lot of attention is concerned with the role of innovation for sustainable urban development. However, so far it is unclear how Agenda-Stad is going to create ‘space’ for urban sustainable innovations to flourish.

The UK National Government launched a similar policy program back in 2012 called ‘City- Deals’. This research rests on the idea that the Netherlands can learn from the experiences in the UK. The research therefore explores:

“How is the English City-Deal policy of influence on the creation of ‘protected spaces’ for sustainable innovations and what are lessons to draw for the Dutch ‘Agenda-Stad’ in designing their policy program?”

It is interesting to clarify this gap in literature and investigate how tailored urban policies can be designed to stimulate the sustainable entrepreneurial potential of cities.

This research makes use of the Strategic Niche Management framework to understand how the City-Deal policy influences the creation and availability of protected spaces. Sustainable innovations require a protective space when they are promising, but not yet economically or technologically advanced enough to compete unguarded in the existing socio-technical system.

21 Interviews with local government officials and researchers were conducted in the cities of Manchester and Newcastle. This resulted in a comprehensive understanding of the effects of City-Deal policy in the UK urban environment. Results show that that the City- Deal policy in the UK did not directly contribute to the creation of ‘protected spaces’ for sustainable innovations, not the least because a number of contextual characteristics in the UK. Primarily the national focus on economic growth was so profound that it displaced the cities’ aspirations and capabilities to lower their carbon emissions throughout the process of developing City-Deals. Various other national and local characteristic of UK governance had such an adverse effect on the creation of ‘protected spaces’ for sustainable innovations, that they overshadowed the positive influences of City-Deal policy. Nevertheless, this research is able to derive lessons learned from the UK case studies that can avoid similar unsatisfying outcomes for Agenda-Stad in the Netherlands.