Assessing Local Policy Experiments to Combat Climate Change

Excerpt

In An Urban Politics of Climate Change (2015), Harriet Bulkeley and her co-authors present eight case studies of climate change mitigation via energy efficiency in housing in different global cities. The authors explore the mechanics of these climate “experiments” and the way they vary contextually in terms of national priorities, regional and city-governance structures, and social and economic conditions in communities.

This book joins a growing literature on locally-driven climate planning. The local climate planning literature has focused on eliciting the reasons that cities engage in climate planning (Millard-Ball 2013; Sharp, Daley, and Lynch 2011) and categorizing the contents of climate plans (Bassett and Shandas 2010; Wheeler 2008). Bulkeley and Bestill (2005) called for research that clarifies the broader political, economic, and social context in which local climate planning occurs. This book provides a more nuanced understanding of how climate planning is shaped by non-state network governance and multilevel governance by state actors.