Cities and the Governing of Climate Change to limit the extent of climate change Contents...

EG35CH09-Bulkeley ARI 18 September 2010 7:19

Cities and the Governingof Climate ChangeHarriet BulkeleyDepartment of Geography, Durham University, Durham DH1 3LE, United Kingdom;email: [email protected]

Annu. Rev. Environ. Resour. 2010. 35:229–53

First published online as a Review in Advance onJune 14, 2010

The Annual Review of Environment and Resourcesis online at environ.annualreviews.org

This article’s doi:10.1146/annurev-environ-072809-101747

Copyright c© 2010 by Annual Reviews.All rights reserved

1543-5938/10/1121-0229$20.00

Key Words

governance, urban, global environmental change, state, politicaleconomy

Abstract

Studies of the urban governance of climate change have proliferatedover the past decade, as municipalities across the world increasinglyplace the issue on their agendas and private actors seek to respond tothe issue. This review examines the history and development of urbanclimate governance, the policies and measures that have been put intoplace, the multilevel governance context in which these are undertaken,and the factors that have structured the posibilities for addressing theissue. It highlights the limits of existing work and the need for future re-search to provide more comprehensive analyses of the achievements andlimitations of urban climate governance. It calls for engagement withalternative theoretical perspectives to understand how climate changeis being governed in the city and the implications for urban gover-nance, socioenvironmental justice, and the reconfiguration of politicalauthority.

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Climate change:changes in the earth-ocean-atmosphericsystem resulting fromthe introduction ofgreenhouse gases fromanthropogenic sources

Adaptation:implementation ofmeasures to reducecurrent and futurevulnerabilities to theimpacts of climatechange

Mitigation: thereduction of GHGemissions and theircapture and storage inorder to limit theextent of climatechange

Contents

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230URBAN RESPONSES TO

CLIMATE CHANGE: A REVIEWOF THE EVIDENCE. . . . . . . . . . . . . 231The Emergence of Urban Responses

to Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231Assessing Urban Policies

and Initiatives. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235GOVERNING CLIMATE CHANGE

IN THE CITY AND BEYOND . . . 236Network Governance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237Vertical Autonomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238Urban Climate Governance and the

Restructuring of the State . . . . . . . 239POLICY FAILURE AND

POLITICAL STRUGGLE . . . . . . . . 242Institutional Capacity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242Political Economies of

Urban Climate Governance . . . . . 244New Directions in Understanding

Urban Climate Governance . . . . . 245CONCLUSIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247

INTRODUCTION

Perhaps one of the most surprising responsesto climate change over the past two decadeshas been the growing involvement of munic-ipal governments and other urban actors in ef-forts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases(GHGs) and increasingly to adopt adaptationmeasures. Traditionally conceived as a globalproblem requiring global solutions, the urbanpolitics of climate change has been a key factorin challenging research and policy communi-ties to reconsider how the governance of globalenvironmental problems takes place (1–4). Thisarticle reviews the debates concerning the roleof cities in governing climate change and as-sesses the wider implications for our under-standing of (urban) environmental governance.

Research on the development of urbanclimate policy and governance began in themid-1990s (e.g., 5–8) and focused on single

case studies predominantly of cities in theUnited States, Canada, Europe, and Australia(e.g., 9–16), although important work has morerecently been conducted in Asia, South Africa,and Latin America (17–21), and the researchcommunity has begun to examine issues con-fronting urban climate adaptation in the globalSouth (e.g., 22–25). As the research on urbanresponses to climate change has grown, so toohas recognition of the potential importanceof the city as a site for addressing the issue.Both the International Energy Agency (26) andthe Stern Review (27) suggest that cities maybe responsible for up to 75% of global emis-sions of carbon dioxide from anthropogenicsources. Although, as discussed below, thesefigures are highly contested (28–29), the urbanconcentration of GHG emissions is perhapsnot surprising—given the increasing propor-tion of the world’s population that lives andworks in cities and the ways in which energydemand, buildings, waste and water services,as well as industrial processes are centeredin urban locations (30). Cities in the North,and increasingly in rapidly industrializingcountries, may therefore represent a significantproportion of global emissions. For example,London’s emissions of GHGs are estimated at44 megatonnes or 8% of the United Kingdom’stotal in 2006 (31) and are considered to be ona par with those of some European countriessuch as “Greece or Portugal” (32, p. 1). At thesame time as the debate on the mitigation ofclimate change has grown, there has been anincreasing recognition that issues of adaptationare also critical for cities. Urban vulnerabilitiesto climate change are particularly acute in theglobal South, where processes of global envi-ronmental change may not only lead to extremeevents but also exacerbate chronic problems ofpoverty and environmental stress (24, 30).

In seeking to understand the potential of ur-ban climate governance and its implications,the research community, mirroring the pol-icy world, has primarily focused on issues ofmitigation. Accordingly, in assessing the workin the field to date, this review also con-centrates on the issue of mitigation, but also

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discusses the growing literature on adapta-tion. It examines the three areas of work thathave dominated the field: examining policy re-sponses to climate change in the city; seekingto explain the governance of urban responsesto the issue; and assessing the reasons why therealities of urban mitigation and adaptation ef-forts frequently fail to live up to the rhetoric.This review considers these aspects of the de-bate in turn, offering a summary and critiqueof current analyses and suggesting potential av-enues for future research. The first section ofthe article considers the history and nature ofurban responses to climate change. It reviewsthe evidence of the history of urban engage-ment with climate change, the critical role oftransnational networks in this process, and thesubsequent development of climate policy andinitiatives. The second section examines the ap-proaches that have been used to explain howthe governing of climate change is taking placein cities. What is apparent from this analysisis that urban climate governance is a complexprocess driven by the intersection of the spe-cific challenges of the issue itself and the recon-figuration of political authority across multiplelevels and between public and private actors.To date, much of this literature has viewed themultilevel context within which urban climategovernance is taking place as relatively staticand benign. More recent work, however, takesa more critical approach, seeking to understandhow and why cities have become a site for gov-erning climate change and the implications thismay have both for how we conceptualize thecity and for our understanding of the nature ofpublic and private authority. For all the promiseof the growing involvement of cities in address-ing climate change, authors have consistentlypointed to a gap between the rhetoric and re-ality of urban responses. The third section ofthe article reviews the two key issues that havebeen found to lie at the heart of this issue—the institutional capacity of municipalities toact on climate change and the political econ-omy within which such approaches are framedand implemented. However, more fundamen-tal questions concerning the political economic

context within which such struggles take place,and the sociotechnical networks through whichpolicies are mediated, have to date been ne-glected in the literature. Taking these issuesinto account requires a more nuanced conceptof the city as a site within which climate gov-ernance is taking place, one which recognizesthe complex interaction of the social, material,economic, technical, and political within andbetween different spheres of authority.

URBAN RESPONSES TOCLIMATE CHANGE: A REVIEWOF THE EVIDENCE

In seeking to understand how cities are re-sponding to climate change, the research com-munity has focused on two key issues: (a) thehistory of the development of municipal re-sponses and (b) the assessment of the strategiesand actions that have been deployed in cities inresponse to the issue.

The Emergence of Urban Responsesto Climate Change

Turning first to the development of urbanclimate governance, scholars have drawn atten-tion to the changing politics and geographies ofmunicipal responses. A first wave of municipalresponses to climate can be identified from theliterature starting in the early 1990s as individ-ual cities, predominantly in North America andEurope, began to engage with the issue. Forexample, Lambright et al. (8) document howclimate change emerged in Toronto followingthe international conference On the ChangingAtmosphere—widely regarded as a policy cat-alyst for the international science communityand nation-states—held there in 1988 andthe subsequent championing of the issue by asenior politician. In the United Kingdom andGermany, pioneering local authorities, includ-ing those in Leicester, Kirklees, Newcastle,Heidleberg, Munich, and Frankfurt, developedclimate change policies on the basis of theirhistory of engagement with issues of energyconservation and the growing popularity of

www.annualreviews.org • Cities Governing Climate Change 231

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CCP: Cities forClimate Protection

the discourse of sustainable development(5, 12–13).

