Cities, Climate Change and Multilevel Governance

Abstract

Cities represent a challenge and an opportunity for climate change policy. As the hubs of economic activity, cities generate the bulk of GHG emissions and are thus important to mitigation strategies. Urban planning will shape future trends and the concentration of population, socio-economic activity, poverty and infrastructure in urban areas translates into particular vulnerability to increased climate hazards. City governments and urban stakeholders will therefore be essential in the design and delivery of cost-effective adaptation policies. Further, by empowering local governments, national policies could leverage existing local experiments, accelerate policy responses, foster resource mobilization and engage local stakeholders. This paper presents a framework for multilevel governance, showing that advancing governance of climate change across all levels of government and relevant stakeholders is crucial to avoid policy gaps between local action plans and national policy frameworks (vertical integration) and to encourage cross-scale learning between relevant departments or institutions in local and regional governments (horizontal dimension). Vertical and horizontal integration allows two-way benefits: locally-led or bottom-up where local initiatives influence national action and nationally-led or top-down where enabling frameworks empower local players. The most promising frameworks combine the two into hybrid models of policy dialogue where the lessons learnt are used to modify and fine-tune enabling frameworks and disseminated horizontally, achieving more efficient local implementation of climate strategies.globalisation, environmental policy, competitiveness, supply chain, eco-innovation

The Role of Health in Households’ Balancing Act for Lifestyles Compatible with the Paris Agreement—Qualitative Results from Mannheim, Germany

“…In this case, these are possibly other urban and suburban settings. As 76% of Germans live in urban and suburban settings [54], and cities are important players in climate change mitigation [55] the urban settings seems justified.…”

Eco-districts: can they accelerate urban climate planning?

“…Specifically, we examine governance and planning as important leverage points for transformative change in achieving sustainability and significant GHG emission reductions (Corfee-Morlot et al, 2008;Lenhart et al, 2014). One of the most important is vertical integration, or support from higher levels of government (Baker and Eckerberg, 2007;Corfee-Morlot et al, 2009;Kern and Alber, 2008) such as mandates or legislation that motivate local action (e.g. renewable energy portfolio standards, waste diversion from landfills) as well as funding to support specific mitigation and adaptation initiatives (Ayers, 2009;Bailey, 2007;Betsill, 2001;Kern et al, 2007;Meadowcraft, 1999).…”

Multi-level climate change planning: An analysis of the Italian case

“…The necessary involvement of regional and local authorities to achieve national and international climate goals revealed an important policy gap (Corfee-Morlot et al, 2009). While traditionally, national, regional and local environmental policies have been insufficiently coordinated (Lesnikowski et al, 2020), several authors now focus on multilevel climate governance as a crucial factor to open up these divisions and highlight inter-influences (Nilsson et al, 2012;Revi, 2017), and to manage the transboundary nature of environmental impacts.…”