Includes bibliographical references and index.

Rethinking hierarchy in sustainability governance. A literature review / Philippe Hamman -- Toward systematic understandings of sustainability governance. A conceptual meta-framework / Basil Bornemann, Philipp Lange and Paul Burger -- Why does promoting energy efficiency not contradict the paradigm of sustainability? A normative approach using the Pareto criterion / Bianca Blum, Bernhard NeumaÌrker and Anja Simoneit -- Urban planning and adaptation to climate change: a legal perspective / Vincent Tissot and Marie-Pierre Camproux-duffreÌne -- Sustainabilizing the government machinery? Exploring sustainability-oriented transformations of internal governance in Swiss cantons / Basil Bornemann and Marius Christen -- (Self-)governing urban energy transitions: from revolution to evolution? / Jens Koehrsen -- Governance for sufficiency: a new approach to a contested field / Paul Burger, Iljana Schubert and Annika Sohre -- Governance of urban metabolism: when a system creates its own limitations / Maurice Wintz -- Urban sustainability governance and social transactions in France: a social sciences perspective / Philippe Hamman -- For a new conception of the metropolis. The "Danube" eco-district in Strasbourg as a new model for urban governance and an experiment in local democracy / Patricia Zander -- Governance for sustainability in European cities / Cristina Garzillo and Matthew Bach

"This book provides a solid, theoretically and empirically grounded reflection on the concept of "sustainability governance", whose growing popularity in social science literature, as well as among decision-makers and governance actors, may seem intriguing, all the more so as it articulates together two vast fields of study that have sometimes been dismissed as vague or ideologically loaded. In order to think together the concepts of "sustainability" and "governance", the book is organized around the exploration of hierarchy issues, which often lie in the background of the existing literature but are not the focus of analysis. To fill this gap, the contributors are interested in the interactions between different scales and the way the issues are territorialized, from a conceptual or a methodological point of view, and considering ongoing practical experiments, connected by a trans-disciplinary questioning. From this it appears that real-world governance modes can often best be understood as combinations of hierarchical and non-hierarchical approaches to sustainability governance, and as permanent transactional processes between institutional regulations and social linkages. This book will be of interest to advanced students and scholars focusing on governance issues, sustainability studies, environmental studies, as well as on the methodological aspects of the social sciences (economy, geography, law, philosophy, political science, sociology, urbanism and planning)"--