Meta-governing the Co-creation of a Green and Just Transition in Urban Areas: The Role of Facilitative Leadership,Institutional Design,and Collaborative Platforms

Introduction

The accelerating climate and nature crisis and the political ambition to ensure distributed socio-economic prosperity inherent to the United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goals call for swift action to create a sustainable future while leaving nobody behind. While global and national efforts to promote green and just transitions in contemporary societies are indeed crucial, they rarely consider the challenges that such transitions entail for local communities—and not least for those living in poor and devastated urban areas. For example, national targets and initiatives for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, mitigating pollution and natural disasters, and protecting nature rarely take local conditions and challenges into account (Scheuch 2025; Sharp, Daley and Lynch 2011; Wang 2013). Therefore, one of the key questions of our time is how to strengthen the leadership of green and just transitions in society and the economy at the local level, where social and environmental problems are highly visible and a plethora of social and political actors must be mobilized in the pursuit of socially, economically, and environmentally—or “green”—sustainable transitions in local communities. The challenging task for local leaders is to overcome collective action problems, institutional inertia, and local capacity gaps, while setting bold goals and aiming to achieve them through the involvement of relevant and affected actors in the co-creation of change. The embeddedness of urban neighborhoods in larger regional, national, and global political economies provides clear constraints on local leaders’ attempts to pull up a devastated locality by the bootstraps (Stevis and Felli 2016). Hence, it is comparatively more difficult in governance systems with weak sub-national governments lacking the authority and resources to adapt policy goals and adjust initiatives to serve local purposes (Sudmant, Howarth and Lane 2022). Nevertheless, there is growing evidence of how local leadership and action matter for the green and just transition (Block and Paredis 2013; Bulkeley 2022; Schneider and Rossi 2025), perhaps due to a combination of local interconnectedness, pragmatism, creativity, and a strong sense of urgency (Barber 2013).

Urban planning theory suggests that a key task for local community leaders is to facilitate and provide favorable institutional conditions for collaboration between local actors (Healey 2020; Innes and Booher 2015; McPhail 2023). Theories of public governance take a further step by highlighting the importance of process facilitation, institutional incentives, and the establishment of supportive platform arrangements as crucial for promoting collaborative governance. The latter set of theories conceptualizes collaborative leadership as meta-governance, defined as the attempt to influence the process and outcomes of collaborative governance in networks and partnerships without reverting too much to traditional hierarchical forms of command and control (Jessop 2020; Meuleman 2008; Meuleman and Niestroy 2015; Sørensen and Torfing 2009, 2017). The meta-governance concept has also gained traction in urban governance research (see, e.g., Agger and Sørensen 2018; Doberstein 2013; Engberg and Larsen 2010; Gjaltema, Biesbroek and Termeer 2020; Tønnesen et al. 2019). While meta-governance theories tend to view the relationship between meta-governing leaders and those involved in collaborative processes in one-directional terms, recent contributions highlight the interactive dynamics at play between them (Sørensen 2020; Sørensen, Bryson and Crosby 2021). Based on this literature, we propose that the successful leadership of green and just transitions in local urban neighborhoods requires both “leadership of interaction” and “interactive leadership.” The former refers to process facilitation and the creation of institutional conditions that incentivize and support collaboration on green projects between local actors, while the latter involves purposeful efforts to qualify leadership efforts by collecting input in the form of knowledge, ideas, and experiences from a diverse set of local actors (Torfing et al. 2012). As illustrated by several case studies in the GOGREEN database, we will also show how this kind of leadership can benefit from the presence of institutional platforms that help to lower the transaction costs of collaborative interaction.

The article proceeds as follows: The first section examines the need for a green and just transformation and reflects on the prospects for such an endeavor. The second section emphasizes the role of interactive leadership, arguing that local leaders may benefit from interaction with and input from their followers. The third section reasons that no matter how clever, resourceful, or charismatic leaders may be, they cannot foster the green and just transformation alone but must rely on and lead collaborative governance processes and the co-creation of innovative public value outcomes. We illustrate the potential inherent in co-creation using cases from the GOGREEN database (https://gogreen-project.com/). The fourth section details how urban leaders can meta-govern the co-creation of green and just solutions by combining the facilitation of collaborative processes with the establishment of institutional designs that motivate and support co-creation between relevant and affected local actors. Section five points to the need to develop platforms capable of supporting the co-creation of green and just transformations, and it calls for future research investigating a new type of “generative governance” that enables distributed actors to engage in emergent forms of collaboration, learning, and innovation without predetermining the outcomes of their endeavors. The conclusion summarizes the argument and presents a vision for the future of local urban leadership of environmentally sustainable neighborhoods and distributed wealth creation.

