No abstract

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.

Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractThis paper seeks to develop an alternative account of the geographies of environmental governance to those current conceptions which tend to take space and scale for granted as pre-given, contained, natural, entities. Through an engagement with the debates on the politics of scale, the argument is made that a new spatial grammar of environmental governance must be sensitive to both the politics of scale and the politics of networks.Rather than considering "scalar" and "non-scalar" interpretations of spatiality as necessarily opposite, the paper argues that through a more careful deployment of concepts of hierarchy and territory common ground between scalar and network geographies can be forged, and can inform our understanding of environmental governance. In making this argument, the paper provides an overview of contemporary configurations of global environmental governance, and seeks to illustrate by reference to one transnational municipal network, the Cities for Climate Protection program, how governing the environment involves both political processes of scaling and rescaling the objects and agents of governance, as well as attempts to create new, networked, arenas of governance. The paper concludes that recognition of new spatial grammars is necessary for understanding emerging hybrid forms of environmental governance, and their political and ecological implications.

Studies of the urban governance of climate change have proliferated over the past decade, as municipalities across the world increasingly place the issue on their agendas and private actors seek to respond to the issue. This review examines the history and development of urban climate governance, the policies and measures that have been put into place, the multilevel governance context in which these are undertaken, and the factors that have structured the posibilities for addressing the issue. It highlights the limits of existing work and the need for future research to provide more comprehensive analyses of the achievements and limitations of urban climate governance. It calls for engagement with alternative theoretical perspectives to understand how climate change is being governed in the city and the implications for urban governance, socioenvironmental justice, and the reconfiguration of political authority.

This paper argues that, in order to address the challenges of climate change, attention needs to be focused not only at the international level but also on how climate protection policy is taking shape locally. It provides a comparative analysis of local climate change policy in Germany and the UK. By moving the focus from an analysis of the formal competencies of local government to the multiple modes of governing through which climate protection is taking place, the similarities between the two countries are brought into view. In both cases, actions are concentrated in the energy sphere and municipalities are increasingly deploying self-governing and enabling approaches to undertaken emissions reductions. The paper argues that the impacts of EU policies, financial crises and the political challenges of implementing climate change policies are changing the capacity for local intervention, with potentially significant consequences for medium- and long-term goals for climate protection.