• Energy Research

Digital technologies are used in various local government activities. Adopting suitable digital technology strategies could enhance service efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability. The challenges of technology adoption among local governments, however, are also evident. One of the major challenges is capacity, including the lack of knowledge or awareness of how to balance the local government’s resources and the strategies that need to be implemented. This challenge also forms a research gap. The study aims to consolidate the understanding of local government digital technology adoption strategies via the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA). It analyses the adoption opportunities, challenges, and strategies through the lens of people, processes, and technology frameworks. The results show that: (a) Strategies concerning the people aspects include building a platform for public participation, employees’ skills, and decision-makers' positive mindset development. (b) Strategies concerning the process aspects include recognizing the players’ roles, having a clear aim and procedure, proper regulation, and receiving user input. (c) Strategies considering the technology aspects include understanding the effect of the technology, technological preparedness, and convenience adoption. The findings inform local government policymakers in digital technology adoption and transformation endeavors.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made many urban policymakers, planners, and scholars, all around the globe, rethink conventional, neoliberal growth strategies of cities. The trend of rapid urbanization, particularly around capital cities, has been questioned, and alternative growth models and locations have been the subjects of countless discussions. This is particularly the case for the Australian context: The COVID-19 pandemic heightened the debates in urban circles on post-pandemic urban growth strategies and boosting the growth of towns and cities across regional Australia is a popular alternative strategy. While some scholars argue that regional Australia poses an invaluable opportunity for post-pandemic growth by ‘taking off the pressure from the capital cities’; others warn us about the risks of growing regional towns and cities without carefully designed national, regional, and local planning, design, and development strategies. Superimposing planning and development policies meant for metropolitan cities could simply result in transferring the ills of capital cities to regions and exacerbate unsustainable development and heightened socioeconomic inequalities. This opinion piece, by keeping both of these perspectives in mind, explores approaches to regional community and economic development of Australia’s towns and cities, along with identifying sustainable urban growth locations in the post-pandemic era. It also offers new insights that could help re-shape the policy debate on regional growth and development.

Climate change is the biggest global threat of our time. As a signatory nation of the Paris Agreement, Brazil has made a climate action commitment, and expressed its nationally determined contribution to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 37%. The Brazilian population is highly urban, and Brazilian cities are mostly responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, and the worst effects of global warming are experienced in cities. Hence, the fulfillment of the Brazilian climate commitments depends on the active engagement of municipalities. Nevertheless, the Brazilian national government does not monitor local climate actions, and it is not clear how local urban policy is aligned with climate action. In order to bridge this gap, this study tackles the question of: “Are, and if yes how, cities considering the climate emergency in their local planning mechanisms?” This question is investigated by placing five major Brazilian cities under the microscope. The methodological approach includes literature review and applied qualitative analysis to scrutinize how climate issues and actions are factored in urban planning regulations to verify if and to what extent local policies contribute to the fulfillment of the Brazilian nationally determined contribution, and sustainable development goals. The results disclose that investigated cities have adequately incorporated climatic issues in their urban planning mechanisms. However, policy concentrates more on adaptation rather than mitigation, and policy implementation yet to be realized.

Quantitative measures of transport disadvantage are reviewed in this paper from the perspective of their effectiveness to investigate social exclusion. The effectiveness is assessed using criteria derived through a review of the concepts of transport disadvantage and social exclusion and their operationalisation. The specified criteria are related to issues of spatial (e.g., urban accessibility, and public transport accessibility), temporal (e.g., public transport availability, and facility opening hours), and social attributes of travel and activity participation (e.g., personal mobility, and disability). Four groups of transport disadvantage measures are identified and evaluated. These include deprivation-based measures, mobility-based measures, accessibility-based measures, and activity-based measures. The review suggests that although the first three categories of measures have traditionally been used to identify transport disadvantage, they do not satisfy issues surrounding activity participation—the key outcome of social exclusion. The activity space concept is a way in which these issues can be incorporated, as it is a measure of the outcomes of activity participation and their associated travel to that activity. Participation in an activity means that an individual has overcome the spatial, temporal and social barriers of travel for that activity. The research using the activity space concept has, however, inadequately identified individual travel and activity participation. This has been due to a separate application of a range of different indicators to assess activity space size. These indicators are by their nature multidimensional—e.g., area visited, distance travelled, and number of activity sites visited. Although each indicator represents a specific qualitative/quantitative aspect of travel and activity participation, researchers have treated these indicators in an isolated manner to identify transport disadvantage and consequently transport-related social exclusion. This paper identifies the weaknesses and strengths associated with these measures; and methods are directed to overcome the limitations.