Green and Just Transformations in Urban Areas

The public sector was originally expanded to solve a series of simple and “tame” problems relating to public security, health, education, and social assistance. However, growing numbers of reports of policy and planning failures led to recognition of how some problems are complex and “wicked” (Rittel and Webber 1973). Wicked problems are highly complex and have no single root cause. They involve stakeholders with different interests, triggering goal conflicts that preclude the use of trial-and-error experimentation. Recent research even mentions “super-wicked problems,” where the time for solving them is running out, governments fail to control the choices necessary to solve them, and the future is irrationally discounted, as key decision-makers are more concerned about the short-term costs of solving them than their long-term negative consequences (Lazarus 2008). While the persistent exacerbation of poverty and social inequalities constitutes a wicked problem, the climate and nature crisis provides examples of super-wicked problems.

Neither the environmental crisis nor the socio-economic crisis is confined to specific localities, regions, or nation-states, as they cut across jurisdictions, borders, and sector boundaries. Hence, according to the UN, attempts to solve or alleviate them require a combination of global action, government action, and popular action. The latter speaks to the necessity of bringing local actors together in urban areas—local government actors, citizens, civil society organizations, and businesses—in a collaborative effort to tackle wicked problems (Alford and Head 2017; Anthony Jr 2024; Bradley and Mahmoud 2024; Fahmi et al. 2016; Healey 2020; Leino and Puumala 2021; Purbani 2017; Sørensen and Torfing 2018). The local visibility of problems and challenges may create an impetus for collective action. The sense of sharing a common destiny, prior experiences with collaboration, and the prospect of jointly benefitting from new solutions may prompt collaboration based on the recognition of mutual resource dependency (Barber 2013). Finally, the proximity of relevant and affected local-level actors makes it relatively easy for them to meet face to face and jointly tailor new solutions to local problems through the development and testing of scalable prototypes in individual neighborhoods.

However, the lack of local resources and weak community relations may impede local action (Anthony Jr 2024). Additionally, distrust between public, private, and civic actors, the fragmentation of local communities, and entrenched socio-political conflicts can hamper or prevent collaboration (Bradley and Mahmoud 2024). Moreover, local actors who recognize the need for action may feel small and disempowered in the face of the sizeable problems and challenges they are confronting (Oetken 2025). Finally, there might not be any positive past experiences with collaborative problem-solving to lean on. Where this is the case, local government actors and non-governmental entrepreneurs can play a key role in empowering and aligning local communities and initiating place-based dialogue and collaboration (Torfing, Ansell and Sørensen 2024). As we shall see, this requires local public officials and social entrepreneurs who are centrally positioned in local networks to be willing and able to cover some of the transaction costs necessary to co-finance initiatives, initiate and advance collaboration, and provide solid organizational backing for co-created action (Ansell, Sørensen and Torfing 2022; Sørensen and Torfing 2009).

Although considerable variation can be observed in the institutional setups among OECD member countries (Denters and Rose 2005), the capacity of local governments to initiate and drive collaborative networks and partnerships for green and just change can be bolstered by supportive interaction with regional, national, and, in some cases, even supranational actors. These higher-level actors are sometimes present at the local level, either through deconcentrated local agencies or through their remit, which gives them a role in boosting local growth and sustainable development. Multilevel governance systems are often marked by the formation of territorially defined networks of public, private, and civic actors operating at different scales but focused on promoting local change. To illustrate, Local Strategic Partnerships in the United Kingdom received government funding and had close interactions with regional actors, despite their focus on enhancing sustainable neighborhoods in deprived localities (Bailey 2003; Geddes, Davies and Fuller 2007).

In sum, urban planning research and governance theory broadly agree that the local level plays a key role in solving wicked and super-wicked problems, such as the climate and nature crisis and socio-economic devastation. It can contribute to harnessing the resources, ideas, and competencies of relevant and affected public, private, and civic actors while ensuring that new and bold solutions build on a proper understanding of the problems at hand. However, exploiting the full potential of local action requires support from other levels of government in addition to strong and persistent local leadership of networks and partnerships.

Interactive Leadership

As empirical studies from Auckland, Bristol, and Melbourne have demonstrated (Hambleton 2009, 2015, 2019), the green and just transition relies on effective and legitimate governance prompted by leaders who set a common agenda for local change and innovation through inspirational storytelling that recruits and mobilizes local actors. Leadership can be usefully defined as the achievement of results through or with other actors (Ansell, Sørensen and Torfing 2022). This definition perceives leadership as a social and political practice involving the formulation and effort to achieve a particular set of goals, such as solving a problem, responding to a challenge, or exploiting an opportunity. Leadership may be exercised by different kinds of individual or collective leaders and may be more or less collaborative in nature.