Given their small-scale and incrementalnature, these individual efforts may havegone largely unnoticed by the research andpolicy communities concerned with globalenvironmental issues if it had not been forthe involvement of many of these pioneeringmunicipalities in transnational networks. Inthe early 1990s, preceding the Rio UnitedNations Conference on Environment andDevelopment, three different transnationalmunicipal networks were formed. The In-ternational Council for Local EnvironmentalInitiatives, now known as ICLEI Local Gov-ernments for Sustainability, organized theUrban CO2 Reduction Project, funded bythe U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,the City of Toronto, and several privatefoundations, with the aim of developingcity-level plans and tools for the reduction ofGHG emissions (8, 12). Subsequently, thisprogram was expanded into the Cities forClimate Protection network, which has growninternationally over the past two decades toinclude over 1,000 members worldwide (33),accounting for “approximately 15% of globalanthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions” (34).A second, the Climate Alliance, was foundedin 1990 as an alliance between European citiesand indigenous peoples and now has some1,100 members in 17 European countries witha concentration in Germany, Austria, and theNetherlands. Its aim is to reduce emissions to50% below 1990 levels by 2030 and protect therainforest through partnerships and projectswith indigenous rainforest peoples (35). Athird, energie-cites, was initially formed in1990 by 6 local authorities, including Besacon(France), Newcastle (United Kingdom) andManheim (Germany), involved in a EuropeanUnion (EU) project. With the support ofthe European Union, additional participantswere sought, and in 1994 with 16 membersfrom across Europe, the network was formallyconstituted as an association of municipalities.By the end of the 1990s, concentrations ofurban responses to climate change were taking

place in Europe, driven by the Climate Al-liance and energie-cites’ networks, as well as inNorth America and Australia, where the Citiesfor Climate Protection (CCP) network wasbeginning to expand (9–12, 16). In the main,national governments and the emerging inter-national regime for governing climate changeshowed little interest in these activities at thisstage (12), though in both Japan and Swedenresearch has found that local governments wereencouraged by national authorities to developclimate change strategies and were providedfinancial assistance to this end (36, 37).

Since the early 2000s, a second wave ofmunicipal action on climate change can beidentified encompassing a new generation ofmunicipal networks and a more geographicallydiverse range of cities (38–40). The municipalnetworks that have been established over thepast decade are significantly different from theirpredecessors in three key ways. First, manynetworks are now nationally organized. In part,this reflects the changing organizational struc-ture of municipal networking. Transnationalmunicipal networks have established regionalor country-based campaigns, such as the CCPprogram in Australia or the energie-cites’ net-work in Poland, while national networks havealso been established, most notably the U.S.Mayors Climate Protection Agreement (http://www.usmayors.org/climateprotection/documents/mcpAgreement.pdf). Althoughit was in 2000 that the U.S. Conference ofMayors first noted the significant role thatmayors could take in addressing climatechange, it was in 2005 that the Mayor of Seat-tle, Greg Nickels, challenged mayors acrossthe United States to take action on the issue(38, p. 142). Following an initial agreementamong 10 of the leading U.S. cities on climatechange, a further call to action attracted over180 mayors, and by 2009 over 900 mayors hadsigned the Climate Protection Agreement (38,p. 143). This approach has been replicatedglobally, most recently with the launch in2009 of the European Covenant of Mayors,which now has more than 1,000 members.In addition, research has found that once

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examples of climate change strategy and actionhave been developed nationally, “attentionshifts to these cases” (41, p. 353) rather thanto international examples. In Sweden, of 184responding municipalities, “72% stated thatthey cooperate with other actors in networksdedicated specifically to climate issues orwhere climate was included as one issue amongothers. . .[and] networking was most frequentamong towns and cities within Sweden”(36, p. 542).

A second feature of the new generation ofmunicipal climate networks is the way in whichthey mobilize private actors alongside the (lo-cal) state (42). For example, the C40 Cities Cli-mate Leadership Group has bought together40 of the world’s global cities to address climatechange (39). This network was instigated by theMayor of London and the Climate Group andwas formed by 18 cities in 2005 as a parallelinitiative to the Group of Eight (G8) Glenea-gles summit on climate change. In 2007, thisnetwork entered into a partnership with theClinton Climate Initiative (CCI) and expandedits membership to include 40 of the largestcities in the world. Private actors are centralto this network, for example, in the form ofcollaboration with Microsoft to produce soft-ware for GHG emissions accounting at the cityscale and in the CCI’s Energy Efficiency Build-ing Retrofit Program, which brings togethercities, building owners, banks, and energy-service companies to reduce GHG emissionsfrom large corporate buildings. Third, a num-ber of grassroots networks are now emergingthat have an explicit urban focus (43). Here, themost notable is the Transition Towns move-ment, which began in 2006 in Totnes, UnitedKingdom; by 2008, it had some 100 commu-nities as members, which were primarily in theUnited Kingdom but also included some in theUnited States, Australia, Japan, and Chile (43).These developments suggest that it is no longeradequate to consider the urban governance ofclimate change solely from the perspective ofmunicipal authorities but that it is necessaryto consider how, why, and with what impli-cations other actors are seeking to govern the

Global city: a citywith particularstrategic economic orpolitical importance

climate through the city (42). In addition, ur-ban networks have taken a more overtly politi-cal stance toward the issue, seeking to positioncities as critical sites for addressing the issueof climate change or even opposing nationalgovernments (as in the United States and Aus-tralia), and in so doing have advanced claimsfor the strategic importance of urban gover-nance (39). The growing weight of this move-ment was evident at the 2007 Conference ofthe Parties to the United Nations FrameworkConvention on Climate Change in Bali, whererepresentatives from municipalities formed asubstantial constituency and signed the BaliWorld Mayors and Local Governments Cli-mate Protection Agreement, drawing togetherfor the first time the diverse networks discussedabove.

Alongside this new generation of urbanclimate networks, researchers have identifiedthe growth and diversification of the citiesinvolved. First, a new engagement with issuesof climate change has been identified amongglobal cities. Although the pioneering mu-nicipalities that engaged with the issue in the1990s tended to be medium or small cities(35), the past decade has seen climate changebecome a policy issue for capital cities and largemetropolitan areas (39). Second, there has beena growing involvement from cities in the globalSouth (28–29, 42). Although the CCP programhas sought to expand its membership in regionssuch as Asia and Latin America, new networks,including C40, CCI, and the Resilience Net-work, have explicitly targeted cities in middle-and low-income nations. At the same time,mainstream development organizations—mostnotably the World Bank, which hosted anUrban Research Symposium on the topic in2009, and UN-HABITAT, whose 2011 GlobalReport on Human Settlements will addressthe issue—have begun to show an interestin the urban implications of climate change.Coupled with this increasing diversity hasbeen a growing acknowledgment that issues ofvulnerability and adaptation are as significantas mitigation. However, research suggests thatissues of adaptation remain marginal:


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most urban governments in low- and middle-income nations have not considered adapta-tion seriously. For instance, in India, Chile,Argentina and Mexico, central government isbeginning to take an interest in adaptation, butthis interest has yet to engage the interests ofthe larger, more powerful national ministriesor agencies or city and municipal governments(44, p. 14).

A recent analysis of the climate change strate-gies and actions of 10 cities in India, China,Mexico, Brazil, Australia, South Korea, Indone-sia, and South Africa found that mitigation re-mains the focus of urban climate policy, despitethe arguably more pressing adaptation issuesfacing cities in the global South (42).

In seeking to explain the emergence ofurban climate governance, many scholars havedrawn attention to the importance of individualpoliticians or officials—sometimes termed pol-icy entrepreneurs—who champion the issue,set agendas, and establish the basis for policyresponses. For example, in Baoding, HebeiProvince, the development of a low-carboncity development initiative was facilitated bythe Mayor, who realized “the need to developinstitutions and policy for low-carbon city de-velopment and hopes that his pioneering effortswill set a role model for low-carbon city devel-opment in the country” (45, p. 386). Likewise,in both London and Los Angeles, it has beenthe influence of the Mayor that has been criticalin mobilizing climate change policies (46, 47),and the emergence of the U.S. Mayors ClimateProtection Agreement, discussed above, alsopoints to the significant role that individualpoliticians are playing in catalyzing climategovernance in the city (38). However, thesestudies also suggest that individuals can onlytake climate change action so far, for “whilepolicy entrepreneurs are critical at the startof a policy process, in order to overcome theconstraints of administrative structures, partypolitics and political timetables, and to survivethe loss of particular individuals, a broaderinstitutional capacity for climate protection isnecessary (13, p. 2253). Policy entrepreneurs

may then be a necessary, but not sufficient,ingredient in the development of urban climategovernance. Researchers have also identifiedthe transnational municipal networks, dis-cussed above, as a key factor in generatingurban responses to the issue. Networks haveprovided the resources and political spacewithin which policy entrepreneurs can operatewith some degree of protection from “politicsas usual” (see below). Hoffman (48) suggeststhat the transnational urban governance ofclimate change is one of a suite of “governanceexperiments” that are emerging in response tothe issue. Experiments are, he argues, emergingas a result of the fragmentation of authority togovern global environmental issues (discussedbelow) and of a growing dissatisfaction withthe multilateral processes put in place toaddress climate change. Although some citiesand networks started to address climate changebefore the Kyoto Protocol agreement, thismovement has gathered pace significantly sincethe early 2000s because of a growing senseof the failure in international negotiations.Within this context, Hoffman (48) suggeststhat actors are motivated to devise and imple-ment experiments on the basis of profit, out ofa sense of urgency, through a desire to expandauthority and their claims to resource, and asa form of ideological expression. In relationto the urban governance of climate change,these motivations are clearly visible as actorsseek to develop the “win-win” potential ofresponding to climate change, make claimsthat cities can act more quickly on this issuethan national governments, stake claims forresources based on their potential to mitigateor adapt to climate change, and use the issueas a basis for political contestation with otherlevels of government. In marrying broaderstructural processes affecting the governing ofglobal environmental issues with the actions ofpolicy entrepreneurs, Hoffman (48) providesa convincing framework within which tounderstand the basis of the phenomenon.At the same time, his analysis provokes arange of further questions for the researchcommunity concerning the extent to which

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such experiments are taking place within aswell as across cities and their implications interms of the accountability and legitimacy ofdecision making in this critical policy area.

