The urban governance configuration: A conceptual framework for understanding complexity and enhancing transitions to greater sustainability in cities

This article proposes a conceptual framework for analysing and comparing urban governance configurations and their dynamics in the context of sustainability transitions. Our contribution to the debates consists of drawing on a literature review to develop a conceptual framework with the dimensions necessary for understanding urban governance processes and their dynamics; an urban governance configuration framework. We argue that this framework allows us to combine important dimensions (discourses, actor networks, knowledge and material processes) shaping urban development decision‐making and outcomes in their social, economic and environmental domains, in a complex world. The main advantages of this approach are: first, it enables the analysis how complex decision‐making is combined in a particular time and space, generating decisions and outcomes based on a variety of knowledge; second, it allows a comparative analysis of governance configurations across different places within the same city and between cities; and third, provides lessons on how urban governance could shift to more inclusive, sustainable forms of urban development.