Urban sustainability approaches focusing on a wide range of topics such as infrastructure and mobility, green construction and neighbourhood planning, or urban nature and green amenities have attracted scholarly interest for over three decades. Recent debates on the role of cities in climate change mitigation have triggered new attempts to conceptually and methodologically grasp the cross-sectorial and cross-level interplay of enrolled actors. Within these debates, urban and economic geographers have increasingly adopted co-evolutionary approaches such as the social studies of technology (SST or 'transition studies'). Their plea for more spatial sensitivity of the transition approach has led to promising proposals to adapt geographic perspectives to case studies on urban sustainability. This paper advocates engagement with recent work in urban studies, specifically policy mobility, to explore conceptual and methodological synergies. It emphasises four strengths of an integrated approach: (1) a broadened understanding of innovations that emphasises not only processes of knowledge generation but also of knowledge transfer through (2) processes of learning, adaptation and mutation, (3) a relational understanding of the origin and dissemination of innovations focused on the complex nature of cities and (4) the importance of individual actors as agents of change and analytical scale that highlights social processes of innovation. The notion of urban assemblages further allows the operationalisation of both the relational embeddedness of local policies as well as their cross-sectoral actor constellations.
Cities around the world have launched greening initiatives to reduce their carbon footprint and to become more sustainable. At the same time, they have also sought to use these initiatives to position themselves as climate change leaders and green champions. This paper focuses on the City of Vancouver's Greenest City 2020 Action Plan as urban policy strategy to reduce carbon emissions. Based on interviews with actors and experts involved in the development and implementation of the plan, the paper evaluates the role green leadership aspirations play in shaping urban climate change policy and how policy makers and stakeholders use policy to position the city and its greening initiatives locally and globally. In particular, it analyzes the role of competitive positioning and green leadership in sustainability initiatives and change within and beyond urban boundaries. While leadership suggests increased buy--in of residents and those involved in the implementation of the strategy and multiplication effects through learning within the region and between (peer) cities, it can also pose challenges as the interest in meeting leadership claims can impede more radical change through specific targets and implementation strategies and challenge other sustainability objectives.
Over the past few decades, conflicts over resources have increased in scale and intensity. They are frequently dominated by environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs) that fight, boycott, lobby, and negotiate with other interest groups to privilege nonindustrial, particularly environmental, values of resources. This article proposes an environmental bargaining framework to analyze the many and varied forms of interactions and processes through which ENGOs seek to change existing practices and decision structures. Drawing on political economy and political ecology approaches, environmental bargaining recognizes the importance of multiple perspectives, strategies of actors, and the regional context. Conceptually, the article interprets environmental conflicts along two dimensions: the distribution of power between actors and forms of interaction ranging from confrontational to collaborative. Examples from British Columbia, Canada, and Tasmania, Australia, reveal the value of comparative perspectives and the importance of the regional context that determines behavior and relationships between actors. While confrontational action has brought considerable change to Tasmania's forests, the example from British Columbia suggests that collaborative forms of decision making that are based on a balance of power have more potential to protect environmental values and bring peace to the woods.
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