Collaboration is strongly promoted as an effective means for cities to respond to climate change. While collaboration is perceived to offer opportunities to progress climate action in cities, little is known about how collaboration can enable low‐carbon transformation in practice. Furthermore, while collaboration is largely framed as a positive endeavour, there is a need to more carefully explore the challenges and barriers that may arise. This paper explores the aims, processes, and outcomes of collaboration within urban climate governance. Drawing on a policy review and semi‐structured interviews, we present empirical findings from the case study of Hong Kong. This paper identifies three types of collaboration that are structured by regulations, oriented to policy goals, and emerge as everyday practices within the governance of climate change and the energy system. The forms of collaboration challenge the assumptions that collaboration always brings positive outcomes in mobilising action for climate change. While collaboration opens up different modes of governance within cities, the paper highlights significant barriers in terms of the diverse roles of actors, ongoing power imbalances, and shifting governance spaces for intervention. Given the prevailing interest in working together, it is critical to review carefully how collaboration facilitates cities to achieve their climate goals and create momentum for action.
The role of cities in mobilising transformative change has gained increasing attention in global discourses on climate change and sustainability. Through the lens of urban energy transitions, this paper focuses on how this form of change within the urban energy system can be mobilised. Capacity is an emergent concept and has been adopted to identify areas for change and assess the transformative potential of cities. Connecting three dimensions of capacity: capacity for what, capacity of whom and the process of capacity building, we present a new conceptual framework to understand diverse transition pathways. To interrogate the capacity framework in practice, we explore the illustrative cases of Hamburg and Hong Kong. The paper demonstrates that capacity is connected to specific changes in political, material, institutional and other energy‐related societal contexts. Understanding the variety of dependencies and underlying challenges within urban energy systems , as well as the kinds of actor coalitions that are capable of addressing such complexity and mobilising change, enables the development of specific socio‐technical solutions for urban energy transition pathways. Our focus on local capacity to act and how such capacity can be expanded or diminished contributes to a deeper understanding of the power relations embedded in urban energy systems and the role local actors can play in enabling and hindering processes for change. Such examination of how complex trajectories for change are defined and shaped allows significant insights into plausible futures of urban development.
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