Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Cities journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cities Transformative agency in co-producing sustainable development in the urban south Wikke Novalia a, ⁎ , Briony C. Rogers a,b , Joannette J. Bos b , Rebekah R. Brown c , Eddy S. Soedjono d , Vanessa Copa a a School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Monash University, Melbourne 3800, Australia b Monash Sustainable Development Institute, Monash University, Melbourne 3800, Australia c Monash University, Melbourne 3800, Australia d Department of Environmental Engineering, Sepuluh Nopember Institute of Technology, Surabaya, Indonesia ARTICLEINFO Keywords: Transformative agency Urban transitions Co-production Governance Sustainable development Developing context ABSTRACT The role of transformative agency in facilitating urban transitions has received significant attention in the lit- erature given a growing interest in how cities may provide leaderships for realising sustainable development. Existing debate on the co-productive aspect of transformative agency tends to emphasise the progressive role of non-stateactorsinmobilisingurbanreformagendasbuthashadlittlefocusontheprogressiveformofagencyby local state actors. To advance this debate, our paper draws on existing conceptualisations of transformative capacity in the sustainability literature, which accentuates the plurality of agency. Rather than distinguishing agency narrowly in terms of a particular type of struggle outside the =regime, our paper utilises a practice perspective to examine the mixture of strategies employed by various urban actors. Our paper takes this ex- panded view of transformative agency to study over three-decade of relatively successful green transformations in Surabaya, Indonesia. This reveals how different actors executed confrontative and co-operative strategies to generate socio-political momentum across the city. We argue that our expanded view of transformative agency canclarifythevariationofurbanmovementsintheglobalsouth,whichco-producesgovernanceinnovationsand supports long-term societal changes needed to facilitate transitions. 1. Introduction As the world becomes more urban, the challenge of developing sustainably as a global collective is greatly determined by how cities can robustly cope with changing socio-environmental pressures by transforming existing urban infrastructures and planning practices. This challenge is even more pronounced in developing regions, particularly in Asia and Africa, wherein an estimated 90% of the additional urban population will be concentrated by 2050 (UNDESA, 2014). Yet, there remain starkly limited contributions from urban research in developing contexts within mainstream urban science literature (Nagendra, Bai, Brondizio, & Lwasa, 2018). Nagendra et al. (2018, pp. 346–7) contend that this gap has important practical and theoretical implications such as the ‘lost opportunity to inform urban practices in the global south’ and the weakened ‘ability of existing research to provide a compre- hensive picture of urban sustainability’. Within prominent urban planning literature, (Watson, 2009a, 2009b)has remarked on the proliferation of traditional planning paradigms, such as master planning, land use zoning, and modernist spatial logics—transplanted from the north across cities in the global south, from Africa, South America, to Asia. This is despite growing evidences of failures of those approaches in meeting particular societal needs and addressing actual governance and political conditions shaping cities in the south. Similarly, Parnell and Robinson (2012, p. 596) argue that critical perspective on urban neoliberalism, a main- stream theory derived primarily from northern urban studies, is utilised to ‘interpret contexts in which the associated processes are less im- portant, where they can be understood only alongside other drivers of change, or where they do not apply at all’. On the one hand, main- streamtheoriesappeartobeill-suitedforprobingintothediverserange of ‘potentially developmental, even progressive’ kind of local state agency that may be relevant and critical in the global south contexts (Parnell & Robinson, 2012, p. 594). On the other, a consistent view has emerged and is shared by scholars who studied the global south con- texts (Friendly & Stiphany, 2018; Kooy, 2014; Roy, 2009a; Watson, 2016, 2009a) that urban research needs to pay a greater and overdue https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2020.102747 Received 1 February 2019; Received in revised form 15 March 2020; Accepted 21 April 2020 ⁎ Corresponding author at: 8 Scenic Boulevard Clayton Campus, Clayton 3800, VIC, Australia. E-mail address: wikke.novalia@monash.edu (W. Novalia). Cities 102 (2020) 102747 Available online 06 May 2020 0264-2751/ © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T