From National Plans to neighbourhood Action: How URBANEW and the Building Decarbonisation Partnership are reinforcing each other in Spain

Most European cities working on decarbonisation are, right now, being asked to do two things at once. Under the revised Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD), Member States are required to submit National Building Renovation Plans. While municipalities are not obliged to develop their own renovation strategies, it is strongly advisable to do so in alignment with the national framework. And under the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED), municipalities above 45,000 inhabitants must produce Local Heating and Cooling Plans. Two obligations, two processes, two sets of actors and, in most cases, very little connection between them. 

This fragmentation is not just an administrative inconvenience. It goes to the heart of why building decarbonisation so often stalls between national ambition and local action: the instruments land on local governments in silos, and municipalities are left to find the coherence that the policy architecture has not built in. 

This is the problem that two European initiatives, the Net Zero Cities project URBANEW and the Urban Agenda for the EU (UAEU) Building Decarbonisation Partnership, have been independently working to address. And over the past months, their collaboration has produced something neither could have generated alone. 

At the centre of this story is a governance ambition. URBANEW works with the seven Spanish Mission cities to develop the enabling conditions for large-scale building renovation at neighbourhood scale. One of these enabling conditions is multi-level governance which was the focus of an innovation lab that took place on 9th June: a space where local governments, regional authorities, national ministries, and other stakeholders worked through the political, regulatory, and planning challenges that large-scale renovation requires. 

That lab was originally designed around a clear but bounded objective: aligning actors around neighbourhood-scale building renovation. What changed was the realisation, emerging from the collaboration with the UAEU Building Decarbonisation Partnership, that the lab could do more. 

The UAEU Partnership was created precisely to address the gap between National Building Renovation Plans (NBRP) and local implementation, and specifically to develop the methodology for integrating building renovation plans or strategies (voluntary at local level) and Local Heating and Cooling Plans (compulsory) into a coherent single planning framework at municipal level. When GBCE (Green Building Council España), which is active in both initiatives, began working to align their agendas, the implications for the innovation lab (focused on multilevel governance) became clear. 

The lab was since redesigned. It brought together both planning obligations: the EPBD-derived building renovation plans and the EED heating and cooling plans within a single governance space. What was a lab about building renovation became a lab about integrated local energy planning. That was not a small shift. It meant the lab’s outputs carried legal weight under two directives, not one. 

Vitoria-Gasteiz is one of the seven URBANEW cities and is the coordinator of the project. It is also in this city where this integration was made tangible, since Vitoria-Gasteiz is adapting its local building renovation plan (in draft phase) to incorporate the local heating and cooling planning requirements, following the methodological framework being developed by the UAEU Partnership. What started as a neighbourhood renovation strategy is becoming a fully integrated local energy plan, aligning building-level intervention with district-scale energy system decisions. 

This kind of integration is what the UAEU Partnership was designed to enable, but it required a real city, a real planning process, and real political will to make it operational. Vitoria-Gasteiz provided all three. And in doing so, it moved the Partnership’s methodological work from framework design to operational demonstration, a shift that significantly increases its policy credibility. 

The multilevel governance lab that took place on 9th June was the next concrete step. It brought together local officials, technical actors, and stakeholders from multiple levels of government (regional and national) to work through the specific challenges of this integration: how to align administrative processes designed for different directives, how to coordinate across departments and scales, and how to translate the integrated planning framework into decisions that actually move buildings and energy systems. 

The inclusion of regional governments, the Autonomous Communities, as full participants in the governance process has been at the heart of the design of the lab from the very beginning. In Spain’s administrative structure, the Autonomous Communities sit between municipalities and the national government and hold significant competencies in housing, energy, and urban planning. Any integrated local planning process that ignores this level is structurally incomplete. 

Their inclusion in the lab is not a formality. It is a recognition that the coherence between building renovation plans and heating and cooling plans cannot be built at the local level alone. Regional governments shape the regulatory and funding environment within which municipalities operate. Without them in the dialogue, the integrated planning framework produced by the lab risks running into regional barriers from the moment it tries to be implemented. 

This makes the governance architecture of the lab genuinely multilevel in the fullest sense: local government as the planning authority, regional government as the intermediate regulatory and enabling layer, national ministries as the framers of the legislative obligations, and the European Commission as the originator of the directives. Convening all these actors around a shared planning object (the integrated local energy plan) is itself a significant governance achievement. 

At the national level, Spain’s Ministry of Housing and Urban Agenda (MIVAU) has been engaged in both initiatives: as a participant in the UAEU Partnership bringing the national EPBD perspective, and as a strategic interlocutor in URBANEW’s governance process. But MIVAU’s role has gone further: it has been instrumental in bringing the Ministry for Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge (MITERD) into the process. 

MITERD is responsible for shaping the national regulatory framework that will guide how local heating and cooling plans are developed in Spain, a framework that is under Public Consultation (at the moment of writing this article) to transpose the EED requirements. Its participation in the preparatory sessions of Vitoria’s governance lab was significant: it meant that the national body responsible for EED transposition was actively engaged in the local governance process through which that transposition is being implemented. That is precisely the multilevel coherence both initiatives were trying to produce. 

These joint meetings between MIVAU, MITERD, GBCE, and the URBANEW coordination team were not accidental overlaps. They were deliberate coordination moments, the kind of boundary work that rarely appears in project deliverables but is often the most consequential activity in determining whether parallel initiatives converge or remain disconnected. 

The European Commission has been increasingly explicit that EU funded projects and Urban Agenda partnerships should not operate in silos. The URBANEW – UAEU collaboration is a concrete demonstration of what that expectation looks like in practice: shared actors, complementary expertise, aligned objectives, and the willingness to do the coordination work that turns parallel initiatives into connected ones. 

The conditions that made it possible (GBCE as a bridge actor across both initiatives, MIVAU’s engagement at multiple levels, Vitoria-Gasteiz’s readiness to pilot an integrated approach) are not unique to Spain. They are present, in different forms, wherever local governments are working to make sense of overlapping EU directives with insufficient support from above. 

The lesson from URBANEW governance lab is straightforward: when two regulatory obligations land on local governments simultaneously, the most effective response is rarely to run two processes in parallel. It is to find the space, the actors, the method and the ambition to run one. And to design that process from the beginning to remain beyond the project that made it possible.