Abstract
Local urban governments struggle to approach environmental goals in the global climate crisis. An understanding on the necessitiy to increase fair citizen engagement in governmental sustainability initiatives has become fundamental, the challenge emerge on how processes can become resilient beyond specific project initiatives. The concept of infrastructruring, here understood as a situated effort to hold together socio-material constellations that enable certain ways of acting, provides a foundation for long-term interaction between the public sector and citizens. But as the participatory design community is strong on providing ”points of entry” for citizen participation it remains less clear how one cares for nursing relations after projects end. Analyzing an ongoing case of a municipality’s efforts to engage citizens in sustainable co-creation towards climate transition. We introduce ”points of exit” as an analytical concept and how the concept of ”aligning actants” is relevant for participatory design, policy development and governance models.
Keywords
Sustainability, Design, Politics, Governance
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1868
Citation
Smedberg, A., Linde, P., Melin, A., and Nordqvist, J. (2026) Public sector’s climate commoning and infrastructural care, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1868
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Public sector’s climate commoning and infrastructural care
Local urban governments struggle to approach environmental goals in the global climate crisis. An understanding on the necessitiy to increase fair citizen engagement in governmental sustainability initiatives has become fundamental, the challenge emerge on how processes can become resilient beyond specific project initiatives. The concept of infrastructruring, here understood as a situated effort to hold together socio-material constellations that enable certain ways of acting, provides a foundation for long-term interaction between the public sector and citizens. But as the participatory design community is strong on providing ”points of entry” for citizen participation it remains less clear how one cares for nursing relations after projects end. Analyzing an ongoing case of a municipality’s efforts to engage citizens in sustainable co-creation towards climate transition. We introduce ”points of exit” as an analytical concept and how the concept of ”aligning actants” is relevant for participatory design, policy development and governance models.