Bringing environmental knowledge into action: Environmental knowledge management in Norwegian local governments

Our project developed into three more precise main questions: 1. What is important knowledge of sustainable cities and who decides this? We found that making visions is a way to create and negotiate knowledge of environmentally friendly cities. Here we compared the national and local authorities' vision of tomorrow's cities in Norway. We found that these levels of management agreed on the content of the vision. For example, they found that environmentally friendly cities in Norway had compact city centers where residents could go, ride or ride collectively for daily activities. Nevertheless, the findings point to several conflicts of conflicts between national and local authorities in the development of environmentally friendly cities. There were particularly different expectations regarding the division of responsibility between levels of government, where national authorities pointed out that urban development was primarily a local responsibility, while local authorities stressed that they lacked tools and partly cooperative willingness from national authorities. Furthermore, there were different ideas about the role of citizens in the development of more environmentally friendly cities. Despite the unanimous expectations, we found that the work of negotiating visions helped create an arena to discuss what environmentally friendly urban planning could be about. The findings show that it is important to work on the development of visions both to negotiate what an environmentally friendly city implies and may or should be, and to invite more actors into the discussion of what future we want. 2. How do you learn and share knowledge about sustainable urban development? We investigated how urban planners who participated in Future Cities learned to create more environmentally friendly cities. Planners experimented with innovative environmental design in the nearly 50 pilot projects involved in the program. The planners described the knowledge as 'problem driven' or 'operational' because the knowledge they produced had to solve specific problems in a given context - for example, in the pilot projects. The actors in the Future Cities Program thus established multidisciplinary project groups to create such problem-driven knowledge. As important as formal education, the experience-based expertise they gained through participating in various projects. We call this form of multidisciplinary and experience-based knowledge 'transdisciplinary' because it went both across disciplines and included a strong element of experience expertise. The planners 'retrieved' and shared knowledge through special two practices, namely making narratives (or stories) about success projects and by exploring a pilot project that was considered to have a successful environmental design. The planners made narratives about pilot projects in other Norwegian cities, but also cities abroad. Similarly, the planners went on a visit to cities in Norway and in other countries, preferably within Scandinavia or Northern Europe. We use the term 'translocal learning' to illustrate that learning did not take place locally but across project groups and places. The planners thus learned to create environmental design in pilot projects by moving people and / or stories of successful pilot projects in other cities. We explain this to the fact that planners developed horizontal learning networks where they exchanged experiences, people and stories. This finding specifically points to the importance of developing and maintaining horizontal learning networks across cities at home and abroad to facilitate the development of new ideas and knowledge exchange between actors working on environmentally friendly urban development. 3. What is it that determines what kind of sustainable transportation cities choose? Part of the project has studied the choice of public transport systems in Bergen and Trondheim, and the effects of these choices, namely the Bybanen in Bergen and the buses (including the new metro bus venture) in Trondheim. Arguments about topography and demographics were dominant in the arguments for lane versus bus systems. Trondheim was described as a circular city where a bus system that could operate in several directions was considered to be the most appropriate settlement pattern. This, unlike Bergen City, was described as a more straight-line axis, where a track system was a good solution for transporting the city's inhabitants, especially in the Bergens Valley. Despite this argument, we found that the choice of transport technology was more complex and consisted of a number of factors other than topography and demographics. This included the transport history of the cities, questions about expulsion, funding opportunities, expectations related to other urban developments, the symbolic value of transport technologies and not least user configurations.

We want to study what we have called environmental knowledge management in local governments. We have chosen to approach the issue in four ways. First, we study a national initiative, "Cities of the future" to examine what kind of input to local environme ntal knowledge management that may be produced through national policy-making. Second, we investigate an experiment in some local governments to implement mainstreaming of environmental concerns. We believe such mainstreaming to illuminate possibilities a nd challenges of environmental knowledge management in a context of a concerted effort to improve local efforts to enact environmental knowledge. The concept of mainstreaming also adds an interesting strategic component, not the least in the sense that en vironmental knowledge also needs to be mainstreamed in such efforts. Mainstreaming represents an overarching effort of enacting environmental knowledge. To supplement this angle, we will also take a sector approach to investigate how environmental knowled ge management is performed in a more focused setting. We have chosen to look at transport, which we see as a particularly important and pertinent area of concern with respect to sustainability. Finally, we want to explore the issue of interdisciplinarity . Effective environmental knowledge management has to be interdisciplinary, but what are the implications of this? How is interdisciplinarity enacted in environmental knowledge management? We shall study this by analyzing interdisciplinarity as it is prac ticed in the three previously mentioned approaches; the national initiative, mainstreaming and local transport.