Democratic discrepancies in urban sustainable development

Abstract Cities are critical for achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Their urban sustainable development (USD) plans and policies cover a wide range of issues, such as biodiversity protection, transportation or poverty reduction. Yet, such policy-making may lack democratic legitimacy if these policies are out of step with the demands and concerns of residents. Considering this, the present study compares residents’ preferences about USD policy issues with the priorities set out in existing USD policy plans. We scrutinized the preferences of 5,800 residents across eight European cities through the application of survey experiments and simultaneously examined 166 existing USD policy plans from these cities and compared them with the survey results. Our findings indicate an on average high acceptance of USD (72.61%) but with substantial democratic discrepancies: while USD policy plans predominantly prioritize issues, such as biodiversity, education and transportation, residents expressed preferences for issues linked to their essential and everyday needs, such as cost of living, public health and poverty. These democratic discrepancies between residents’ priorities and the content of USD policy plans highlight the necessity of securing basic human needs as integral aspects of USD to foster a more profound and democratically supported urban socio-ecological sustainability transformation.