Mobilizing Sustainability, Fixing Competitiveness: An examination of policy mobility Lux-embourg

The movement of policies across space, often referred to as policy mobility, has been a vibrant area of discussion in the geographical literature in recent years (c.f. McCann 2011; González 2010; Larner and Laurie 2010; Peck and Theodore 2010; Ward 2006; Peck 2002). In particular, scholars have brought forth geographical concepts of relationality and territoriality, along with post-structural accounts of the social construction of knowledge and power, to provide sophisticated and complex accounts of the spatial flows of urban policies and their contingent ‘local’ expressions. In the tradition of urban geography and analysis, mobility stories tend to come from paradigmatic cases, such as Barcelona, Vancouver, New York and others. This paper brings to this conversation a policy mobility story from the rather specific, non-paradigmatic case of Luxembourg.

In recent years Luxembourg’s welfare state has developed spatial development policies embedded in the rhetoric and practice of sustainability in an attempt to counteract the contradictions of the State’s rapid development. Much of this policy account emerged from the transfer of ideas and practices from neighboring countries and the European Union. While certainly similar to other new economy spaces in terms of tensions, Luxembourg’s unique system of governance and social and cultural context may yield new insights into the policy mobility literature. The paper thus seeks to contribute to the policy mobility literature by bringing into the fold a case study from a somewhat unique urban context, Luxembourg, concerning the under-explored area of policy mobility domain, urban sustainable development. We hypothesize that Luxembourg’s specific urban policy context could reveal limitations of current approaches. Further, by focusing on sustainability as a policy ‘fix’ for spatial planning, we expect to capture additional nuance of the politics of capital accumulation in a highly fragmented, increasingly relational urban and regional setting.