Based on distrust in the motivation and competencies of public employees, the New Public Management reform movement reframing the public sector as a market governed by business entrepreneurs recommended the development of transactional leadership based on clear goal setting, performance measurement, and conditional rewards and punishment (see Osborne and Gaebler 1993), which impacted city governance in metropoles such as New York (Weikart 2001). Today, there is increasing skepticism toward this type of leadership, which tends to crowd out the public service motivation of the employees seeking to produce value for citizens and society at large (Jacobsen, Hvitved and Andersen 2014). Indeed, control-based and incentive-driven leadership tends to turn those who are subjected to it into cynics who care only about receiving personal rewards while avoiding punishment (Moynihan 2010), which is not conducive to building trust-based collaboration between local community actors aiming to solve shared problems through the design of common solutions.

The promotion of green and just change calls for more transformational forms of leadership, in which leaders create and mobilize a followership through the formulation, communication, and reassertion of common visions, goals, and strategies aiming at stimulating joint action (Jensen et al. 2019; Sirisawat and Chaiya 2025). Transformational leaders may rely on a particular set of personal traits (e.g., charisma, proactivity, extraversion, and agreeableness) when seeking to create and maintain what leadership theory denotes as a followership (Judge and Bono 2000; Uhl-Bien et al. 2014). However, various strands of research criticize top-down and unidirectional understandings of transformative leadership, stressing the need for close and continuous dialogue between leaders and their constituencies intended to promote mutual understanding. Among these strands of research are theories of collaborative and communicative planning and political and administrative leadership (Burns 2003; Legacy 2023; Nye 2008; Senbel 2015). This interactive form of transformational leadership, which we denote interactive leadership, is increasingly important as citizens become more competent, self-confident, and critical, and as leader‒follower relationships become increasingly negotiated (Dalton and Welzel 2014; Kean et al. 2011; Mhaibes and Al-Janabi 2019; Sørensen 2020).

Ongoing interaction between leaders and empowered, competent, and critical followers is even seen to strengthen leadership endeavors because it helps to qualify, situate, and legitimate leadership rhetoric and initiatives (Kellerman 2008; Lord et al. 2020; Nye 2008; Uhl-Bien et al. 2014). Hence, interaction with different groups of followers allows leaders to better understand the problems and challenges at hand, to design and revise needs-based solutions, and to create common ownership of their implementation (Sørensen 2020). Indeed, both political and administrative leaders may benefit from inputs from relevant and affected actors capable of helping them to identify the “needs behind the demands” and to “better hit the target” by ensuring that proposed solutions are feasible, aligned with political and moral values, and match the conditions on the ground. The emphasis on the interactive aspect implies that leadership cannot be understood simply as a relationship in which leaders influence followers; rather, leadership emerges through the co-construction of problems, solutions, and actions (Ospina and Foldy 2016). As such, interactive leadership is defined as the orchestration of processes leading to the co-creation of visions, goals, and solution strategies between leaders and critical, competent, and assertive followers (Sørensen 2020; Sørensen and Torfing 2023).

The advancement of interactive forms of leadership is supported by new systemic theories of deliberative democracy (Dean, Boswell and Smith 2020; Owen and Smith 2015; Parkinson and Mansbridge 2012), which are arguing that close leader‒citizen dialogue is paramount for securing the legitimacy of leadership and the political system as well as for promoting effective problem-solving. These theories both highlight the citizens’ supply of critical insights and the demand among policymakers for this type of input, which allows them to make balanced, well-informed decisions. To illustrate, several interviews with senior national-level ministers from Anglophone countries around the world reveal that political leaders value input from citizens and other stakeholders, because it informs and qualifies their decisions, connects them to everyday people, and enables them to “test” advice from other sources. Interestingly, the political leaders find formal consultation processes in big forums overly staged and antagonistic to producing constructive interaction. Instead, they prefer informal, spontaneous conversations with individual citizens in smaller forums (Hendriks and Lees-Marshment 2019). Connecting deliberative forums and arenas with political and administrative leaders not only improves the quality of public governance but also contributes to advancing trust in government and reducing polarization between different segments of the community (Hendriks, Ercan and Boswell 2020; Neblo, Esterling and Lazer 2018).

In sum, ongoing dialogue with citizens, civil society organizations, and businesses in urban neighborhoods is needed to enable local leaders to inspire, mobilize, and direct joint action in ways that promote a green and just transformation.

Collaboration and Co-Creation as Levers of Urban Change

When it comes to leading the urban transformation of engrained patterns of production, consumption, and social living, heroic stand-alone leadership is insufficient to bring about much-needed change. Not even interactive leaders with strong social and political connections to the community can create the required solutions and secure their implementation. To illustrate, efforts to prevent recurrent river flooding or reduce CO₂ emissions are likely to fail either due to a lack of local knowledge or resistance if those who are affected by the initiatives are not involved in designing the solution. Indeed, no single actor (whether public, private, or civic) possesses the knowledge, ideas, and capacities necessary to construct and realize the green and just transformation singlehandedly. Doing so requires the exploitation of “collaborative advantage,” defined as what a diverse group of actors can achieve together but none can achieve individually (Bailey 2003; Huxham and Vangen 2013).

