On April 13, 2023, the 40th lecture of the Fudan-LSE Lecture Series was held in the conference room on the 8th floor of the West Sub-Building of Guanghua Towers. Professor Jose A. Puppim de Oliveira, a professor from FGV and a Fudan Chair Professor, gave a lecture on "The Dynamics of Innovation in Local Governments". The lecture was hosted by Professor Yijia Jing, Dean of the Institute for Global Public Policy, Fudan University. Associate Professor Yitian Huang from School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University served as the discussant.

At the beginning of the lecture, Prof. Jing briefly introduced Prof. Jose A. Puppim, expressed sincere welcome to his visit to IGPP, and presented an appointment letter of Fudan Chair Professor. Prof. Jose A. Puppim has extensive teaching and research experience in the areas of urban planning, management and global climate change. He has worked in research and policy consulting in more than 20 countries and has served as lecturer, consultant and researcher for UN agencies, the OECD, the World Bank, national and subnational governments, various NGOs and large and small companies.

Prof. Jose A. Puppim started the lecture by discussing issues such as climate change, global food and energy crisis. He argued that these challenges are global and interconnected, which requires stronger support and more innovative initiatives to address. Local governments in this process should be identified as key stakeholders in leveraging collaborative initiatives between different sectors and levels to promote innovation. He emphasized that it was critical to place global issues in local contexts for understanding and research. Furthermore, innovation in the local government public sector can significantly improve the quality of public services and the problem-solving capacity of various departments in local governments to address social challenges, especially those on the global agenda, such as climate change.

Next, Prof. Jose A. Puppim presented his research project "IFWEN - Understanding Innovative Initiatives for Governing Food, Water, and Energy Nexus in Cities”. He explained how local governments can improve their innovative capacity to address issues such as global climate change through multiple interactive mechanisms. Through case studies of innovations using green and blue infrastructure in nine cities in Asia, Africa and Latin America as well as an analysis of the ICLEI database, Prof. Jose A. Puppim pointed out that although countries and cities have different characteristics in terms of population and context, local governments share similar innovation mechanisms in building green and blue infrastructure. For example, local governments tend to rely mainly on external resources and two-way knowledge flows for policy learning and innovation.

After the presentation, Associate Professor Yitian Huang gave his comments. He commented that Prof. Jose’s lecture offered new insights to the policy innovation mechanisms of local governments. Taking the implementation of household clean energy policy as an example, he discussed with Prof. Jose A. Puppim on issues such as the implementation and scaling-up of policy innovations by local governments, the socio-technical framework, lock-in effects and etc.

Prof. Jose A. Puppim also exchanged views with the students and faculty, discussing specific issues such as understanding policy implementation and promotion from the demand side, and co-production with local communities. A lively discussion brought the lecture to a successful conclusion.