Metropolitan governance in action? Learning from metropolitan Melbourne’s urban forest strategy

ABSTRACT One of the central, flagship actions of the Resilient Melbourne Strategy has been the development of a metropolitan urban forest strategy, called ‘Living Melbourne’. Its explicitly metropolitan scope has been one of the distinct features of Resilient Melbourne, established through the global city network 100 Resilient Cities, pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation. It is an Australian first – a metropolitan strategy galvanising support for a unified vision for urban greening across the plethora of local governments, state government, water authorities, statutory planning agencies as well as various non-governmental organisations. This policy commentary interrogates and reflects on the development of this strategy in-the-making as an instance of metropolitan governance in action. Rather than being subjected to the paralysing partisan politics of formalised metropolitan governance, it casts metropolitan governance in Melbourne into a new perspective that is driven and framed as a thematically led initiative around urban-greening and nature-based solutions. In particular, the commentary will focus on the question of agency and policy innovation in metropolitan governance through examining policy levers of a thematically led initiative of ‘Living Melbourne’, the activation and collaboration in global city networks and the valorisation of knowledge-driven alliances locally and globally.