The mobility of the governance of the commons

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The Mobility of the Governance of the Commons

Ieva Punyte

Amsterdam University

MSc International Development Studies

2016

Amsterdam

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G

raduate School of Social Sciences MSc International Development Studies

Title: The Mobility of the Governance of the Commons Name: Ieva Punytė

E-mail: ievapunyte@gmail.com Date: 16th_January ₂₀₁₇

UvA ID: 11181427 Word Count: 24,760

Course: Research Project IDS – Field Work and Thesis Supervisor: Dennis Rodgers

Professor of International Development Studies Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences

University of Amsterdam THE NETHERLANDS

Second Reader: Luca Bertolini

Professor of Urban Planning and Regional Planning Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences

University of Amsterdam THE NETHERLANDS

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Abstract

The co-city policy suggests a new orientation of the urban governance. Based on shared responsibility over the preservation of the urban commons, multi-stakeholder collaboration, sharing and facilitation, it has been advocated to be a proven and fundamental direction that every city should take in order to comprehensively address urban development as well as the contextually specific urban hazards, and ultimately sustain inclusive well-being (Foster and Iaione, 2016). The co-city underlying principles seem to be universally relevant due to the growing commodification, urban deterioration, social exclusion and polarization not only within the social domain, but also between public authorities and citizens (Sassen, 2016).

However, in the light of the overarching policy mobility theory and practice, the universality aspect of the co-city policy is highly questionable. Having learnt from the theory and practice of the policy transfer, it has become a common knowledge that policies taken from a specific context and replicated in another do not necessarily bring expected outcomes and tend to be incomplete versions of the original policies (Peck, 2011). There are countless policy transfer examples, which bypassing political, social and economic local circumstances, were

unsuccessful, inefficient or caused further externalities (Clarke, 2012). Additionally, the policy mobility suggests that policies are not only communicated through multiple sites, but also shaped by certain determinants such as political will, intellectual climate, social environment, legal systems and economic conditions and therefore are almost never the same. These determinants are locally specific and in regard to a different policy and its underlying principles could be either drivers or constrains of the potential success of the policy mobility in a chosen context. Therefore, to evaluate the universality aspect, the co-city policy is taken as a unit of analysis within the extensively comparative research of two contrasting contexts: “Context of Innovation” and “Context of Implementation”: Bologna and Vilnius. The underlying objective is to identify what attributes ultimately determine the co-city mobility to a context that differs from the context where it emerged first.

Key Words: Policy Transfer, Policy Mobility, Mobility Determinants, Co-City, Collaboration,

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Introduction: the Mobility of the Governance of the Commons

Today a number of cities face challenges that are accelerated by the rapid climate change, growing social inequality, economic instability and hence migration. There is a tendency to address these issues in a hierarchical, rigid and closed manner. This means that in many instances the sustainable and inclusive urban development, which fundamentally relies on the interaction between public authorities and citizens, is disrupted both externally and internally. Consequently, in the light of top-down politics and market dominance (Bavel, 2016; Barnes, 2006), urban growth transforms cities into commodities, which are owned and governed by a homogenous few (Sassen, 2016). Such phenomena capture urban governance as a permanent development issue while putting comprehensive urban policies at the centre of attention (Cohen and Rogers, 2003; Dean, 1999; Fagotto and Fung, 2006; Healey, 2006).

Regardless worrisome estimations, cities undergo exemplary governance practices, which, in order to address growing urban threats, culminate into “mental maps of ‘best cities’ for policy that informs future strategies” (McCann and Ward, 2009:175). There is a growing number of intelligent, smart, sharing, resilient, green and sustainable urban paradigms, which include practices like: the development of urban cyber-culture in Seoul (Townsend, 2007), regeneration of public spaces in Barcelona and Bogota (Peck, 2003; Moore, 2007), participatory budgeting and direct democracy in Porto Allegra (Baiocchi, 2003), environmental grids and park conservancies in New York (Foster, 2011), Localism Act in London, citizen juries and business improvement districts from the world’s South to the North (Geissel, 2008). This justifies the fact that the urban governance knowledge and practices are equally relevant in developing as much as developed world (Kofman and Lebas, 1996:6) and it adds that the ideas, principles and policies, which originate in and are conditioned to a specific context, are simultaneously recognised as templates, icons or prototypes and ergo emerge in other localities. The newly commenced policies address various challenges and alter urban contexts – the social, political, institutional and economic dimensions – but concurrently they undergo changes themselves, which means that they derive into different versions of the original policies (McCann and Ward, 2009; Peck, 2011).

Furthermore, among plenty contemporary governance practices, there is an arrangement that suggests switching the focus from dealing with the consequences of the urban hazards to critically assessing the inputs, and hence fundamentally transforming a city – its administration and the tradition of decision making. The model projects a gradual transition to unleashing the potential of the civic in writing its respective urban narrative, when the public remains with an enabling rather than a fully decisive role. It is the co-city (collaborative, commons-based and cognitive city) arrangement – a result of an extensive scientific research and experimentation1_{. The co-city –}

perceived as a multidimensional model, which is influenced by a number of factors and thereby is also transforming them – suggests an adaptive manner to approach the alarming urban environment

1_{The co-founders of Co-city: Sheila R. Foster Fordham Law (New York) and Christian Iaione (LUISS Guido Carli}

University), among others who have contributed to its development. See, Foster, Sheila R. and Iaione, Christian (2016) “City as a Commons,” Yale Law & Policy Review: Vol. 34: Iss. 2, Article 2.

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by restructuring its internal dynamics first. The key orientation of the arrangement is grounded in the outsourcing and reducing the asymmetries in the distribution of power within the city management, rather than being embedded in a downgrading manner by the public to the citizens. The co-city is a collaborative space – a common good rather than a commodity. It is where city assets either tangible (soft and hard urban infrastructure) or intangible (e.g., knowledge, digital good) are co-produced, accessible and co-managed by five types of protagonists: public, private, social, cognitive and civic. It is projected to ensure a universal access to participation, sharing of local resources and collaboration, and its ultimate phase – polycentrism to create and co-manage the future shapes of the new local economy, institutions and community enterprises. The arrangement manifests from a solid and trustworthy partnership between the cognitive – knowledge institutions – and the social – the third sector organizations. This partnership is meant to make the civic – urban inhabitants – gain influential voice in an active and collective creation of urban welfare and inclusive development while being in collaboration with other essential protagonists. It fosters multi-stakeholder synergies for common purposes that materialize from the interplay between legal and administrative expertise, place making, communication and mutual facilitation. Thus, cooperation in this model goes beyond subsidiary bottom-up facilitation. It rather immerse in the social innovation, civic imagination and an open dialogue, meaning, that a city, its suburbs and neighbourhoods become experimentation grounds where social interactions crystalize into a new form of social enterprises for local services based on an open and collaborative production for a universal benefit. The co-city is advocated to generate results that are functional and consistent with the needs and the local conditions respecting the genius loci of a place. It ultimately contributes to the local economic development, trustworthy horizontal governance while stimulating inclusive and sustainable wellbeing.

