Abstract
Cities are key sites where climate change is being addressed. Previous research has largely overlooked the multiplicity of climate change responses emerging outside formal contexts of decision-making and led by actors other than municipal governments. Moreover, existing research has largely focused on case studies of climate change mitigation in developed economies. The objective of this paper is to uncover the heterogeneous mix of actors, settings, governance arrangements and technologies involved in the governance of climate change in cities in different parts of the world.The paper focuses on urban climate change governance as a process of experimentation. Climate change experiments are presented here as interventions to try out new ideas and methods in the context of future uncertainties. They serve to understand how interventions work in practice, in new contexts where they are thought of as innovative. To study experimentation, the paper presents evidence from the analysis of a database of 627 urban climate change experiments in a sample of 100 global cities.The analysis suggests that, since 2005, experimentation is a feature of urban responses to climate change across different world regions and multiple sectors. Although experimentation does not appear to be related to particular kinds of urban economic and social conditions, some of its core features are visible. For example, experimentation tends to focus on energy. Also, both social and technical forms of experimentation are visible, but technical experimentation is more common in urban infrastructure systems. While municipal governments have a critical role in climate change experimentation, they often act alongside other actors and in a variety of forms of partnership. These findings point at experimentation as a key tool to open up new political spaces for governing climate change in the city.
Highlights
Addressing climate change requires an ‘‘unprecedented level of cooperation, between countries, and between different levels of Governments and the private sector’’ (De Boer, 2009, p. 1)
While there remains much dispute about the exact contribution that cities make to GHG emissions (Dodman, 2009), and about who and what is most vulnerable to the effects of climate change (De Sherbinin et al, 2007), urban centres are regarded as a vital part of the global response to climate change (UN-Habitat, 2011; World-Bank, 2010)
The results concern three main questions: (1) where and when these experiments occur; (2) what types of interventions are emerging as climate change experiments and the extent to which we can identify some common trends and characteristics; and (3) who leads the experiments and what governance mechanisms make them possible
Summary
Addressing climate change requires an ‘‘unprecedented level of cooperation, between countries, and between different levels of Governments and the private sector’’ (De Boer, 2009, p. 1). Fewer studies have sought to undertake systematic comparison between cases, or have employed quantitative methodologies Where these exist, analysis has focused on whether particular urban characteristics explain the emergence of particular kinds of policy response within cities in more developed economies A fuller understanding of urban responses to climate change will require new forms of case-study and comparative research that consider a more geographically diverse range of cities together with the range of urban actors involved in such responses, and capture initiatives and interventions falling outside of formal processes of planning and policy. Despite the acknowledgement that there remains a ‘stubborn gap’ between the rhetoric and reality of local climate policy and its implementation (Betsill and Bulkeley, 2007), urban landscapes are littered with examples of actions being taken under the banner of climate change Our approach examines these initiatives, which we term ‘climate change experiments’. Municipalities have a critical role in experimentation, though analysis reveals the wide variety of forms of partnership through which experimentation is taking place and that are arguably opening up new political spaces for governing climate change in the city
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