This paper aims to emphasize the need for enhancing inclusivity and accessibility within smart-city societies. It represents the first attempt to apply Amartya Sen’s capability approach by exploring the implications of digital divides for promoting inclusive and climate-friendly cities that prioritize well-being, equity, and societal participation. Sen’s framework recognizes individual variations in converting resources into valuable ‘functionings’, and herein emphasizes the importance of aligning personal, social, and environmental conversion factors for individuals to fully navigate, participate in, and enjoy the benefits provided by smart cities. Adopting the capability approach and employing a cross-disciplinary analysis of the scientific literature, the primary objective is to broaden understanding of how to improve inclusivity and accessibility within smart-city societies, with a specific focus on marginalized community members facing first- and second-level digital divides. This paper underscores the importance of adopting a systemic perspective on climate-smart city navigation and stresses the importance of establishing a unified governing body responsible for monitoring, evaluating, and enhancing smart-city functionality. The paper concludes by summarizing some policy recommendations to boost social inclusion and address climate change in smart cities, such as creating capability-enhancing institutions, safeguarding redundancy in public-choice options, empowering citizens, and leveraging academic knowledge in smart-city policy formulation.

Youth empowerment within the context of sustainable development (SD) is starting to gain more attention within social work, both internationally and in Sweden. SD, as an integrated set of global goals in tackling social, economic, and ecological challenges, is a vital concept in social work. Protecting people and the natural environment can be considered the fullest realization of the person-in-environment, a foundation upon which the social work profession is built. The ecosocial perspective is widely discussed in terms of societal transformation in harmony with nature. Within this context, this article explores ecosocial work discourses in youth empowerment. Data were gathered through 20 qualitative semi-structured interviews with key representatives of youth organizations from Gävle municipality, Sweden, and analyzed using ATLAS.ti v.9.0. The main findings are discussed within the framework of ecosocial work, youth empowerment, and a Foucauldian perspective on discourse, power, and knowledge. The results indicate the need for an ecosocial youth empowerment, calling for increased knowledge of both youth empowerment through SD and ecosocial work for those working with/for youth connected to social work practice. The results highlight the importance of an ecosocial youth empowerment on a more structural and collective level.

Climate change and the coupled loss of ecosystem services pose major collective action problems in that all individuals would benefit from better cooperation to address these problems but conflicting interests and/or incomplete knowledge discourage joint action. Adopting an inductive and multi‐layered approach, drawing upon the authors’ previous research on urban commons, we here summarize key insights on environmentally oriented urban commons and elaborate on what role they have in instigating climate‐proofing activities in urban areas. We deal with three types of urban commons, i.e., “urban green commons,” “coworking spaces,” and “community climate commons.” We describe how allotment gardens, community gardens, and other types of urban green commons contribute to environmental learning that may boost understanding of environmental issues and which constitute important learning arenas for climate‐change mitigation and adaptation. We also deal with the newly emerging phenomenon of coworking spaces that share many essential institutional attributes of urban commons and which can work for climate‐change mitigation through the benefits provided by a sharing economy and through reduction of domestic transportation and commuting distance. Community climate commons represent commons where local communities can mobilize together to create shared low‐carbon assets and which hold the potential to empower certain segments and civil society groups so that they can have greater influence and ownership of the transformation of reaching net‐zero carbon goals. We conclude this article by identifying some critical determinants for the up‐scaling of environmentally oriented urban commons.

The Swedish universal welfare state has transformed since the 1990s into a mixed welfare model with increasing deregulation, recommodification, and reverse distribution from the public to the private sector where capital and influence have concentrated. In major cities such as Stockholm, this has resulted in a polarization where groups in the city centre and residential areas have accumulated wealth and resources while groups in marginalized suburbs and neighbourhoods have faced increasing social exclusion and marginalization. Public sector social work has long focused on individual case work, whereas this development calls for increasing community work initiatives. In this article, we analyse the rise of urban social movements mobilizing for inclusion, influence, and social justice as important aspects of contemporary community work in the Swedish urban periphery. Through analysis of semi-structured interviews with community workers and activists as well as media articles, reports, and web-based materials, the results show how the mobilization of the organization Megafonen has contributed to the development of new social institutions and urban commons.

Community work is a concept that includes a diversity of directions and working methods that are conducted at group and community level worldwide. It is conducted in slums, segregated suburbs, disa...

Carbon taxes are considered to be an efficient method to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; however, such taxes are generally unpopular, partly because they are seen as unfair. To explore if public acceptance of a stricter carbon tax in Sweden can be enhanced, this study investigates the effectiveness of three different policy designs, addressing collective and personal distributional consequences and promoting procedural aspects (democratic influence). A large-scale (n = 5200) survey is applied, combining a traditional multi-category answer format with a binary choice format. The results show that support for higher carbon taxation can be enhanced if tax revenues are redistributed to affected groups. Policies with collective justice framings can change the attitudes of individuals who express antagonistic attitudes to increased carbon taxation and influence groups comparably more affected by carbon taxes, such as rural residents, low-income groups, and people who are driving long distances. Policy designs addressing collective distributional consequences are, however, less effective on individuals expressing right-leaning ideological views and low environmental concern. Policies addressing personal distributional outcomes, or perceptions of procedural injustice, had no significant effect on policy acceptance.