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In collaboration with women's organizations in India, Indonesia, Mexico and South Africa, an approach for a novel gender assessment of urban climate policies was developed and tested. The Gender Assessment and Monitoring of Mitigation and Adaptation (GAMMA) methodology allows for an in-depth analysis of the institutional framework and the mitigation and adaptation policies of cities. Its application by the women's organizations in 14 pilot cities led to policy recommendations on how to integrate gender equality into urban mitigation and adaptation actions. The results of a monitoring exercise show that the project has made a significant step forward in raising awareness of gender issues and gender-responsive action at the urban level. It provides civil society organizations working on climate justice with a tool to push local governments to work towards low-carbon, resilient, gender-just and inclusive cities. It can also be used by local governments for self-assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Normative future visioning (NFV) offers a critical approach that can respond to the challenges of transformative adaptation. In the context of climate crisis, an understanding of the diversity of desired end-states and pathways for good urban futures is fundamental to fostering cooperation and inspiring purposeful action that can challenge and transform unsustainable processes and behaviours, and researching these processes. This paper contributes to transformative adaptation and climate resilient development by conceptualising NFV as a critical pedagogy. This framing understands NFV as a collective learning experience that can lead to emancipation and transformative action. A novel Encounter–Change Framework is proposed as a general mechanism for evaluating NFV methods. The framework is tested through the Tomorrow’s Cities project across its NFV deployment in nine cities: Quito, Istanbul, Nairobi, Kathmandu, Rapti, Nablus, Dar es Salaam, Cox’s Bazar and Chattogram. General lessons highlight the importance for NFV evaluation of analysing both methodological detail and its positioning within wider policy and planning processes. Detailed empirical findings reveal key lessons and challenges that emerge from practice – related to time, ethics, co-production, diversity, consensus, equity and authorship. These inform both NFV and other participatory experiences that aim at transformation. Policy relevance Transformative adaptation has proven difficult to implement in cities. It promises fundamental changes to socio-technological systems and in so doing raises concerns for future populations and generations, particularly those more vulnerable and equity-deprived. This paper puts forward a framework that offers one way beyond this impasse and supports practices that are future- and transformation-oriented: the Encounter–Change Framework. By drawing on key themes and insights from critical (urban) pedagogies (encounters, connections, emancipation and action and change), a way is proposed to evaluate practical NFV experiences. The Encounter–Change Framework is tested across nine cities. The results emphasise two lines of innovation for policy: a) unpacking the process of NFV from a perspective of power to increase its chances for impact and b) evaluating the positioning of NFV, both in relation to other future approaches and questions and as a part of wider adaptation policy and planning strategies.

The world is rapidly suburbanising and, as recognised in numerous academic and policy documents, suburbs are not only environmentally unsustainable but also particularly vulnerable to climate change. This same literature and policy discourse suggests the solution to making suburbs more sustainable and adaptable is densification and investing in infrastructural green growth. Meanwhile, alternative approaches in critical suburban literature suggest that densification might create negative externalities, and instead propose the transformation of infrastructures’ management and ownership to support an innovative and autochthonous path for suburbs’ climate adaptation. Yet limited empirical knowledge exists on what adaptation strategies are being implemented across peripheral municipalities where suburbs are more prevalent. A comparative analysis is presented of three peripheral municipalities in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, on their adaptation strategies for water and sanitation. This shows how mainstream assumptions about suburbs and imaginaries of adaptation influence their strategies, as well as how the specific characteristics in the peripheral municipalities allow or hamper more innovative approaches. Three factors emerge as more important in allowing innovation and autochthonous solutions: the level of suburbanisation, the management model for municipal infrastructures, and their political context (including proximity of local government with higher-tier bodies and government composition). Practice relevance Peripheral municipalities around the world, with a predominant suburban character, are considered the most unsustainable form of urbanisation and the areas in cities that are most at risk to climate change. This research demonstrates the importance of policymakers’ imaginaries for advancing less formal and de facto (as well as formal) innovative adaptation strategies in peripheral municipalities. While the production of formal adaptation strategies by capital cities’ governments is growing, less formal, more intuitive and de facto strategies dominate any adaptation efforts in peripheral municipalities, where suburbs are prevalent. Opportunities for innovation in adaptation strategies and challenging existing assumptions reside in influencing the underlying policy assumptions and imaginaries that peripheral municipalities’ policymakers currently hold.

