City cultural official as a strategic agent: Governing partnerships and networks towards sustainability.

This article deals with attempts to enhance sustainability at the local municipal level through culture and cultural expertise. It builds on the belief that cities as sites and organisations play a key role in the path toward sustainability and that arts and culture have a great potential to facilitate the much-needed systems change. Empirically the article focuses on the case of Espoo, Finland's second largest city, and explores in detail the working model of a municipal cultural official who is tasked with strategic advancement of sustainability. The article describes the official's culture-based work in networks, linking the City's strategic level and various administrative sectors as well as local NGOs, professional artists, and residents. While highlighting the working model's strengths, the analysis also brings up challenges in its implementation, such as the integration of a horizontal, cross-sectoral approach into municipal bureaucracies. The article is written collaboratively by the official and a cultural policy researcher who were brought together by a research project commissioned by the Culture Unit of Espoo (Hirvi-Ijäs et al., 2020). Combining internal and external viewpoints, our scholarly contribution is to shed light on how urban sustainability strategies are operationalized and administered at the level of individual officials. For the practitioners, we introduce a model, an institutional innovation, on how to tap the power of culture to serve overall urban sustainability aims that may be experimented and developed further in other cities.