An Urban Politics of Climate Change

Experimentation and the Governing of Socio-Technical Transitions

Harriet Bulkeley, Vanesa Broto, Gareth Edwards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317650096
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias físicas
• Subtopic: Geografía

The confluence of global climate change, growing levels of energy consumption and rapid urbanization has led the international policy community to regard urban responses to climate change as 'an urgent agenda' (World Bank 2010). The contribution of cities to rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions coupled with concerns about the vulnerability of urban places and communities to the impacts of climate change have led to a relatively recent and rapidly proliferating interest amongst both academic and policy communities in how cities might be able to respond to mitigation and adaptation. Attention has focused on the potential for municipal authorities to develop policy and plans that can address these twin issues, and the challenges of capacity, resource and politics that have been encountered. While this literature has captured some of the essential means through which the urban response to climate change is being forged, is that it has failed to take account of the multiple sites and spaces of climate change response that are emerging in cities 'off-plan'.

An Urban Politics of Climate Change provides the first account of urban responses to climate change that moves beyond the boundary of municipal institutions to critically examine the governing of climate change in the city as a matter of both public and private authority, and to engage with the ways in which this is bound up with the politics and practices of urban infrastructure. The book draws on cases from multiple cities in both developed and emerging economies to providing new insight into the potential and limitations of urban responses to climate change, as well as new conceptual direction for our understanding of the politics of environmental governance.

PART I

1

CLIMATE GOVERNANCE AND URBAN EXPERIMENTS

Enter the Anthropocene

Over the past two decades we have lived through a significant transformation in the way we think about ourselves and our relationship with the environment. For Earth Scientists, this is akin to a new geological period called ‘the Anthropocene’ in which ‘the capability of contemporary human civilization to influence the environment at the scale of the Earth as a single, evolving planetary system’ (Steffen et al. 2011: 842) is the dominant force. Climate change refers to the means through which anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) have come to alter atmospheric composition and in turn affect climatic conditions. Over the past twenty years scientists, policy-makers and the public have gradually moved away from asking ‘is climate change happening?’ to ask instead ‘what can we do to stop the dangerous effects of climate change?’ The multi-scalar nature of climate change, where GHGs are emitted locally but their impacts are transmitted through global processes, challenges the capacity of states to protect their citizens and the climate (Biermann and Dingwerth 2004; Bulkeley 2005; Schulz 2010). While scholarly and political attention has focused on how nation-states can seek to overcome this common action problem, there has been a growing awareness of the need to move ‘beyond the state’ in order to understand and develop the possibilities of a response to climate change.

The empirical evidence derived from diverse social and economic sectors has fostered debates about the type of action that should be prioritized, who should take responsibility for leading climate change action and where such action should be located (Hoffmann 2011). These responses are not confined to particular realms or levels of government, but rather take place in a multilevel governance context which extends vertically from international and transnational organizations to states, regions and cities and horizontally to civil society organizations, businesses and other non-state actors (Bulkeley and Betsill 2005; Romero Lankao 2012; Coutard and Rutherford 2010; Puppim de Oliveira 2009). From corporate climate change champions to community-based renewable energy schemes, interventions to decarbonize supermarket supply chains to revised planning policies, climate change has been put to work across a vast array of potential sites for political action.

