Discrepancies in Democratic Demands and Urban Sustainable Development Policies

• In Event: Urban Partisanship, Housing and Elections

Abstract

Cities have emerged as policy actors of global relevance in sustainable development. Their policies are crucial for the realization of the sustainable development goals (SDGs). The substance of urban policy agendas thereby varies greatly in their ecological, social, and economic priorities. Cities incorporate diverse policy issues in their urban sustainable development agendas, such as protecting biodiversity, promoting circular economies, or reducing poverty. We do, however, have only little comparative knowledge about cities' sustainable development agendas and how these different possible configurations of urban sustainable development are perceived by the public.

This paper, therefore, aims to study the preferences of residents in urban sustainable development and compares these residential preferences with actual policy agendas. To do so, we conducted a preregistered, original survey experiment with a total of 5’800 respondents from eight systematically selected European cities, namely Frankfurt, Helsinki, Antwerp, Milan, Manchester, Valencia, Marseille, and Lisbon. In the experiment, survey participants had to assess urban sustainable development policy agendas that were randomly consisting of six out of 17 policy issues that we derived from literature. In addition, we collected and coded 219 specific urban sustainable development plans in these eight cities to find out what these eight cities actually do in terms of planning for sustainable development.

The results reveal a discrepancy between the demands of residents in terms of urban sustainable development and the actual pursued policy priorities by the cities. While the eight European cities pursue strategies mostly related to issues such as education, biodiversity, public transport, and urban green spaces, residents prefer policy issues that secure their everyday needs such as cost of living, public health, education, poverty, and unemployment. This points to a discrepancy between democratic demand and urban sustainable development agendas, but probably more important to the need of securing basic human needs when cities want to pursue profound sustainable development policies in important SDG issues such as climate change, biodiversity, or renewable energy.

Authors

• David Kaufmann, ETH Zürich

• Michael Wicki, ETH Zurich

• Stefan Wittwer, KPM Center for Public Management, University of Bern