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Purpose – The aim of this chapter is to review the relationship of urban climate governance against the background of sustainability and to identify driving forces in a set of leading cities in the United States and Europe.

Design/methodology/approach – Case-study research indicates that efficient, creative and participatory urban governance is key for the quest for sustainability. It is theorized that dynamic governance is composed of high levels of both institutional and social capital or capacity. Each capacity category is composed of different indicators or ‘success factors’ taken from qualitative data in overall 84 cities in the United States and Europe. By triangulating desktop research, mail surveys and review of existing studies, the role and influence of these success factors is evaluated and compared.

Findings – In both the United States and in Europe, the key driving forces are those related to institutional capacity. Yet, cities tend to be more successful in sustainable development if levels of institutional and social capacity are high. Linkages between institutional and social dimensions can be successfully strengthened by capacity building measures.

Research limitations/implications – As the comparison is based on existing studies on leading cities in sustainability, driving factors likely to play a stronger role in the early phase of urban sustainability measures are underrepresented.

Practical implications – Local authorities are advised to encourage social capacities in order to help them pursue local sustainability over time.

Originality/value – This chapter compares and evaluates underlying success factors going beyond a case-study approach across the Atlantic in order to draw broader conclusions.

To meet the rising global needs, the humanitarian community has signed off on making a strategic change toward more localisation, which commonly refers to the empowerment of national and local actors in humanitarian assistance. However, to this date, actual initiatives for localisation are rare. To enhance understanding of the phenomenon, the authors explore localisation of logistics preparedness capacities and obstacles to its implementation. The authors particularly take the perspective of the international humanitarian organisation (IHO) community as they are expected to implement the localisation strategy.

A phenomenon-driven, exploratory and qualitative study was conducted. Data collection included in-depth interviews with 28 experienced humanitarian professionals.

The findings showed the ambiguity inherent in the localisation strategy with largely different views on four important dimensions. Particularly, the interviewees differ about strengthening external actors or internal national/local offices. The resulting framework visualises the gap between strategy formulation and implementation, which forms major obstacles to the localisation aims.

Further research is required to support the advancement of localisation of logistics preparedness capacities. Important aspects for future research include triangulation of results, other stakeholder perspectives and the influence of context.

The authors add to the important debate surrounding localisation by offering remedies to overcoming obstacles to strategy implementation. Further, the authors’ proposed framework offers a language to precisely describe the ways in which IHOs (should) view localisation of logistics preparedness capacities and its operationalisation.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first academic article on localisation within the humanitarian logistics context.

The focus of this article is to examine the relationship between local economic growth and development and local government revenue capacity. A model is established to determine the relationship between the number of agricultural, manufacturing, service, and retail establishments per capita and employees per capita on real local government property tax capacity per capita. High property tax levies are highly negatively correlated with tax capacity. Population density, the general price level, and the presence of local retail sales taxes also play a role in determining tax capacity. New business creation in the service industry does appear to have a positive impact on local government tax capacity, while increases in agricultural, manufacturing, and retail activity do not. Although increasing concentration in the number of service establishments has a positive impact on tax capacity, increasing concentration in the number of service workers alone does not seem to lead to increases in tax capacity.

The aim of administrative reform— a special public policy instrument of governments— is to improve the capacity of public service delivery systems. This study examines the reform-led service delivery situation of public institutions at the local level in South Asia. The study offers an in-depth qualitative study with gleaned data, focusing on primary education in the country in relation to MDGs basic education. Local administration in the country has been a ‘low modicum of self-governance to provide public services. Institutional capacity dealing with educational management has called into question. Primary education in the country is quantitatively discussed while qualitatively is in a state of disarray. As a thorough academic qualitative study with a country-specific case has by far not been explored yet, it fills the information gap. Little is known about the public service delivery capacity with primary education at the local level. This study implicates governments and development partners such as the UN SDGs for effective partnership in development in an era of post-CVID-19 crisis.

Ambitious though it is to summarise the richness of experiences emerging from the country chapters in a few lines, in this concluding chapter we attempt a short synthesis and interpretation, searching for different approaches to resilience and the underlying contextual and organisational explanatory variables. In doing so, we summarise what we have learned about the financial resilience of local governments across 11 countries and discuss possible developments and future research avenues.

While the financial crisis – in some way – impacted most of the countries included in this book, the effects on local governments were not uniform, with some being affected immediately and/or more substantially than others, partly due to the proximity of the crisis, the natural effects of pre-existing fiscal profiles and intergovernmental relations or national coping policies.

The analysis conducted across the 45 local shows that resilience can take different forms, but that important commonalities can be identified across countries. This reveals that there is no one single approach to resilience and that organisations have the choice, based on their latent capacities and how they perceive their vulnerability in the face of a crisis, over which pathway they follow.

The different patterns of financial resilience that emerge can be interpreted as the result of the dynamic interplay among the dimensions of anticipatory capacity, coping capacity and financial shocks, as well as a local government’s associated vulnerability to them.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and empirically test a theoretical framework examining how local network ties and global network ties affect firms’ innovation performance via their absorptive capacities.