Transformative climate adaptation is argued to reduce underlying vulnerability whilst adapting to impacts. However, transformative actions may face resistance in post-industrial shrinking city contexts. Resources to act may be limited and social, cultural and economic links to high-emitting industries make conversations on climate action difficult. This paper assesses how transformative adaptation may be initiated in a post-industrial shrinking city, by evaluating the former coal mining city of Yubari in Hokkaido, Japan. Interviews with organisations and a residents’ discussion group assess how citizens of Yubari experience social and environmental changes. A review of policies that support transformative adaptation in Yubari is undertaken. Although strong ties to Yubari’s mining identity have constrained discussion on climate action, the need to physically shrink the city’s size and engage third-sector organisations beyond local government created opportunities for transformative actions that also support adaptation. The findings support the existing shrinking cities literature. Place attachment can energise residents to take action and defend their locality against the worst effects of urban shrinkage. This highlights the value of intermediary organisations outside local government in initiating discussions on transformative actions towards climate adaptation. Policy relevance The study contributes a climate adaptation angle to applied research and practice for cities facing demographic or economic shrinkage. Shrinkage can initiate transformative and disruptive actions, but limited resources can make it difficult for urban planners and environmental policymakers to promote resilience. The findings from Yubari show that planning decisions can reduce vulnerability from hazards and enhance resilience to shocks and stresses by reducing the physical footprint of the city and engaging third-sector organisations in managing the natural environment. When trust in local governments is low because of a perceived failure to anticipate problems of shrinkage, then intermediary organisations are needed to facilitate dialogue with citizens on significant changes to place that enable transformative adaptation.

The port city of Beira, on Mozambique’s Indian Ocean coast, was devastated by Tropical Cyclone Idai in March 2019. Ever since, a host of unequal international and national actors have been wrangling about the best forms to ‘build back better’, with uneven and socially and spatially unequally distributed results. The institutional set-up and concomitant challenges of making adaptation work are described in a context where the pressures of both growth-based development and climate change mitigation are particularly manifest. In particular, the tensions are explored between political and economic imperatives and the seemingly apolitical, technical best practices advanced by Mozambique’s bi- and multilateral donor partners, as well as the complex infrastructural and economic interdependencies that condition urban planning and development. Through this, the very real constraints of transitioning to climate-resilient cities are demonstrated, along with how most of what turns a climate event into a human disaster sits within highly unequal social, political and economic systems. Policy relevance Empirical, ethnographic material gathered from the post-cyclone reconstruction process in Beira, Mozambique, shows how institutional complexities and political rivalry limit the possibilities of reconstruction. These organisational issues impact more than technical or financial challenges. ‘Best practices’ of ‘building back better’ are almost rendered moot by socio-economic and political constraints, revealing the substantial challenges of implementing large-scale, technically ‘best practice’ reconstruction programmes. The analysis of the factors that contributed to making Cyclone Idai such a calamitous event holds important lessons for climate adaptation and disaster reconstruction in coastal cities, especially for those operating in challenging political and economic conditions.

