Toward Sustainability as Democratic Process: Politicizing EU Innovation Partnerships Through a Critical Urban Lense

As European societies struggle with complex crises, the global goals for sustainable development (SDGs, UN 2015) call for joint human action toward planetary transformation. As the UN-SDGs also dedicate a specific urban objective (no. 11, 2015), the EU's sustainability agenda comprises not only legal and economic measures for green and digital transition but also promotes a wide range of bottom-up projects for structural and societal transformation on the ground. Focusing on cities, urbanised areas, growing as well as declining regions, new policy instruments such as the EU's Urban Initiative, Just Transition Regions or Horizon missions promote multi-level partnerships for policy-learning through place-based innovation systems. In times of stagnating political integration and national-populist retreat, such stakeholder cooperation mechanisms offer multi-facetted opportunities for 'soft' multi-level governance, local civic participation and experimental learning across countries, sectors and disciplines. However, merging economic with social and environmental objectives, the notion of sustainability addresses not only practical limitations of growth but also implies critiques of modernity through loss of trust in institutional ordering and human progress. Particularly, cities symbolise these modern tensions - as centres of growth, competitiveness and creative technological and societal innovation as well as places of complex interconnected global and political problems. In a rapidly changing and diverse world, any stategies for governing sustainability are necessarily limited, contextually differentiated, imply winners and losers, and thus possibly conflicts and contentious mobilisations. So, how may the EU's sustainability agenda contribute toward implementing the SDGs in practice? Reflecting current transformations, scholarly debates on urban globalisation and the 'right to the city' pose societal diversity as critical claim, which connects capitalism critiques with social justice, cultural identity and environmental sustainability. As the SDGs frame a variety of transformation efforts, this paper elaborates my previous work on the EU's Urban Agenda (De Frantz 2022) by operationalising sustainabilitiy objectives through various EU-funded stakeholder innovation projects for place-based urban-regional transition. Enquiring challenges of inequality, difference and complexity in different practical contexts contributes toward framing a research agenda for politicizing abstract technocratic policy notions through open-ended democratic transformation processes 'on the ground'.