Local Action on Climate Change

Opportunities and Constraints

Susie Moloney, Hartmut Fünfgeld, Mikael Granberg

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781134810901
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

There is growing interest in analysing the role and effectiveness of the local scale in responding to the global challenge of climate change. However, while accounts of urban climate change governance are growing, there is now a real need for further conceptual and empirical work to better understand processes of change and uptake across a range of climate change actions.

Local Action on Climate Change examines how local climate change responses are emerging, being operationalized and evaluated within a range of geographical and socio-political contexts across the globe. Focussing on the role and potential of local governments, non-government organisations and community groups in driving transformative change, the authors analyse how local climate change responses have emerged and explore the extent to which they are or have the potential to be innovative or transformative in terms of governance, policy and practice change.

Drawing on a diverse range of case studies, including examples from Vanuatu, Japan, South Africa, Australia, Sweden, the USA and India, this volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, environmental policy and governance, and sustainability.

1 Climate change responses from the global to local scale

An overview

Susie Moloney, Hartmut Fünfgeld and Mikael Granberg

Introduction: scope and aims of the book

If there was any doubt, the Paris Agreement has placed climate change firmly on the agenda of decision-makers and planners at all scales of government (Bulkeley 2015) and also continued to emphasise the need to focus on climate change adaptation. In light of efforts to contain global warming below two degrees by the end of the century, there is a clearer than ever scientific and political imperative to act now in a decisive manner. This entails action on both reducing greenhouse gas emissions as well as planning for the impacts of climate change through adaptation.

The enormity and complexity of the challenge calls for coordinated action, with regard to international cooperation, devising coherent policy frameworks at the national scale and developing local and regional actions and initiatives that involve public and private sectors as well as community groups and households (Harrison and Sundström 2010; Bulkeley and Tuts 2013). At the international level, global institutions such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) provide highly formalised institutional frameworks that help coordinate action across national and otherwise defined administrative boundaries as their core purpose. Under the guidance of the UNFCCC, least-developed nations (LDCs) have developed National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs) to address their most urgent and immediate adaptation needs, while most governments in the Global North as well as some non-LDCs in the Global South have developed National Adaptation Plans – in many cases these have been cascaded down to the regional level.

Yet to achieve the ambitious goal of retaining global warming to below two degrees, it is increasingly clear that cascading, top-down action from the international to national scale is going to be insufficient. Rather, for climate change action to be catalysed in a way that is needed, transformative change is going to be required, changing aspects of people’s everyday lives to changing our governing institutions. Such broad institutional change can only be facilitated with significant degrees of local and regional action. Local governments, community organisations and private companies are already engaging in climate change action, thereby exploring not only new opportunities for innovation (of processes, institutions, products, etc.) and risk mitigation but often, also developing new approaches for collaborating with partners to plan and implement climate change responses. This arena of action provides significant opportunities for catalysing innovative climate change action and achieving more inclusive processes that can lead to effective and widely supported outcomes.

Understanding and situating local climate change action and governance

There is growing interest in better understanding the types of action that are forming in cities and regions around the world to tackle climate change and the value that different forms of local action bring to effectively dealing with the challenges climate change presents. This interest can be traced in the growing body of work that has emerged focusing on the role of local actors in responding to climate change (cf. Connor 2016; Kent 2016; Hoff and Gausset 2016; van Buuren et al. 2016; Salih 2016) and in particular the role of cities, local governments, community organisations and private enterprises involved in ‘climate change experiments’ (McGuirk et al. 2014; Karvonen et al. 2013; Moloney and Horne 2010; 2015; Bulkeley et al. 2011, 2014; Hoffman 2011; Castan-Broto and Bulkeley 2012). Action, innovation and transformation at the local scale are of interest not only to researchers, but also to activists who are frustrated with the slow progress with multi-lateral treaties, agreements and targets at the international scale, despite recent progress in COP21 in Paris.

While the local level is significant, it is also evident that climate change action requires multi-level governance responses, which coordinate and integrate vertically, across hierarchical levels of governance, as well as horizontally, across different spheres of society (Keskitalo et al. 2016; Moloney and Fünfgeld 2015; Stephenson 2013; Sovacool 2011). Research, policy practice and politics of climate change (climate governance) have for a long time had a strong focus on the global level and the formation of international regimes. Contemporary perspectives, however, have taken greater interest in local and regional dimensions of climate governance and a “more ‘polycentric’ or multi-level approach [that] regards the plurality of actors and levels and the complexity of their interactions” (Jänicke et al. 2015, p. 3). Increasingly, research investigating the local and regional dimensions of climate governance focuses on aspects such as: examining the actors involved in responding to climate change, on various scales and across scales (Bache et al. 2015; Betsill and Bulkeley 2006); investigating who has formal or informal responsibility and mandates to make decisions and act on climate change (Corfee-Morlot et al. 2011; Craft and Howlett 2013); exploring how climate change ‘problems’ are framed and ‘solutions’ identified (Bisaro et al. 2010; Fünfgeld and McEvoy 2011); and uncovering the conditions for enabling and constraining capacities to act in different contexts (Jones et al. 2010; Pahl-Wostl 2009).