Assessing Urban Policiesand Initiatives

In terms of documenting urban responses tothe issue of climate change, a second core con-cern has been with the assessment of the strate-gies and initiatives that have been developed.On the one hand, researchers have sought toanalyze and explain the nature of urban climatechange policy. Even though many transnationalmunicipal networks have sought to promote asystematic response to the issue, characterizedby the assessment of GHG emissions, targetsetting, and performance monitoring, researchhas found that “numerous cities, which haveadopted GHG reduction targets, have failedto pursue such a systematic and structured ap-proach and, instead, prefer to implement no-regret measures on a case by case basis” (49,p. 4). Furthermore, research suggests that, inthe main, municipal authorities have focusedon implementing measures in their own estaterather than in the community and have con-centrated effort in the energy sector (1, 13,38). Reviewing the evidence of the sorts ofschemes and measures that have been imple-mented, Schreurs (41, p. 353) finds that “thekind of climate change initiatives that localgovernments can most easily do appear to besuch activities as climate change and renew-able energy target setting, energy efficiency in-centive programs, educational efforts, green lo-cal government procurement standards, publictransportation policies, public-private partner-ship agreements with local businesses, and treeplanting.” That energy, and in particular energyefficiency, is at the heart of many urban climatechange initiatives is perhaps not that surprising.Energy provision and management is a sectorin which municipalities have had a long historyof engagement in North America and Europe,albeit this influence is now waning (5, 13, 51).Furthermore, as Rutland & Aylett (52, p. 636)

have argued in the analysis of the developmentof climate change policy in Portland, Oregon,energy efficiency is a particularly powerful mo-bilizing device as it can “advance diverse (andoften divergent) goals in tandem,” serving totranslate various interests into those concern-ing climate change and effectively forging newalliances. Increasingly, issues of energy securityand energy costs are serving to place the issueon urban policy agendas, and links to addressingclimate change can therefore serve to justify anew politics of urban “ecological security” (39).However, as the issue of reducing GHG emis-sions has started to be addressed in a more geo-graphically diverse range of cities, there is someevidence of a switch from a concern with re-ducing the domestic use of energy to commer-cial buildings and of the development of initia-tives that target transportation issues, primarilyto address congestion and air quality, but thatalso have side benefits in terms of mitigation(21, 42).

At the same time, a shift has been notedin the approaches taken to address climatechange in cities. If the pioneering cities thattook on the issue in the 1990s were mainlyconcerned with self-regulation—the reduc-tion of emissions from their own estate andoperations—and the development of enablingactivities to promote the actions of commu-nities and businesses (13), there is some ev-idence that, as climate change becomes anissue in a wider range of cities and gains po-litical momentum, regulation and the directprovision of low-carbon services and infras-tructures are being deployed by municipalities(42). Equally, the growing involvement of awider range of partners in the urban gover-nance of climate change and the growing num-ber of ad hoc projects developed to respond tothe issue mean that the governing of climatechange now extends beyond municipal author-ities. Nonetheless, within both local govern-ments and other organizations, researchers findthat climate change remains a marginal issue,usually confined to the environmental wing oflocal authorities and disjointed from other ar-eas of policy making (49). Furthermore, to date


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the literature has provided very little evidenceof the extent to which the growing mass of ur-ban policies and initiatives to address climatechange are having an impact either in terms ofreducing GHG emissions or through reducingvulnerability to climate risks. In part, this re-flects the more general challenges of assessingthe impacts of policy interventions, the rela-tively short timescales involved, and the frag-mented nature of the data available, especiallywith regard to levels and reductions of GHGemissions across urban communities. Althoughstudies explicitly examining the stocks and flowsof GHG in cities have been conducted (see, forexample, References 53 and 54), these analy-ses of “urban metabolism” are focused on un-derstanding historical and future trends ratherthan any direct assessment of the impact of poli-cies and measures that have been put in place.It would seem that there is significant scopefor a productive engagement between those re-searchers examining the governing of climatechange in the city and those whose primaryfocus has been detailing the factors that areshaping trends in GHG emissions.

Such an engagement may also be onemeans of responding to recent critique thatthe focus on cities’ responses to climate changeis misplaced. Dodman (28) and Satterthwaite(29) have powerfully argued that the rhetoricthat attributes over 70% of anthropogenicemissions of carbon dioxide to cities couldbe regarded as one that blames cities forthe problem without either acknowledgingthe possible benefits of urban living or thesignificant differences within and betweencities in terms of where responsibilities forcurrent and future climate change might lie.Citing evidence that shows that urban dwellershave lower per capita GHG emissions thantheir rural counterparts, Dodman argues thata perspective that sees cities as the root of theclimate change problem “ignores the fact thatmany of the processes implicit in urbanizationcan actually have a positive overall effect onglobal environmental change, and fails to rec-ognize that the spatially varied consequences ofglobal environmental change are likely to affect

different urban areas in a variety of differentways” (28, p. 186). While transnational net-works and urban elites may seek to enroll citiesin the global South into the politics of reducingGHG emissions, Satterthwaite (29, 55) andDodman (28) express concern that this maybe both inappropriate—given the low levelsof emissions involved and the more pressingissues of climate adaptation—and unjust,shifting the blame from northern consumerswho are driving much of the emissions growthin industrializing countries and missing the“very large differentials in per capita emissionsbetween different city individuals and house-holds” (29, p. 546). Both authors are, however,at pains to point out that such an analysis “isnot intended to mask the scale of the problemor to disguise the need for substantial actionat the city level to address greenhouse gasemissions” (28, p. 197). Rather, it suggests thatmore careful analysis than has been offeredin most of the literature to date is required asto where and with whom responsibilities foraddressing climate change in the city may lie.

GOVERNING CLIMATE CHANGEIN THE CITY AND BEYOND

A second broad area of investigation with whichthe literature on cities and climate change hasbeen concerned is the multilevel governance ofglobal environmental issues. Work on urban re-sponses to climate change was among the first tochallenge traditional approaches that regardedthe international community, and the develop-ment of regimes, as the exclusive site of globalenvironmental politics. Equally, scholars haverecognized that the context within which ur-ban actors are responding to the issue is crit-ically shaped by the structures and processesof governing taking place at other scales andthrough multiple networks (30, 36, 43, 50, 56,57). Such multilevel approaches have been usedto analyze the nature of urban climate changegovernance and, more recently, to analyze itsimplications in terms of the reconfiguration ofpolitical authority within and beyond the state.Taking their cue from the original literature

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on multilevel governance in Europe, scholarshave situated the development of urban climategovernance at the interface of horizontal net-worked forms of authority and vertical divi-sions of responsibilities among different parts ofthe state. These different spheres of authorityhave been found to have profound effects on theways in which climate change is governed in thecity, and each is considered below in turn. Suchapproaches have, however, primarily taken theprocesses of multilevel governance for grantedand have regarded urban climate governance asthe outcome of this complex politics. A new di-rection in the research field, considered in thelast part of this section, argues instead that re-sponding to climate change in the city has be-come a strategic arena for the development ofthe state and one in which the restructuring ofauthority is taking place.

Network Governance

As discussed above, many scholars have iden-tified the development and growth of transna-tional and national networks as central to thehistory of urban climate change responses (19,35–36, 40–41, 57). Determined as an importantfacet of the multilevel governance frameworkwithin which urban responses have emerged,the analysis of municipal networks has alsosought to uncover how, and with what impli-cations, such networks are able to govern theirconstituent members in the absence of any di-rect form of authority. One analysis suggeststhat it is the opportunities that networks conferon their members that provides both the incen-tives to join and the “glue” that keeps networkstogether. For example, Granberg & Elander(36, p. 545) find that

participating in networks gives municipali-ties access to flows of opportunities, and al-lows the municipality itself to be a part ofthe flow. Cooperation also opens a possibil-ity to create a positive image of a munici-pality as forerunners spearheading innovativeideas align with ecological modernisation, i.e.,combining local economic development with

reduction of GHG emissions. Thus, networksmay strengthen their participants’ ability to at-tract investments from the private sector andfrom public funding to bring about sustainabledevelopment.