The co-city was recently developed in Bologna (Italy), where, having academia’s support, the further legal adjustments on sharing knowledge and resources between public, social and private, were introduced.2 This not only enabled citizens to contribute to the redevelopment of their surroundings, but it also locally recognized the added value of the multi-stakeholder ecosystem for a sustainable urban governance development. These practices have been recognized and prototyped to other cities and thereby the essential co-city’s principles like pooling of resources, heterogeneous collaboration and the enabling state (defined in Part I and Part III) recently accommodated peculiar institutional structures as well as political, social and economic environments. It has been argued that the co-city has a potential to be a successful policy in various contexts. Nonetheless, yet having brought notable results, cities, where the arrangement took root, share a set of comparable conditions. These cities tend to have administrations that are open to sharing and innovation, history of a thorough decentralization and civic participation and engaged academic sector. This raises a question whether the co-city policy would have any potential to emerge and be successful in a context that lacks such conditions and where, due to the historically

2_{See the Regulation on Collaboration Between Citizens and the City for the Care and Regeneration of Urban}

Commons (2014),

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hierarchical development and political climate – when the civic is disassociated from the public and citizens are merely given a passive consumer role of the standardized services, – the alternative, citizen-oriented governance approaches are generally deprioritized.

To provide a comprehensive answer, first, it is necessary to zoom out from the concrete and specific co-city case and turn to the dynamics of the general and slightly abstract policy mobility. The overarching theory on the policy mobility captures the logic and the evolution of the circulation and adaptation of the locally produced models. Despite the fact that in theory there is no clear-cut on what ultimately drives and/or constrains policies to emerge, the secondary literature suggests certain variables that in relation to the local attributes profoundly shape the process. As such, in the light of “[t]he emergence of multi-disciplinary perspectives on how, why, where and with what effects policies are mobilised, circulated, learned, reformulated and reassembled” (McCann and Ward, 2013:3) I emphasize factors like political will, intellectual climate, social environment, legal system, and economic resources or a capacity to facilitate governance modifications as important determinants for the emergence and consolidation of locally produced policies in peculiar localities, only if, these factors correlate with the principles of a specific policy. Second, in regard to these factors it is necessary to provide an extensively comparative field-study between “the context of innovation” and “the context of implementation” (Clarke, 2012). To address the concrete case I focus on Bologna and Vilnius. The latter city is a capital of a former Soviet Union Republic and a context that has a relatively brief experience with democracy. This context is interesting because it has undergone 26 years of democratization, decentralization and marketization and only very recently show positive nodes of close and productive state-society engagement. Historically, it experienced many externally approved policies and currently its administration focuses on further innovative development paradigms, yet it still lacks knowledge, expertise and systemic thinking to address significantly low civic participation (Aidukaite et al. 2012). The research is based on an extensive comparison of the pre-existing political, social, legal and economic Vilnius environment in regard to the key principles of the co-city to determine the potential policy’s success.

Lastly, to provide a well-defined answer it is important to structure the argumentation. Thus, the thesis is divided into four parts and a concluding section, organized as follows: Part I covers theoretical literature on policy mobility and its evolution. It delineates the multidimensional concept and defines its key shapers with a view to the historical, economic, political and social dimensions. This part further concentrates on the concrete co-city policy, its academic and practical origins, evolution and underlying principles to produce a frame for the empirical analysis. Part II presents the research design and methods conducted for the data collection, which is based not only on theory and typologies, but also on a carefully selected primary qualitative data to provide a broad perspectives on expert knowledge, experiences, attitudes and opinions concerning the co-city. The absence of clear policy mobility methodology (McCann and Ward, 2009) makes the field-research an experimental practice, yet Part II justifies why semi-structured expert interviews were chosen as the main method for data collection. Part III presents the co-city’s architecture in Bologna – to what extent it has been determined by the pre-existing political, social

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and legal conditions. Part IV focuses on Vilnius. It initially addresses the resent regional socio-economic changes that affected both political and social formation and urban development. It defines contemporary issues and presents the nodes of the participatory practices. This part is not only based on the instigation of the regional and urban development and social progress, but also on the analysis of the local circumstances and a comprehensive study of the experts’ views on the co-city’s principles, essentially, interagency and inter-sectoral collaboration. The Part V is a concluding section that summarises the findings. It visualizes the conceptual differences between the contexts and normatively reasons further action in regard to collaborative governance arrangement in Vilnius. It stresses the overall necessity for the in-depth context analysis prior to the co-city policy mobility to a peculiar locality where the issues of the standardized state-society relations yet have been meticulously challenged. That is why the last part is based on at least the most general normative remarks to distinguish whether the governance model is progressive or not for the chosen context.

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Part I: Theory & the Conceptual Model

Policy-making is an “intensively and fundamentally local, grounded and territorial” (McCann and Ward, 2009:176). It is commonly dictated by the political authorities and the so-called policy

agents. However, the volatile globalization in a line with the worldwide digital progress (Saunier,

2002; Clarke, 2012) has greatly affected the diffusion of sources and sites of policy advice and advocacy and complemented the “No Government is an Island” (Mörth, 1998) notion, which means that policies are not determined by the government officials only – they rather exhibit an immense spectre and levels of mobility while “exerting normative power over significant distances” (Peck, 2011:773). Contemporary policies became mobile policies that, despite particular territorial and jurisdictional boundaries, have spilled over within a transnational reach.

