The role of local governments in governing sustainable consumption and sharing cities

Chapter 11, The role of local governments in governing sustainable consumption and sharing cities’ by Jenny Palm, Nora Smedby and Kes McCormick introduces and analyses cities as sustainable consumption governors. In a rapidly urbanizing world, the role of cities in enhancing sustainable consumption patterns is increasing, so the progressive governance agenda requires cities to engage with issues of lifestyle and consumption. When addressing sustainable consumption challenges, cities need to adopt working methods and approaches to include multiple stakeholders in their governance processes. Most likely, cities will use both traditional forms of authority and new partnerships or processes to achieve effective and efficient governance. For example, collective ownership is being discussed as a way to mobilize participation from the local community and ideas of decentralized structures and democratized technical infrastructures are being debated. The authors discuss how local governments need to deal with different trends when taking a meta-governor role in developing sustainable consumption patterns. Finally, the chapter analyses conflicts in literature and in practice, related to how the different forms and structures of governance processes contribute to sustainable cities. Future research should develop methods for evaluating different governance modes of cities and to explore how and when the infrastructure and planning of cities should change in order to facilitate sustainable consumption and the sharing economy.