Sweden expands city climate coalition beyond pilot group
Viable Cities opens new call to expand beyond its 48-city Climate Neutral Cities 2030 initiative. The expansion tests whether collaborative governance models can scale — a recurring question in transition practice.
Viable Cities, Sweden’s network for urban climate transition, has opened a new funding call to expand beyond its current cohort of 48 cities working toward climate neutrality by 2030. The expansion tests a familiar tension in governance innovation: whether collaborative models developed with early adopters can maintain their transformative potential at scale.
Program director Olga Kordas frames the expansion around collective capacity — “the power of many” — suggesting the network sees value not just in replicating tools but in expanding the community of practice itself. This reflects a broader shift in climate governance from showcase projects to systemic change attempts, where the social infrastructure of transition matters as much as the technical roadmaps.
The call represents what might be called governance through accretion: building change capacity by inviting more municipalities into an established practice space rather than designing new programs from scratch. Whether this approach can preserve the depth of engagement that smaller networks afford — or whether it becomes diluted coordination — remains an open question. Sweden’s municipal structure, with significant local autonomy and relatively strong civic capacity, provides particular conditions for this experiment.