However, the study of policy replication and adaptation is recent, it combines multiple fields and therefore is yet sufficiently addressed. Despite being abstract and having a number points for the analysis (McCann and Ward, 2009, 2013; Peck 2003), policy mobility has a clear pattern of progression. Scholars agree that in theory and practice it has evolved from “the rational-formalist tradition of work on policy transfer, rooted in orthodox political science, [to] social-constructivist approaches to policy mobility and mutation, an emergent project with diverse roots in the interdisciplinary zone of ‘critical policy studies’” (Peck, 2011:774). Furthermore, the secondary literature suggests that not only policy agents and non-governmental advisors determine the emergence and consolidation of policies. There are other broader variables like political will, intellectual climate, social environment, legal systems, and economic resources, which, depending on the local circumstances, ultimately determine policy mobility. The relation of these determinants with the underlying principles of a chosen policy is fundamental in grasping why some contexts are receptive to certain policies while others fail to deliver expected results in time or at all. Therefore, before switching to the potential success of the co-city policy mobility to Vilnius, it is important to address the evolution of the policy mobility in theory and practice while delineating the determinants that shape the process.

1.1. From Transfer to Mobility

1.1.1. Policy Transfer

Traditionally, policies were understood as sets of regulations that could be transferred from “the context of innovation” to “the context of imitation” (Clarke, 2012). Under the ontology of the policy transfer, the replication of the impersonal policy products was based on a horizontal and unilineal convergence or a one-way policy diffusion. The to-be-transferred policy was externally identified as a best practice. It was then abstracted from its peculiar context and transacted as a product ‘in-a-box’ (Peck, 2011). Thus, policies, governance models and landscapes were understood as asocial, ideologically-exclusive and open beneficiaries (Peck, 2011; Clarke, 2012). Additionally, the process of policy replication was believed to be driven by competition (Dye, 1990). In this line of reasoning the rational policy-agents were given a protagonist role in

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advocating for the “universalistic models of rational or satisfying behaviour, abstracted from their respective social and institutional contexts” (Peck, 2011:780). Therefore, the majority of the best policy choices have been focused on fostering market relations while impeding grounded strategies on social welfare and environment, which made the policy transfer a politically vested “entrepreneurialism in urban governance” (Harvey, 1989).

Evidently, policies that were replicated between resource-rich countries with corresponding political, intellectual, social and institutional environments and economic capacities were more successful. As a result, these effective policies became normatively brimming and thereby blindly replicated to other locations that had rather contrasting environments and development traditions. In many instances, the latter cities or countries had no resources for a locally determined intentional policy innovation and therefore agreed with a short-cut to catch-up development (Peck, 2011; 2003; Clarke, 2012). This correspondingly culminated into an opening for the further development interventions and subsequently was criticized to be a politicized event to consolidate international dependency (Schuurman, 2009).

Many transferred policies were justified through structural adjustment programs by a virtue of international regulatory forms like among others the conditions of the International Monitory Fund loans or sanctions and regulations of European Union (Peck, 2011). Needless to say, practices on the ground turned to be more complex than on a paper. Consequently, a number of the uniform and contextually unfitting models have failed to bring anticipated outcomes either on time or at all (UN-Habitat, 2013). The growing disappointment triggered critical thought, which concluded that “policies toward the backward countries are unlikely to be successful if they ignore the basic peculiarities of economic backwardness” (Gerschenkron, 1962:30), which is fundamentally based on other locally specific attributes such as social, political and ideological nuances. In many instances, the “application of institutional instruments for which there was little or no counterpart” (1962:7), not only failed to fulfil expectations, but even brought negative externalities such as unemployment or depopulation.

Many examples of this phenomena are located in Eastern Europe, when policies from the progressive West were replicated to the East after the collapse of the Soviet Union. These examples reveal that the “broader social, political, and economic contexts in which they [institutional arrangements] were developed and embedded” (Locke and Jacoby, 1997:58) were intentionally overlooked. The paradoxical situation received criticism to be politically twisted since it furthered normative judgements over emulating context’s state of institutionalization. The failure of the best policies rarely led to the critical re-thinking of the policy itself in correlation with the local political and intellectual setting and social environment. Rather, when policies failed to deliver expected results the external policy agents recognized local institutions as inefficient and incompetent, hence in need of a further reformism (Peck, 2011; Clarke, 2012). Consequently, the illusion of the

unintentional and painless development catching-up while neglecting local conditions became

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1.1.2. Policy Mobility

The criticism to the policy transfer is based on the recognition of what is generic and what is peripatetic and specific to time and place (Rose, 1991; Saunier, 2002; Peck 2011). This contributes to the social-constructivist addition to the debate – the policy mobility, which first and foremost indicates that policies and institutions are man-made (Peck, 2011). They are constructed ground-up and subdued to the respective spatial specificities. To add, they require constant improvement based on the local environment and global trends. This does not neglect international policy circulation. It rather states that it is a socially vocal process, vigilant to socio-spatiality and dependent on relational interpretations (Clarke, 2012; Hall, 1993; Foster, 2011), which “resemble a rolling conversation rather than a coherent paradigm” (Peck, 2011:774). Policy mobility is based on a heterodox line of thinking, which is sensitive to geographies and “historically distinctive forms of ideological mediation and institutional interdependence” (Peck, 2011:786). Thus, being based on different epistemological and ontological foundations, policy mobility is not horizontally brought from one context to another by a group of external experts. Rather, in itself it is “a wider, transformative process, involving the ongoing mutation of policies and policy regimes in a manner that seems to be more deeply cross-referential and relativized than ever before. Thus, there is a need to problematize not only the movement itself […] but also the restructured macro institutional environments” (2011:793). In this line of thought policies “arrive in cities not as replicas of policies from elsewhere but as ‘policies-in-transformation” (Clarke, 2012:27).

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Policy mobility is shaped by an extensive group of policy agents, practitioners and advisors that include civic social organizations, social entrepreneurs and communities of practice (Clarke, 2012: 27). Therefore, the field of the geographically extensive, multilateral and disorganized policy mobility is “populated by a wide array of actors and institutions” (Peck, 2011:791). This highlights why urban policies “must not just be negotiated between local politicians and council officers on the one hand, and national or international politicians, bureaucrats, consultants, researchers, journalists, etc. on the other. It must also be negotiated with local citizens and their representatives, groups, movements, and organizations” (Clarke, 2012:34).

