Climate partners of Helsinki: Participation-based structures and performance in a city-to-business network addressing climate change in 2011–2018

Highlights

• City-to-business networks (CBN) hold potential for climate governance collaboration.

• Network science combined with an index is used to analyse the performance of a CBN.

• The Climate Partners network manages to attract diverse companies.

• The Climate Partners network faces problems with engaging its members.

• Clarifying the goals and the rules could help with engagement and ambitiousness.

Abstract

Private actors are important for urban climate action, because the public sector can control the carbon footprint of a city only partly. Public-private partnerships have been created through different voluntary approaches, such as city-level voluntary networks for companies with the aim to engage private actors in climate change mitigation and to support learning processes by bringing different actors together. If these processes are to happen, network members should connect with each other through voluntary networking activities. These connections can be studied using methods from network science. As a case example, we study the event-participation-based structures of the Climate Partners network of the City of Helsinki between 2011 and 2018, and develop an index to measure whether active event participation by a company is associated with taking more ambitious mitigation measures. The results show that the network manages to bring together companies from different fields but has difficulties with engaging them and encouraging ambitious climate goals. Our results can help to further develop networking activities. The tools we develop and share allow the replication of the analysis for other data sets, offering a basis for a comparative analysis of different networks. This opens new horizons for studying public-private networking and its effects.