The Bristol Green Capital Partnership: An exemplar of reflexive governance for sustainable urban development?

The theory of ‘reflexive governance’ prioritises process over outcomes and advocates participatory procedures, valorising multiple sources of knowledge, mutual learning and continuous evolution of organisational forms. Through the lens of reflexive governance, we explore the evolution of Bristol Green Capital Partnership, which, since 2008, has played a pivotal role in animating the environmental debate within Bristol, especially in the European Green Capital programme (2015). We conclude that the BGCP represents a ‘bounded’ example of reflexive governance, one that exhibits advanced forms of deliberation and coproduction but, ultimately, addresses too narrow a constituency of environmental, business and green activist interests.