Working in networks is widely promoted in public policy, urban innovation, and climate action – but too often, they create more meetings than results and more expectations than impact. NetZeroCities partners at the Technical University of Madrid offer a method to rethink how to get the most from networks. In highly complex environments, real innovation is not about doing more, but about working together better. But why do networks – a necessity for urban transformation – sometimes fail? Building a network is not just about adding people or organisations or even making sure they talk to each other. It’s a [...]

Funding for cities is changing while their responsibilities are increasing – but to shape this change, cities must take part in the process now, says Natalia Lewandowska from NetZeroCities’ partners ICLEI Europe. Recent experience in Poland can show them how.  As the European Union moves closer to defining its next long-term budget one thing is becoming clear: the rules of the game are changing. For cities where climate action is implemented, tested, and scaled, the coming years will require not only new projects, but a fundamentally new mindset around funding.  Against this backdrop, a Better Funding Dialogue (BFD) in Poland offered a structured process to help cities, ministries, [...]

Working within the EU Cities Mission requires both operations and innovation – but teams can get stuck on only one and miss the complementary benefits of the other. To help them overcome this familiar problem, NetZeroCities partners from the Technical University of Madrid introduce a method to examine and redirect their activities. During a rainy spring in Spain in 2025, players from central and city government, business, academia and other institutions were coming together to advance an ambitious goal and speed up building renovations on a large scale. But they met a familiar constraint: responsibilities and [...]

Research increasingly shows that energy and resource efficiency and technological innovation alone cannot solve our climate and environmental crises. Major actors like the IPCC and the EU Horizon Programme are therefore turning their eyes towards how resource demand can be reduced, while ensuring that everyone’s needs are met. A new NetZeroCities report by partner Demos Helsinki takes a deeper look at what sufficiency policy could mean for cities, especially when it comes to housing, mobility and food.   ‘Sufficiency’ has gained attention in recent years as a way of decreasing emissions and reducing environmental footprints while securing sustainable wellbeing for all.   A key takeaway of our report is that sufficiency offers cities a necessary complement to efficiency and technological innovation. Adopting sufficiency principles can guide cities to design fair and effective [...]