Since “the locus of policy transfer has shifted away from its original government-centric emphasis to encompass multiple sites and actors” (Benson and Jordan, 2011:372) policy mobility became to be addressed as a transdisciplinary phenomenon. Therefore, apart from categorizing policy-agents and expected outcomes, a more profound focus on the synergies and interoperability of the input factors surfaces in the policy mobility literature (McCann and Ward, 2009; Foster, 2011). There is a set of policy mobility determinants (Table 1) that have been identified to play a crucial role in the recognition, emergence, consolidation and success of policy mobility. As showed in the Table 1. there are five general determinants among which political will for a comprehension of a mutual policy value is crucial. It determines the level of engagement when “a sufficient set of decision makers intends to support a particular initiative and that such support is committed” fully (Post et al. 2010:653). This is believed to be focal to a policy change and a “sustained commitment […] to invest political resources to achieve specific objectives” (Rose and Greeley, 2006:5). To add, it strongly correlates with the local intellectual climate. Knowledge that is accumulated by various knowledge and research institutions plays an important role in directing the format and content of strategies over common problems hence policies (Iaione, 2016). The interdisciplinary nature of issues requires clear and open communication and common understanding not only within the interdisciplinary fields, but between decision makers, advocacies and practice communities too. Therefore, the academia’s active engagement in formulating and communicating a critical thought is significant. Additionally, social acceptance is an important variable that influences further progression of a policy (McCann and Ward, 2009). Thus, social environment, which is shaped by the local cultural setting, exhibits different tolerances and norms toward a suggested form of propositions (Post et al. 2010:665). Before any policy mobility, it is important to address whether the “jurisdiction has the ability and resources to implement an outcome” (Post et al. 2010:656). Policy change, emergence, consolidation are determined by the fact whether there are institutional incentive structures, supportive legal regulations or at least whether they are flexible. This finally leads to the availability of economic resources to facilitate new development strategies. The allocation of resources depends on political strategies hence on the political will that is influenced by the intellectual climate, which has the capacity to formulate solutions based on the social environment – showing an evident interdependence of the determinants.

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The determinants of the policy mobility are neutral yet they turn to be drivers or constrains depending on the attributes of the local context. They shape policy emergence, consolidation and modification while bridging cities into international networks based on collaboration and knowledge exchange rather than competition (Clarke, 2012; Cochrane and Ward, 2012). The ideas, practices and institutional arrangements are not only transformed while being in transition, they are also profoundly determined by the local settings. That is why the most relevant “approach to understanding contemporary urban governance in a global context is to develop a conceptualization that is equally sensitive to the role of relational and territorial geographies […] of global contexts and place-specificities, of structural imperatives and embodied practices” (McCann and Ward, 2009: 175).

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1. 2. City as a Commodity vs City as a Commons

The Global Trends

Policy transfer based on competition accelerated economic growth as well as welfare inequality, environmental and political downturns (Barnes, 2006; Bavel, 2016; Sassen, 2016). To add, the volatile urbanization and population growth contributed to the inefficient urban management and rivalry over a city space. Therefore, urban environments that “historically were democratic spaces

for everyone to make history, politics, economy and culture have been losing their citiness.”3 The loss of citiness refers to the social, political and economic expulsions, gentrification, accumulation of private wealth and growing consumerism (Sassen, 2016). Unfitting policies made cities become characterised by both privatization and a regulatory slippage, which occurred “when the level of local government oversight and management of the resource significantly decline[ed], leaving the resource vulnerable to expanded access by competing users and uses” (Foster, 2011:57). Consequently, urban spaces that “refresh the soul of the city, but […] also empower citizens” (Barber, 2014:47) deteriorated alarmingly indicating the democratic shrinkage, decline of good governance, fragility of social co-existence and dominance of top-down decision making (Sassen, 2016). A city became a rivalrous resource, making those who own it profit while excluding people without property rights. The ownership of land and property is more than profitability, though. It not only enables to acquire housing, but it empowers individuals to contribute to the city making. This means that individuals via collective initiatives are able to improve the quality of life autonomously. Nonetheless, almost all urban land and resources are enclosed – owned and governed – either by a state or private entity. This setting is hardly open to alternatives, without market or state acceding with a change.

Additionally, cities have been experiencing an increase in urban buying which has been supported by the competitive policies. However, this has not necessarily led to the utilization of bought infrastructure. The opposite – many cities have become enclosed, expensive, socially homogenous harbours governed by the owning political or market elite.4 The state, which is meant to serve, represent and protect society’s interests, unfortunately, has been subdued to other more influential entities. In this respect, people without property rights have been losing their control over democratic system. Due to their social status they have been denounced to be expelled without being able to afford urban life they have a reason to value (Harvey, 2003; Sassen, 2016). People have been moving to the modest neighbourhoods at the peripheries of their cities. These neighbourhoods became spaces where they can contribute to the city making, yet only on a temporary basis – making communities dependent on the allowances and permissions by other parties – running the risk to get expelled at any moment (Sassen, 2016; Iaione, 2015; Foster, 2011).

3_{From the interview with Saskia Sassen. Parts of the interview were integrated into “We Own the City” article}

(https://citiesintransition.eu/publication/who-owns-the-city-we-own-the-city).

4_{Market elite tends to become a political elite after having accumulated enough resources, such as land, labor and}

capital, to have a decisive political power in order to serve respective interests (Bavel, 2016). From the interview with Bas van Bavel, see “Is it really about the Invisible Hand?” (https://citiesintransition.eu/interview/is-it-really-about-the-invisible-hand).

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Subsequently, the growing distance between political elite and citizens have made the public domain incompetent not only in representation and protection of the civic, but also in provision and management of public goods and services. The political environment have turned sour or “too closed, formalistic, narrow-minded, conservative, rigid, uncoordinated, and exclusive” (Torfing, 2012:9), which have made citizens lose their confidence in institutional structures and authorities (Torfing, 2012; Lund, 2006; Appadurai, 2001; Ansell and Gash, 2007; Gaventa, 2006). This has been illuminated by the “declining patterns of political participation, ‘hollowing out’ of politics and the growing power of special interests” (Gavaneta, 2006: x) commonly illumined by the contemporary anti-establishment movements and consolidation of coercive governance. However, an adequate reaction to the “profound and transformative crisis” (Appadurai, 2001:25) is not chaos or authoritarianism. A deep democracy (Gaventa, 2006; Appadurai, 2001) through new forms of citizen engagement, removal of power asymmetries, enhancement of collaboration and cooperation is rather needed. This comprehension paves the way for innovative approaches to re-think participation, authority and citizenship. It respectively contributes to the reconstruction of the business-as-usual decision making and introduction of an open and collaborative practices – the possibility of an inclusive and sustainable governance, which indicates that expulsion is not the ultimate stage of a contemporary city.

