Abstract/Summary

The green economy has been widely advocated by global policy frameworks as a promising concept for accelerating urban sustainability. Its applications and practices have been spatially connected to cities due to their roles and functions as hubs of people, resources, knowledge, and economic activity. This distinction for cities emphasises the importance of examining how cities can accelerate the transition to the green economy by clarifying what influences and inhibits change toward this goal, and what the interrelationship between the city contextual setting and the green economy applications might look and feel like. Thus, the quest to implement this change also needs to analyse and understand the city's physical and functional features as well as its broader socio-technical networks. However, in practice there is a huge gap between real-world practises and contemporary transition research analytical frameworks, which are dominated by ‘acontextual’ approaches and thus fail to represent cities' real-world spatial, functional, and physical challenges. Whilst the multi-level perspective (MLP) provides a useful framework for understanding socio-technical transitions, it falls far short as a means of providing a contextual approach for urban transitions. To address this, in this thesis a modified analytical framework that placed spatial dimensions that shape and influence cities at the heart of MLP was developed for better understanding real-world challenges. Based on an analysis of twenty-six (26) interviews, three (3) focus groups, and secondary sources, this framework is tested using Makkah city as a case study for empirical examination of the nature and characteristics of the national KSA green economy transition, thereby generating valuable insights and evidence that reflect the complexity and fragmented nature of urban transitions. Four overarching dimensions have been identified that affect and shape the city's spatial context and strengths its role in the MLP and socio-technical transitions: (i) city functions and activities, (ii) city spatial and physical features, (iii) local government arrangements, and (iv) local economic structures . This novel MLP spatial technique combined top-down and bottom-up spatial analysis approaches that helped find spatial variability in transition pathways and provided better understanding of how new networks, fluxes, and activities drive developing niches. Additionally, the MLP's analytical framework moves from a descriptive study of the transition to pragmatic, practice-led spatial analysis that better explains city progress, disparities, successes and failures in urban systems reconfiguration as well as change in the built environment. This spatial MLP framework empirically shows that the original three MLP lenses, though useful, cannot provide a complete, detailed, and clear picture of social and technical urban transitions in the real city context and that explicitly including spatial dimensions analysis was a crucial step to understanding and interpreting functional and physical spatial forces and their impact on the city's socio-technical transition to sustainability. However, the findings suggest that unless the city’s existing multi-segmented regimes that drive urban action are re-configured in line with systematic and long-term characteristics of a green economic transition, then progress will be slow and may be limited. It further suggests that top-down ‘green innovation’ and bottom-up ‘project-based approach’ alone will not be enough to accelerate the green economic transition. Thus, future research and policies should focus intensively on destabilizing and unifying the city's existing fragmented regimes, including the integration, replication and expansion of successful experimental initiatives. Furthermore, consistency in both policy and practice is needed across scales and levels. To this end, there is a need for indicators or assessment tools, new business models, capacity buildings and better-integrated leadership at the city level.