Effectual Urban Governance: The Effectuation of Cities for Systems Change Under Uncertainty

Abstract

Three key drivers create the imperative for a new approach to urban governance. Firstly, scientists around the world agree that global ecological systems are at risk of collapse if current development trajectories continue. Secondly, decision-makers are facing a heightened level of uncertainty, due to factors including climate risk, ecosystem changes and geopolitical tensions – and since 2020, the COVID-19 global pandemic. And thirdly, given these complexities, current models of forecasting and prediction for strategic decision-making are increasingly constrained and unreliable, particularly for informing urban infrastructure governance decisions with multi-decade legacies. While urban infrastructure decision-makers find uncertainty challenging, for entrepreneurs uncertainty is the basis for opportunity. Entrepreneurs are agents of systems change, especially under conditions of heightened uncertainty. As a result, this thesis turns to the entrepreneurship domain to inform a new approach to urban governance, specifically the entrepreneurial decision-making logic of ‘effectuation’ developed by Saras Sarasvathy through her study of expert entrepreneurs’ approaches to new venture creation. Effectual urban governance includes establishing design principles, beginning with available means, establishing partnerships, and taking effectual action to iteratively increasing the structuration of innovations. In Part 1 - the thesis develops this model by reviewing and synthesizing the literature on sustainability transitions, urban governance, and entrepreneurship, with a historical analysis illustrating the role of entrepreneurship in industrial systems change. Building on a novel taxonomy of urban governance along the axes of uncertainty and systems change, the dynamic model of effectual urban governance combines entrepreneurship theory with sustainability transitions theory and is demonstrated through an illustrative civil infrastructure case study of the Willunga Basin Water Company informed by semi-structured research interviews. Part 2 of the thesis justifies the applicability of this model through focus on four key elements of effectual urban governance with application to urban transport, elaborating the theoretical rationale for each element and providing insights from effectuation literature and supporting complementary academic theories and research conducted during this thesis. In doing so, the thesis makes theoretical and practical contributions to urban governance and the development of civil infrastructure in the 21st century. At a time of heightened uncertainty, when global industrial and economic transformation to avert ecological collapse is imperative, this thesis begins a new conversation by demonstrating how adopting an entrepreneurial approach to civil infrastructure development can help government and civil actors proactively address the world’s shared and complex challenges. Effectual urban governance is this approach.