1.2.1. City as a Commons

There is a growing appreciation worldwide of smart and sharing city paradigms. Although, these policies have been receiving criticism. They were accused to even accelerate the commodification the urban space.5 There is another paradigm that intervenes into the City as a Commodity. That is the co-city paradigm based on the logic of the commons. Dr. prof. Christian Iaione, one of the pioneers of the urban commons theory and practice emphasizes that the commons thinking confronts the rationale of privatization and commodification, it contrasts with the conventional understanding of the ownership by a singular entity and introduces ownership and governance by a collective – the essence of the right to the city. Accordingly, prof. Sheila Foster, another prominent commons thinker and practitioner, adds:

“Commons is a claim to the City. It is a way of saying that resources should be accessible

to a broader group of people, and, in particular, to those who are […] vulnerable to expulsion. Humans in cities to survive and flourish need affordable housing, safe environment, and access to good food. The value generated by transforming an underutilized or vacant urban land or a building into a public or community good, outweighs or at least competes with whatever value that structure would have, either being sold on a market or laying vacant and underutilized. The ownership of commons comes with responsibilities and that’s why commons is about the

5_{Ibid. 3.: “The sharing economy only strengthens and accelerates the current system of ownership. So, that is the}

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governance structures to generate goods for human development and flourishing, sustainable well-being and other immaterial, social, relational assets.” 6

For the comprehensive governance the logic of commons is crucial: “[u]rban commons is

the set of practices on the ground and city as a commons is about changing the way city has been governed.”7

Therefore, the commons lens contributes to a different perspective to a resource, whether it is tangible or intangible. It “transforms city officials from a hierarchical, standardized,

expertise-based governance model to a distributed, adaptive, collaborative one in which local and sub-local actors share responsibility and collaborate with the city to achieve a range of social and economic ends.”8

The co-city is meant to distribute the stronghold of political decision making and resource allocation (Silver et al., 2010). This requires a supporting social environment, political will and openness, because it leads to a profound transformation of the traditional top-down standardized setting. The suggested governance arrangement is based on trust relations that bring multiple actors with different stakes and interest, yet with an equal say, into an open dialogue on the development of a city. Through this line of thinking the whole city becomes a common resource co-owned and co-governed with its inhabitants – securing the right to co-produce public life, services and goods within “an institutionalized partnership between the public, private and the community” (Iaione, 2015:210). This means that policy-making is not only influenced by scattered advocacies, activists and public authorities, but it relies on the local knowledge, capabilities and imagination of a city inhabitants.

It is important to mention that the accessibility and open production of knowledge is crucial for a collaborative governance. The evolution of the knowledge society inherits such notion (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorrf, 1998). It means that the public conduits are not only maintained between government and industry, but include knowledge institutions. The universities besides being knowledge producers also actively engage to “generate new institutional and social formats for the production, transfer, and application of knowledge (Iaione, 2016:426). The interactive governance, promoted by Torfing (2012), is largely based on this. However, truly collaborative governance (hence the co-city arrangement) further focuses on public agency (Ansell and Gash, 2007). This results in the quintuple helix arrangement that justifies the “collaborative value and create[s] collaborative economic ecosystems that foster creativity, knowledge, identity, and trust” (Bauwen, 2015) among five types of actors: the civic (e.g. social and urban innovators and active citizens), public (e.g. political and administrative authorities), private (e.g. businesses and social entrepreneurs), social (e.g. civil society organizations), and cognitive (e.g. schools, universities,

6_{From the interview (1) with Sheila. Parts of the interview were integrated into “We Own the City” article, see:}

https://citiesintransition.eu/publication/who-owns-the-city-we-own-the-city

7_{From the interview (2) with Sheila. Parts of the interview were integrated into “LabGov Amsterdam” article, see}

https://citiesintransition.eu/cityreport/labgov-amsterdam

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think tanks) – to establish public-private-community partnerships (Iaione, 2016). The quintuple helix collaboration, access to knowledge production, enabling state and pooling of resources are recognized as crucial elements of the co-city logic. They are necessary prerequisites to foster inclusive character of a city that then is capable of confronting urban hazards (Iaione, 2015; Foster, 2011). Therefore, co-Bologna has been recognized as a promising attempt of an inclusive and sustainable state-society ecosystem that correspondingly confronts contemporary urban challenges (Iaione, 2016:417; City Makers Summit, 2016).

1.2.2. Urban Commons

“The logic of commons has been there for centuries. What is particular about the governance of

the commons we practice, is the fact that we work on ways how to make commoning a sustainable practice, not a temporary activity”9

Commons has a deeply democratic meaning. It originates in the traditional fields of property, environmental law and economics, where its equivalence is the common-pool resources like pasture where animals graze, forests and lakes – vital for both human survival and ecosystem. Urban commons is a recent concept within the debate (Ostrom, 2005; Hoh Teck et al., 2016; Hess, 2008). It merges multiple disciplines such as public administration, urban sociology, economics, anthropology, but is still understudied and unknown for the public and social domains (Iaione, 2015).

Commons hence are “gifts we inherit or create together” (Figure 2) (Barnes, 2006:4) – units for “social access and existential exchange” (Mattei, 2011: 55) that emphasize universal rights rather than pure exchange value (Barber, 2013) because commons is based on shared responsibility or non-excludability, collective preservation and collective enjoyment. Moreover, it

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is “unique, because they create a relationship of interdependence among stakeholders” (Iaione, 2016:425) and it could be identified by their relationship to the surrounding community at the scale of a block, a neighbourhood, or a city. It is additionally stated that the quality of and access to commons, which is determined by the consumption and management, has direct implications to the quality of urban life (Iaione, 2015, 2016; Ostrom, 1990, Sassen, 2015; Barber, 2013).