This insight has spurred the development of new research on collaborative governance, defined as a collective decision-making process based on more or less institutionalized interactions between two or more actors aimed at establishing common ground for joint problem-solving and value creation (Ansell and Gash 2008; Emerson and Nabatchi 2015; Peters et al. 2022). Governance is typically defined as the formulation and achievement of common goals (Torfing, Sørensen and Røiseland 2019). It may rely either on centralized government decision-making and top-down bureaucratic implementation or on market-based governance involving competing private actors in the provision of public solutions and services. More recently, however, these forms of governance have given way to more collaborative governance forms based on the exchange and pooling of ideas and resources across a wide range of public, private, and civic actors (Ansell and Gash 2008). Research suggests that collaborative governance broadens the knowledge base for public problem-solving while simultaneously avoiding the inter-organizational conflicts and rivalry associated with competitive markets (Roberts 2000). To illustrate, a recent Danish case study of the development and scaling of a new path-breaking pyrolysis technology—which turns biomass from local farmers into a combination of green pyrolysis gas and clean and stable biochar that can be tilled into and sequestered in the soil—could not have been achieved without sustained collaboration between researchers, private businesses, local authorities, and agricultural associations representing the farmers (Sørensen and Torfing 2024).

Collaborative governance is based on collaboration, defined as the constructive management of differences to find joint solutions to common problems (Gray 1989). Although mainly developed in public administration research, similar concepts have in parallel emerged in planning theory (Booher and Innes 2002; Healey 2003). Collaboration is sometimes wrongly associated with endless talking aimed at fostering unanimous consent. The problem is that obtaining “total consensus” between public, private, and civic actors with different views and interests is either excessively time- and resource-consuming or based on the identification of the least common denominator, which is so minimal that it is highly unlikely to produce any change. Therefore, based on collaborative governance theory and planning theory, we understand collaboration as the process of aiming to produce a provisional agreement that might be tacitly contested by dissenting actors but still enables the group to move forward and take bold action (Torfing 2016). The whole point of collaborating is to engage with people who bring different goals, experiences, insights, and ideas to the table. Although heated discussions and conflicts may arise between actors with different views and interests, solutions that all parties can live with are often possible. A less-than-perfect common agreement is often the best alternative to no agreement when actors face a pressing problem (Innes and Booher 2010).

Collaborative governance assumes many different forms. A corporatist tripartite arrangement bringing together central state institutions and peak organizations from the economic sector is a classic type of collaborative governance focusing on interest mediation and bargaining based on pre-defined interests (Binderkrantz and Christiansen 2015; Lembruch and Schmitter 1979). Policy networks are another form of collaborative governance typically convened and orchestrated by civil society entrepreneurs or public agencies aiming to expand their reach into society by involving and aligning organized stakeholders within a particular policy domain to enhance societal coordination (Marsh and Rhodes 1992). Finally, we talk about co-creation when the range of participating actors not only includes well-organized public and private actors but also lay actors (e.g., users, citizens, and local communities), and when the purpose is not restricted to interest mediation and societal coordination, focusing instead on creative problem-solving and the development of innovative solutions to complex problems, such as the green and just transformation (Ansell and Torfing 2021).

Co-creation is a subset of collaborative governance that has increasingly come into focus in public administration research (Ansell, Sørensen and Torfing 2022; Brandsen, Steen and Verschuere 2018; Carpenter and Horvath 2022; Lund 2018; Voorberg, Bekkers and Tummers 2015). It can be defined as a process relying on relevant and affected actors collaborating to jointly identify and define common problems and to design, test, and implement innovative solutions (Ansell and Torfing 2021). The co-creation concept occupies a distinct space in the intersection between the expanding literature on collaborative governance and the emerging literature on public innovation. Hence, with its emphasis on how collaboration can drive innovation, co-creation can be seen as a shorthand for collaborative innovation (Torfing 2016).

We propose that the co-creation of innovative public value outcomes in networks and partnerships involving public, private, and civic actors can contribute substantially to achieving a green and just transformation (Ansell, Sørensen and Torfing 2022; Newig et al. 2023). When facing wicked and super-wicked problems (e.g., the enduring poverty problems and the climate and nature crisis), standard solutions are insufficient. We must stimulate mutual learning to craft innovative solutions that break with conventional wisdom and habitual practices; just as we must establish common ownership over new and bold solutions to promote their implementation and ensure that benefits are equally distributed while losers are compensated.

The potential contribution of co-creation to promoting a green and just transformation is gaining increasing prominence in countries around the world as hierarchical and market-based forms of governance are tried and found wanting with respect to securing an economically and environmentally sustainable future. A sign of the growing interest in what co-creation has to offer is the recommendation of co-creation as a lever for promoting green and just transitions in the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Hence, Goal 17 (“Partnership for the Goals”) suggests that the best way to achieve the first 16 SDGs is through co-creation aimed at linking public, private, and civic actors (Ansell, Sørensen and Torfing 2022). The UN partnership strategy and repeated calls by UN Secretary-General Guterres for “all hands on deck” are important, as they lend credibility and legitimacy to local efforts to spur co-creation for a green and just transition.