Access to the resources offered throughtransnational networks has been regardedas especially critical for cities in the globalSouth. In Mexico City, Romero Lankao(21) argues that the presence of influentialscientists, together with the CCP network, wasinstrumental in establishing climate change onthe policy agenda, though their presence couldnot overcome greater institutional barriersto action such as the availability of resourcesand the coordination within and betweenrelevant government bodies. Another inter-esting example can be drawn from Holgate’sstudy (19) of two cities in South Africa—CapeTown and Johannesburg. Although both citieshave similar socioeconomic and institutionalchallenges, the implementation of GHG miti-gation policies has differed greatly. Cape Townhas successfully implemented GHG mitigationmeasures because of cooperation with externalinstitutions, including ICLEI’s CCP program,nongovernmental organizations, Eskom (thelocal utility), and academic institutions. Incontrast, Johannesburg has been less successfulowing to a lack of institutional capacity, a frag-mented structure, and privatized utilities, all ofwhich reduced the city’s ability to implementclimate change initiatives (19).

Municipal networks are found to be suc-cessful in enrolling and keeping members in sofar as they can offer expertise, funding opportu-nities, and the ability to disseminate and learnfrom good or best practices, and these networkshave developed a range of mechanisms andtools, such as target setting, benchmarking,and other forms of soft regulation, enablingthem to govern through their networks (35).However, as Toly (40) argues, these practicesrepresent a form of technical leadership inwhich fundamental issues concerning thenature of the problem to be governed and theimplications of various solutions are rarely


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discussed. As he goes on to suggest, the “CCPand its member cities most often frame the callto action in terms of cobenefits that primarilysatisfy the demands of other competing firstprinciples,” which serve to legitimize “neolib-eral ecopolitical principles” and dilute “thecapacity for norm contestation” (40, p. 350).However, Toly also identifies the potential fornetworks to govern differently through “normentrepreneurship”—providing a political spacein which alternative understandings of the(urban) climate change problem might be pur-sued. He identifies the 2005 International SolarCities Initiative as one such example, given thatit both “affirms the goal of a sustainable and eq-uitable per capita emissions target” and seeks todevelop “a cadre of entrepreneurial, pioneer, or‘benchmark’ cities, which commit to ambitiousemission reduction goals. . .which meet 2050IPCC-consistent targets” (40, pp. 350–51).The Transition Towns network might also beconsidered in this regard, as it promotes alter-native discourses about the nature of the climatechange problem as linked to the profligate useof fossil fuels and the need to localize economicproduction and social life (43). In pointing tothe critical role of networks in both technicaland normative terms, Toly (40) captures theessence of their role in the urban governance ofclimate change. However, whether these tworoles are as distinct as his analysis suggests isperhaps moot. The technical leadership offeredby the CCP program, and indeed many othernetworks, is a means through which normsconcerning what governing climate changeshould be about are made concrete. Mosturban networks currently have goals that gofar beyond those agreed upon in internationalforums, suggesting perhaps that challengesto climate orthodoxies are being mountedthrough these means. Nonetheless, his analysisis that by tying into neoliberal and eco-modernapproaches to environmental governance—based on the fundamental principle that inaddressing climate change or any other issueeconomic growth need not be jeopardized—such networks limit their capacity to achievetheir ambitions, and this anlysis is persuasive.

Vertical Autonomy

In addition to considering the “horizontal”means through which the urban climate gover-nance is being conducted, many analysts havefound that the relations between local, regional,and national state authorities have been criticalin determining the scope for responses (6, 12,20–21, 36, 50, 56–59). In the main, this analysishas focused on the competencies that munici-pal governments have—in terms of their powersand duties—and the extent to which they haveautonomy in exercising these in key policy sec-tors, such as transport, land-use planning, in-frastructure development, building standards,waste management, and so on. The role of mu-nicipalities in these areas is usually defined bycentral or regional governments and is dele-gated to local authorities. Research has foundthat municipalities that have specific compe-tencies for the direct provision of waste, trans-port, or energy services, such as is the case inmany northern European countries, can havesignificant capacity to address climate changethat other local authorities lack (5, 13, 17).However, this is a relatively rare situation. Mostanalysts find that municipalities have limitedpowers and responsibilities with respect to keysectors related to GHG emissions, includingenergy policy, pricing, and supply; the develop-ment of urban infrastructures, such as transportsystems; the use of economic instruments, suchas taxes and charges; as well as energy efficiencystandards for buildings and appliances, thoughthere is more autonomy with regard to land-useplanning, education, and voluntary programs(5, 37, 41, 60–62). A study of climate change re-sponses in Helsinki, Finland, illustrates how therelations between different levels of governancechanges significantly across sectors. Monni &Raes (50) found that energy consumption in thebuilt environment was determined by Europeanregulations, such as the Energy Performanceof Buildings, national regulations, municipalregulatory oversight, and voluntary agreementsbetween energy companies and government de-partments. In this policy area, “the different lev-els of governance are working well together in

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this field: the city is implementing energy per-formance policies by implementing the build-ing code and granting energy aid, and also byparticipating in the voluntary energy conserva-tion agreement scheme” (50, p. 753). However,when it comes to the promotion of renewableenergy, policy initiatives at the city level remainin contradiction with EU and national policiesof increasing renewable energy generation be-cause of the technical and financial implicationsof changing existing energy networks to accom-modate biofuels (50, p. 749).

Furthermore, although most municipalitieshave been found to have at least a degree ofpartial autonomy over the governing of climatechange locally, the extent to which national andregional governments have actively supportedurban actions varies significantly from countryto country. In Sweden, for example, “althoughclimate policy is not mandatory, central gov-ernment support to local climate-change mit-igation is offered through environmental andclimate investment programmes requiring co-operation between local actors from both thepublic and the private sectors” (58, p. 63). Else-where, researchers suggest that it has only beenbecause of changes in policy at the national levelthat municipal action has been forthcoming. InChina, changes in local government prioritiesare usually the result of requirements or incen-tives offered by the national government (45).However, such mandates do not automaticallylead to local responses. Qi et al. (45) propose in-stead that “local governments operate accord-ing to motivation (M), power (P) and capacity(C). They are also affected by various incen-tives (I) and constraints (C)” (45, pp. 389–90).Although relations between local and centralgovernments are critical in determining thesedifferent factors, they also find that interna-tional policy—in the shape of the availabilityof carbon finances—and personal motivationsare also key in determining the nature of ur-ban climate governance in China. However, themultilevel governance of urban responses to cli-mate change is not only structured by the for-mal competencies, autonomy, and financial in-centives offered to local government but also

by the political conflicts involved. It is per-haps in the United States that this has beenmost evident. Research by Betsill found that in“Colorado the state’s 1999 appropriations billforbids the expenditure of any state funds toimplement the Kyoto Protocol until the treatyhas been ratified by the U.S. Senate” (cited in17, p. 21). However, in the United States, asin Australia, the absence of national leadershipon the issue of climate change has also servedto create a policy vacuum into which city andstate authorities have ventured, suggesting thatcoordination and support across vertical layersof government may not always be necessary inpromoting urban responses to climate change.Nonetheless, in each case, (state and) municipalauthorities were able to draw on federal fund-ing to undertake various initiatives, albeit thesewere relatively small in scale, and have beenable to exercise their autonomy in devising andimplementing climate policy. Summing up thecurrent situation, Gore & Robinson (38, p. 155)suggest that, although “federal institutions havenot directly impeded municipal actions,” theyhave “only provided limited and largely incon-sistent support,” and it is currently unclear asto whether they will support future municipalaction.

