Fostering Sustainability Transitions by Designing for the Convergence of Policy Windows and Transition Arenas
Abstract
:1. Introduction
- The first journal article explicitly articulates that transition arenas can host MSA streams: “The context in which actors from all three streams develop a joint perception of problems and solutions may be termed ‘transition arenas’” [25] (p. 298). However, Nooteboom and Tesiman’s 2003 article primarily concerns the role of impact assessments in sustainable development.
- The second article explores “daring decision-making” with policy entrepreneurs as individual actors in transition arenas [26]. Scholten’s 2009 article is specific to the municipal administrators who mediate between public processes and transition arenas.
- In 2013, Paredis and Block used the MSA for post hoc analysis of Dutch transition management of environmental policy in their whitepaper, stating that “the current understanding of how transition management works in practice and how it influences regular policies is far from adequate” [27] (p. 22).
- Bettini and Head’s 2016 report [28] primarily focuses on governance of “water sensitive cities,” and the transitions material is mainly confined to a Rotterdam case study in an appendix.
- MacRae and Winfield’s 2016 article attempts “to unify disparate literatures pertinent to the food policy change process in Canada” [29] (p. 141), with transitions and policy windows two among many referenced literatures. However, the transitions approach is only found to be applicable to one of their four cases, and the intersection of transitions and policy windows is not a major focus of their framework.
- The MSA appears in only one paragraph of the conclusion of Van Poeck et al.’s 2017 article [30] on sustainability change agents, and is not integrated with any discussions of transitions.
- Like Paredis and Block [27], Noboa and Upham [31] directly connect transitions and the MSA in their 2018 article. They focus on transition management for energy policy in illiberal democracies, propose that transition arenas include policy entrepreneurs, and identify transition arenas as a venue to host the joining of the MSA streams.
Background
- Evaluate transit and street transportation needs.
- Obtain citizen input through a variety of public engagement methods.
- Provide interim reports to the Citizens Transit Commission and Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Committee progress.
- Develop a draft transportation plan that includes a funding strategy.
- Present a recommendation to the Mayor and Council on the future of transportation in Phoenix [36].
2. Materials and Methods
2.1. Priortization Workshop Design
2.1.1. Prototype 1
2.1.2. Prototype 2
2.1.3. Prototype 3
2.1.4. Prototype 4—The Final Product
2.2. Prioritization Workshop Evaluation
- “Empathy” was coded when CCFPT members expressed empathy with the public; for example: “People who ride the bus need to get to work”.
- “Rationale” was coded when CCFPT members offered a rationale for the inclusion or removal of a plan element; for example: “That costs too much, we should take it out”.
- “Data” was coded when the data available to CCFPT members was leveraged to make decisions; for example: “The map shows high population growth there”.
- “Staff” was coded when the attending city staff answered questions beyond the data available to CCFPT members; for example: “What federal fund would potentially be available to pursue this transit expansion?”.
3. Results
4. Discussion
4.1. The Prioritization Workshop as a Boundary Object
4.2. The CCFPT in the Context of Transitions
- The mayor and Phoenix’s Streets Transportation and Public Transit Departments (problem owners, content experts) and the authors as academic collaborators (transition management experts) [2] formed an informal transition team.
- Based on City of Phoenix staff research on the state of transportation in Phoenix, and the relevant stakeholders and actors in the city, participants were invited by the mayor and Phoenix City Council to a transition arena (i.e., the CCFPT) with the city staff and academic partners who structured and facilitated the committee’s process.
- Transition teams structure problems, which in this case included unmet promises from T2000, overdue street repairs, and the expiry of transportation funding in 2020.
- The CCFPT met repeatedly to envision a future in which Phoenix had transitioned its transportation system to a more sustainable level of high-capacity public transit, starting with T2000 light rail maps (visionary images) and negotiating potential guiding principles (transit access, budgetary responsibility, etc.).
- The product of the CCFPT transition arena was a transition agenda in the form of a 2050 transportation plan with specific transition pathways of fundamental investments (e.g., new high-capacity transit lines, street overlays) and funding mechanisms.
