Climate pioneership and leadership in structurally disadvantaged maritime port cities

Abstract

This article assesses innovative climate governance in small-to-medium-sized structurally disadvantaged cities (SDCs) which have remained an under-researched subject area. Considering their deeply ingrained severe economic and social problems it would be reasonable to assume that SDCs act primarily as climate laggards or at best as followers. However, our novel empirical findings show that SDCs are capable of acting as climate pioneers. This article identifies and assesses different types and styles of climate leadership and pioneership and how they play out within multi-level and polycentric governance structures. It concludes that SDCs seem relatively readily willing to adopt transformational climate pioneership styles in the hope of creating 'green' jobs, for example, in the offshore wind energy sector and with the aim of improving their poor external image. However, in order to sustain transformational climate pioneership they often have to rely on support from 'higher' levels of governance. For SDCs there is a tension between learning from each other's best practice and fierce economic competition in climate innovation.

Governance and decentralized energy transitions: a comparative case study of three medium-sized cities in Sweden, Canada, and the United States.

“…Cities have potential to be drivers of innovation in the energy transition. Often centers of social progress, grassroots action, and experimentation, many cities are leading the fight against climate change (Bulkeley, Metsill 2003;Betsill, Bulkeley 2004, 2007Wurzel et al 2019). For cities, the energy transition is an opportunity to both reduce global emissions while creating opportunities of local autonomy and resiliency.…”

Pioneers, leaders and followers in multilevel and polycentric climate governance

“…We could consider the success of a social enterprise such as FairPhone in providing exemplary leadership for other corporations as followership on the part of those other corporations, though, as Biedenkopf et al show in their contribution to this volume, structural constraints limit the possibility of such followership materialising. Wurzel et al (2019), who assess whether structurally disadvantaged cities can act as leaders/pioneers or merely as followers of more affluent leader cities, argue that even for the same type of actor (i.e. cities) further differentiation may be necessary to establish the dynamics of leader/ pioneer-followership relations.…”