Across the landscape of climate governance, increasing attention is being paid to the ways in which cities might respond to the challenges of mitigation, reducing emissions of GHGs, and adapting to the impacts of a changing climate (UN-Habitat 2011; World Bank 2010). The UN estimates that while the total world population will grow by 2.3 billion people between 2011 and 2050 (up to 9.3 billion), urban populations will grow even faster, increasing by 2.6 billion people up to 6.3 billion (UN Population Division 2011). Urban populations are both growing naturally and through processes of urbanization as people migrate from rural areas, seeking to embrace the economic opportunities cites provide. The consequences of this trend are geographically uneven. Rapid urban growth, particularly in cities in the global south, is often associated with the growth of settlements in high-risk areas, most vulnerable to global environmental change (e.g. Hardoy and Pandiela 2009; Parnell and Walawege 2011). Climate change-related events and challenges to resource security exacerbate a set of ongoing urban vulnerabilities resulting from growth, poor service provision, lack of access of vulnerable populations to basic services and weak governance structures (Watson 2009). If cities are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, however, they are also at the heart of the processes through which GHG emissions are produced. While the exact proportion of GHG emissions that can be attributed to cities may be impossible to qua.jpgy (UN-Habitat 2011), the production and use of energy and transportation in cities, as well as the consumption of food and resources, means that cities are critical to any response that seeks to reduce GHG emissions. In one calculation, for example, the International Energy Agency (IEA) (IEA 2009: 21) finds that over two-thirds of annual global energy demand comes from cities and towns, which also ‘produce over 70% of global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions’. By 2030, the IEA predicts that, with 60 per cent of the world’s population, cities and towns will consume over 75 per cent of the world’s energy demand, and that ‘over 80% of the projected increase in demand above 2006 levels will come from cities in non-OECD countries’ (IEA 2009: 21). Urban areas therefore present major challenges both in terms of concentrating activities that produce GHG emissions and concentrating vulnerabilities. At the same time, they also offer great potential to open up spaces for action addressing climate change. Over the past two decades, researchers and practitioners have sought to gather evidence across a range of cities to understand how and why cities are responding to climate change and the challenges they face.

In this book we seek to expand our knowledge and understanding of urban climate change responses by offering a new perspective on these issues. Theorizing urban climate governance as a set of processes that exceed the institutional boundaries of the local state, we argue that central to the urban response to climate change is a mode of experimentation where municipalities, private and civil society actors seek to demonstrate, experience, learn and challenge what it might mean to respond to climate change through a multiplicity of interventions, projects and schemes. Such experiments, we argue, are not simply ad hoc ventures, but need to be understood as situated and purposive interventions that demonstrate the ways in which new forms of authority are emerging in the context of climate change and the critical socio-technical dimension to realizing any governance response.

This book analyses the phenomenon of urban climate experimentation through the development of a new analytical approach and a series of cases that interrogate experimentation in practice. It seeks to develop our knowledge of the possibilities and limitations of urban responses by examining their emergence, dynamics and consequences. In the remainder of this chapter, we develop our argument that experimentation represents a critical aspect of the urban response to climate change. First, we situate our approach within the broader field of research on cities and climate change, exploring the roles of municipalities and non-state actors in responding to climate change within the urban arena as well as the broader context of urban political economy within which such responses have been pursued. We then turn to consider the ways in which different literatures have addressed questions of innovation and intervention in the urban arena. These insights inform an empirical analysis of evidence gathered from a survey of 100 global cities about the nature and characteristics of urban climate experiments. The chapter concludes by outlining the structure of the book.

Climate change: an emerging urban paradox?

Cities lie at the heart of the challenge of addressing climate change. Urban areas concentrate economic activities and social life which produce GHG emissions. While, as we point out above, several commentators have pointed out that anthropogenic GHG emissions are concentrated in urban areas, others point to the complexity of allocating emissions across geographical regions. With limited data and significant uncertainties, these studies have suggested that there is significant diversity within and between cities in terms of the production of GHG emissions, so any broad brush generalization will be inaccurate (Dodman 2009; Satterthwaite 2010; Hoornweg et al. 2011; Glaeser and Kahn 2010; Hillmer-Pegram et al. 2012). Furthermore, the urban contribution to climate change does not only rest with the in-situ production of GHG emissions, but also extends to their roles as centres of consumption for goods and services produced elsewhere. How, where and why cities should mitigate climate change is therefore no straightforward matter. At the same time, the concentration of people and hazards in urban areas poses significant challenges in terms of addressing the impacts of climate change (Dodman and Satterthwaite 2008). As with mitigation, exposure to climate risks differs across cities, with lower classes being generally more vulnerable to climate impacts (Grineski et al. 2012). Vulnerability to such impacts is linked not only to exposure, but also to poverty, segregation, lack of access to fundamental services and inequalities in terms of access to fundamental services (Ayers 2009; Hardoy and Pandiela 2009; Laukkonen et al. 2009). Responding to these challenges not only offers potential for addressing climate change, but also for attending to the wider causes and consequences of urban vulnerability. However, deciding what should be adapted, where, when and by whom raises fundamental questions in terms of the evidence base upon which decisions should be made, financial calculations, and questions of justice. Furthermore, while much discussion in urban planning for climate change has focused on whether adaptation or mitigation should be prioritized (e.g. Pizarro 2009), in practice both mitigation and adaptation share two crucial aspects that, at least within the city, suggest the need for convergence across both forms of intervention. First, both mitigation and adaptation require a definite intervention in the systems of provision and the built environment in the city (e.g. Coutard and Rutherford 2010; Mondstadt 2009; Laukkonen et al. 2009; Bulkeley et al. 2013), where GHG emissions and vulnerabilities to climate risks are profoundly interconnected. Second, both mitigation and adaptation are linked with broader questions of environmental justice and unequal access to resources and services in urban areas.

