ESG Without Governance is Just Good Intentions

Cities account for over 70% of global emissions. They consume two-thirds of the world's energy. And yet, when you look closely at how urban sustainability decisions actually get made, who approves them, who owns them, who is held accountable when they stall, the picture becomes uncomfortably blurry.

That is the governance gap. And it is costing us more than we admit.

The problem isn't ambition. It's architecture.

Across urban institutions, a familiar pattern appears. Sustainability strategies exist. Net-zero targets are published. Green infrastructure plans are announced. But implementation drags. Timelines slip. And when you trace why, it almost always leads back to the same place: no one had clear, functional authority to act.

This is what I call governance strain, the gap between structural responsibility and real decision power.

It's not laziness. It's not even poor intent. It's what happens when sustainability work is layered onto organisations that were never designed to carry it. Committees exist but can't decide. Roles are defined but overlap. And progress waits, not on data, not on funding, not on technology, but on the one person whose approval is needed for everything.

The world's cities are sitting on $4.3 trillion in annual climate finance needs. Only $831 billion is currently being mobilised. That gap isn't only financial. Much of it is institutional.

The delegation trap

Many urban institutions describe themselves as decentralised. But there's a critical difference between structural decentralisation and functional decentralisation.

Structural decentralisation means departments exist. Functional decentralisation means those departments can actually decide.

If every sustainability approval still travels up to the same two or three people, you don't have a decentralised system. You have a bottleneck with extra steps.

The answer isn't to centralise more. It's to design delegation with accountability built in: clear decision rights, traceable workflows, and leadership visibility without operational interference.

Decentralisation without visibility creates fragmentation. Centralisation without delegation creates stagnation. The question is never which to choose; it's how to design both at once.

What urban governance failure actually looks like

Los Angeles is instructive. The city has some of the most ambitious climate targets of any municipality in the world. Yet research published in February 2026 in Frontiers in Sustainable Cities found that climate planning in LA is "routinely undermined by budgetary volatility, leadership turnover, and structural inequalities in governance." The ambition is real. The governance architecture to sustain it across political cycles is not.

India's Smart Cities Mission tells a similar story. As of late 2023, only 60% of AMRUT 1.0 urban infrastructure projects had been completed, not because funding was absent, but because of what the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability described as "administrative hurdles" and weak implementation mechanisms. Good policy. Inadequate governance design.

These aren't outliers. They are the norm. And the pattern is consistent: sustainability stalls not where vision is lacking, but where governance is weak.

What strong urban governance looks like

Singapore offers a different model, and one worth examining precisely because it is so deliberate.

Singapore's urban governance framework is built on a principle rarely articulated this clearly: policy is implementation, and implementation is policy. The system is not designed to announce targets. It is designed to execute them.

What makes it work is not just digital infrastructure , it's the integration of accountability into institutional architecture. Long-term master planning is paired with dynamic governance that allows course correction. Decision rights are explicit. Performance is traceable. Leadership sets direction; capable institutions carry it forward. And critically, the system is designed to outlast any individual , political transition does not reset institutional memory.

In 2024, Singapore ranked 3rd globally in Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, the only Asian city in the top 10. That is not incidental. It is the product of governance design: asset declarations, conflict-of-interest regulations, competitive public sector remuneration, and independent oversight , all embedded into the system as structure, not as aspiration.

This is what governance continuity looks like in practice.

Digitalisation is not the goal. Accountability is.

Digital tools matter, but only insofar as they embed accountability into process design.

When sustainability workflows move through documented digital systems rather than informal follow-ups, decision rights become visible. Approvals are time-stamped. Responsibility is attributed. Escalation paths are clear. Leadership can monitor without micromanaging.

Work no longer depends on who is in the room.

But the technology is not the governance. The governance is the intent behind the technology, the decision to design accountability into the system rather than rely on individuals to carry it.

When governance is weak, work relies on reminders.

When governance is strong, work relies on systems.

What ESG governance requires in urban practice

Across public institutions and urban development contexts, five things separate aspirational ESG from operational ESG:

Clear decision rights: who recommends, who approves, who must be consulted, who must be informed. Not implied. Written.

Functional delegation: authority travels with responsibility. Decentralised teams can act. Leadership can see.

Digital workflow transparency: sustainability files move through structured systems, not inboxes. Progress is visible. Delays are traceable.

**Independent oversight: **review mechanisms that are not subject to political cycles or individual tenure. Continuity is structural.

Institutional memory: documented decisions, defined cadences, structured reporting. Progress does not reset when people leave.

The real question for urban institutions

Ask this of your city, your department, your project:

If the person who owns sustainability decisions is unavailable for two weeks, does work continue, or does it wait?

If it waits, the problem isn't capacity. It's governance design.

The future of ESG in urban development will not be shaped by the strength of targets alone. It will be shaped by the strength of the systems built to implement them.

Governance is not the quiet letter in ESG.

It is the reason the other two letters can exist at all.