The potential contribution of co-creation to meeting the SDGs in urban areas around the globe is illustrated by the 41 case studies reported in the GOGREEN database (https://gogreen-project.com/). While some cases focus more on co-creating the green transition in rural areas, many reports concern successful co-creation in urban areas. In Thailand, for example, researchers, NGOs, and local authorities in the city of Chiang Mai have co-created a food project whereby homeless and vulnerable citizens collect food waste, turn it into compost, and then grow organic vegetables that feed the homeless and are sold at local markets to improve food security (https://gogreen-project.com/blog/case/case-chiang-mai-project/). Another GOGREEN example involves the co-creation of urban and semi-urban planning in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where local government agencies and civil society organizations have worked closely together over several years to support the development of sustainable urban agriculture in poor indigenous neighborhoods (https://gogreen-project.com/blog/case/case-developing-sustainable-urban-and-periurban-agriculture-in-sao-paulo/). A third example is from Roskilde, Denmark, where a vocational training school developed teaching programs aimed at advancing environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable forms of craftsmanship through close collaboration between students, teachers, municipal staff, and local businesses (https://gogreen-project.com/blog/case/case-musicon-cratfsman-dormitory/). These and other GOGREEN cases all illustrate the interconnectedness between advancing green transitions and improving the social conditions and livelihoods of the actors involved. Some of the cases also demonstrate remarkable efforts by local leaders to empower vulnerable minority groups and ensure their effective participation in and contribution to the co-creation of local change. A fourth case is the co-creation of initiatives to reduce air pollution in Almaty, Kazakhstan, involving the city government, local businesses, and civil society organizations (https://gogreen-project.com/blog/case/case-almaty-air-inititative-kazakhstan/).

Leadership of Interaction

The 41 cases in the GOGREEN database all document the importance of interactive leaders who initiate, sponsor, and direct co-creation processes through close and ongoing dialogue with other actors involved in the co-creation process. However, they also highlight how interactive leadership must be combined with skillful leadership of interaction, which is essential for creating positive and productive dynamics in the collaboration process and for overcoming barriers in the form of distrust, biases, and conflicts of interest. Hence, comparative research on the cases documents that institutional framing and facilitative leadership are among the most important of a list of 16 governance factors for promoting the successful co-creation of a green and just transition in urban and rural areas alike (Ansell, Sørensen and Torfing 2026; Cristofoli et al. forthcoming).

Inspired by governance theories and theories of collaborative networks and partnerships, as well as recent contributions to urban governance research, we introduce the term “meta-governance” to specify how leadership of interaction can be conducted in practice (Engberg and Larsen 2010; Jessop 2002; Meuleman 2008; Peters et al. 2022; Sørensen and Torfing 2009, 2017; Tønnesen et al. 2019). Just as “meta-learning” refers to learning about how we learn, “meta-governance” refers to the governance of otherwise self-regulated collaborative processes in which public, private, and civic actors collaborate to solve complex problems. Hence, the “meta” in meta-governance refers to the endeavor to “govern governance” in an attempt at spurring constructive interaction and the production of desirable results. Since meta-governance is often (but by no means always) exercised by government actors, it holds the potential to link government-controlled governance with interactive governance processes involving distributed actors in creative problem-solving. Hence, meta-governance specifies how government can play a key role in promoting and guiding local co-creation processes in urban areas and beyond without undermining their capacity for self-regulation (Gjaltema, Biesbroek and Termeer 2020).

Governing more or less self-regulating co-creation processes is no easy task. If local leaders—whether public, private, or civic—aim to govern collaborative networks and partnerships through heavy-handed and intrusive steering that straitjackets the collaborative arena and disregards its preference for self-regulation, they will most likely either pacify or scare off the participants, possibly even triggering fierce opposition that may sever the leader‒follower relation. To illustrate, meta-governors aiming to restrict the collaborative agenda to a few safe issues may generate dissatisfaction among participants who want to pursue a broader set of controversial issues. This explains why meta-governance is defined as an attempt to influence the processes and outcomes of collaborative governance and co-creation without reverting to top-down steering based on command and control (Peters et al. 2022). Hence, although meta-governing leaders must strongly defend principles of legality, inclusion, and fairness while also insisting on sanctioning breaches of trust, they should strive to allow as much room as possible to the collaborative and innovative network dynamics to stimulate the production of common ownership of new and bold solutions.

As a concept and theory, meta-governance thus provides a new take on leadership, as it highlights the role of soft power that induces voluntary action as opposed to hard power that compels action (Nye 2008). Soft power based on motivation, coaching, and storytelling that shapes autonomous governance spaces is the primary objective, whereas hard power is a last resort and used as little as possible. Hence, the attraction of meta-governance is that it allows the leaders of urban neighborhood transformation to mobilize local knowledge, ideas, and entrepreneurship, to spur collaborative innovation, and to build widespread support for disruptive transitions while maintaining the ability to influence the processes and outcomes of collaboration in subtle, indirect, and non-intrusive ways.