Responding to climate change at the urban level is not therefore simply a matter of recognizing that cities have an important role in terms of mitigation and adaptation and enacting a set of well-worn interventions. Rather, it raises critical issues of knowledge, politics and justice. These challenges and opportunities have generated considerable interest about the potential to foster and maintain effective action for addressing climate change through cities. Initially, much of the interest concentrated on understanding the motivations, reactions and latent institutional potential within local governments. Debates about multilevel governance have also generated interest in the ways in which non-state actors engage in climate change action. These debates tended to regard climate change as a separate sphere of urban governance. More recently, research has interrogated the ways in which climate change is becoming integral to the processes and politics of urbanism, through discourses such as ecological security, decarbonization and green growth. Below, we review each of these debates in turn.

Municipalities and climate change governance

Since the early 1990s, academic research on urban responses to climate change has explored the questions of why cities should take the leadership for climate change action, the forms of urban response that municipalities were undertaking, and the institutional factors which facilitate or prevent climate change action in city governments. These debates developed following the observation that municipal governments were taking action in the absence of initiatives at the national level and, in some cases such as the USA and Australia, in spite of it (Bulkeley and Betsill 2003; Gore and Robinson 2009; Warden 2011). This spurred interest in why municipal governments regarded cities as a key site to address climate change. This research points first to institutional reasons, second to reasons related to the potential to address climate change in cities, and third to reasons related to the adequacy of the responses at the city level. Those who invoke institutional reasons often also advocate the subsidiary principle, that is, the need to address policy problems at institutional levels as close as possible to citizens, so that interventions can lead to climate change-responsive planning that is also democratically legitimate (Kithiia and Dowling 2010). Commonly, institutional reasons are also used to ide.jpgy the role that municipal governments have in the delivery of public services and management of infrastructure systems, so that they can intervene directly to reduce emissions and vulnerabilities (Bulkeley and Betsill 2003; Dodman and Satterthwaithe 2008). Moreover, emphasis on establishing measurable objectives at the local level helps establish direct linkages between policy aspirations and practical implementation challenges (Burch 2010; Bulkeley and Betsill 2005). Connecting climate change dynamics with their local impacts may also help local governments to mobilize different publics in response to climate change (Hunt and Watkiss 2011). At the urban level, citizens may find it easier to establish clear channels of communication with municipalities than with regional or state governments. Institutional motivations may also be embedded in the influence of other levels of government across vertical multilevel governance structures. For example, cities may simply be pressed by national governments to take action (Schreurs 2010).

A second – and related – set of arguments points to the potential of cities to concentrate people, knowledge, capital and resources in such a way as to provide the potential to implement climate change action. These arguments point to the critical role of municipal government intervention both through formal competencies and by enabling local action. Municipal governments have varied roles in the delivering of energy, land use planning, water, urban development, waste and transportation services – all of which are key sectors through which responses to climate change need to be addressed (Bulkeley and Betsill 2003). From an economic point of view, cities offer the opportunity to achieve economies of scale, which may allow interventions not available in other contexts. For example, in terms of achieving emissions reductions, cities may be characterized by high-energy density and service heterogeneity that may support the emergence of economies of scale and agglomeration, leading to social and technological innovation (Schulz 2010). Some local governments...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Frontmatter
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Index