Commons is inherit to the co-city model, where the common assets are “meant to be preserved regardless of their return to capital. Just as we receive them as shared gifts, so we have a duty to pass them on in at least the same condition as we received them” (Barnes, 2006:6). Yet, commons is “undergoing a deep crisis period, determined by two factors: the decline of public or collective spaces and citizen disaffection. Urban public spaces are perceived as nobody’s or local authority’s spaces, rather than everybody’s places” (Iaione, 2016: 416). The traditional dominant institutional structure has been malfunctioning to sustain the quality and accessibility to commons, prevent deterioration and negative implications to the collective well-being. Furthermore, the legal framework has hindered interagency collaboration. The collaborative preservation of the governance of the commons becomes a point for a departure to reintroduce urban wellbeing. That is why the question of governance structure, which goes beyond private or public scheme, arises anew (Ostrom, 2010; Foster, 2011).

1.2.3. The Governance

The governance of the commons dates back to the traditional economics and Garrett’s Tragedy (1968), where “all users of commons were helplessly trapped in a causal process leading to overuse, if not destruction, of the very resource on which they were dependent” (Ostrom, 2005:4). In the light of the rational choice theory, Garret saw individuals as purely self-interested beings who were not likely to co-operate despite mutual benefits (Ostrom, 1990). This realist vision was used as a justification for the resource enclosure either by a private or public entity.

The tragedy and its implications equally concerns the urban environment (Iaione, 2016). Yet, the urban context differs. The “urban commons dilemmas arise not from an unregulated space ‘open-to-all’, as in Hardin’s example, but rather from a highly regulated space which has slipped significantly behind previous levels of public control or management” (Foster, 2011:64-65). This could happen due to “corruption, rent-seeking, lobbying behaviour, poor policy prescription monopolization due to lack competition and proper audits by external authorities, poor maintenance, poor management and sanction enforcement on wrongdoers, political red tape, overburdening of financial/fiscal resources, shortage of man-powers, and technical restrains” (Hoh Tech et at., 2016: 309). Thus, a city is overly regulated space that is exposed to the regulatory slippage when a “government authorities fail to enforce existing regulatory controls and/or tolerate widespread noncompliance with them by users of the resource. This slippage, in turn, can lead to congestion and/or rivalry as users who may have been previously excluded from, or constrained in their use of, the common resource are able to more freely access and exploit the resource for their own use” (Foster, 2011:65). The other part of the urban tragedy is overexploitation,

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commodification, and lack of environmental protection, degradation and social exclusion from the resource (Foster 2011), which respectively leads to the previously described loss of citiness.

As addressed above, consumption and management determine the quality of commons hence urban well-being (Hess, 2008; Foster 2011). The co-city is not about self-governance, but about co-governance that is supported by regulations, administrative (organizational) rules, judicial decisions and contractual arrangements that altogether justify the distribution of power. It is an “arrangement where one or more public agencies directly engage non-state stakeholders in a collective decision-making process that is formal, consensus-oriented and deliberative and that aims to make or implement public policy or manage public assets” (Ansell and Gash, 2007:544). The decision-making process is prosecuted “across boundaries and in multi-agency, multi-sector, and multi-actor relationships. It includes the general public, state, regional, and local government agencies, tribes, non-profit organizations, business, and other nongovernmental stakeholders to address issues that cannot be addressed by any one organization of its own” (Bingham, 2009:274). A well-managed collaboration is projected to culminate in health improvement, social inclusion, strong relations and communication. It also generates economic value, reduces crime and unemployment and lessens pollution (Hoh Teck et at., 2016; Iaione, 2016). The collaborative urban governance tends to be viable, equitable, stable, efficient, ecologically appropriate and sustainable (Ostrom, 2005; Hoh Tech et at., 2016:310). Based on communication and trust, it is about social rules and horizontal conflict resolution. Yet, to be successful it must have a continuous engagement of multiple stakeholders who share high mutual trust, have collectively defined leadership and boundaries. There are multiple examples of commons that turned into a low scale collaborative governance:

“Communities have turned some of the vacant, abandoned, burnt out land into urban

farms and gardens. Urban abandoned structures were turned into places for affordable housing or for other community functions. This finally categorized these resources not as privately owned by someone who has abandoned it or even held publically by the city, but rather as a commons – property in transition that belongs to all of us.” 10

The collaborative urban governance also contributes to the “Comedy of Commons” (Rose, 1986), which means that the open-access urban spaces increase the diverse usage of the resource and ergo enhance the shared social, economic and environmental value and collective enjoyment. Therefore, it is highly appreciated and mutually beneficial. Thus, the community presence is a common determinant for a resource quality (Hoh Teck et al., 2016:319). When community members have clear rights and duties, when they maintain reciprocal relations with public authorities to voice their concerns and are supported, then the community existence confirms the efficiency and successfulness of such arrangement. However, cities are immense, heterogeneous and dense. Due to the heterogeneity and “social disorder in urban communities, particularly in public spaces” (Foster, 2011:82), the decision making is complex and problematic. The passive

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management and engagement challenges to “sustain cooperative management of a common urban resource over time” (Foster, 2011:83) and so this justifies that in a common ownership regime “[t]here is much more significant government-enabling role present” (2011:64). Thus, the co-governance of urban commons “calls attention to the state, or local government, in relationship to collective action” (2011:83). A strong support from the government is meant to consolidate the democratic legitimacy and accountability. In legal and political terms it safeguards equal access to the decision making, it facilitates the pluralism of actors not only in regard to participation but also in distribution of the revenues.

“The state in the governance of commons is a facilitator. It is meant to unleash the potential

of our cities’ inhabitants, despite whether they are citizens or newcomers, because this is not only beneficial for our urban communities, but for the whole city. That’s why the local government should take part in designing new legal and policy tools to facilitate multi-stakeholder collaboration and cooperation.”11

The co-governance is based on social pooling too. Closely related to the original ideas of sharing economy, social pooling is not about the individual exchange of resources, but rather the creation of an open-access resource pools. This is closely related to the peer-to-peer production of goods and services, co-production through open-source software, and open data. The pooling of resources contributes to the shared production of social welfare through various co-operatives. It is based on the value that is created via local or sub-local ingenuity and entrepreneurship, anchoring the social and economic wealth to the community.

