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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.

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.

Climate change governance is increasingly being conducted through urban climate change experiments, purposive interventions that seek to reconfigure urban sociotechnical systems to achieve low-carbon and resilient cities. In examining how experiments take effect, we suggest that we need to understand not only how they are made and assembled, but also how they are maintained within specific urban contexts. Drawing on literatures from urban political ecology and the specific debate on urban repair and maintenance, this article examines maintenance in two case studies of climate change experiments in housing in Bangalore (India) and Monterrey (Mexico). We find that maintenance is a crucial process through which not only urban obduracy is preserved, but also the novel and innovative character of the experiment is asserted and reproduced. The process of 'maintaining' experiments is a precarious one, which requires a continuous external input in terms of remaking the experiment materially and discursively. This process causes further reconfigurations beyond the experiment, changing the patterns of responsibility attribution and acceptability that configure the urban fabric. © 2013 Urban Research Publications Limited.

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.

The rapid global deployment of solar photovoltaic (PV) technologies since the early 2000s has attracted sustained attention. Solar PV has become an increasingly established, widespread and flexible form of electricity generation. In the research language of socio-technical or energy transitions, solar PV can reasonably be viewed as acquiring the characteristics of a 'socio-technical regime.' Such regimes are found where a co-evolving set of social and technical developments have built sufficient momentum for a particular technology to become accepted as an established part of the energy provision system. As solar PV becomes integrated into the project of providing secure, affordable and sustainable energy for development, this momentum is now spreading across sub-Saharan Africa. In this article, we examine the emergence and adoption of solar PV in Mozambique and South Africa. While solar PV has gained ground in both cases, it has done so in different ways and with varying consequences. Our analysis suggests that even as niche technologies reach maturity and transcend the contexts from which they have emerged, they remain constituted through multiple sets of relations that are continually remade, such that the geographies, histories and politics of transitions are an ongoing project. Such a perspective, drawing on energy geographies and landscape studies, can enrich the sustainability transitions literature, enhancing our understanding of different ways of developing and adopting solar PV in particular places.

In a world in which rising powers are reconfiguring global development trajectories with significant implications for their sustainability, it becomes increasingly important to understand whether and how low carbon energy transitions might be enabled or frustrated by this new global geography of power. Towards this end, this paper makes the case for bringing together insights from three broad sets of literature on: (1) socio-technical transitions; (2) the rising powers as (re)emerging development donors and; (3) energy geographies. In building bridges between these three bodies of scholarship we seek to develop an alternative analytical framework that attends more effectively to the global and domestic political economy of transitions and whose value is illustrated empirically in relation to the growing involvement of Brazil, India and China in the energy systems of Mozambique and South Africa. We argue that this alternative framework provides a better understanding of how the rising powers are influencing the changing relationships between low carbon and fossil-fuel based energy pathways and of the multiple roles they are playing in the development and transformation of energy systems, through the development of 'niches' where innovation can emerge, or in reinforcing or challenging existing 'regimes' or dominant ways of providing energy services.