Urban Climate Governance and theRestructuring of the State

Across a wide range of literature, then, mul-tilevel governance—in terms of both thedevelopment of (transnational) networks andthe relation between different levels of thestate—has been found to be a critical factorshaping urban climate governance. In themain, authors have analyzed these processes interms of (a) the divisions of responsibility andsharing of competencies between and acrosslevels/spheres of governance; (b) the resourcesthat are mobilized vertically and horizontallythrough these different sets of relations; and(c) the ways in which ideas and norms arelearned, shared, and contested in these pro-cesses. In such accounts, multilevel governanceis both regarded as the context within which


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the urban governance of climate change hasunfolded—providing opportunities for subna-tional actors and transnational networks as theauthority of the nation-state is reduced and thegoverning of environmental issues takes placelocally and globally—and as a set of processesthat structure the opportunities for acting at thecity scale. In effect, most authors have regardedmultilevel governance as the stage upon whichthe drama of urban responses to climate changeare played out. There has been considerably lessattention given to the possibility that the urbangovernance of climate change may be a key sitein the reconfiguration of (state-based) politicalauthority. The absence of such consideration isperhaps all the more surprising given that suchquestions have been at the heart of urban andregional research for the past two decades (63).It is in part a reflection of the fundamentaldisconnect between scholars whose primaryfocus is on understanding the dynamics ofurban governance, who have traditionallyneglected the environmental sphere (64–66),and those whose first concern has been withunderstanding responses to climate change inthe city, predominantly from an environmentalor political science background. Some recentpapers have, however, started to buck thistrend. In their discussion of the climate policiesdeveloped by two cities in Sweden, Sundsvalland Vaxjo, Gustavsson et al. (58, p. 70) find aprevalence of networks ranging from the “verylocal network encompassing only local gov-ernment actors to national and transnationalnetworks, aiming at exchange of knowledgeand experience between cities. There are alsopartnerships including actors both from thepublic and the private sectors in developingnew technical solutions.” They argue that thisphenomenon is representative of what Brenner(63) has termed the rescaling of statehood, suchthat “climate networks and other networks arerelatively self-governing, with collective actorschallenging the territorially bounded, vertical,nature of central-local government relations”(58, p. 70) and that urban responses to climatechange should be considered not only as anoutcome of globalization but as fundamental to

that contested set of processes (58, p. 72). Whatis less clear from their analysis is, however, theextent to which the state is being fundamentallyreconfigured through this process or whetherthe governing of climate change in the city istaking place through an alternative geographyof authority and resources that operates around(and some would say at the margins of) existingstate practices.

In their recent paper, While et al. (66) makea stronger claim for the reworking of the stateand the resulting implications for urban and re-gional governance through processes of “car-bon control.” They suggest that a continual(and contested) process, occurring over the past40 years, of eco-state restructuring can be iden-tified and defined it as “the ongoing reorga-nization of state powers, capacities, regulationand territorial structures around institutionalpathways and strategic projects which are (atleast from the vantage of state interests at agiven moment in time) viewed as less environ-mentally damaging than previous trajectories”(66, p. 77). In practice, eco-state restruc-turing “includes organizing and mobilisingstrategic interests and actors to under-take specific projects and activities that thestate. . .understands to be consistent with strate-gic environmental goals and outcomes set atinternational and national levels” (66, p. 80).Within this framework, they suggest that overthe past four decades, three waves of environ-mental governance can be identified: the first,which dominated the 1970s and 1980s, focusedon prevention and control of environmentalpollution; a second was based on the concepts ofsustainable development and ecological mod-ernization in the 1990s; and a third, which oc-curred over the past decade, has had at its heartthe notion of carbon control (66, pp. 80–82).They suggest that the current phase of eco-state restructuring, which is based on carboncontrol, is giving rise to a “distinctive politicaleconomy” given that discourses of mitigatingclimate change both “open up, and necessitatean extension of, state intervention in the spheresof production and consumption. Controllingcarbon emissions might be seen as a problem

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and an opportunity for advanced liberal states”(66, p. 82).

Other authors have, of course, drawn at-tention to the fundamental challenges that ad-dressing climate change poses for the state, andin particular its relation with private author-ity (for a review, see Reference 2). However,While et al. (66) offer a perspective that dealsdirectly with the potential implications for ur-ban and regional governance. As they argue, todate less attention has been paid to how “inter-national and national carbon control regimescome to ground” at the urban and regional scale.This, they argue, is critical for “the coming eraof carbon control will alter the strategic con-text for urban and regional management in waysthat go beyond the largely voluntaristic carbonreduction strategies so far pursued by activistauthorities” (66, pp. 86–87) through, for ex-ample, the need to comply with new forms oflegislation, pressure to invest in low-carbon in-frastructures, the need to manage low-carbonbudgets, and the opportunities offered by newcarbon markets. In particular, they suggest thatthe restructuring of the state around carboncontrol may alter the “calculative practices ofurban management” (66, p. 87) both in sim-ple financial terms and in relation to the roleof the state in relation to energy networks andinfrastructures. This, in turn, may “open up al-ternative socioeconomic possibilities for locali-ties and regions locked into the narrow growthpathways of the neoliberal competition state”(66, p. 87). Furthermore, they argue that, aspractices of carbon control come into contactwith existing patterns of uneven social and eco-nomic development, a distributional politics ofthe responsibilities, benefits, and consequencesof addressing climate change may emerge. Forexample, this is witnessed in the growing de-bates in the United States about the impactof cap-and-trade schemes on different regionsand the impacts of climate policies on the in-ner cities and suburbs (66, p. 88). In makingthe connection between the reworking of thestate, processes of urban and regional gover-nance, and efforts to address climate change inthe city, While et al. (66) offer much food for

thought and a significant set of questions forthe research community. However, althoughtraces of the sorts of processes that they iden-tify can be seen [for example, as global citiesstart to engage with the issue (39, 67) and al-ternative discourses of economic developmentemerge (43)], there is limited evidence to datethat they are becoming widespread, especiallyoutside of the United Kingdom. In addition, forthe most part, urban and regional responses toclimate change remain voluntary, and despitethe strong emphasis on carbon control in thesediscourses, whether “state strategies of carboncontrol. . .represent a harder edge to state envi-ronmental regulation” (66, p. 77) through theuse of nonnegotiable targets is moot. Further-more, as summarized above, research has foundthat, even though the state has had a criti-cal role to play in orchestrating the possibil-ities for responding to climate change in thecity, this has also been determined through arange of networks and the interweaving of pub-lic and private authority, raising questions as tohow far the politics of carbon control is a stateproject.

Nonetheless, the argument that climatechange is becoming a key strategic issue forcities around the world and that this processcannot be understood without recourse to thebroader processes affecting urban and regionalgovernance is well made. In another recentaccount, Hodson & Marvin (39) argue thatglobal cities are now engaged in a project of ur-ban ecological security in response to concernsover resource constraint and climate change. Ina similar vein to While et al. (66), they suggestthat issues of environmental governance arebecoming a key strategic concern for urbanauthorities, provoked by discourses of the ur-ban causes and consequences of environmentalproblems and facilitated through the restruc-turing of the state and the creation of “new statespaces”1 (39, pp. 195–96). This they contend

1The term new state spaces describes novel arrangementsfor governing public affairs undertaken by the state, usuallyin partnership with private and third sector organizations,beyond traditional government mechanisms and institutions.


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is leading “the world’s largest cities” to begin“to translate their strategic concern about theirability to guarantee resources into strategiesdesigned to reshape the city and their relationswith resources and other spaces” (39, p. 200).They suggest that these strategies are manifestin three particular ways: the protection of thecity against the potential impacts of climatechange, the decoupling of urban infrastruc-tures from national and regional systems “bybuilding more ‘self-sufficient’ infrastructures ofprovision on a city scale” (39, p. 201), and thecreation of new global urban agglomerationsthrough the development of networks of worldcities and the development of intercity tech-nological networks. Together, they suggest,this amounts to the “metropolitization” ofecological resources, as urban authorities seekboth to relocalize key infrastructure networksand to “glurbanize” through transnationalcollaboration, underpinned by a new logicfor urban development of “Secure Urbanismand Resilient Infrastructure” (39, p. 204). Indocumenting the growing response amongthe world’s major cities to climate change,Hodson & Marvin raise some significant issuesconcerning both how climate change is beinginterpreted and the consequent implicationsfor these and other cities. As such cities makeclaims on national resources and enroll power-ful private actors “to develop strategies, socialrelations and technologies that can attempt toguarantee the ecological security of infrastruc-ture” (39, p. 201), there is a need to criticallyassess “the implications of this new logic inshaping the contours of the emblematic, exem-plary and dominant sociotechnical-ecologicalfix for cities” (39, p. 210). In particular, theyraise questions about the roles of elites andparticular interest groups in establishing whatcounts as feasible and desirable responses to cli-mate change and which cities and communitiesmay be excluded through these processes. Indrawing attention to the political economies ofthe processes of responding to climate changein the city, Hodson & Marvin (39) providesome crucial avenues for future research in thisarea. This is particularly important given that

research in this field has to date failed to pro-vide much insight into who gains and who losesfrom the new urban politics of climate change.