Abstract Metropolitan cities and regions are vastly exposed to the global climate change impacts. The reasons for such exposure include the gradual urban encroachments to nearby peri‑urban areas that cause destruction of natural resources and ecosystem services. While policymakers and planners are struggling to make trade-offs between urban growth, environmental degradation and mitigating climate change impacts, limited evidence exists regarding the public perceptions on the matter. This study aims to address the question of how does the public perceive on the interplay between peri‑urban growth and climate change? The methodology concerns conducting an online survey with the peri‑urban dwellers (n = 659) from South East Queensland, Australia, and undertaking an exploratory factor analysis on the collected data. The study findings reveal that: (a) Younger and highly educated people are much stronger believers of climate change; (b) People composting at home have a stronger belief in human-induced climate change than those using solar energy, energy monitoring devices and harvesting rainwater; (c) Despite local impacts of climate change garb the attention of almost everyone, self-motivations towards shifting habits and taking actions for mitigating climate change are limited, and; (d) Government policies and actions for combatting climate crises are largely seen inadequate.

Despite the rhetoric of “citizen-first,” which has been tokenized in recent years by the smart city administrations, what it means has long been unclear to many, including the public at large. Put simply, this rhetoric concerns the mindset of the members of a local community and places them at the heart of the smart city initiatives. In order to bring further clarity to this issue under the current neoliberal urbanism, this study aimed to identify the key indicators of citizen-centric smart cities from the perspective of participative governance practices and citizens’ responsibilities. To achieve this aim, this study involved a systematic literature review of the social inclusion indicators for building citizen-centric smart cities. The social inclusion indicators that were formed were verified by practitioners to suit the local contexts of an emerging and developing country, in this case, Malaysia. The findings of the review revealed that: (a) the acceptance of social inclusion indicators was mainly limited to the realm of democratic developed countries, leaders’ understanding of citizenship, the delegation of decision-making power in governance practices, the participative culture of societies, and individual citizens’ self-discipline; (b) the social inclusion indicators may not be welcomed in emerging and developing countries; (c) in the long term, these indicators would shed light on the rise of self-organizing cities that will gain popularity in potential city developments, be it in developed or developing countries.

Abstract Renewable energy and energy efficiency are recognized among the key factors of transitioning towards a low-consumption and low-carbon society. In order to achieve such transition, the government policies should be aimed at meeting the renewable energy generation and energy efficiency targets of specific localities. Nonetheless, these targets vary between different urban regions, and there is limited knowledge on the correlation between energy transition and urbanization levels. The aim of this paper is to identify that correlation in urban regions. This study places Italian regions under the microscope of an empirical investigation. The study adopts a two-step analysis that provides a useful model for regional analyses. The results of the study consolidates our understanding and highlights that the energy transition process requires greater efforts concerning social participation and provision of incentives for renewable energy production, mainly in the less urbanized areas.

In recent years, climate change belief across countries has gone through an enormous political debate. Due to different perspectives, the issue of climate change belief in relation to political orientations cannot be considered uniform. This study aims to identify different groups of respondents based on their level of knowledge concerning climate risk against their political orientations. This in return helps in understanding political bias in forming a climate change belief. The methodological approach of this study comprises two major steps. First, to carry out a public perception survey in South East Queensland, Australia. Second, to undertake a hierarchical cluster analysis to derive the groups of respondents with distinct political orientations regarding climate change beliefs. The findings disclose that: (a) Public stances about climate risk knowledge in the case study area are rigid and simply distributed between the two groups—i.e., ‘least concerned/mostly disagreed group’ and ‘highly concerned/mostly disagreed group’; (b) The ‘least concerned/mostly disagreed group’ is highly rigid on the stance that there is nothing like anthropogenic climate change, and; (c) Climate risk concerns of the ‘least concerned/mostly disagreed group’ do not influence significantly in guiding their voting decisions. The insights generated help in overcoming the knowledge gaps between climate risk believers and deniers, and thereby inform decision-makers in taking adequate measures to address climate risks and develop appropriate land use decisions.