Navigating urban sustainability: The role of contextual factors and transformative capacities

Cities are central to global sustainability goals, yet evidence on urban transitions skews towards Western democracies. This paper addresses that gap by examining how context shapes urban transformative capacity in Baku, Azerbaijan, a city with a deep oil legacy and centralised governance. Methods comprise a qualitative case study built on thirty-five semi-structured interviews conducted in 2022 with government, civil society, business, academic, and student actors, alongside documentary analysis. The study traces how forms of agency, core development processes, and cross-scale relationships develop together in the urban energy domain. Findings show that long-standing dependence on oil anchors governance norms and public imaginaries, which limits empowered communities and genuinely disruptive experimentation. International drivers, including the Paris climate commitment and the 2015 oil price shock, opened windows for reform and led to new agencies, laws, and pilot projects. Change, however, remains largely top-down. Participation is curated by state institutions, cross-agency coordination is weak, and reflexivity and social learning are limited. Intermediary organisations and international collaborations catalyse activity, but their efforts rarely become routine practice or broaden community autonomy. Empirically, the paper offers among the first systematic assessments of urban transformative capacity in a post-Soviet city. Conceptually, it shows how political regimes and historical legacies shape the link between experimentation, learning, and policy embedding. Practically, it identifies priorities for durable and inclusive transitions: widen civic space and support communities of practice, institutionalise cross-scale coordination and evaluation, align external pressures with domestic enablers, and invest in participatory foresight and locally rooted experimentation. These steps can turn symbolic progress into structural change in Baku and in comparable resource-dependent cities.