- This plan was presented to and approved by voters in a 2015 ballot initiative.
- Subsequently the Citizens Transportation Commission was established to disperse funds, and ideally to develop transition strategies and implement transition experiments.
4.3. The CCFPT in the Context of the MSA
5. Conclusions
- (1)
- How can stakeholder selection and thoughtful inclusion balance the diversity of frontrunner ideas with the value acceptability of the MSA?
- (2)
- How can boundary objects make potential futures salient for policy makers in the present?
- (3)
- How can innovative facilitation strategies help policy makers incorporate desirable futures into considerations of resource adequacy and technical feasibility?
- (4)
- What practices support the intentional design of policy windows in transition arenas?
Author Contributions
Funding
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
Appendix A
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Prototype | Materials | Goals | Feedback | Resulting Changes |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Cut up 8.5″ × 11″ paper and pen | Explanation to staff and opportunity to present to CCFPT | Prepare for CCFPT presentation | Color coding and rough cost projections |
2 | Large color-coded pieces of different sizes printed with costs and visuals | Explanation to CCFPT and authorization to implement | Prepare to deploy the activity | Cost table, sets of pieces, boards, and facilitation guide |
3 | 36″ × 48″ boards and a full set of pieces | Train facilitators, test the guide, and review materials | Guide did not match sheet, print totals on one board | Guide matched to sheet, board redesign, typos and sizing corrected |
4 | Five 36″ × 48″ boards and five full sets of accurate pieces with costs, visuals, and justifications | Satisfied CCFPT; empathy with the public and each other; accessibility of data and staff expertise; sufficient opportunities to express and explain ideas | Audio coding, and process satisfaction survey results | NA |
Empathy with Publics | Rationale for Plan Priorities | Use of Available Data | Use of Staff Expertise | Total Time | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
% Time on Topic | Min on Topic | % Time on Topic | Min on Topic | % Time on Topic | Min on Topic | % Time on Topic | Min on Topic | Min | |
Group | |||||||||
1 | 9.3% | 7.1 | 62.4% | 47.4 | 32.2% | 24.5 | 22.9% | 17.4 | 76 |
2 | 19.4% | 16.7 | 94.9% | 81.6 | 11.4% | 9.8 | 17.8% | 15.3 | 86 |
3 | 8.7% | 9.4 | 64.3% | 69.4 | 6.2% | 6.7 | 10.3% | 11.1 | 108 |
4 | 15.6% | 18.1 | 54.0% | 62.6 | 20.4% | 23.7 | 10.7% | 12.4 | 116 |
Avg | 13.3% | 12.8 | 68.9% | 65.3 | 17.6% | 16.2 | 15.4% | 14.1 | 96.5 |
Very Dissatisfied | Somewhat Dissatisfied | Neutral | Somewhat Satisfied | Very Satisfied | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Overall, how satisfied were you with the Saturday, November 22nd prioritization workshop? | 1 | 1 | 7 | |||
Specifically, how satisfied were you with the Saturday November 22nd prioritization workshop: | Activity | 1 | 1 | 7 | ||
Facilitation | 2 | 2 | 5 | |||
Availability of data | 2 | 4 | 3 | |||
Availability of relevant staff | 2 | 6 | ||||
Opportunities to voice your thoughts | 2 | 7 | ||||
Final Product | 1 | 1 | 1 | 6 | ||
Do you feel the conversation at the workshop changed anyone’s ideas about transportation? | Yes | No | ||||
6 | 3 |
MSA Concept [4] | Correspondence to Transitions Approach [2] | CCFPT Example | |
---|---|---|---|
Problem stream | Indicators | Indicators are defined by transition spatial boundaries, provide content knowledge, and help monitor and evaluate transition progress. | City of Phoenix staff PowerPoint presentations [55] |
Focusing events | Focusing events are “jarring and sudden” [4] (p. 15) things that help answer the question: “Why do we need a transition?” [51] (p. 95). | CCFPT formation to prevent transit service loss and articulate a transition narrative | |
Load | Institutional load reduces the attention policy makers can direct to new problems, which creates niches for frontrunners to develop transition ideas [56]. | N/A because this occurred before the CCFPT and the authors’ involvement | |
