New Approaches to Steer Sustainability Transitions Within Service Ecosystems in the Context of Municipalities

This chapter highlights the active role of municipalities in sustainability transitions. It adopts a service-ecosystems view in the public management domain to identify the systemic nature of impact and the dynamic role of the different actors in resource integration for increasing environmental, economic, cultural and social sustainability. It offers a new approach to steer the mindset change, give the direction and capture the long-term impacts of value co-creation, and systematically examine the interactions and dimensions of value at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels in municipalities. The aim is to offer a more balanced and comprehensive picture of the dynamics of the municipal service systems to help identify predictable patterns for positive leverage points, and steer value co-creation in the complex systems towards positive sustainability impacts in the long-term. As a case-study with a design science approach, we co-created a framework with a Finnish municipality where the approach has been operationalized as part of strategy reorganization process. The outcome is a holistic and systemic framework that looks at the societal impacts in parallel with the techno-economic impacts, while unfolding the impacts on six dimensions: the residents, community, society, reputation, infrastructure and financial resources.