Environmental and climate change governance integration into municipal development process: Aggregation approach for governance process stages

The environmental governance sector is nowadays the mandatory, but integrative applicable subject of municipal development governance content and process, including planning documents and their practices, but, certainly, to be done in close interconnection with the other main dimensions of sustainable development – economic and social dimensions, as well as importantly, the governance dimension. Valmiera city as one of the leading proenvironmental municipalities in Latvia was selected as a pilot territory within the Environmental and Sustainable Development Governance project (SUSTINNO) of the National Research Grant Programme, in order to study the environmental governance strength and challenges into their both complementary general application formats: governance sector and integration approaches, and, eventually designing and implementing some innovative but pragmatically based mixed/hybrid applications. The environmental governance sector (branch), as a multidisciplinary sector itself, including internal interdisciplinarity, has continuously and substantially evolved to study and manage the socio-ecological system in their interactive diversity. Valmiera city municipality has made clear and recognizable progress in complex implementation of the environmental governance in its territory by adopting and step-wise implementing environmental planning elements and management practices. Studies were realized in cooperation with municipality applying research-and-development framework approach and using case study research integrative methodology, complementary including document studies, household questionnaires and all main stakeholders deep semi-structured interviews, altogether. There have been designed and partially tested set of action policy proposals/instruments for systemic environmental governance process and its stages development for Valmiera city, what also could be eventually recommended for municipal environmental governance stages in general in Latvia.