Urban areas account for around 50% of global solid waste generation. In the last decade, the European Union has supported numerous initiatives aiming at reducing waste generation by promoting shifts towards Circular Economy (CE) approaches. Governing this process has become imperative. This article focuses on the results of a governance analysis of six urban regions in Europe involved in the Horizon 2020 project REPAiR. By means of semi-structured interviews, document analysis and workshops with local stakeholders, for each urban area a list of governance challenges which hinder the necessary shift to circularity was drafted. In order to compare the six cases, the various challenges have been categorized using the PESTEL-O method. Results highlight a significant variation in policy contexts and the need for these to evolve by adapting stakeholders’ and policy-makers’ engagement and diffusing knowledge on CE. Common challenges among the six regions include a lack of an integrated guiding framework (both political and legal), limited awareness among citizens, and technological barriers. All these elements call for a multi-faceted governance approach able to embrace the complexity of the process and comprehensively address the various challenges to completing the shift towards circularity in cities.@en

Resource consumption and related waste production are still rapidly increasing all over the world, leading to social and environmental challenges and to the production of the so-called ‘wastescapes’. Peri-urban areas—in-between urban and rural territories—are particularly vulnerable and prone to develop into wastescapes because they are generally characterised by mixed functions and/or monofunctional settlements, as well as by fragmentation in a low-density territory that is often crossed by large infrastructure networks. Moreover, peri-urban areas are generally the selected locations for the development of plants for waste management. In this way, they are crossed by waste flows of a different nature, in a landscape of operational infrastructures and wasted landscapes. Implementing Circular Economy (CE) principles, interpreting waste and wastescapes as resources, is a way to significantly reduce raw material and (soil) resource consumption, improving cities’ metabolism. A circular approach can positively affect the spatial, social and environmental performances of peri-urban areas. However, the transition towards a CE presents many challenges. This article outlines an approach to address these challenges, presenting a co-creation process among researchers, experts and stakeholders within Living Labs (LLs) processes. LLs are physical and virtual spaces, aiming at the co-creation of site-specific eco-innovative solutions (EIS) and strategies. In the LLs, public–private–people partnerships are developed by applying an iterative methodology consisting of five phases: Co-Exploring, Co-Design, Co-Production, Co-Decision, and Co-Governance. This article presents a case study approach, analysing the co-creation methodology applied in two peri-urban living labs, located in the Metropolitan Areas of Naples (Italy) and Amsterdam (The Netherlands), within REPAiR Horizon2020 research project.
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REPAiR will develop, test, and implement strategies for improved urban metabolisms in six peri-urban living labs (›PULLs‹) in the case study areas of Amsterdam, Ghent, Hamburg, Łódź, Naples, and Pécs. In the frame of REPAiR a geodesign decision support environment (GDSE) will be developed and first tested in the PULLs. In REPAiR’s Work Package 6 “Developing and implementing decision models” decision making processes will be analysed and decision models for all six case studies will be developed in order to be implemented in cooperation with stakeholders in the six case study areas feeding into the GDSE. The deliverable D6.1 Governance and Decision-Making Processes in Pilot Cases is focused on the definition and clarification of governance and decision-making structures in the two pilot cases of the REPAiR project: Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Naples, Italy. The deliverable is divided into 5 chapters. After a brief introduction to the work done for the drafting of this document (Chapter 1), the second Chapter aims to explain the theoretical background on governance and stakeholder analysis and gives an overview on the development of EU policies in the field of waste management. The third chapter and the fourth chapters report a description of the pilot caseworks Amsterdam and Naples they include an overview on the governance setting, a detailed timelines of the development of the waste governance and the decision-making framework. This is followed by descriptions of the stakeholder identification and interviews conducted in the pilot cases. The Amsterdam focus area is located in the Western part of Amsterdam Metropolitan Area. The central idea of the case study is to develop a more circular economy. This idea is already quite present among many stakeholders and is formulated as an objective by public stakeholders. Moreover, the public side encourages the involvement of economic stakeholders into the development of a circular economy. The private stakeholders express great interest in becoming (more) involved into the process. However, the interviews also show that the development of a circular economy and changes in waste management in the Netherlands can only be reached on a long perspective and that many frame conditions in the waste management sector are long term bound. The Naples focus area is covering parts of the City of Naples and 10 municipalities in the north-east of Naples. After the conclusion of the waste crisis in Naples public authorities are aiming to improve the waste management on a long term perspective. The interviews show that there are two main challenges linked to this process: firstly, the current change of the administrative system in both Italy and the Campania region; secondly, the necessity to involve local citizens in the decision-making process to regain the trust of the population. Chapter 5 illustrates the conclusion of this first step of the project and gives an outlook on further steps.@en