Transnational actors are critical for financing programs and generating awareness around climate change adaptation in cities. However, it is unclear whether transnational support actually enables more authority over adaptation actions and whether outcomes address wide-ranging development needs. In this article, I compare experiences from three cities in India—Surat, Indore, and Bhubaneswar—and link local political agency over adaptation with their supporting transnational funders. I find that adaptation governance involves powers of agency over directing bureaucratic practices, public finance, spatial strategies, and institutional culture. A city's ability to exert these powers then yields different patterns of adaptation. However, political agency is circumscribed by a combination of historical political economic constraints and emerging transnational resources that promote specific forms of political meaning and procedures. The presence of external support therefore paradoxically constrains the governance autonomy of cities. This opens up new opportunities for development dependency—that is, ones that mirror neoliberal critiques of foreign aid—within the global marketplace for climate finance.
In cities that are pursuing climate change adaptation actions, transnational actors are critical catalysts for financing programs, generating public awareness, and legitimizing the agenda. However, scholars of urban climate adaptation have yet to understand whether such external interventions have long-lasting effects on the sustainability and equity of urban governance processes, particularly when placed in context with competing development priorities across the global South. In this paper, I draw on experiences from three cities in India – Surat, Indore, and Bhubaneswar – to analyze the multilevel dynamics that link local adaptation actions with their supporting transnational networks and funders. Drawing on a comparative multi-scale case study methodology, I find that current capacity deficits in Indian cities indeed allow external actors to catalyze adaptation, but this relationship becomes more dialectical farther into the planning and implementation stages. The governance of climate adaptation in fact involves embedding adaptation into bureaucratic practices, financial processes, spatial plans, and institutional cultures. The interaction between these four pathways results in the coproduction of knowledge, co-creation of options, and inter- institutionalization of standards, practices, and behaviors. A particular actor's ability to exert authority over how interventions are framed, financed, bureaucratized, and built across the urban landscape then yields different patterns of adaptation. This finding therefore reasserts the role of urban political actors operating within the global climate governance regime and the marketplace for climate finance.
This book presents pioneering work on a range of innovative practices, experiments, and ideas that are becoming an integral part of urban climate change governance in the 21st century. Theoretically, the book builds on nearly two decades of scholarships identifying the emergence of new urban actors, spaces and political dynamics in response to climate change priorities. However, it further articulates and applies the concepts associated with urban climate change governance by bridging formerly disparate disciplines and approaches. Empirically, the chapters investigate new multi-level urban governance arrangements from around the world, and leverage the insights they provide for both theory and practice. Cities - both as political and material entities - are increasingly playing a critical role in shaping the trajectory and impacts of climate change action. However, their policy, planning, and governance responses to climate change are fraught with tension and contradictions. While on one hand local actors play a central role in designing institutions, infrastructures, and behaviors that drive decarbonization and adaptation to changing climatic conditions, their options and incentives are inextricably enmeshed within broader political and economic processes. Resolving these tensions and contradictions is likely to require innovative and multi-level approaches to governing climate change in the city: new interactions, new political actors, new ways of coordinating and mobilizing resources, and new frameworks and technical capacities for decision making. We focus explicitly on those innovations that produce new relationships between levels of government, between government and citizens, and among governments, the private sector, and transnational and civil society actors. A more comprehensive understanding is needed of the innovative approaches being used to navigate the complex networks and relationships thatconstitute contemporary multi-level urban climate change governance. Debra Roberts, Co-Chair, Working Group II, IPCC 6th Assessment Report (AR6) and Acting Head, Sustainable and Resilient City Initiatives, Durban, South Africa 'Climate Change in Cities offers a refreshingly frank view of how complex cities and city processes really are.'Christopher Gore, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Politics and Public Administration, Ryerson University, Canada'This book is a rare and welcome contribution engaging critically with questions about cities as central actors in multilevel climate governance but it does so recognizing that there are lessons from cities in both the Global North and South.'Harriet Bulkeley, Professor of Geography, Durham University, United Kingdom'This timely collection provides new insights into how cities can put their rhetoric into action on the ground and explores just how this promise can be realised in cities across the world - from California to Canada, India to Indonesia.' Sara Hughes is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on urban politics, the institutions of local government, urban environmental policy, and the politics of local climate change response. In 2013 Sara was named a Clarence N. Stone Scholar by the urban politics section of the American Political Science Association. Current projects examine the implementation of climate change policy in Toronto, Los Angeles, and New York City; transitions in urban waste management; the determinants of policy attention in local governments; and building capacity for adaptation in cities. Eric K. Chu is a Lecturer in Planning and Human Geography in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham in the UK. His research is on the politics of climate change governance in cities, with particular emphasis on the globally comparative perspectives of socio-spatial change, development planning, policy change, and local environmental justice.Susan G. Mason is Emeritus Faculty in the School of Public Service at Boise State University. She was previously Director of Strategic Initiatives for the School of Public Service and Professor and Founding Director of the Department and Master and Certificate programs in Community and Regional Planning at Boise State University. Her research focuses on regional governance, urban and community development, and sustainability.
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Perspectives from worldwide experts on how major cities across the globe are responding to the major environmental threats of our time, including global climate change Over half of the world's population now lives in cities, and this share is expected to increase in the coming decades. With growing urbanization, cities and their residents face substantial environmental challenges such as higher temperatures, droughts, wildfires, and increased flooding. In response to these pressing challenges, some cities have begun to develop local environmental regulations that supplement national and environmental laws. In so doing, cities have stepped into a role that has been historically dominated by higher levels of government.Global Sustainable Cities takes stock of the policies that have been implemented by cities around the world in recent years in several key areas: water, air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and climate adaptation. It examines the advantages—and potential drawbacks—of allowing cities to assume a significant role in environmental regulation, given the legal and political constraints in which cities operate.The contributors present a series of case studies of the actions that seven leading cities—Abu Dhabi, Beijing, Berlin, Delhi, London, New York, and Shanghai—are taking to improve their environments and adapt to climate change. The first volume of its kind, Global Sustainable Cities is a critical comparative assessment of the actions that major cities in the global North and South are taking to advance sustainability
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