Sustainability discourses influence the practices of urban climate action by establishing objectives and ways of doing things. Key concepts such as ‘risk’, ‘resilience’ and ‘efficiency’ have been central in the history of sustainability discourses, but their influence has changed over time. The use of these terms is analysed in policy narratives of urban climate action, exploring how they are deployed in policy and practice. A document database (n = 463) was analysed to show how the terms have evolved from their application in specific contexts to a more open interpretation in which different forms of environmental action are linked to development. Interviews with practitioners (n = 100) were analysed to reveal the influence of these narratives and how they organise action in urban environments. Three tensions emerge from the mobilisations of hegemonic discourses in practice: the contradiction between facilitating harmonised approaches across locations while at the same time scaling up action; the contradiction between implementing action in place and providing frameworks of action that can be evaluated at the global scale; and the challenge between identifying sources of leadership and accepting the increasing importance of multiple actors in local climate action. These tensions open opportunities to disrupt climate change adaptation discourses. Policy relevance The history of the formation of environmental discourses has shaped climate policy at a fundamental level. These discourses contain embedded assumptions and reasoning that relate to their history and contextualisation rather than with absolute truths that inform them. Understanding the formation of these discourses may be necessary to identify the biases inherent to urban environmental practitioners’ discourses and to understand their effectiveness and operation. A better understanding of these discourses supports policymakers in shaping responses to environmental challenges and finding new narratives to inform sustainable futures. Improved knowledge has been created by focusing on the tensions that emerge from policy documents and practitioner interviews.

The scaling of urban climate action and its governance is rapidly becoming a central focus in the urban climate governance literature and policy debates. Building on the broader scaling literature and inspired by related initiatives in other fields, this article calls for the development of a systematic "science of scaling" for urban climate governance. Such a science of scaling may help to give a better understanding of how well-performing urban climate action and its governance can be multiplied, accelerated and broadened (ie horizontal and vertical scaling and scaling out, up and down), and it may help to uncover scaling trajectories towards systemic change in cities (ie deep scaling). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What characterizes the relations amongst actors engaged in decarbonization? I posit that no single characteristic can satisfactorily explain the heterogeneous politics of reducing emissions and propose the concept of styles as the patterned ways in which actors relate to each other to decarbonize. Based on qualitative fieldwork, I compare two projects for a national policy mandating the use of low-carbon technologies – India's Smart Cities Mission – and find variation in their styles. In Rajkot, local state, business, and policy elites with a variety of interests converged to impose decarbonization on a site used by herders as pasture. In Davanagere, local industry, workers, state bureaucrats, and experts independently bargained over a plan that accommodated livelihoods in a puffed rice manufacturing district. I theorize styles as a systematic heuristic to capture variation in the politics of reducing emissions and identify surprising coalitions for decarbonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainability discourses influence the practices of urban climate action by establishing objectives and ways of doing things. Key concepts such as 'risk', 'resilience' and 'efficiency' have been central in the history of sustainability discourses, but their influence has changed over time. The use of these terms is analysed in policy narratives of urban climate action, exploring how they are deployed in policy and practice. A document database (n = 463) was analysed to show how the terms have evolved from their application in specific contexts to a more open interpretation in which different forms of environmental action are linked to development. Interviews with practitioners (n = 100) were analysed to reveal the influence of these narratives and how they organise action in urban environments. Three tensions emerge from the mobilisations of hegemonic discourses in practice: the contradiction between facilitating harmonised approaches across locations while at the same time scaling up action; the contradiction between implementing action in place and providing frameworks of action that can be evaluated at the global scale; and the challenge between identifying sources of leadership and accepting the increasing importance of multiple actors in local climate action. These tensions open opportunities to disrupt climate change adaptation discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the relationship between urban planning and mobility management, TeMA has gradually expanded the view of the covered topics, always following a rigorous scientific in-depth analysis. This section of the Journal, Review Notes, is a continuous update about emerging topics concerning relationships among urban planning, mobility, and environment, thanks to a collection of short scientific papers written by young researchers. The Review Notes are made up of five parts. Each section examines a specific aspect of the broader information storage within the main interests of the TeMA Journal. In particular: the Town Planning International Rules and Legislation. Section aims at presenting the latest updates in the territorial and urban legislative sphere. Accelerating the sustainable urban transition requires functional and structural changes in urban systems through which challenges such as the climate crisis are addressed. Researchers, professionals, policy makers in their various roles are trying to provide concrete proposals and actions to the challenge of climate change in cities from a sustainability perspective. The European Commission has also played a crucial role in providing forms of funding on the issue. In this direction, the paper examines precisely the European regulatory excursus starting from the climate law up to the EU Adaptation Strategy to increase the resilience of cities.

