There are several types of actions that can be taken to accelerate climate cooperation between municipalities and business. For each type of action, it may be useful to reflect on and highlight what level of ambition is appropriate at the moment and how you see the development going forward.
Doing nothing is also a choice.
Even if it is not possible to deploy major resources, there are often a few measures that take a short time to implement but can have a major positive impact by removing major obstacles or lowering thresholds. Examples of such measures include reducing requirements on, for example, plot sizes for sale to enable smaller companies to establish themselves, enabling several companies to join forces in a procurement process, or reducing the scope of the procurement process to enable smaller and local companies to participate.
The next level of ambition involves communicating the municipality's ambitions and policies in terms of different types of interventions, as well as providing simple support such as information on the municipality's website. Another possibility is to also appoint contact persons who can answer questions.
Setting concrete targets and following them up will further raise the level of ambition. This in turn requires recruiting competent staff and earmarking resources in the budget. At this level of ambition, there are also regular dialogues with relevant stakeholders to drive issues together.
The highest level of ambition involves creating better conditions for your own municipality by joining forces with others outside its borders. This could be creating procurement or needs networks with other municipalities. Another example is being part of system demonstrators and policy labs to influence legislation and practice. It can also be to be part of innovation projects to showcase opportunities.
For all these levels, government agencies has an important role to play. It can be to produce knowledge bases for the municipalities, such as the Swedish National Board of Housing, Building and Planning 's report on Building Communities (which also inspired the ambition level model above) and the Swedish Energy Agency and the Swedish Transport Administration's joint action program for charging infrastructure and tank infrastructure for hydrogen, the Swedish Energy Agency's funding for energy advisors, Vinnova's work on running policy labs linked to Viable Cities and the Swedish Public Procurement Agency's work on innovation procurement.
National platforms such as Viable Cities and network organizations such as Climate Municipalities and the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions also have important roles to play in identifying further needs and helping to develop solutions. Learning from each other can go a long way, but accelerating development requires collaboration to significantly reduce costs to free up capital for investment and create systemic change. There is therefore every reason to continue and expand the collaboration between municipalities and government agencies that Viable Cities' climate contract work represents, as one of the areas that needs to be developed more is support for companies due to the EU's Green Deal and the existing and future legislation that it entails, for example in terms of CSRD and the EU taxonomy, where a knowledge review commissioned by the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth points to both challenges and solutions.
