Level

Component

1. Political and Financial Seed Capital

・ Political seed capital―Diverse stakeholders mobilize sufficient political support for the project, including for the STE approach to urban innovation. The support of local-, regional- and national-level policy makers is important, and this may be stimulated by a show of support from other stakeholders in civil society, working in concert with community based organizations and/or NGOs, and business leaders. Conservatives in government who are slow to innovate may see that their political interests are best served by supporting the urban innovation effort, especially when it tackles pressing economic, social and environmental issues. International NGOs, business philanthropists, and progressive universities are in a strong position to help garner this essential capital. The multi-sector approach has the potential to garner broad-based political support.

・ Financial seed capital―Diverse stakeholders work together to garner seed finance/funding for pilot projects and demonstration projects that can be used to leverage ongoing investment. Private-public partnerships can work well here provided they also work closely with other stakeholders―esp. civil society groups and marginalized groups―and are invested in the collective STE approach. Source of seed funding include government agencies, multi-lateral development agencies, aid organizations, private-sector donors―and the preference is for a diversified funding stream that will provide stable funding until enterprise activities (Level #6) and economic energy can step-in to replace it. Reliance on one source only is not desirable. The multi-sector approach has the potential to garner diverse funding support for constituent sectors/issues. Many funding sources do seem to be seeking integrative projects with strong stakeholder partnerships.

2. Human resources, education and training, awareness- raising

・ K-12 programs and curricula that encourage sustainability principles and ways of thinking and doing in the lives of children, families and communities.

・ Higher education programs and curricula that encourage sustainability principles for urban settings. UD/UP/UDP programs that use critical, engaged and integrative modes of teaching, research and practice, including undergraduate, certificate and graduate levels.

・ Awareness-raising activities in popular media (TV, radio, social media) that promote innovative ways of thinking about cities, and constructively challenge conventional, business-as-usual modes and ideas.

3. Information and knowledge resources

・ Creation of multi-stakeholder, shared knowledge resources using co-generation modes. Mobilization and integration of diverse data, information and knowledge types: indigenous; experiential; narrative (oral histories, storying); video/photographic; qualitative; geo-spatial/remotely-sensed; quantitative; modeling and computer-generated scenarios. The form of this resource may vary according to the setting and scales to be considered, but a very promising platform for this resource is cloud-based mapping. For example, stakeholders co-generate a web-based Health & Sustainability Atlas (see 4.3) of social, economic and environmental indicators and conditions. The Atlas is populated by diverse data that are processed and integrated by academic researchers who act as gatekeepers, and QC/QA checkers.

4. Policy making, decision making and governance

・ Policy formulation is informed by the information resource in Level #3, and serves as a response to a set of needs and priorities that emerge from the STE approach

・ Among the policy instruments are regulations that encourage sustainable UD/UP/UDP work and discourage un-sustainable policies and practices. Alongside regulations it is necessary to consider incentives that reward compliance (e.g. tax rebates for renewable energies), as well as penalties that exact costs. Having responsive UD legislation and regulations is only half of the picture; capacity must also be built to verify compliance and monitor the performance of projects (feeding back into the information resource of Level #3).

・ Governance―the action or manner of governing, exercising control―is often the focus of development innovation, but when over-emphasized as a matter of power/influence, it can become an end in itself (exerting control) instead of a means to an end (more sustainable cities and regions). STE approaches use transparent, more equitable and accountable modes of governance and decision making, for example the use of integrative, more equitable and transparent approaches to Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). The ethos of a STE approach is that power/influence is more equitably distributed to serve the social good.

5. Appropriate technologies and infrastructure

・ This level can be thought of as the ‘hardware’ of UD/UP/UDP work, in the form of manufactured capital: roads, bridges, tunnels, railroals, light rail, airports, ports, pipelines, buildings (residential, commercial, industrial, agricultural), energy and power systems of generation and transmission etc. In development work, there has long been a push to think of the ‘appropriateness’ of the technology choice in terms of accessibility, affordability, cultural sensitivity and ‘sustainability’/longevity. These criteria still apply to an integrative STE approach, but the integrative lens on sustainability and climate resilience offers new ways to conceptualize, design and assess the impacts of alternatives.

6. Enterprise development

・ Stimulation of the local and regional provision of key products that constitute and support more sustainable urban solutions (e.g. local/regional manufacturing and installation of solar panels, windmills, wave-power devices). This allows for economic sustainability and the replacement of seed finance and investment from Level #1, and explicitly connects social, economic and environmental aspects of sustainability together such that they are inter-dependent and reinforcing of each other.

・ Likewise for enabling services, e.g. research and information generation, investment stimuli, management services, monitoring and evaluation services throughout project stages (Figure 1). There are many services related to education and the knowledge economy of the 21st Century that are integral to all six of these STE capacity levels (e.g. education), and also to the consideration of the six domains of the integrative frame (see 3.0).