How do cities achieve strategic sustainability goals and change?
Cities are complex and involve many stakeholders so achieving change can be difficult, slow and require a wide range of mechanisms. It is not sufficient to have a high-level strategy; real change requires strategic targets to be integrated and driven by policies and programs and publicity and incentives to change behavior are often also required.
However, how do we know required change is being achieved? For this, effective monitoring and evaluation are required to understand what works, and what does not. This should track indicators that are linked to strategic targets and ideally be available in databases that are publically available and easy to access.
Interesting work in this area is the public open database developed by Charlottesville in the USA. This has 72 datasets which can be used to track performance in relation to strategic goals. This can be accessed here.
