Empowerment and Disempowerment of Urban Climate Governance Initiatives

Scholars have increasingly argued over the last decade that there are compelling opportunities as well as persistent challenges for climate action in cities, yet the overall implications for designing and pursuing urban climate initiatives remain unclear. Urban climate initiatives may take many different forms, such as policy innovation, experimentation, and urban laboratories (Evans & Karvonen, 2014) – all of which involve novel forms of agency seeking to influence urban governance systems to drive climate action. However, the existing literature on these topics remains piecemeal and fragmented from the perspective of informing strategic action. There is a key need to synthesize insights about ways in which empowerment/disempowerment of climate action in cities occurs, in order to understand the potential success or failure of future urban climate governance initiatives. Urban climate governance initiatives may be empowered or disempowered by many different factors across different contexts. For example, this may relate to the presence of complex infrastructure systems, heterogeneous actors with contested interests, and intersecting structures of power and authority in urban governance (Aylett, 2013; Castán Broto, Oballa, & Junior, 2013; Hughes, 2017). Urban governance systems are often open-ended and not clearly demarcated from broader societal governance systems. Earth System Governance (ESG) scholars commonly view urban governance systems as multilevel (Betsill & Bulkeley, 2007), observing problems in divorcing the city from other jurisdictional levels (e.g. subnational, national, global) (Bulkeley & Betsill, 2005a: 43), and a frequent ‘lack of “fit” between the nature of the problem to be governed and the institutions undertaking governance’ (Betsill & Bulkeley, 2007; 450). Urban governance systems are also increasingly viewed as transnational (Bulkeley et al., 2014; Gordon & Johnson, 2017) owing to the emergence of a new urban climate change politics