Urban policy and governance in a global environment: complex systems, scale mismatches and public participation

The urbanization process and urban activities generate environmental impacts both within and beyond city boundaries. Urban policy plays an important role in shaping and changing the regional and global linkages of cities. Integrating regional and global environmental concerns into urban policy and management practices remains a challenging issue because of the inherent temporal, spatial and institutional scale mismatch between urban policies and regional and global environmental issues. This paper argues that firstly, urban policy has increasing relevance to regional and global environmental issues, and a systems approach is essential in urban policy making to maximize co-benefit and negotiate trade-offs and secondly, although the current institutional settings in urban policy making are not necessarily best suited for managing these issues, enhanced governance processes such as increased public participation and networking and learning across cities can be effective.