Sustainable development is recognised as major policy issue by city officials in the Asia-Pacific region. However, isolated policy measures may create unintended consequences and produce trade-offs between policy objectives. This is the starting point for a collaborative project between partners from Germany and New Zealand and later in the process a wider set of countries in the Asia-Pacific region. The aim of this project is to develop policy packages that can turn these trade-offs into synergies and co-benefits. This project would analyse in depth the interplay of policies in selected model cities that represent a cluster of similar cities in the Asia-Pacific region. This will identify synergies, co-benefits and trade-offs of selected policies, which will directly feed into policy recommendations for the participating administrations. Furthermore, the project aims to enable a cooperation between German and New Zealand cities and to examine the transferability of policy packages to different political, economic and environmental policy contexts.

The workshop "Sustainable Cities - Co-Benefit Strategies for Sustainable Cities in the Asia-Pacific Region" held on 26 March 2012 in Wellington was a crucial part of the project.

Within the project Steven März visited WCC (Wellington City Council) and Massey Universitys as guest researcher and worked collaboratively on a case study analysis for the city of Wellington.