In the 30 years since the journal Environmental Politics was founded, we have witnessed a profound shift in how we understand climate from its initial framing as global problem, to one that is ...increasingly understood as transnational, personal, urban, networked, and regional. Charting the rise of climate change's urban agenda over the past decade, I suggest we are now witnessing a 'third wave' of climate urbanism in which the challenge of addressing climate change is recognised as deeply connected to wider issues of sustainable development and social justice. These shifts are in turn shaped by and giving rise to new developments in terms of the form of climate politics, how it is conducted, and where the battle lines over what it means to act politically under conditions of climate change are being drawn. Recognising that the nature of climate urbanism is continually emergent and highly contested will be critical for future work in this field.
Despite a growing interest in critical social and political studies of climate change, the field remains fragmented and diffuse. This is the first volume to collect this body of scholarship, ...providing a key reference point in the growing debate about climate change across the social sciences. The book provides a new set of insights into the ways in which climate change is creating new forms of social order, and the ways in which they are structured through the workings of rationality, power and politics. Governing the Climate is invaluable for three main audiences: social science researchers and advanced students in the field of climate change; the wider research community interested in global environmental politics and global environmental governance; and policy makers and researchers concerned more broadly with environmental politics at international, national and local levels.
As the trend of urban climate experimentation continues, many accounts now seek to identify how it can be harnessed toward responses of sufficient scale and magnitude for the crises at hand. The ...imperative is to move beyond experimentation. Yet some authors now suggest that this may not be so straightforward for, they argue, we increasingly inhabit a condition of permanent experimentation. Taking its cue from this premise, this article explores where the condition of experimentation may have emerged from. I trace these roots to the limit points now encountered within ecologically modernist governance-the shifting dynamics of governing authority, the relation between knowledge and policy, how to address indeterminacy, and what progress or improvement looks like in the condition of a climate-changed socio-natural world. Viewed in this light, experimentation, I want to suggest, represents a significant and potentially paradigm-shifting break with established norms and practices concerning the nature of the climate problem. Fundamentally, this line of thought means that it may neither be possible nor even desirable to abandon experimentation and to return to more centralized, controlled, and certain responses for it is from within the difficulties of governing a climate-changing world through this paradigm that experimentation has arisen in the first place. The vital task is instead to understand the politics and possibilities of experimentation for progressive and just urban sustainability.
•European cities are making explicit contributions to biodiversity through nature-based solutions, using quantitative targets.•The Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework should incorporate the goals ...of Conserve, Restore, and Thrive that cities pursue for biodiversity.•Urban NBS need to further integrate biodiversity goals, as well as restoration actions that emphasize species and genetic diversity.
In this paper, we examine how cities are working with nature-based solutions for biodiversity. Drawing on a sample of 199 nature-based solutions across Europe, we identify how cities work with nature-based solutions to conserve nature, restore nature, and to find ways to thrive through harnessing nature’s contribution to people. Our findings show that cities are making explicit contributions to biodiversity through nature-based solutions, and often adopt specific and quantifiable targets to guide their actions. Yet there is significant variation in the ways in which biodiversity goals and interventions are being pursued. Where biodiversity goals and actions are included in nature-based solutions, they are mainly ecosystem-based - focusing on the protection, restoration or enhancement of the integrity, functionality, and connectivity of habitats and ecosystems - with fewer focused on specific species, and very few projects concerned with genetic diversity. Although it is often assumed that urban action towards biodiversity goals will be undertaken through local planning processes, our analysis shows that European cities are taking project-based actions for biodiversity through a set of explicit, quantitative and measurable targets, which are tailored to the specific conditions of urban settings. On the basis of these findings, we suggest that if cities are to achieve ambitious goals for biodiversity over the next decade, new international frameworks being developed for the post-2020 period should include targets that acknowledge the way in which biodiversity is governed in cities and the contribution that cities make to conserve, restore and thrive with nature to guide urban action.
► A database analysis reveals urban climate change experimentation as a global trend. ► Experimentation is a recent trend not confined to specific world regions or cities. ► Although experimentation ...is heterogeneous, energy experiments predominate. ► Multiple actors, often through partnership, intervene in urban climate change governance. ► A characteristic trend of experimentation led by private actors emerges in Asia.
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.
This book provides a new approach to thinking about the politics and geographies of climate governance. It argues that in order to understand the nature and potential of the range of new responses to ...climate change emerging at multiple scales we need to examine how governance is accomplished - how it is undertaken, practised and contested. Through a range of case studies drawn from communities, corporations and local government, the book examines how climate change comes to be governed and made to matter as an issue with which diverse publics should be concerned. It concludes that rather than seeking the solution to climate change once and for all, we need to engage with the ways in which we can channel our intentions to ameliorate the climate problem to more progressive ends. The book will be of interest to researchers, advanced students and policy makers across the social sciences.
Growing emphasis on finance as key to decarbonization requires social science research that critically attends to the emergent and diverse forms taken by carbon finance. First, we pluralize research ...into carbon finance, building on existing work to identify four main forms: carbon markets; ecosystem services; natural capital investment; and, capital allocated to low-carbon enterprises and projects. Second, we propose that research should problematize the processes through which carbon is variously translated into financial value. Illustrated with reference to low-carbon investment in electricity generation, our agenda thereby extends from the difficulties of producing carbon-as-commodity to the uncertainties of constituting carbon-as-asset.
In this paper, we argue for an approach that goes beyond an institutional reading of urban climate governance to engage with the ways in which government is accomplished through social and technical ...practices. Central to the exercise of government in this manner, we argue, are 'climate change experiments' – purposive interventions in urban socio-technical systems designed to respond to the imperatives of mitigating and adapting to climate change in the city. Drawing on three different concepts – of governance experiments, socio-technical experiments, and strategic experiments – we first develop a framework for understanding the nature and dynamics of urban climate change experiments. We use this conceptual analysis to frame a scoping study of the global dimensions of urban climate change experimentation in a database of 627 urban climate change experiments in 100 global cities. The analysis charts when and where these experiments occur, the relationship between the social and technical aspects of experimentation and the governance of urban climate change experimentation, including the actors involved in their governing and the extent to which new political spaces for experimentation are emerging in the contemporary city. We find that experiments serve to create new forms of political space within the city, as public and private authority blur, and are primarily enacted through forms of technical intervention in infrastructure networks, drawing attention to the importance of such sites in urban climate politics. These findings point to an emerging research agenda on urban climate change experiments that needs to engage with the diversity of experimentation in different urban contexts, how they are conducted in practice and their impacts and implications for urban governance and urban life.
In our 2005 paper, Rethinking Sustainable Cities, we made a case for the increasing significance of climate change in the urban politics of sustainability. Taking a multilevel governance perspective, ...we argued that the 'urban' governance of climate protection was not confined to a local arena or to the actions of the state, but rather was orchestrated through the interrelations between global, national and local actors across state/non-state boundaries. We revisit these arguments and examine their validity in the light of the rapidly changing landscape of urban responses to climate change and the growing academic literature in this field. We consider in turn: the ways in which climate change is shaping urban agendas; the utility of multilevel governance perspectives for understanding this phenomenon; and the extent to which we can identify a 'new' politics of urban climate change governance and its consequent implications for the development of theory and practice in this field.
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