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The question of how the urgent transformation in fossil fuel based economies might be realised has come to occupy an increasingly prominent place within the social sciences. The challenge here is often cast in terms of how one or more existing system can be replaced by alternatives in which the carbon content has been removed or at least diluted by purposeful interventions. Here we approach the question from a different angle, asking how ongoing transformations in critical systems (in this case energy) are or may be leveraged in relation to climate change. We take as our focus the emergence of the smart city and examine a case in which the notion of the smart city has become wedded to the ambition for a low carbon city: Malmö, Sweden. As commentators suggest, the growth of the smart city reflects a capitalist reflex to develop new waves of investment to realise new arenas for capital accumulation in the city. Yet shifting from this broad political economy diagnosis, we argue that there is a need to attend to the ways in which climate is imbued and embedded in the smart city and how this in turn enables and constrains low carbon transitions.

In the 30 years since the journal Environmental Politics was founded, we have witnessed a profound shift in how we understand climate from its initial framing as global problem, to one that is increasingly understood as transnational, personal, urban, networked, and regional. Charting the rise of climate change’s urban agenda over the past decade, I suggest we are now witnessing a ‘third wave’ of climate urbanism in which the challenge of addressing climate change is recognised as deeply connected to wider issues of sustainable development and social justice. These shifts are in turn shaped by and giving rise to new developments in terms of the form of climate politics, how it is conducted, and where the battle lines over what it means to act politically under conditions of climate change are being drawn. Recognising that the nature of climate urbanism is continually emergent and highly contested will be critical for future work in this field.

Nature-based solutions have recently been embraced as one route towards simultaneously addressing urban environmental and social problems, but an emerging agenda has sought to ask whether and how the ‘greening’ of cities may actually reinforce inequalities or lead to new forms of social exclusion. Using comparative case-study analysis, this paper examines the extent to which nature-driven stewardship initiatives recognize and redress inequalities. We compare two urban contexts that have undergone significant societal transformations over the last two to three decades: Sofia and Cape Town. The comparison shows how nature-driven stewardship initiatives differentially address deeper roots of environmental, social and racial privilege shaped significantly by post-socialist and post-apartheid transition contexts. Instead of assuming a homogenous ideal of urban nature and focusing on questions of the distribution of urban nature and its access, this paper finds it is important to consider the kinds of social relations that are required to both shape decision-making processes and generate meaningful and diverse values and ways of relating to nature in the city. Furthermore, it finds that inclusive nature-based solution governance recognizes and redresses both inequalities in access and inequalities that perpetuate dominant views about what nature is and for whom nature is produced and maintained. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd

In this paper, we examine how cities are working with nature-based solutions for biodiversity. Drawing on a sample of 199 nature-based solutions across Europe, we identify how cities work with nature-based solutions to conserve nature, restore nature, and to find ways to thrive through harnessing nature's contribution to people. Our findings show that cities are making explicit contributions to biodiversity through nature-based solutions, and often adopt specific and quantifiable targets to guide their actions. Yet there is significant variation in the ways in which biodiversity goals and interventions are being pursued. Where biodiversity goals and actions are included in nature-based solutions, they are mainly ecosystem-based - focusing on the protection, restoration or enhancement of the integrity, functionality, and connectivity of habitats and ecosystems - with fewer focused on specific species, and very few projects concerned with genetic diversity. Although it is often assumed that urban action towards biodiversity goals will be undertaken through local planning processes, our analysis shows that European cities are taking project-based actions for biodiversity through a set of explicit, quantitative and measurable targets, which are tailored to the specific conditions of urban settings. On the basis of these findings, we suggest that if cities are to achieve ambitious goals for biodiversity over the next decade, new international frameworks being developed for the post-2020 period should include targets that acknowledge the way in which biodiversity is governed in cities and the contribution that cities make to conserve, restore and thrive with nature to guide urban action. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd

Transactions of the Cumberland & Westmorland Antiquarian & Archaeological Society, 11, 70-72

TExamines the current state of urban climate change policy and action by drawing on 10 case studies of cities in those countries considered most likely in academic and policy circles to be faced with some form of emissions reduction target in the post-2012 era and where many of the world's largest and potentially most vulnerable cities are located. Key factors shaping responses to mitigation are the following: effective policy entrepreneurs; municipal competencies in critical areas such as transportation, infrastructure, energy, and planning policy; access to additional financial resources, and flexibility in their deployment; an enabling policy framework at national and regional levels; the fit between jurisdictional areas and problem boundaries; the ability to engage partners to achieve action beyond the municipality; the knowledge and resource capacity, as well as political support, generated by networks and partnerships; and the reframing of climate change as an issue of local importance and the absence of conflict between addressing climate change and other local priorities.

