Framing of innovation in urban Australian municipal climate policy

Abstract

Despite growing recognition of the importance of innovation in achieving net zero transitions, it remains unclear how to govern transformative innovation. Urban municipalities are consistently recognised for going above and beyond their state and national counterparts in their policy stances on climate change, yet there is limited investigation into how municipalities engage with and frame innovation in their decarbonisation policies, plans and strategies. In this study, we operationalise the three frames of innovation by Schot and Steinmueller (2018) to investigate the positionality of urban Australian municipalities in their innovation trajectory. Through a discourse analysis exploring 116 policy documents across 101 urban Australian municipalities, we find that despite ambitious rhetoric around innovation and system change, there is little evidence of transformative innovation within the policy deliverables. This has significant repercussions on the feasibility of locally driven net zero transitions and the consistent championing of municipalities within the literature. We call for greater attention to municipalities within the transformative innovation literature and propose a capability uplift in the sector is required to facilitate locally driven net zero transitions.