The conceptual framework is empirically tested in a field study with multi-source data collected from a sample of 297 manufacturing firms located in four. Manufacturing clusters in the south-eastern Yangtze River Delta of China. Hypotheses were tested with the use of path analysis with maximum likelihood robust estimates through the structural equation modelling approach.

The asymmetry between local network ties (LNT) and global network ties (GNT) in terms of influences on firms’ innovation performance is confirmed by empirical tests. LNT not only significantly and positively contribute to firms’ innovation performance directly but also enhance it indirectly via absorptive capability, whereas GNT exhibit only marginal influence on innovation performance. GNT are shown to boost innovation performance (IP) only indirectly via firms’ absorptive capacities. Knowledge heterogeneity and the difference between domestic and multinational firms’ institutional environment are considered to be the main causes of the asymmetric effects.

While the previous literature either focused on the mediating role of firms’ knowledge absorptive capacities or investigated the effects of social networks separately, this study incorporates both mechanisms into a single analytical framework to better account for the interactions between network effects and absorptive capacities. The results challenge some previous studies positing that GNT are stronger determinants than LNT in shaping a local firm’s innovation capacity in emerging economies, and the findings emphasize the importance of absorptive capacity in helping local enterprises to leverage external linkages to enhance firm’s innovation performance.

Achieving localisation (the transfer of control to local actors) has proven extremely challenging in the development sector, and the humanitarian sector appears to be facing equal challenges. This chapter seeks to engage with that struggle and examine why this lesson has been so difficult to learn. Drawing on conference workshops and 10 key informant interviews, this paper examines the obstacles and opportunities for localisation, seeking to understand what makes it so hard for those who hold disproportionate power in humanitarian encounters to hand over power. The authors found a clear sense of localisation being a process rather than an outcome; optimism that momentum is slowly gathering towards this process, and a clear sense of the steps required to fully achieve it. Examining practitioners’ perspectives in this way adds an important voice to discussions of humanitarian practice.

This study aims to focus on dual embeddedness as an important channel through which foreign subsidiaries access and share valuable and idiosyncratic knowledge within the multinational corporation (MNC). The authors examine the dual embeddedness challenges of foreign subsidiaries based in the context of Iran as a transitional market.

The final sample includes 144 active foreign subsidiaries in Iran from across a broad range of industries. A structured questionnaire was distributed to firms and structural equation modeling was adopted to analyze the results.

The findings reveal how building external embeddedness in an environment with potentially poor access to valuable knowledge, and risk of knowledge leakage impacts the subsidiary’s ability to subsequently transfer this knowledge within the MNC. The authors identify the significance of absorptive capacity as a way for the subsidiary to access knowledge from and share knowledge with firms in the local market.

Departing from existing work on subsidiary embeddedness in developed markets, the authors reveal how competence creating subsidiaries manage dual embeddedness and knowledge transfer in transition economies that are low in knowledge stocks. The authors unpack how subsidiary absorptive capacity enables access to local knowledge in a transitional market and increases reverse knowledge transfer in the MNC. In doing so, the authors answer calls for work on the dynamic and complementary relationships that exists between subsidiary dual embeddedness, absorptive capacity and knowledge sourcing in less open markets. Focusing on Iran as a transitional economy, this study provides greater contextual nuance to the extant literature on subsidiary dual embeddedness.

This paper aims to understand how international interorganizational relationships (IORs) impact the organizational creativity of a local partner in an emerging country, and how the creative capacities of emerging countries firms are developing.

The study is exploratory and qualitative, based on five IORs between European multinational corporations (MNCs) and Tunisian firms operating in the consumer goods sector analyzed using the Gioia method.

The results show that it seems necessary for firms in emerging countries first to be legitimate, then to have dynamic capacities (learning capacities in particular), and that they know how to develop an innovation strategy and implement it concretely. The authors highlight three different organizational mechanisms. The first concerns analyzing the legitimacy of the local partner to engage in an innovation process based on its distinctive capacities and formalization of procedures. The second involves building dynamic capabilities, especially technological and managerial skills, in order to meet the challenges of the growing collaboration between the partners and to expand their mandate. The third deals with implementing an innovation strategy on two fronts: trust between partners and sustainable innovation.

The contributions focus on the international dimension of the IORs' impact on creativity and the role of the local partner's creative capacities. The work highlights to what extent “techno-centric” creativity plays a role in the absorption capacity of local partners, as well as the level of assistance provided by MNCs for developing innovation in emerging countries' firms. Moreover, our results show that increasing awareness of ecological and responsible consumption is reorienting production patterns on both local and global scales and offers many benefits for local and multinational firms. The limitations concern the sample size, the narrow diversity of the sector and the lack of information regarding multinational firms.

The originality of this paper is to show the construction of the creative process at the level of the local partner, from the execution of a specification to the implementation of a sustainable innovation strategy.