Enacting urban governance innovation: beyond strategic pathways to incremental “muddling through”

In recent years, cities and city governance have been comprehensively urged to innovate to address complex societal challenges. An epistemic community–including the UN, OECD, global philanthropies, consultancies and think-tanks–has provided influential support by globally circulating examples of pathways to urban governance innovation (UGI) and codified best-practice innovation techniques. In this paper, we address how these pathways and codifications of UGI gel with actual practices of institutional change. We present a grounded theorization of UGI to enhance empirical understandings of its practice, framed through a novel combination of conceptual resources drawn from recent relational theorizations of governance innovation from scholarship on urban sustainability transitions and new municipalism. Drawing on analysis of a suite of urban-based innovation units internationally, we propose three key dimensions to a more nuanced understanding of UGI; namely that UGI is a process enacted relationally, and through navigations that are inevitably situated. We conclude by stressing the importance of understanding how UGI proceeds through more uncertain, piecemeal and incremental routes than globally-circulating pathways infer. Second, we argue that understanding the relational, navigational and situated dynamics of UGI is critical to evaluating its agendas, ambitions and (ambiguous) political possibilities.