Attention in this sphere of analysis also focuses on forms of network governance that includes not only connected government departments and agencies but actors external to administrative bureaucracies such as urban planners, local decision-makers, civil society leaders and private business actors (Luthe et al. 2012; Hanssen et al. 2013; Hajer and Wagenaar 2003). Given the pervasiveness of both cause and effect of anthropogenic climate change, network governance that both complements, and sometimes challenges, traditional forms of government holds potential for developing and implementing innovative and transformative climate change responses. While small, incremental actions can be considered insufficient in the face of systemic changes required, it is in such networked forms of cooperation, collaboration and sometimes conflict where local transformative action is taking place. There is therefore an imperative to better understand the innovative and transformative potential of locally and regionally connected climate change actions, along with the conditions constraining that potential.

When examining any local processes that involves multiple actors and institutions with different capacities and power to make decisions, examining issues of politics and social relations becomes important (Gillard et al. 2015) to better understand the role of particular actors involved in local climate change efforts. Key questions here are: who is included and excluded and why; what are their motives for engagement/dis-engagement; and how do political agendas and goals emerge and how are they enacted through collaborative endeavours? Furthermore, the extent to which climate change is framed as a collective, societal problem is critical for understanding the nature and potential of local responses, including the particular forms of knowledge that are drawn upon and created when devising such responses (Granberg et al. 2016).

In paying attention to issues of politics, social relations, social in-/exclusion and the framing of policy issues and problems, gaining an understanding of power and influence becomes particularly relevant (Beetham 2013). Here, we see power as a wide concept including power of decision and non-decision making (Bachrach and Baratz 1962), power as the manipulation of desires, preferences and worldviews in ways that does not make open coercion necessary (Lukes 1974) and power as a force forming subjects (Foucault 1977; Digeser 1992). This entails that individual (subjects) perceptions of interests, rationality, intentionality, responsibility, the “rules of the game”, policy issues and problems, etc., are formed and framed over time in ways that can enable or disable agency. Having access to and exerting power impacts on people’s ability to make judgements and choices and on what is perceived as possible (or impossible), desirable (or undesirable) (Bacchi 1999), and – importantly in the context of politicised public discourses on climate change – what “counts as knowledge, what kind of interpretation attains authority as the dominant interpretation” (Flyvbjerg 1998, p. 226). Power, from this perspective, operates in subtle ways impacting the utilisation of knowledge, inclusion and exclusion and societal priorities in general (Bulkeley and Newell 2010, p. 112). Power, therefore, is at the foundation of social practices of politics, planning, religion, etc. (Beetham 2013, p. 3), and of course, this includes social practices relating to climate change responses such as mitigation, adaptation and risk reduction.

With great awareness of how issues of power and conflict manifest themselves at the local scale, we will look at how climate change responses have emerged and are being operationalised and evaluated within a range of geographical and socio-political contexts across the globe. Contributions to this book also illustrate the processes by which dominant logics connected to incumbent policy frames shape or influence the development of local climate change actions and responses. They highlight the relevance of understanding the priorities and politics of the wider local and multi-level policy context, to better understand the conditions for action and how climate change action is formulated, defined and implemented (Granberg et al. 2016). Through these case studies, we examine how climate change is framed and embedded in both discourse and action, and discuss how it can leverage (or constrain) innovations across different policy, social and technical domains. We highlight institutional and political flow-on effects, such as how the broader policy context at the local scale influences the identification, formulation and given priority of climate change action and partially determines the inclusion or exclusion of climate change considerations in policy agendas. Most importantly, the case studies were selected because they lend themselves to a critical examination of the institutional frameworks, actors and capacities that enable and constrain local climate change action.

Accordingly, we envisage this book to feed into the ongoing research and policy dialogue on local climate change responses, through learning from existing practice to advance our theoretical understanding based on lived experience in different empirical contexts. The book’s intended target audiences are thus not only researchers and students, but also policy makers and practitioners who work on climate change issues with a keen interest to better understand what drives local climate change action in different parts of the world.

Climate change action context

There is, in principle, scientific consensus that the Earth’s climate is changing and that the emergence of global warming over recent centuries is clearly connected to human action and to the development of society (cf IPCC 2014; Oreskes 2004; NAS 2001). The warming of the Earth’s atmosphere leads to a diverse range of biophysical impacts entailing rising temperatures, more frequent and more intense downpours, rising sea levels, droughts and in general, an increased frequency of extreme weather events (IPCC 2014). Accordingly, the human challenges arising from climate change develop in a complex interaction between nature, technology and society, and it is clear that a changing climate, among changes to biophysical parameters in the natural environment, also drives demand for changes to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• Contributor biographies
• 1 Climate change responses from the global to local scale: an overview
• 2 Using collaborative governing to catalyse climate change action in Australian municipalities
• 3 Governance and agency beyond boundaries: climate resilience in Port Vila’s peri-urban settlements
• 4 ‘Learning by Doing’: lessons from the co-production of three South African municipal climate change adaptation plans
• 5 Towns in transition – regional and ideological diversity among local climate protection projects and regional revitalisation efforts in rural Japan
• 6 Multi-level climate change planning: scale, capacity and the ability for local action
• 7 Climate change adaptation, city competitiveness and urban planning in the city of Karlstad, Sweden
• 8 From engagement to empowerment: climate change and resilience planning in Baltimore City
• 9 Towards transformative action: learning from local experiences and contexts
• Index