Carrots, Sticks, or Something In Between: Reflections From The Sustainable City.

Published: 2025

Last month I attended the SEE Institute Sustainability Summit in The Sustainable City, Dubai — and the setting itself was half the argument.

The Sustainable City is a functioning model of sustainable community living: a 46-hectare development that is home to around 3,000 residents, generates more energy than it consumes through solar panels on every roof, recycles 100% of its wastewater, and grows food on site through eleven bio-domes at its centre. The residential clusters are car-free — people walk, cycle, or use electric buggies. The SEE Institute building itself is the first Positive Energy Building in the region, designed to produce 140% of its energy requirement over its lifespan.

It is one thing to debate whether sustainable community living is viable. It is another to hold that debate inside a place where it is visibly, measurably happening.

The debates that follow you around the world

What struck me most, though, was not the solar panels. It was how familiar the conversations were.

The debates at the summit echoed discussions I have heard in the UK for years. How do we balance incentives with regulation? Can policy drive genuine business accountability without stifling innovation? How do we embed sustainability into every role in an organisation, rather than siloing it into a dedicated team that everyone else can safely ignore?

Different city, different climate, different regulatory context — same fundamental questions. Geography shifts the context, not the challenge. Creating sustainable systems that are commercially viable, socially conscious, and genuinely impactful is hard, everywhere, for the same underlying reasons.

The carrot and stick problem

The framing I keep returning to from those discussions is the balance between carrot and stick — between incentives and regulation.

Too much carrot, and you get greenwashing: businesses that collect the incentives, adopt the language, and change very little. Voluntary frameworks with no teeth produce voluntary compliance, which is to say inconsistent compliance concentrated among the organisations that were already committed.

Too much stick, and you get compliance minimalism: businesses that meet the letter of the regulation while innovating around its spirit, treating sustainability as a cost centre to be managed rather than an opportunity to be pursued. Heavy regulation without incentive alignment can also genuinely stifle the experimentation that produces better solutions.

The organisations and policymakers that get this right are the ones that understand the interplay — that use regulation to set a credible floor and incentives to make ambition commercially rational, and that treat the E, the S, and the G as genuinely co-dependent rather than as three separate reporting workstreams.

That last point deserves more attention than it gets. Environmental initiatives that ignore social consequences produce backlash. Social commitments without governance to enforce them produce broken promises. Governance structures that treat environmental and social factors as externalities produce exactly the outcomes we currently have. The organisations that will succeed are those that understand the co-dependencies deeply — not as a slogan, but as an operating principle.

Why models matter

The Sustainable City will not scale to every context. It is a purpose-built development with a specific economic model, in a specific climate, with specific resources behind it. Critics of flagship projects make this point regularly, and it is fair as far as it goes.

But it misses what models are for. The value of a functioning demonstration is not that it can be copied wholesale. It is that it converts an abstract debate — can communities actually live this way? — into an empirical question with an observable answer. Every conversation at the summit happened against the backdrop of a place where the concept demonstrably works. That changes the quality of the conversation.

If you are in Dubai, visit. It is worth seeing what is possible — and then asking the harder question of how the principles travel to the places where most people actually live.