Roles of cities and governance in sustainability transitions: Challenges in leadership

This chapter summarizes the important findings of the previous chapters and identifies the different challenges in leadership roles of cities with regard to enhancing sustainability transitions. Accordingly, the discussion focuses on challenges in responding to favourable localized assets that are inherited, from nature or from past developments, and challenges in active city policies that connect and enhance seedbed functions, cluster formation/strengthening and bottom-up initiatives. Specific attention is given to the key condition of attracting and retaining talent, in other words a highly skilled and diverse workforce. The chapter closes with a discussion of factors that will enhance city leadership (in the future) and indicates a few important directions of future research.