The array of meta-governance tools at the disposal of leaders tends to fall into two broad categories: facilitative leadership and institutional design. Both aim to support the collaborative process and bring out the benefits in terms of collaboration, innovation, and democratic ownership while mitigating problems such as freeriding, mistrust, and destructive conflict. Facilitative leadership aims to promote visionary inspiration, active engagement, trust-based collaboration, and open-minded searches for new solutions (Forester 2017). Institutional design aims to build a supportive institutional framework of rules, norms, values, and forms of knowledge capable of stabilizing and guiding the interactions between actors with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and interests (Klijn and Koppenjan 2015). Both facilitative leadership and institutional design can be exercised hands-off (i.e., at a distance from the collaborative process) and hands-on (through close interaction with the actors in the collaborative arena).

Meta-governance through facilitative leadership involves the hands-off framing of collaborative arenas through goal-setting, storytelling, and the communication of budget frames together with hands-on orchestration and promotion of co-creation through process management, conflict mediation, and efforts to catalyze creative problem-solving by disturbing the actors in ways that make them think outside the box. Facilitative leadership also involves working behind the scenes to transform the socio-political context through strategic management aimed at removing barriers to and mustering support for collaborative problem-solving (Ferlie and Ongaro 2022). This type of hands-off leadership aims to transform the strategic goals and organizational culture of the involved actors so that they become more open, responsive, and focused on collaboration innovation.

Meta-governance through institutional design involves the hands-off design of institutional arenas based on formal mandates and remits together with the hands-on co-design of the rules, norms, and values governing the networked interaction between the participating actors. Hands-off institutional design shapes and supports collaborative governance and co-creation processes by selecting the participants, creating a collaborative arena, setting up a communication infrastructure, providing purposeful tools for interaction, and proposing procedures for decision-making, implementation, and horizontal accountability (Sørensen and Torfing 2009). When actors come together in a collaborative network, there are initially very few rules, norms, and values supporting their interaction beyond the formal mandate or remit that tends to play a limited role because the actors have little ownership over it and may support an alternative agenda. However, leaders may involve the participants in hands-on institutional design that gradually develops and revises a common set of rules, norms, and procedures for how to interact, conduct meetings, and make and implement decisions. The institutional scaffolding of collaborative processes is important, as it helps to build trust and lower the transaction costs of collaborating.

A crucial final set of questions regarding meta-governance is: Who are the meta-governors and what does it take to become a successful meta-governor? As already indicated above, meta-governors are central and competent actors capable of relation-building, critical reflection, and proactive intervention. In principle, public, private, and civic actors can all serve this function if they possess what Hood (1986) refers to as NATO resources:

Nodality stands for and points to the importance of being a centrally located actor with a broad web of contacts and connections to relevant and affected stakeholders within a given area, which makes them capable of bringing together and aligning actors in a collaborative network or partnership.

While private and civic actors may possess one or more of these NATO resources, public actors are part of a political and administrative system endowed with them all. Hence, non-public meta-governance often benefits from involving public actors in the leadership of co-creation processes to boost their leadership resources.

Meta-governance may be exercised by one or more people from the same organization, which can be at the same or a higher level than the network of actors that it is trying to meta-govern. Hence, a local network may be meta-governed by a local, regional, national, or transnational actor. Meta-governors at different levels may play different roles. Institutional design may be provided by regional, national, or transnational actors (sometimes in conjunction with local actors), while facilitative leadership may be provided by a local actor. If actors from different levels conduct meta-governance, it is referred to as multilevel meta-governance (Jessop 2004). In most cases, however, local government agencies will meta-govern the local co-creation processes—alone or in partnership with other local actors. Rivalry between meta-governors from different levels, jurisdictions, and sectors occurs and calls for coordination and dialogue to secure proper coordination and to avoid ambiguities and trade-offs.

In the public sector, the exercise of meta-governance often falls to administrators who tend to have both the time and professional skills needed to act as meta-governors (Agger and Sørensen 2018). Whereas executive public managers often lack training in process facilitation, lower-level managers or consultants may possess both the required skills and the necessary experience. Elected politicians seldom play an active role in meta-governing networks, although they may be involved in designing institutional conditions, but they are rarely involved in process facilitation (Koppenjan, Kars and Voort 2009; Sørensen et al. 2020). Leaving meta-governance to administrators may work well for many purposes, not least because public administrators will seek political support for particularly sensitive decisions or at least anticipate the opinions and reactions of their elected principals. Nevertheless, greater involvement of elected politicians in meta-governance can reduce the risk of creating tension between formal political decision-making and the outcomes of collaborative governance processes.