Feedback | Problem stream feedback can be used for reflexive transition activities, such as “the monitoring and evaluation of experiments, agenda, vision, policies and change processes” [51] (p. 87). | Data from Phoenix Public Transit and Streets Departments on the state of the transportation system | |
Policy stream | VALUE ACCEPTABILITY | Transitions explicitly focus on “transformative change, not on adaptive or corrective strategies to existing policy programs,” [51] (p. 81), which is outside the regime’s value acceptability. | Transformative change (>USD 30B) in the regime’s value acceptability demonstrates the potential of linking the approaches. |
TECHNICAL FEASIBILITY | Transitions are less concerned with technical feasibility than envisioning desirable futures. | CCFPT disinterest in autonomous vehicles | |
RESOURCE ADEQUACY | In contrast to focusing on resource adequacy and costs, transitions focus on envisioning desirable futures. | Costs and justification on pieces; starting with pieces on the boards highlighted desired futures. | |
Network integration | Facilitation of transition arenas functions for network integration especially through thoughtful inclusion [57]. | The CCFPT integrated many Phoenix networks. | |
Policy community | The tenet of steering from the “inside” means that transition arenas include regime insiders, and policy entrepreneurs, as well as niche frontrunners. | The CCFPT included niche and regime players. | |
Politics stream | Party ideology | N/A at urban scale | N/A at urban scale |
Mood of the public | The tenet of stakeholder participation and the guiding principle of inclusivity bring the mood of the public into the transitions approach. | Citywide engagement efforts reaching ~3500 people. | |
Balance of interests | The social learning and capacity building principle of transitions suggests that the balance of interests can be negotiated with boundary objects, because they address: “the nature of cooperative work in the absence of consensus” [33] (p. 604). | The workshop facilitated articulation and negotiation of the balance of interests, and attendees reported changed perspectives on transportation. | |
Institutional context | Coupling logic | Transition arenas offer venues for coupling MSA streams with “logic or arguments” [4] (p. 16) grounded in transition principles and practices. | The boundary object workshop structured the CCFPT’s coupling logic. |
Decision style | Transitions emphasize diversity and reflective decision-making in which participants embody decisions in their subsequent practice. | The workshop was an innovative decision style | |
Policy entrepreneur | Access | “Steering from the inside” imbues transition efforts with access to decision makers. | The makeup of the CCFPT and explicit connection to mayor and council |
Resources | The time and money connected to successful policy entrepreneurship are also criteria for effective transition management. Developing transition visions, piloting experiments, and monitoring progress require heavy time and resource investments from the participants in transition arenas. | The resources required to achieve the vision articulated by City of Phoenix staff were the most common point of discussion at CCFPT meetings. | |
Strategies | Strategies and strategic planning are key to achieving transition visions, and strategies are employed throughout the transitions approach, from stakeholder selection to designing transition experiments. | The boundary object workshop for the transition arena was the strategy to couple the streams in the CCFPT case. |
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Harlow, J.; Johnston, E.; Hekler, E.; Yeh, Z. Fostering Sustainability Transitions by Designing for the Convergence of Policy Windows and Transition Arenas. Sustainability 2018, 10, 2975. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10092975
Harlow J, Johnston E, Hekler E, Yeh Z. Fostering Sustainability Transitions by Designing for the Convergence of Policy Windows and Transition Arenas. Sustainability. 2018; 10(9):2975. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10092975
Chicago/Turabian StyleHarlow, John, Erik Johnston, Eric Hekler, and Zoë Yeh. 2018. "Fostering Sustainability Transitions by Designing for the Convergence of Policy Windows and Transition Arenas" Sustainability 10, no. 9: 2975. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10092975