Diagnosing strategic influences of different agents in governing transition towards green city in Surabaya, Indonesia

A paradigm shift towards promoting urban sustainability can be noted in the ubiquity of eco-city concepts and practice since beginning of the 21 st century. To intervene in such transition, mainstream scholars have generally focused on recommending 'new patterns of governance' that facilitate wider engagements and collective learning. Such pluralist turn has promoted a plethora of participatory and collaborative arrangements into, some would argue, a panacea. Despite proliferation of urban best practices and governance concepts, to date, there is limited understanding on how different agents can strategically influence decisions and investments towards wider adoption of novel solutions. With regards to developing urban contexts, recent debate increasingly questions whether the lagging formation of conventional regimes might mean that those cities are better placed to accelerate adoption of sustainable solutions. Against this background, this paper aims to provide empirical insights into the strategic influences of different agents in governing transition towards green city in Surabaya. In recent years, Surabaya's success has garnered substantial national and international recognitions. Strategic agency is diagnosed through practice and institutional perspectives operationalised as the capability to respond to relevant institutional contexts with a range of institutional works that are fine-tuned and combined into coherent practice sequences. This theoretical underpinning allows agency to be examined as the exercise of power coupled with reflexivity. A qualitative case study was conducted to construct a chronology of the green transition over the past five-decade. Data used consist of in-depth interviews with 21 research participants-including present day and former mayors, key government officials, technical and policy advocates, community leader, media partners, and NGO representatives-triangulated with content analysis of policy and regulatory documents, media reports, relevant books, and scientific literatures. This study confirms the interrelated nature of actor-networks and governance levels (from bottom-up local initiatives to state-sanctioned programs), strategically set up to steer collective actions for addressing environmental quality degradations throughout history. Political elites exerted authoritative power to creatively respond and shape 'episodes of disruption' (e.g. waste crisis, political unrests, and nationally-imposed targets). Other strategic capabilities displayed by non-state actors, such as, science networks, grass-root leaders, interest groups, and opinion makers are also elucidated. These findings suggest that governance interventions need to be specifically tailored around such 'episodes' and geared towards modifying and diversifying the field of interaction among agents. As such, this paper contributes to advancing the debate on agency in contemporary literatures by clarifying context-specific effectiveness of different agents in influencing urban transition outcomes in Surabaya.