Climate competitiveness through collaboration between municipalities and businesses

In 2023, Viable Cities initiated a study of the various ways in which municipalities are already collaborating with businesses to address climate change. An important aim of this work was to disseminate good examples, not only within the programme but to all Swedish municipalities, as part of Viable Cities' scaling efforts to achieve its mission of climate-neutral cities with a good life for all within the planet's limits. This report describes how the study was conducted, presents the results, and discusses possible areas for development and future studies. The work was mainly carried out in collaboration between the Viable Cities programme management, the cities within the Climate Neutral Cities 2030 programme, the Climate Municipalities(1) ,the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SKR(2) )and the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth(3) . The results show that the collaboration can be grouped into three different types of areas of focus: industry- specific initiatives (e.g. energy, transport and tourism), general business initiatives (e.g. establishment, skills supply and industrial symbiosis) and innovation collaboration (e.g. collaboration with science parks and incubators). The initiatives range from individual innovation projects to more long-term and systematic initiatives based on strategic decisions. Perhaps the most important finding from this study is that it shows both a high prevalence and breadth in terms of types of climate collaboration between municipalities and businesses, and that it indicates that there is considerable variation between cities, which opens up opportunities for learning. The results also indicate that collaboration takes place between companies and many different parts of the municipality's activities, which probably makes it difficult for a single unit or individual to have a coherent picture of all the collaboration that is taking place. Together, this indicates a need to develop support at various levels (municipal, regional, national, international) in order to create more coherent and transformative initiatives that address both the opportunities and risks of the green transition. An important part of this work is to co-create with business actors.