Sustainability Governance in the City of Tallinn

Since change is ultimately about people, Tallinn is involving its HR department to drive the cultural change at city level, putting people at the centre of the process. Both internal and external stakeholders are to be involved through inter-departmental cooperation and participatory processes and will be invited to co-create a green, sustainable city.

A more active involvement of the private sector, green public procurement and a closer, more formalised collaboration with the national level have been brought forward as potential levers to ensure long-term policy implementation and enforce policies beyond election cycles.

The peers underlined that targeted communication plays a vital role and underlined the importance of better understanding the needs and powers of different stakeholder groups. As a starting point, the experts suggested defining WHY Tallinn is engaging in the change process and what are the specific benefits for the city, for each sector, and the different stakeholders, and what SDGs mean in each context.

Closer cooperation with the communication department could help to shape communication tools and channels that engage internal and external audiences. Tallinn would benefit from a common narrative and storytelling to make overarching policy aims more tangible and accessible for citizens and the administration alike.

In addition to the strategic framework in place, Tallinn could ‘bridge the action gap’ by developing a rolling action plan that combines short-term and long-term actions. The peer experts provided many examples for pilot actions that would also allow to try out innovative formats e.g., increasing the participatory green budgeting from 1 million EUR upwards; sharing economy projects that are easy to implement; biodiversity measures that are properly communicated, and last but not least, leading by example with specific projects for the administration, such as employee sustainable mobility schemes.