Evidently, the co-city arrangement needs organizational innovations inside city’s administrative structures. Thus should be initiated by recognizing and engaging with existing social and urban innovators. There is a set of instruments that are critical for this. As such, “The

Regulation on Collaboration between Citizens and the Administration for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons”12, which is meant to allow collaboration not only across several policy domains, but enable city’s inhabitants without a legal title to engage in urban regeneration practices to “harness and encourage the collective power of these groups [whose] output will be a structure of collaborative governance of distributed networks with innovative public interest designs and solutions” (Iaione, 2016:427). The regulation is a precondition for the urban collaboration pacts that are agreements between city inhabitants and local authorities. Another instrument is urban laboratories, where multiple stakeholders unite to design policies for, for instance, housing, transportation, and social inclusion. Lastly, there are places for experimentation –spaces where collaborative practices take place, where a public agency is perceived as an “initiator or instigator of collaborative governance” (Ansell and Gash, 2007:545). These instruments enable to shift centralized institutional structure to “owned, managed, and

11_{From an interview with C. Iaione.}

12_{See the Regulation here:}

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produced [where] the community as a whole can capture the value” (Iaione, 2016:416). Without a political and administrative openness to alternatives to the established tradition, the multi-agency and polycentric arrangements can hardly take place. Thus, usually, the rejection of the collaborative governance is reasoned by the fact that this is a way to actually reduce what is supposed to be indisputable government’s responsibility, because it contributes to “the progressive exemption of the state from the role of guarantor of rights” (Dagnino, 2005:159). Yet, this is a misleading understanding, because as mentioned above, co-governance requires “a strong central government role in supporting a collective resource management regime” (Foster, 2011:93). Additionally, the private sector is crucial too, yet again it should facilitate the provision of “various levels of support and incentives to cooperative resource management regimes” (2011:65) by a technical or financial means. Only a well-functioning ecosystem determines an effective multilevel “collaborat[ion] with engaged citizens and associations to carry out initiatives [that] sustain interest and needs of the general population. These collaborative governance efforts are also

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crucial tools to properly address and help in solving a widespread crisis engulfing urban areas and citizens” (Johanson, 2015).

In the light of urban co-governance, “a city can work towards a system in which citizens can not only manage a city, but make it what it is. They can actively engage in government to develop an urban commons strategy, solve urban commons problems, and develop urban commons policy” (Iaione, 2016:425). It is a model in process, as it departs from a cheap talk that includes research, communication and identification of the commoning nodes. In a mean time practices are mapped, which later leads to facilitating and practicing collaboration. This is meant to be prototyped or scaled, which leads to the laboratories of law-making and co-design of public policies that are expected to become governance units that adopt laws and regulation acts and sustain polycentricism – a new democratic space “at the interface between state and society” (Cornwall and Coelho, 2006:1). The co-city requires a constant interagency engagement, institutional transformation, and a profound social shift (Iaione, 2016), yet the governance outcome while living, growing, making, governing and imagining together, projects a high socio-economic and environmental value creation.

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1.3. The Mobility of the Co-City

Urban “policies are not simply travelling across a landscape – they are remaking this landscape and they are contributing to the interpretation of distant policy making sites” (McCann and Ward, 2013:10). This means that the co-city developed for Bologna’s local context has also altered it. Furthermore, the model has been subsequently communicated to a wider national and international audiences through texts, conferences, seminars, presentations, deliberations, networking as well as informal meetings. This illustrates the imaginative travel of knowledge and know-how, and the formation of networks and partnerships in regard to further co-city’s advancement. It has consequently prepared the intellectual ground for its prototyping to other cities. The communication of the core ideas, social relevance and positive impact has been promoted through academic institutions, various affiliated associations and independent researchers – creating synergies between likeminded people who are either in a direct contact with cities’ administrative bodies or in a contact with foundations that would support the realization of the model, which either way puts them in contact to administration and political authorities. In addition, the international recognition of the participatory and deliberative methodology and inefficiencies of the top-down governance and development have contributed to the wide acknowledgement of the co-governance.

“We have started working in Naples too. The city has a completely different social context

and political climate. Here, we are not working with the centre-left, which we are used to working with. This is to prove that co-city is applicable despite which political party has the majority” 13

Thus, what is particular about the governance of the commons is its adaptive character (Foster and Iaione, 2016). Rather than being a policy “in-a-box”, the co-city is a fluid community-driven process. It is not about discovering new prospects for investment, growth and competition, but it is concerned with already existent resources and stakeholders:

“What we need is to focus on how to make this a sustainable practice. There are so many

small-scale initiatives, which in multiple ways address issues related to environmental challenges, migration and inequality. It is important to support them, identify where they are lacking expertise and then scale-up – this forms a new paradigm that challenges the way our old system has been regulated”14

The mobility of the co-city coalesces both top-down and bottom-up currents of influence, yet not experts, but communities are meant to have the leading role (Foster, 2011). If there is no facilitation from the state, just like if there is no urgency from the community, the co-city can

13_{Ibid. 11, new co-city projects are started in Naples and Milan.} 14_{Ibid. 6}

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hardly function. Thus, the integration of commoning ideas into daily practices as well as the alteration of the way this model has been practiced in Bologna does not only depend on institutional structure and political climate (which tend to determine it), but also on integrative anthropological and sociological dimensions i.e. synergy between current government strategies and historical governance traditions, political will as well as power allocation, shared social norms, interpersonal conducts, and social relations, constructs, perceptions towards collaboration and the reoccurring challenges in terms of a durable civic engagement.

Where the co-city is prototyped, its underlying principles embrace different political, institutional, and economic environments. The urban problems in these contexts are not alike too. “My work, as well as others, is calling for a different urban growth and governance model

based on the idea of the city as a shared resource (or a “commons”) which requires co-governance among a variety of urban nongovernmental stakeholders and solutions tailored to local circumstances and the needs of particular communities. We anticipate working in a number of specific areas that have served, or will serve, as laboratories for commons experimentation in different cities”. 15 In spite of different contexts, the main areas that the governance of commons focuses are:

“Affordable housing and commercial space. We focus on land trusts and similar

collaborative governed land use mechanisms to stabilize communities under threat of broad scale gentrification, also climate resiliency and justice, we design and engineer new forms of energy governance at sub-local level including co-managed community micro-grids and technological equality, we are setting up, replicating and scaling up neighbourhood based mesh networks, open community-based broadband networks, and cooperative platforms as alternatives to Uber and other “sharing” economy platforms”.16

In addition to what communities and the existing circumstances already provide, the co-city is implemented through:

“What we do, we draft enabling legislation to experiment and allow co-governance

arrangements across several policy domains. Then we draft collaboration pacts or agreements between local authorities and local and sub-local actors to regenerate an urban space, structure or infrastructure in line with particular local, sub-local needs. We create urban collaboration labs, like LabGov in Bologna, in which stakeholders cooperatively design, create or re-design local policies in specific policy arenas like housing, transportation, infrastructure, digital and institutional cooperative platforms that help to strengthen local collaborative economies, neighbourhood specific policies designed to promote social inclusion and social justice and the

15_Ibid. 16_Ibid.