We analyze a multi-level ad-hoc emergency fund (MAEF) – the European NextGenerationEU program – as an opportunity to advance ambitious municipal climate action. Presently, MAEF follow a vertical complex governance structure, including strict timelines, evaluations, and competencies spread across policy scales, which condition local aspirations for transformative governance in terms of participation, inclusion, and equity. Drawing on qualitative data (interviews with key actors, participant observations, and primary policy and planning documents), we examine the implementation of NextGenerationEU-funded naturalization projects in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, 2012 European Green Capital. We offer an empirical analysis of how MAEF requirements challenge locally formulated values of governance meant to advance civic participation, inclusion, and equity. Findings indicate that the municipal dependence on multi-level financing schemes represents a trade-off with local democratic governance, whereby the need for slow-er and finance-detached civic engagement processes clashes with EU requirements for rapid project execution. Here, civic contestation against the projects' processes reveals some of the core emergency funds governance weaknesses: a) a bricolage approach at the expenses of democratic governance, to ensure successful applications for climate finance projects and b) a fuzzy process without transparent communication of project selection and implementation. However, findings also reveal that the municipality failed to build up participation, inclusion, and consideration of social equity goals upstream, before and outside the context of MAEF. This reality calls for local decision-makers to develop more transparent governance models that help build up civic support when projects are in their early conception stage. • Municipalities depend on multi-level climate finance to materialize climate action. • Local planners deploy bricolage approach to attract funds. • NextGenerationEU pose risk on governance prioritizing civic participation, inclusion, equity. • Planners must operate with transparent project communication and justification to assure civic support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the relationship between urban planning and mobility management, TeMA has gradually expanded the view of the covered topics, always following a rigorous scientific in-depth analysis. This section of the Journal, Review Notes, is a continuous update about emerging topics concerning relationships among urban planning, mobility, and environment, thanks to a collection of short scientific papers written by young researchers. The Review Notes are made up of five parts. Each section examines a specific aspect of the broader information storage within the main interests of the TeMA Journal. In particular: the Town Planning International Rules and Legislation. Section aims at presenting the latest updates in the territorial and urban legislative sphere. Accelerating the sustainable urban transition requires functional and structural changes in urban systems through which challenges such as the climate crisis are addressed. Researchers, professionals, policy makers in their various roles are trying to provide concrete proposals and actions to the challenge of climate change in cities from a sustainability perspective. The European Commission has also played a crucial role in providing forms of funding on the issue. In this direction, the paper examines precisely the European regulatory excursus starting from the climate law up to the EU Adaptation Strategy to increase the resilience of cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on experimental governance in the context of stimulating urban climate action in the European Union (EU). Experimental governance endorse and support climate action by encouraging the transfer of urban innovations by upscaling climate best practices in and across cities in the EU. Policymakers, practitioners and academics view this as increasing urban climate activities and as a path to cope with urban climate change mitigation challenges.The article describes and analyses the complexities ingrained in experimental climate governance by studying the climate trajectory of the mid-sized city of Turku in Finland. The article increases the understanding of urban climate governance challenges and advocate for a debate regarding the norms used to incentivize innovative urban climate action. These norms do not consider urban variances and fail to contextualize exchange of innovative climate action experiences. The feasibility of experimental governance as expanding urban climate action in and across cities is dubious, as it increases short-term disjointed climate action, rises the possibilities for misaligned action routines that may desynchronize urban actor orientation, and decreases organizational transparency, ultimately complicating a mainstreaming of urban climate efforts.