POLICY FAILURE ANDPOLITICAL STRUGGLE

The third key issue with which scholars in thisfield have been concerned is with examiningwhy the political rhetoric of urban commit-ments to addressing climate change has sofar failed to make a significant impression.Explanations are usually described either interms of institutional capacity (for example,concerning the jurisdictional remit or re-sources of municipal authorities) or in terms ofpolitical factors (for example, the opportunitiesfor political leadership or the degree to whichaddressing climate change fits with other socialand economic concerns in the city). Thesedifferent approaches are reviewed and critiquedbelow. New research in the field suggests thatthere is a need to critically address the basisfor the lack of capacity and the politicalconflicts that have been encountered locally,and that this may require the deployment ofalternative theoretical perspectives.

Institutional Capacity

Turning first to issues of institutional capacity,as discussed above, one factor that many au-thors have identified is the level of vertical au-tonomy between municipalities and other levelsof government (17). This is further exacerbatedby what has been termed the problem of “fit”—the lack of coincident boundaries between thescale of the issues that need to be addressed(e.g., commuting) and municipal authority. InThailand, Lebel et al. (68, p. 117) suggest thatthe “jurisdictional areas of the current munic-ipal boundary of Chiang Mai is way too smallto be relevant to affectively govern the urban-ization process” given the interplay between ur-ban and rural processes in shaping urbanization.Similarly, in her study of climate responses inMexico City, Romero Lankao (21, p. 529) finds

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the administrative structure of city’s gover-nance differs from its boundaries and carbon-relevant socioeconomic and ecological func-tioning. Administratively, the city is managedby diverse federal, state and local tiers of gov-ernment. Yet, the city functions as a complexsystem; its core area and localities, activitiesand households are interlinked by economicinterchanges and transportation activities, byfluxes of materials and energy.

In such cases, analysts usually suggest thatmore coordination between different levelsof government is required. Other issues ofcapacity and resources are also consideredsignificant. One is the degree to which mu-nicipal authorities and other urban actorshave sufficient knowledge of the problem ofclimate change upon which to act. In termsof reducing GHG emissions, researchers havefound that, despite the efforts of transnationalmunicipal networks and a few examples oflocalized models, problems in assessing GHGemissions remain significant for most local au-thorities, particularly those in the global Southbecause of a lack of data and the challenges ofdownscaling approaches designed for profilingemissions at regional and national spatial scales(9, 37, 68). Arguably, given the significantvariations involved between and within citiesand the uncertainty over the potential impactsof climate change, these issues are even morepressing when it comes to climate adaptation(25). A third set of institutional issues identifiedin the literature relates to the internal dynamicsof municipal governments. Research has foundthat expertise on climate change remainsconcentrated in the environmental department(49). This potentially limits municipal capacityfor two reasons. First, environmental depart-ments are often marginalized within municipal(and other) authorities. Second, the “crosscutting nature of climate change governancemeans that environment departments oragencies are frequently not able to implementthe policies (for transportation or finance forexample) that are required to address the prob-lem” (42, p. 23).. In this context, it has been

argued that “mainstreaming, coordination,and cooperation across government agencies isvital” (69, p. 24; see also 17, 49).

A final, and arguably the most important,institutional factor shaping urban capacity torespond to climate change identified in the lit-erature is that of resources—both human and fi-nancial. Holgate’s (19) study of climate changepolicy and action in Johannesburg and CapeTown demonstrates how limited human re-sources can make a significant difference to theextent and efficacy of the measures taken. InCape Town, the comparatively well-resourcedmunicipality was able, with the help of addi-tional resources from outside the local author-ity, to make significant advances in tackling theissues, whereas in Johannesburg, one officer wasresponsible for addressing the range of environ-mental challenges facing the city, and, at leastpartly as a result, the response to climate changewas minimal. Satterthwaite (44) draws attentionto the problem of a lack of municipal finance forproviding basic infrastructures and the conse-quent implications for adaptation. This lack ofservice provision, he goes on to argue, reflects

local governments lacking the resources tomeet their responsibilities—and often withvery limited capacities to invest (as almost alllocal revenues go to recurrent expendituresor debt repayment). These inadequacies of-ten reflect local governments that are unrep-resentative, unaccountable and antipoor—asthey regard the population living in informalsettlements and working within the informaleconomy as ‘the problem’ (44, p. 11; see also24, 55).

Although not as critical in life-and-death terms,similar findings concerning the lack of re-sources to implement measures that could ad-dress climate change have also been found indeveloped countries, where the ability to ac-cess external sources of funding has been akey factor in determining which municipalitieshave put some policies and measures into place(13, 36, 61).


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Political Economies ofUrban Climate Governance

Frequently, the prescription given for over-coming the institutional barriers discussedabove is to generate more capacity through thedevelopment of more knowledge, the provisionof more resources, the creation of new institu-tions, enhancing good governance, or throughceding more autonomy to municipalities (e.g.,9, 17, 19, 21, 42, 49, 56). However, as manyresearchers have pointed out, such institutionalbarriers do not operate within a political vac-uum, and more often than not, it is the urbanpolitical economies of climate change that mat-ter most in enabling and constraining effectiveaction.

At the most fundamental level, struggleshave emerged over whether cities should orshould not be addressing climate change. Bai(17) suggests that the “not on my turf” and “notin my term” arguments are prevalent in manycities, particularly in the global South, whereresources are limited and other concerns aremore pressing (see also 24). Likewise, given theglobal politics of climate change, questions ofresponsibilities and of development prioritiesalso arise. As Lasco et al. (70, p. 84) explain, “formany developing countries GHG mitigationhas a negative connotation because of the per-ception that this will deny them of their basicright to growth in human services and economicactivities; the prospects of ‘reduced growth’ or‘no growth’ are not feasible.” Such tensionsare, however, also discernible in the politicsof addressing climate change within cities inthe North. In the United States, for example,Zahran et al. (71) observe that it is communitiesmost likely to be affected by the impacts of cli-mate change, and those with a liberal politicalconstituency, in which climate change mitiga-tion is likely to be prioritized. In their studyof climate change mitigation and transportpolicy in Cambridgeshire, Bulkeley & Betsill(12) found that efforts to reduce the demandfor travel and hence of GHG emissions locallyhad been confounded by the priority given toeconomic considerations within transport and

land-use planning and the stress on the needfor increasing travel demand in the county.

At the same time, research suggests thataddressing the challenges of adaptation is alsopolitically difficult, particularly in cities in theglobal South. As Satterthwaite (44) argues,those most vulnerable to the impacts of climatechange are those in the more vulnerable andhigh-risk sites, which may lack competent, ca-pable, and accountable government, and oftenlie outside the public provision of infrastructureand services, such as those living in squattersettlements. In these cases, it may be an absenceof governance rather than any overt conflictsabout how to address adaptation that is creatingthe biggest barriers to action. This is not to saythat more explicit conflicts may not arise. AsHuq et al. (23, p. 14) have argued, the “kindsof changes needed in urban planning and gov-ernance to ‘climate proof’ cities are often sup-portive of development goals. But. . .they couldalso do the opposite—as plans and investmentsto cope with storms and sea-level rise forciblyclear the settlements that are currently onfloodplains, or the informal settlements that areclose to the coast.” To date, research on the ur-ban politics of adaptation has received relativelylittle attention, but as these arguments makeclear, there is a pressing need to understandhow, and with what implications, adapting toclimate change is taking place in the city.

Given the potential ambiguous or overtlyhostile responses to urban climate changeinitiatives, researchers have found that twofactors have been important in enabling citiesto respond to the issue. One factor has beenthe presence of opportunities to demonstrateleadership (by politicians and businesses, or forthe municipality), and these have provided ameans of countering arguments against takingaction (41). These opportunities have arisenthrough the development of transnationalmunicipal networks, which offer “soft” rewardsfor pioneering actions and trigger events,such as the hosting of global conferences orsporting events (35, 36, 42). These findings doof course beg questions about the possibilitiesfor ordinary cities to overcome opposition

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to addressing climate change through thesemeans, with the potential of a divide opening upbetween those cities that can deploy resourcesto act on climate change ahead of the pack, cre-ating a positive spiral of reward and (economic)gain, and those who can not, for whom climatechange will remain a marginal issue. Equally,research has found that adaptation measuresoften get adopted only in response to specificlocal or regional natural disasters, which mayor may not be climate related. For example,in Mumbai, after the 2005 deluge flooding,the Greater Mumbai Disaster ManagementPlan was revised in 2007, strengthening theMunicipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai’sDisaster Management Committee and raisingthe disaster preparedness of the city (72).However, in general, although political leadershave been able to create significant politicalcapital on the issue of mitigation, to date thereis little evidence that this has been the case interms of addressing adaptation because of therelatively mundane nature of such measures,and this lack of opportunity for leadership mayprovide one explanation as to why this issueremains on the back burner for many cities.

