New Socio-ecological Imperatives for Cities: Possibilities and Dilemmas for Australian Metropolitan Governance

This review examines two new socio-ecological imperatives that have the potential to reshape planning practice and policy: urban climate governance and governance for resilience. The roots of the new imperatives lie in international city collaborative networks funded by philanthropy organisations that operate at city scale. City networks operating at the metropolitan scale raise issues for Australian cities with distributed governance. This practice review considers the early manifestation of both imperatives in what might be termed ‘policy experiments’ in Australia’s two largest cities: the new climate governance framework emerging through the City of Sydney’s collaboration with the C40 network and the resilience regime being shaped by the City of Melbourne’s partnership with Rockefeller Foundation’s Resilient 100 program. Whilst our early analysis has accentuated the positive to some degree, pointing to different, if preliminary, forms of success in both Sydney and Melbourne, the limits and frustrations that present in both contexts cannot be discounted. Urban planners in many world cities and regions will need to consider and possibly absorb these new agendas of urban climate governance and governing for resilience driven by international city collaborative networks.