The growing interest in urban areas as sites for climate action has led to new ways of conceiving and planning the urban. As climate actions reshape existing understandings of what cities are or ought to be, they constitute new modalities of what recent scholarship has referred to as 'climate urbanism'. This research has framed climate urbanism as a climate‐inflected iteration of neoliberal urban development, geared towards the mobilization of 'green' private capital for large‐scale infrastructural projects, focused on carbon metrics, and conducive to population displacement through eco‐gentrification. In this intervention, we commend these efforts to deliver a critical perspective on how climate change gives rise to forms of urbanism that reproduce urban injustices without addressing the root causes of the climate crisis. However, we warn against two biases in recent scholarship, namely an emphasis on technological solutions and an overreliance on familiar contexts of climate action. The literature on climate urbanism does not yet reflect the diversity of urban responses emerging under the broad umbrella of urban climate action. Adopting a post‐colonial perspective on climate urbanism, we call for a greater engagement with the heterogeneous character of climate‐changed urban futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is significant potential for reducing energy use and emissions from buildings through energy efficiency retrofits. However, a number of barriers, including long payback periods and uncertainties around business models and technologies, restrict large scale implementation. A recent joint project, piloting green energy schemes and low-carbon investments in public and commercial buildings in the Changning district of Shanghai, China, indicated opportunities to break through these barriers. This study conducted a cost benefit analysis to investigate how an innovative combination of financial and non-financial supported retrofits, and could serve as a model for other urban areas. In total, 44 retrofit sub-projects were carried out and achieved energy savings of 30,217 tons of coal equivalent. The average payback period was 2.43 years, and with subsidies was further reduced to 1.79 years. The Changning Low Carbon Office played a critical role in coordinating and supporting the uptake of retrofit measures but non-economic factors continue to restrict investment by financial institutions and the implementation of retrofits on a larger scale. Key policy insights Public and commercial building retrofits in Shanghai are found to generate commercially acceptable payback periods while having achieved significant energy and emissions reductions. Subsidies from the city and district governments significantly reduced the payback periods of energy efficiency retrofits, but may also crowd out investment by financial institutions. The Changning Low Carbon Office has coordinated energy efficiency retrofitting efforts, provided access to information, helped to connect investment funds with project opportunities and support project management. Achieving the deeper retrofits needed to achieve China's climate targets may require more substantial financial incentives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing involvement of cities in the fight against climate change is probably one of the most significant features of today's environmental governance. Beyond contributing to mitigation and adaptation efforts, urban climate action also helps in understanding how urban societies and spaces are being transformed in a context of global environmental change. This paper looks in particular at these sociospatial transformations, by presenting an empirical research on Quebec City's climate policy. Since 2004, Quebec City has implemented various mitigation initiatives, but without being able to reduce its emissions. In fact, its policy approach has been mainly symbolic and has not encouraged the institutionalization of the climate issue in planning and governance practices. The case of Québec City shows that climate change is contributing to the renewal of environmental policies, but it also highlights the difficulty of decarbonizing urban socio-technical systems that have mainly developed around automobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact (SFRCCC) has been highlighted as a regional climate change governance exemplar for land use planning. After six years, we find the compact has given momentum to local climate change planning through the Regional Climate Action Plan and provides a foundation for adaptive governance for climate change adaptation. We also find aspects of the compact lacking in terms of representation, decision making, learning, and problem responsiveness. Efforts are now needed to scale down implementation and scale up governance and planning more systematically to address climate change adaptation needs at multiple levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private actors are important for urban climate action, because the public sector can control the carbon footprint of a city only partly. Public-private partnerships have been created through different voluntary approaches, such as city-level voluntary networks for companies with the aim to engage private actors in climate change mitigation and to support learning processes by bringing different actors together. If these processes are to happen, network members should connect with each other through voluntary networking activities. These connections can be studied using methods from network science. As a case example, we study the event-participation-based structures of the Climate Partners network of the City of Helsinki between 2011 and 2018, and develop an index to measure whether active event participation by a company is associated with taking more ambitious mitigation measures. The results show that the network manages to bring together companies from different fields but has difficulties with engaging them and encouraging ambitious climate goals. Our results can help to further develop networking activities. The tools we develop and share allow the replication of the analysis for other data sets, offering a basis for a comparative analysis of different networks. This opens new horizons for studying public-private networking and its effects. • City-to-business networks (CBN) hold potential for climate governance collaboration. • Network science combined with an index is used to analyse the performance of a CBN. • The Climate Partners network manages to attract diverse companies. • The Climate Partners network faces problems with engaging its members. • Clarifying the goals and the rules could help with engagement and ambitiousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]