A second key factor identified by several au-thors has been the ability of municipal actorsto reframe climate change as a local problemand/or one that will have significant additionalbenefits (10). For example, in Canada, “actionsto reduce GHG emissions are also deeply con-nected to other goals and cobenefits such as hu-man health improvements through improvedair quality, cost savings, adaptability to real orpotential vulnerabilities due to climate change,and overall improvements in short, mediumand long-term urban sustainability” (73, p. 9).Equally, Bai (17, p. 26) argues that there areplenty of local hooks upon which responding toclimate change might be hung within cities inthe global South, including “air pollution con-trol, solid waste management, urban develop-ment and growth management, transportationand other infrastructure development, to namea few.” Other studies suggest that it is this pro-cess of reframing, localizing, or issue bundling(74, p. 61) that has been effective in mobilizing

local action on climate change in cities in theglobal South and that this will remain an im-portant aspect of building the local capacity toact (20, 70). Although the research communityhas tended to evaluate such political strategiespositively, little analysis has been conductedabout their potential implications. Arguably, afocus on the win-win potential of addressingclimate change lends support to neoliberal dis-courses about the ways in which the problemshould be defined, focusing attention on issuessuch as energy efficiency, where there are clearmonetary gains, and avoiding more fundamen-tal questions concerning, for example, how (andby whom) energy is provided, mobility demandssatiated, and the production of wastes reduced.Furthermore, it is not clear that all aspects ofthe climate change problem can be successfullyreframed locally. Research suggests to date thatthere is an “absence of issue framing that haslinked adaptation to pressing urban social, eco-nomic and environmental issues with the resultthat adaptation has limited traction or supportlocally” (42, p. 78).

New Directions in UnderstandingUrban Climate Governance

Despite the emphasis in many studies on the po-litical issues that are arising in response to ad-dressing climate change locally, relatively fewexamine the basis for such conflicts. Recentwriting suggests the need to examine three keyareas: the relation between public and privateauthority; the ways in which the policy prob-lem of climate change is constituted; and thematerial basis of policy interventions in the net-worked infrastructures, which mediate relationsbetween society and nature.

As discussed above, studies of urban gov-ernance have drawn attention to the need tocritically consider the dynamics of politicalauthority, the restructuring of the state. and theconsequent implications for reducing GHGemissions or adapting to climate change. Arecent study of the responses of two cities inSweden (58) suggests that this can be critical:


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contrasting business structures lead to differ-ent climate-policy strategies. The large andenergy-consuming industries are crucial ac-tors in the local climate strategy of Sundsvall.In addition, the domination of a few largeindustries tends to bring about large-scaleprojects and solutions. In Vaxjo, however, lo-cal industry is typically small scale and lessproblematic from an environmental point ofview. The city’s climate policy thus has initi-ated a variety of projects, often small scale andexperimental in character, where local govern-ment and local firms interact as partners withmutual interests (58, p. 71).

The boundaries of the relations between pub-lic and private are also in flux, particularly inthe wake of neoliberal reforms, which have ledto the privatization or contracting out of whatwere previously municipal services (51). Re-search in Johannesburg suggests that a pro-cess of semiprivatization has occurred withinthe local authority that “creates a silo effectwhere communication between different agen-cies, utilities and the city administration arefragmented,” reducing municipal capacity toaddress climate change (19). At the same time,there is evidence that private actors are increas-ingly seeing cities as places within which toact on climate change, for example, the HSBCClimate Partnership in Hong Kong, London,Mumbai, New York, and Shanghai. The waysin which public and private authority is beingreconfigured and contested through urban re-sponses to climate change is a critical area forfuture research.

Although several authors have analyzed theways in which conflicts over addressing climatechange in the city occur, Rutland & Aylett (52,p. 628) suggest that in the main the researchin this field has failed to consider the ways inwhich the object to be governed—in their case,GHG emissions—comes to be determined andunderstood, and the “significant political work”involved in this process. Equally, they suggest,limited attention has so far been given to howmunicipalities (and other authoritative actorsin the city) come to govern the conduct of

others in line with these objectives (52, p. 628).Understanding the work of policy, they argue,requires a different conceptualization of powerand of governance than is usually deployed inthe study of urban environmental governance,one based on theories of governmentality andactor-network theory. Using this framework,Rutland & Aylett (52) provide a detailed andcompelling account of the development of ur-ban climate policy in Portland, Oregon, includ-ing the ways in which interests were alignedand a diverse collection of actors (human andnonhuman) were bought into an assemblagethrough which GHG emissions came to be gov-erned locally. As they explain, in the processof the development of policy “targets and tac-tics were applied only to elements of energyconsumption that could be influenced in an ac-ceptable way by the municipal government. En-ergy used in flights to and from Portland In-ternational Airport, for instance, was excluded.Also excluded were the significant amounts ofenergy used in importing and exporting com-modities, and the energy actually embodied incommodities” (52, p. 636). In effect, the processof making policy also constitutes what the ob-ject to be governed should be, with importantimplications in terms of how climate changeis addressed, and whose interests are served.Rutland & Aylett (52) go on to demonstratehow, once energy efficiency became the centralmeans through which to address GHG emis-sions locally, the municipal authority soughtto govern the conduct of households throughthe deployment of various forms of facilitativepower in the form of technical guidance, incen-tives, rewards. and so on. While several authorshave documented the use of such instrumentsin the development of urban climate policy,Rutland & Aylett (52) offer a novel way of ana-lyzing these processes, which gets to the heartof questions concerning how, given the volun-tary nature of most urban climate governance,anything is achieved. By offering an alternativeaccount of power and authority to most anal-yses of urban climate governance, their workopens up a series of questions for the researchcommunity concerning how, and why, the

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governing of climate change comes to be au-thoritative and is successfully (or otherwise)conducted in the city. Engaging with such newtheoretical perspectives is crucial if the researchcarried out in this field is to thrive and make animpact on broader debates concerning environ-mental governance.

Finally, recent work has also suggested thatthere is significant potential for the researchcommunity to engage not only with the politi-cal but also with the material basis of urban cli-mate governance. To date, limited engagementhas taken place with the infrastructure networksthat produce GHG emissions and that shapevulnerabilities to climate change. This is a crit-ical issue for the research community for thesesociotechnical networks “structure a major partof the material metabolism in industrialized so-cieties. They source, use, and transform hugeamounts of natural resources. At the same timethey are key catalysts of environmental prob-lems like air, water, and soil pollution, and nu-clear risks, and they make a major contributionto global warming” (75, p. 3). Monstadt (75,p. 9) argues that despite their critical impor-tance in urbanization and their role in essen-tially shaping “the scope for urban governance,they have so far been a blind spot in contem-porary governance studies.” Research that hasbeen conducted focuses on “the question of theextent to which” the liberalization, commercial-ization, and privatization of infrastructure sys-tems, together with technical innovation andnew forms of regulation, “induce a ‘splinter-ing urbanism’ which means aggravating urban(social/spatial) inequalities by emerging pat-terns of network provision, access, and use”(75, p. 11; see also 76–78). However, as Mon-stadt (75, p. 12) goes on to argue, this literaturehas to date neglected the ways in which suchinfrastructures mediate the relations betweennature and society, and the processes of splin-tering urbanism “have rarely been reflected onwith regard to their impact on the environ-mental performance of these systems and theirecologically sustainable redesign and reregula-tion in the context of urban and sociotechni-cal renewal.” To address these questions, Mon-

stadt argues for the constructive engagement ofapproaches from science and technology stud-ies, urban political ecology, and urban gover-nance. Given the potential significance of theseprocesses with respect to the potential for ur-ban responses to climate change, scholars fromthis research community may do well to en-gage with this new agenda. One potential fu-ture area of research he suggests is the “study of‘urban infrastructure regimes’ understood asstable urban configurations of institutions,techniques, and artifacts which determine ‘nor-mal’ sociotechnical developments in a city andthus shape general urban processes and theurban metabolism” (75, p. 14). Such analyseswould shed light on the social and technical dy-namics shaping the development of urban re-sponses to climate change while being attentiveto the politics of these processes and, poten-tially, their implications in terms of social andenvironmental justice.

