Applied frameworks develop the Shared Agendas approach in specific fields, providing structured ways to understand complex challenges, identify the relationships and dynamics shaping them, and organise action around a direction of change.
Each framework combines a direction of change with an analytical structure that represents the main elements and relationships shaping the field. This structure is developed through a system map that provides a common reference for exploring system conditions, dependencies, dynamics and possible configurations of change. It can then be used to support systemic diagnosis, the development of portfolios of action, monitoring and collective interpretation over time.
The frameworks are also being developed in digital form. Their underlying structures can be used to connect evidence, developments, initiatives and place-based processes, enabling users to explore relationships, identify patterns and interpret how conditions are evolving across contexts. This creates the basis for increasingly dynamic and AI-supported forms of sense-making while keeping the analytical structure explicit.
Living Cities and Territories is the first framework published in this collection. It provides an operational framework for resilient and regenerative transformation of urban-territorial systems.
New applied frameworks will be added shortly, including work on planetary health, bioeconomy, agrifood systems and systemic investment.
An operational framework for resilient and regenerative transformation of urban-territorial systems
Living Cities and Territories approaches cities and territories as interconnected socio-ecological systems, where urban resilience depends on the relationships between people, the economy, nature and the wider territories and bioregions in which cities are embedded.
The framework provides a shared direction for resilient and regenerative transformation, organised around six principles and four systemic portfolios of action. It relates these principles and portfolios to the conditions and dynamics shaping urban-territorial change, and to monitoring approaches that help interpret how transformation unfolds over time.
It is designed to support place-based work while providing a common structure that can be adapted across different territorial contexts and connected to wider Shared Agenda processes.
Structural conditions and governance requirements for sustaining Shared Agendas
Organising collective action for systemic change under conditions of uncertainty, interdependence and distributed responsibility places demands that expose structural constraints in existing organisational and institutional arrangements. Sustaining Shared Agendas over time brings these constraints into focus.
Experience from place-based collective processes for systemic change shows that difficulties in maintaining coordination, connecting learning to decision-making, and holding shared direction are present from the outset and intensify as initiatives and actors multiply over time.
This document examines how these challenges arise in practice and identifies the key governance tensions and infrastructural requirements for sustaining Shared Agendas over time.