In sum, leaders of interactive processes must take on the role of meta-governors. In doing so, they must respect the self-regulating capacity of local governance networks and refrain from using a hard-power “iron fist,” opting instead for a soft-power “velvet glove” (Jessop 2002, 2016) by combining facilitative leadership with institutional design. Public, private, and civic actors may all act as meta-governors if they possess the required resources and experience, and public administrators and civil society entrepreneurs may benefit from teaming up with politicians to enhance their ability to tackle the political aspects of meta-governance (Sørensen and Torfing 2016).

As mentioned earlier, the GOGREEN database consists of 42 case studies of the co-creation of a green and just transformation of local communities. Mapping how the co-creation processes were conditioned by various systemic, structural, and tactical governance factors such as policy discourses, legislation, institutions, financing models, and facilitative leadership (Ansell, Sørensen and Torfing 2022), the findings highlight the importance of leadership of interaction in collaborative processes. Moreover, the case studies document that the meta-governors are not always government actors operating at different levels but are sometimes scientists, social foundations, international donors, and local business and civil society leaders, which interestingly seems to be more common in the Global South than in the Global North (Cristofoli et al. forthcoming); this may be related to variations in NATO resources in the former.

The Role of Collaborative Platforms: Toward Generative Governance?

As suggested by this variety between cases from different parts of the world, interactive leadership and the leadership of interaction do not take place in a vacuum. In addition to variation in the access leaders have to NATO resources the presence of collaborative platforms supporting meta-governed efforts to build and manage arenas for local green co-creation (Ansell and Gash 2018; Ansell and Torfing 2021; Ansell, Sørensen and Torfing 2022). Directing, designing, and facilitating local-level collaborative processes and then driving them to a successful conclusion is often an uphill struggle and requires a great deal of time, energy, and hard-earned experience. This is especially the case where there are no traditions of collaboration and an absence of supporting administrative traditions, institutions, and tools. Conversely, local co-creation may thrive if enabled by the systematic mapping of a local ecosystem of actors who can be mobilized and activated; by access to information, knowledge, and expertise about the problem at hand; by the presence of organizational templates and communication systems; and by the availability of seed money, free-of-charge meeting venues, and other resources supporting collaborative interaction. In short, the existence of collaborative platforms providing these elements may support the formation and successful completion of collaborative governance processes.

The interest in the city as a collaborative platform is currently on the rise (see, e.g., Lin and Geertman 2015; Repette et al. 2021). Nambisan (2009) describes three types of collaborative platforms: exploration platforms that aim to define urgent problems and connect potential problem-solvers; experimental platforms that enable distributed actors to develop and test prototypical solutions; and execution platforms that build templates for the joint implementation of solutions to problems. Anttiroiko (2016) talks about innovation platforms that seem to cut across Nambisan's platforms by allowing citizens to explore, experiment with, and execute new policy and planning solutions in urban environments. Ansell and Gash (2018) describe a wide range of platforms used to promote collaboration, noting that these platforms often use a franchising strategy to develop a range of parallel but relatively independent collaborations. Franchising refers to the ability of different user groups to use the templates, tools, and resources provided by a particular platform, but to adapt them to their local context while aiming to solve a particular kind of problem.

Platforms are infrastructures providing re-usable, re-programmable, and re-combinable templates, tools, resources, procedures, forms of knowledge, etc. that create the conditions for the formation of collaborative innovation. They organize “flexible interfaces” that facilitate interaction, learning, and joint action (Kornberger 2017), and they operate as systemic intermediaries, promoting and facilitating purposeful collaboration between distributed actors. Ansell, Sørensen and Torfing (2022) claim that collaborative platforms have three basic functions. First, they play an “intermediating role,” forging productive interconnections between people, programs, and ideas. This intermediating role involves bridging and brokering between people, organizations, and projects from different sectors and possibly even different levels (Crona and Parker 2012; Perry et al. 2018). Second, they play a “scaffolding role,” providing flexible templates in the form of pre-established and preformed guidelines, strategies, procedures, and organizational forms that reduce the communication and organization costs and help to sustain collaborative interaction between different stakeholders (Ansell and Miura 2020). Examples of scaffolding templates include guidelines for organizing a living lab or an innovation workshop, tools for conducting stakeholder analysis, a plan for convening and organizing the first meeting between a group of stakeholders, and the provision of procedures for communication and brainstorming. Finally, platforms play a “leveraging role,” as they tend to stimulate joint action by providing tools for engaging in participatory planning, collaborative design, scenario building, joint decision-making, and adaptive implementation.