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establishment of collaboration or experimental areas in a city, which can serve as grounds for experimentation to test or prototype proposed collaborative projects”.17

For the co-city to succeed it is needed to come up with a context-based legislations and strategies to address both resource and governance issues and so transform cities into sufficiently responsive, flexible and adaptive spaces, which engage and involve different ‘publics’ in owning and governing collective economic and social assets. The mobility of the co-city is hence not a linear process between singular jurisdictions. It is rather a chaotic production between and within local and transnational expert networks, administration and practice communities. In this respect, despite the reduction of political asymmetries, the co-city might not have a hunt for a global convergence or a homogenous shape of an outcome, but it should be patterned to the local circumstances, locally specific, contested and unstable and highly dependent on the pre-existing political, legal, social and economic considerations. This means that political will and social environment should be in favour of collaboration and sharing resources. The intellectual domain should be engaged and open to influence public policies. Legal regulations should allow multi-sectoral collaboration and there should be enough economic resources allocated for facilitating such processes.

1.3.1. The Research Gap – Social and Academic Relevance

The popular and academic debates are jammed by smart and sharing cities, participatory and deliberative democracies, bottom-up initiatives, social entrepreneurship and other. One might ask, to what extent these practices are determined by the local social, political, institutional and economic circumstances where they take place, and, importantly, to what extent these practices are not just sound and appealing trends, but truly responsible for the progression of the system that is known for the deepening inequality, expulsions and lack of democratic participation. How could it be ensured that these practices are not formed by the strongest stakes to further exclude interests of those who have no resources?

The conferences on the Commons18 tend to conclude that the co-governance is not the alternative, but rather the right way to govern cities and solve urban issues. It is however a recent practice yet without a convergence of an outcome. This makes, both the overarching frame of the research and the unit of analysis highly vulnerable to criticism. Yet, it still triggers the willingness to know whether this way could become a sustainable practice in cities everywhere – even in countries that have only recently emancipated from a despot rule and still are under self-formation. The co-city requires an active and long-term reciprocal public engagement and strengthening of citizenship, which is not what the established authorities necessarily wish for. Thus, in order to see the sustainability of the policy it is handy to evaluate to what extent a socially, politically,

17_Ibid.

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intellectually and economically peculiar context, like the post-communist one, is receptive for even further transformation.

“Within our society there is a high and, well, historically legitimate level of mutual

distrust. It is complemented with obedience and humility to the normative legal system and political authority. Topics of redistributing and sharing power in decision making are not a priority right now and it won’t be. I doubt it will happen sooner that with the third Independence generation. Only when the age average of the political authorities decrease notably, the ideas of regular people being a part of city development and policy making could be addressed sincerely. We need time and we need older generations to understand younger generations and vice versa.”19

As mentioned the policy transfer from the West to the post-soviet context has rarely brought all-inclusive results. Additionally, there is hardly a set of concrete guidelines for a policy mobility to this context, hence the mobility knowledge and research methods have rather been limited. Therefore, at this stage, it leaves many open questions that are relevant both socially and academically. The co-city arrangement in post-communist countries – characterized by generally passive public engagement, civil individualism and competitiveness over collective action – might either fail to bring expected results, as countries still need to address issues in regard to decentralisation and civic participation, or might require a long and strenuous way to become a normality not only among political elite but among society too. This stance challenges the prototyping of the co-city to a post-soviet contexts, because such practice would not be just “learned from one context and moved to another with the hope of similar results” (McCann and Ward, 2009:177).

Nonetheless, the tension between rigid contexts and alternative policies could be productive (Harvey, 2003). The dynamic co-city’s nature and the established political order, rather than being detrimental could bring promising results. This could lead to a further governance development and advancement in terms of state-society relations. Since there could hardly be a one-size-fits-all situation, the co-governance, as well as policy mobility should be understood as a processes of a constant improvement. Policy experts recommending the mobility of co-city to Vilnius thus should become accustomed to the state of mutual learning and adaptation where “institutions must indeed embrace an almost sartorial and adaptive approach” (Iaione, 2016:423). Therefore, while researching the co-city’s mobility to Vilnius, as well as while providing policy recommendations, it is important not to be overtly prescriptive and do not interpret the co-city policy as a fully-formed model, which either could or could not be transferred, but to reflect on its potential and possible ways of mutation and re-interpretation – fitting within the wider policy mobility discourse.

1.3.2. Problem Statement

19_{From the interview with J. Laniauskas, a director at Youth Relations Department at Vilnius Municipality;}

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The co-city, developed in Bologna, is recognised internationally as an inclusive, fair and sustainable urban co-governance arrangement and promising practice that brings back the universal right to a city. This arrangement is promoted to be successful everywhere, yet, according to the policy mobility theory, the implementation and success of the co-city in any peculiar context would depend on its social environment, political will, intellectual climate, legal regulations, institutionalization and economic resources, which are not bounded or static considerations (McCann and Ward, 2009). These determinants in regard to the local circumstances might either cause failure, success or mutation of the co-city.

Therefore, to understand the potential co-city policy success in Vilnius it is crucial to address its local determinants and identify whether in regard to Vilnius local context they would drive or the co-city policy recognition, emergence, consolidation or mutation.

1.3.3. The Research Question

What ultimately determines the potential success of the co-city policy mobility in Vilnius?

1.3.4. Sub-Questions

How does the theoretical knowledge manifest in practice in Bologna?

To what extent the pre-existing context mattered for the co-city development in Bologna? Is Vilnius receptive for the co-city policy?

The mobility of the governance of the commons