Abstract
Sustainability concerns transgress jurisdictional boundaries compelling multi-scalar and inter-jurisdictional responses. The city-region is one of the scales at which governance actors may mobilise for sustainability and this is now recognised in literatures on integrated food systems, for example. However, within the mainstream debates on city-regions, sustainability as a motivation for inter-jurisdictional governance is still given scant attention. This paper considers the extent to which sustainability is present as a driver towards city-region governance, using countries within the still underexplored BRICS cluster as cases studies. The paper shows that in practice the connection between environmental sustainability and city regionalism remains mainly limited and fractious. In all cases, however, there are emergent connections which offer the potential for stronger connections. Most importantly, public reaction to a mounting environmental crisis in the BRICS is obliging the actors of governance, concerned with sustaining their public legitimacy, to establish or strengthen inter-jurisdictional and collaborative relationships across city-regions. There are however significant limits to these endeavours, especially where levels of social trust are low, or where sustainability problems are rooted within unsustainable national growth paths.
Highlights
The stretching of the urban landscape across multiple governmental jurisdictions presents confounding challenges of coordination and collective action in addressing sustainability concerns
The first limitation rests in the scantiness of the current practice of city-regionalism
The current structures of city-region governance are hardly adequate to the task of addressing the complex, cross-cutting concerns of environmental sustainability
Summary
The stretching of the urban landscape across multiple governmental jurisdictions presents confounding challenges of coordination and collective action in addressing sustainability concerns. The need for such a vision is implicit, but the focus is on understanding the existing links between city regionalism and sustainability drivers within selected contexts This follows Addie and Keil who call for a careful exploration of “real existing city regionalism” which acknowledges that “regionalism is neither a mere normative ideational construct nor a set of predictable practices, but a contested product of discourses (talk), territorial relationships (territory) and technologies (both material and of power)” [16]. Thirty-five in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted in cities across the BRICS in the period 2016 to 2019 as well as an analysis of the grey literatures and scholarly work within the respective contexts This empirical work provides the knowledge setting on city-region governance that underpins the focus of this review article on the sustainability dimension. The position of local government varies significantly across the BRICS from contexts where local government is constitutionally embedded and quite autonomous to those where local government is fragile and dependent for its survival on the whims of higher levels of government
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