CONCLUSIONS

Studies of the urban governance of climatechange have proliferated over the past decade,as cities across the world increasingly placethe issue on their agendas, transnational net-works multiply, national governments seek toimplement policies, and private actors experi-ment with various responses. Although muchof this research has been limited in terms ofboth the number and geographical locationsof the cases examined, it has provided a gooddeal of insight into the development and na-ture of urban climate governance. Following aperiod of policy innovation among some pio-neering municipal governments and the birthof transnational municipal climate change net-works in the 1990s, the 2000s have witnesseda rapid expansion in terms of the number ofcities involved, accompanied by a growing di-versity in terms of their positions within theurban hierarchy (both global cities and smallurban communities) and their geography (espe-cially in the global South). Despite these trends,the research suggests that urban climate changegovernance remains focused on the mitigation


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agenda, with issues of climate change adapta-tion only recently beginning to make their pres-ence felt, and that policy interventions remainconcentrated on those issues, e.g., energy ef-ficiency, in which additional benefits can alsobe realized. The research community has pro-vided several insights into why this has beenthe case. Urban climate governance has pri-marily been driven by policy entrepreneurs andtransnational municipal networks, reliant onpersuasion and soft forms of (self-) regulationthrough which an emphasis on the win-win po-tential of addressing climate change in the cityhas become orthodox. With highly variable de-grees of vertical autonomy, with respect to re-gional and national governments, institutionalfragmentation, scarce finances, and local con-flicts between environmental and developmentgoals, the extent to which municipalities havebeen able to put into place policies that con-strain emissions of GHGs or insist that futurevulnerabilities are taken into account has beenlimited.

Despite these valuable insights, this reviewhas also demonstrated some significant gapsin our current understanding of urban climategovernance, opening up several horizons for fu-ture research. The first, and perhaps most fun-damental, is that of evaluating the impact of thepolicies and measures that have been put intoplace in terms of reducing GHG emissions andenhancing urban resilience. We simply do notknow what the impact of many of the initia-tives that have been undertaken over the pasttwo decades has been or what these achieve-ments might amount to collectively. The sec-ond, related issue is that to date the researchbase has been built primarily upon the ba-sis of small numbers of cases concentrated inEurope and North America. As a growing num-ber of cities across the world engages withclimate change, the evidence base must also di-versify. Equally, there is a need for further com-parative research using significant numbers ofcases. Third, despite some notable exceptions,research on responses to climate change in thecity has been driven primarily from perspectives

of environmental management and global en-vironmental governance. This review has high-lighted several areas where engagement withother fields of study is necessary in order tograsp the complex problem that is governingclimate change in the city. In particular, thereis a need to engage more thoroughly with theprocesses of urbanization, development and ur-ban governance, as well as with debates over thereconfiguration of political authority to under-stand how and why urban climate governance isbeing defined and contested. Such approacheswould enable the analysis of who is gaining andwho is losing from addressing climate change inthe city and of the implications of these findingsfor broader processes of (environmental) gover-nance. Finally, mirroring its intellectual roots,research in the field has deployed relatively fewtheoretical approaches in seeking to understandthe subject of cities and climate change. Againwith some exceptions, questions of how pol-icy is made and contested, how governance ispracticed, and the politics of these processeshave been neglected. This review has shownthat there are several different frameworks thatcould be used, including multilevel governance,actor-network theory, governmentality, theo-ries of the state, and so on, which can providevaluable insights into how urban climate gov-ernance is taking shape. This is not to suggestthat any one of these frameworks might be bet-ter than another, but it is a call for more theo-retical engagement in the field and for the needto unpack some of the fundamental categoriesof analysis. Rather than viewing the city as anactor responding to global processes of envi-ronmental change and political fragmentation,this review has suggested that the urban gover-nance of climate change is constituted througha myriad of public and private actors (operat-ing across different scales and through multiplenetworks) and mediated through sociotechni-cal infrastructure systems and, in the process, iscreating an arena in which what it means to actin response to climate change is being definedand, with it, what it means to have authority togovern.

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SUMMARY POINTS

1. Over the past two decades, two waves of urban responses to climate change have beenidentified. The first was characterized by pioneering municipal governments and focusedon issues of energy efficiency. The second has been more political in nature, encompassinga broader set of climate-related concerns and a wider range of cities, including those inthe global South.

2. The emergence of the urban governance of climate change is one of a growing numberof governance experiments that are emerging as a result of dissatisfaction with progressat the international level and the fragmentation of political authority.

3. The policies and measures that have been put in place in cities across the world are diversebut tend to be concentrated on mitigation, rather than adaptation, and concentrated oneco-modern responses that have economic as well as environmental benefits. Althoughaction at the city level is growing, evidence of the impact and effectiveness of thesemeasures is to date limited.

4. Research suggests that urban climate governance does not take place in a vacuum butrather is structured through processes of multilevel governance. Networks and govern-ments have been found to be critical in shaping the capacity and political space formunicipal responses.

5. On the whole, multilevel governance is regarded by analysts as the stage upon which thedrama of urban responses to climate change is played out. New research suggests thatthe urban governance of climate change may instead be a key site in the reconfigurationof (state-based) political authority through carbon control.

6. Despite over two decades of policy interventions at the city level to address issues ofclimate governance, there remains a stubborn gap between rhetoric and action. Expla-nations for this gap vary from case to case but focus on issues of institutional capacityand factors of political economy.

7. Consequently, recommendations for enhancing responses to climate change at the ur-ban level revolve around the development of capacity (in technical, legal, and financialterms) and of ways to marry climate change policies with other initiatives. However, suchanalyses fail to examine the underlying reasons why capacity is limited and conflict rife.

8. Alternative analyses, which examine issues of power, public and private authority, and thematerial infrastructures that mediate policy interventions, offer several promising linesfor future inquiry. Engagement with these approaches may deliver new insights into howclimate change is being governed in the city and determine the implications for urbangovernance, socioenvironmental justice, and the reconfiguration of political authority.

FUTURE ISSUES

1. What have been the impacts, in terms of reducing GHG emissions and vulnerability, ofpolicies and measures implemented at the city scale? How significant are these impactscollectively?


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2. What are the differences and similarities between policies to address mitigation andadaptation? How and why do approaches to addressing climate change in cities in theglobal South differ from those in the North?

3. To what extent is the city becoming an arena for experimentation in response to cli-mate change? What forms are these experiments taking, and what are their impacts andimplications?

4. How, and why, is climate change becoming a key strategic issue for urban governance?Are new discourses concerning energy and environmental security emerging? What arethe implications of how the governing of climate change is being conducted?

5. To what extent is a more radical urban politics of climate change emerging? What formsis it taking, and what is their potential?

6. What are the implications of urban climate governance for issues of social and environ-mental justice?

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

The author is not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that mightbe perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This review has been conducted as part of my ESRC Climate Change Leadership Fellowship,Urban Transitions: climate change, global cities and the transformation of socio-technical systems, andI am grateful for this support. I also thank my collaborators, Michele Betsill, Vanesa CastanBroto, Kristine Kern, and Heike Schroeder, who have provided invaluable insights and inspiration,which have helped to shape my understanding of the field of cities and climate change researchenormously. Any errors or omissions remain my own.

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EG35-FM ARI 18 September 2010 7:49

Annual Review ofEnvironmentand Resources

Volume 35, 2010 Contents

Preface � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �v

Who Should Read This Series? � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �vii

I. Earth’s Life Support Systems

Human Involvement in Food WebsDonald R. Strong and Kenneth T. Frank � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 1

Invasive Species, Environmental Change and Management, and HealthPetr Pysek and David M. Richardson � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �25

Pharmaceuticals in the EnvironmentKlaus Kummerer � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �57

II. Human Use of Environment and Resources

Competing Dimensions of Energy Security: An InternationalPerspectiveBenjamin K. Sovacool and Marilyn A. Brown � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �77

Global Water Pollution and Human HealthRene P. Schwarzenbach, Thomas Egli, Thomas B. Hofstetter, Urs von Gunten,

and Bernhard Wehrli � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 109

Biological Diversity in Agriculture and Global ChangeKarl S. Zimmerer � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 137

The New Geography of Contemporary Urbanization and theEnvironmentKaren C. Seto, Roberto Sanchez-Rodrıguez, and Michail Fragkias � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 167

Green Consumption: Behavior and NormsKen Peattie � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 195

viii

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EG35-FM ARI 18 September 2010 7:49

III. Management, Guidance, and Governance of Resources and Environment

Cities and the Governing of Climate ChangeHarriet Bulkeley � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 229

The Rescaling of Global Environmental PoliticsLiliana B. Andonova and Ronald B. Mitchell � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 255

Climate RiskNathan E. Hultman, David M. Hassenzahl, and Steve Rayner � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 283

Evaluating Energy Efficiency Policies with Energy-Economy ModelsLuis Mundaca, Lena Neij, Ernst Worrell, and Michael McNeil � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 305

The State of the Field of Environmental HistoryJ.R. McNeill � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 345

Indexes

Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 26–35 � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 375

Cumulative Index of Chapter Titles, Volumes 26–35 � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 379

Errata

An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Environment and Resources articles maybe found at http://environ.annualreviews.org

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