If the governance challenges of climate change have been well researched for medium-sized, affluent and larger entrepreneurial cities, relatively little is known about climate urbanism in small-to-medium-sized cities experiencing long-term industrial decline, social deprivation and austerity. Such structurally disadvantaged cities often struggle to build inclusive new climate alliances, attract green jobs, and forge new images. This intervention argues that research on climate urbanism needs to consider two emerging trends in structurally disadvantaged cities: (1) how austerity is producing uneven geographies of climate urbanism; (2) the local social and economic conditions underpinning the construction of new climate alliances around alternative trajectories of urban development.
This contribution assesses the roles and functions of leaders, pioneers and followers in multi-level and polycentric climate governance. While leaders usually actively seek to attract followers, this is not normally the case for pioneers. We address the following core research questions: (1) Who can be a leader/pioneer?; (2) Why do actors become leaders/pioneers?; (3) How do leaders/pioneers act?; and, (4) How do leaders/pioneers attract followers? In doing so we differentiate between structural, entrepreneurial, cognitive and exemplary leadership and assess the dynamics between leaders/pioneers and followers in climate governance. State-centred, multilevel governance and polycentric governance concepts place different emphasis on the roles played by different types of leadership/pionieership in climate governance. We argue that climate leaders and pioneers can use different types of leadership and often must act (either simultaneously or sequentially) at different levels of climate governance to achieve their ambitions.
As outlined in Chapter 1, the core analytical themes of this book are: the conceptualisation of pioneers, leaders and followers within multilevel governance (MLG) and polycentric (climate) governance structures. These conceptual framings are overlapping and mutually supportive in the quest for greater analytical purchase. Specifically, as most cases exhibit different forms of leadership and pioneership – and even, perhaps simultaneously, followership and possibly also laggardness – MLG and polycentricity permit such complex identities to be located and examined in detail, by enabling the multifaceted 21st century state to be examined from multiple angles. The theoretical insights and empirical findings obtained across this book suggest that while pioneership and leadership may be more commonly associated with the Global North – especially following the explicit allocation of primary responsibility for climate action to developed 'Annex I' states via the 1997 Kyoto Protocol – they may be increasingly found across the globe. Indeed, as the chapters in this volume show, there are instances of climate leadership and pioneership within the Global South and followership within the Global North, as well as the other way round. Although the 2015 Paris Agreement emphasises again the principle of Common But Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR), it requires all parties to put forward voluntary pledges in the form of NDCs. Climate leadership and pioneership from countries in both the Global North and South will therefore be important for achieving the Paris Agreement's goal of keeping global temperatures to well below 2°C and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C. In order to find instances of ambition, the book's use of MLG and polycentricity as guiding themes enables contributing authors to find climate leadership and pioneership beyond the 'usual suspects', and to acknowledge both the guidance of the state, and the importance of non-state actors.