Platforms are institutional constructs that may take either a physical or digital form (Ansell and Torfing 2021). Physical platforms may exist in the form of a particular meeting venue that hosts most of the interaction in a local co-creation project (Perez Mengual, Danzinger and Roth 2024). To illustrate, the new library at the harborfront in Aarhus, Denmark, hosts a variety of designated resources including meeting rooms that enable public and private actors to meet to co-create local green and fair solutions. Digital platforms may simply be a purposefully designed website aimed at defining an urgent problem, attracting relevant and affected actors, and offering advice, tools, and templates to local actors who are in the process of constructing a purposeful co-creation arena (Wegner et al. 2024). In the United States, the Next Door digital platform enables people in a particular neighborhood to connect and get together to solve local problems. Whether physical or digital, platforms can be purposively designed when local meta-governors need them, but they may also pre-date the local endeavors to spur collaboration and form a co-creation project, thereby helping both the meta-governor(s) and the collaborative innovation project to get off the ground. Platforms may gradually emerge and become increasingly impactful through repeated usage, which may give rise to reusable templates, tools and procedures, and collective knowledge about how they can be used and why doing so matters.

Platforms tend to be more stable and permanent than the more temporary arenas they generate. A single platform may give rise to and support multiple co-creation arenas. Over time, these arenas will tend to multiply in a certain governance area or possibly spill over into new problem areas. Arenas may also adapt through learning or if the participating actors redefine the problems and goals. Platforms are slower to adapt but can be modified in response to feedback from the arenas that they are supporting.

New research investigating the joint impact of collaborative platforms, facilitative leadership, and institutional design points to the future potential of generative governance. The study of “generativity” is a new and expanding field (Thomas and Tee 2022). In psychology, it refers to the concerns of middle-aged people for the well-being of their offspring (Erikson and Erikson 1981). In linguistics, generative grammar refers to how a few linguistic elements and rules can produce multiple meanings (Corballis 1992). Engineering is concerned with how generative models leverage networks to learn from input data and foster new designs (Regenwetter, Nobari and Ahmed 2022). The concept of generativity was further developed in computer science, where it refers to the ability of distributed actors to use digital platforms to generate new products, structures, or communication devices without platform-designer input (Zittrain 2006). In contrast, generativity is scarcely explored in the social sciences. This is regrettable, as generative governance holds the key to understanding the conditions of emergence for collaborative problem-solving and the co-creation of innovative solutions. Hence, while meta-governance is an indispensable tool for supporting and guiding collaborative governance arenas, generative governance aims to facilitate the emergence of such arenas.

Generative governance is defined as a particular form of governance that facilitates and enables the emergence of productive interaction between distributed actors (Ansell and Torfing 2021). It offers an alternative to the false choice between “unicentric governance,” which places public bureaucracy in charge of public problem-solving, and “multicentric governance,” which relies more on the market mechanism. It recasts the public sector as a generative platform that enables collaboration and co-creation between distributed public, private, and civic actors engaged in processes of productive transformation.

Future research must also explore the potentials of generativity for public governance and resolve the tensions between the “endogeneity of generativity” and the “directiveness of governance” by re-conceptualizing generative governance as a set of institutions and practices that, rather than dictating outcomes, aim to foster productive conditions for distributed actors to shape outcomes. Once the conceptual problems are solved, we must construct a comprehensive inventory of generative discourses, mindsets, platforms, spaces, technologies, processes, budgets, etc. and assess what this implies for leadership and how and under what conditions these mechanisms prompt and support emerging forms of collaboration, learning, and innovation.

Conclusion

The aim of this article has been to address the thorny question of how to promote a green and just transformation of urban areas suffering from the negative impacts of the climate and nature crisis and socio-economic decline, giving rise to growing poverty. It has drawn together insights from theories of urban planning and public governance in arguing that interactive leadership is required to spark, promote, and give direction to local development based on continuous interaction with local constituencies to ensure that they understand local problems, the needs of the community, and the wishes for the future, and to explain and justify leaders’ actions to those who are affected by them. Moreover, interactive leaders build broad change alliances and harness the collaborative advantage of local governance and co-creation processes that facilitate the exchange and pooling of resources, competences, and ideas in the pursuit of innovative solutions. Drawing on the collective power of collaborative networks and partnerships prompts leaders to take on the role of leaders of interaction, which involves the deployment of meta-governance tools such as process facilitation and institutional design, while considering the goals pursued through collaborative governance and co-creation. Both network-based collaboration and efforts to meta-govern the co-creation process will tend to benefit from the presence and/or construction of collaborative platforms. Together, the growing interest in the soft infrastructures of facilitative leadership, institutional design, and collaborative platforms stimulates interest in generative governance that aims to support the engagement of distributed actors in emerging forms of collaboration, learning, and innovation without predetermining the contents of their solutions.

Out of this research emerges a vision for the future development not only of leadership in urban areas but also of the role of the public sector in governing society. Hence, it recasts the public sector from being an almighty authority, sovereign regulator, and monopolist service provider to being a catalyst and orchestrator of collaborative arenas that allows outputs and outcomes to be co-created through interactions between distributed actors. This would provide favorable conditions for public and private actors to exercise leadership not only of a green transformation of urban areas but also of a more economically and socially sustainable world.