The emerging logics of smart grids rely on reconfiguring the ways in which energy is used in everyday life. In this chapter, we examine the ways in which the governing of energy use through the smart grid is creating new forms of ‘self-government’ tied to emerging alignments between the rationalities of decarbonisation and household economies, and how such interventions seek reconfigure practices in order to realise the intention of smart grid interventions.

In this paper, we argue for an approach that goes beyond an institutional reading of urban climate governance to engage with the ways in which government is accomplished through social and technical practices. Central to the exercise of government in this manner, we argue, are ‘climate change experiments’– purposive interventions in urban socio-technical systems designed to respond to the imperatives of mitigating and adapting to climate change in the city. Drawing on three different concepts – of governance experiments, socio-technical experiments, and strategic experiments – we first develop a framework for understanding the nature and dynamics of urban climate change experiments. We use this conceptual analysis to frame a scoping study of the global dimensions of urban climate change experimentation in a database of 627 urban climate change experiments in 100 global cities. The analysis charts when and where these experiments occur, the relationship between the social and technical aspects of experimentation and the governance of urban climate change experimentation, including the actors involved in their governing and the extent to which new political spaces for experimentation are emerging in the contemporary city. We find that experiments serve to create new forms of political space within the city, as public and private authority blur, and are primarily enacted through forms of technical intervention in infrastructure networks, drawing attention to the importance of such sites in urban climate politics. These findings point to an emerging research agenda on urban climate change experiments that needs to engage with the diversity of experimentation in different urban contexts, how they are conducted in practice and their impacts and implications for urban governance and urban life.

Ongoing problems with renewable energy schemes have shown that institutional factors have proved to be the main determinants of renewables' deployment. The institutional constraints will likely affect the next stage of deployment of renewables even more. This phase concerns the integration of renewables into the energy supply system and the enhancement of these sources by the introduction of so-called 'smart grids' to optimize the exploitation of natural resources. These numerous microgrids mark a revolutionary turn our system of energy generation that requires many fundamental changes in the social construction of power supply. Creating a microgrid with substantial amounts of renewable energy is a problem of collective action, and in this regard Common Pool Resources' adaptive governance comes to the fore as a fruitful concept. Citizens/consumers and other end-users increasingly are becoming co-producers of electricity, and the option to include ‘distributed storage’ (electric vehicles) in the system promises to enhance this role and creates options to increase of renewables deployment. The co-producers may optimize the contribution of distributed generation by feeding their renewable energy in a cooperative micro-grid with mutual delivery. This requires a high level of self-governance and regulation that allows micro-grids. However, although such systems fundamentally concern involvement of a community right from the start, and the effective adaptive governance of such systems may be good for renewable energy, self-governance in the ‘common pool’ brings institutional questions of justice - distributive equity and fairness of process - to the fore. These equity and fairness dimensions of new microgrids and self-governance arrangements are explored in combination with the factors that further distributed energy generation.

Transactions of the Cumberland & Westmorland Antiquarian & Archaeological Society, 9, 186-187

Transactions of the Cumberland & Westmorland Antiquarian & Archaeological Society, 8, 225-232

Through an exploration of UK municipal waste policy, this paper examines debates on environmental policy integration (EPI) and governance. We argue that this policy arena has been characterised by modes of vertical integration, which have failed to promote the horizontal integration required to move beyond the limits of anachronistic institutional structures and have failed to achieve the paradigm shift needed to make meaningful progress towards sustainability. Through this analysis we develop three critical arguments. First, that the analysis of EPI requires attention to embedded paradigms, structures, and dynamics at all levels of governance, emphasising the importance of incorporating subnational levels of governing to EPI analyses. Second, that both analysis of and arguments for EPI need to engage more fully with broader dynamics of governing and to recognise the coexistence of contradictory processes of integration. Finally, we sound a note of caution in\ud relation to calls for EPI. In the messy, dynamic, and multilevelled reality in which EPI has to be implemented, such calls must recognise both sustainability and policy integration as iterative processes rather than as predetermined blueprints.

Cities and Low Carbon Transitions presents a ground-breaking analysis of the role of cities in low carbon socio-technical transitions. Insights from the fields of urban studies and technological transitions are combined to examine how, why and with what implications cities bring about low carbon transitions. The book outlines the key concepts underpinning theories of socio-technical transition and assesses its potential strengths and limits for understanding the social and technological responses to climate change that are emerging in cities. It draws on a diverse range of examples including world cities, ordinary cities and transition towns, from North America, Europe, South Africa and China, to provide evidence that expectations, aspirations and plans to undertake purposive socio-technical transitions are emerging in different urban contexts.