Dear Colleagues,

The governance of urban sustainable development and climate adaptation has become an important challenge for decision-makers and researchers, which is, for instance, emphasized in UN Sustainable Development Goal 11 “Sustainable Cities and Communities”. In this regard, participatory governance is considered a key aspect for strengthening democratic engagement and legitimatizing governmental action. Many authors see participatory governance as a trigger for social change and innovation, particularly in times of crisis. Others criticize the fact that participation procedures may lead to time-consuming procedures, maladaptation, and undermining of democracy through the exclusion of relevant voices.

This Special Issue aims to reflect on the different notions of “participatory governance” in different social and cultural contexts, which modes of participatory governance exist, and in how far they carry transformative potential for different types of change. Therefore, the Special Issue aims to explore to what extent participatory governance can trigger the development of social innovation in times of crisis—such as (but not limited to) climate change. We would like to encourage researchers to discuss theoretical and empirical results in the field of urban climate adaptation and/or sustainability in large and smaller cities as well as townships.

• Analyzing the relationship between social innovation and participatory governance: What is the transformative potential of participatory approaches? How much can participatory governance trigger social change and innovation? Under which conditions are (new) ideas and social innovations generated? Which role does issue-linking to broader societal themes play to enable social innovations? How can we reconcile open-endedness of participatory processes and sustainability goals?
• Analyzing the design and conditions of participatory governance, such as: What are factors of effective integration into urban governance? What role do learning processes and learning communities play? How are processes of issue-linking to broader societal themes designed and which role do they play to foster participatory governance? Which barriers and/or lock-ins exist? What are the different modes and practices of participatory governance? E.g.,(online) participation formats, co-creative processes, experiments, transdisciplinary approaches;
• Building capacities for participatory governance and social innovation: What are the context-specific individual, collective, and institutional capacities that influence participatory governance and social innovation, and how are they embedded and built? How can their impact and/or outcome be evaluated, considering different contexts and wider institutional processes, or temporal dynamics; and which problems and priorities for actions are identified? Which opportunities for transfer exist and how can transfer be realized?

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• climate adaptation
• urban sustainability
• participatory governance
• social innovation
• co-creation
• capacity building
• transdisciplinarity
• transformation