Cities and Climate Change: Urban Sustainability and Global Environmental Governance (review)

Agenda 21, set forth at the Earth Summit in 1992, provided a first draft of instructions for finding a sustainable world, in which meeting the needs of the present might not entail compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. As has become apparent in the years since, Agenda 21 was a crude and incomplete chart. What we have is an atlas no better than the earliest maps of the age of discovery, when Europeans filled in large stretches of the Americas and Asia with drawings of monsters and labeled them "terra incognita."

Harriet Bulkeley and Michele Betsill, young social scientists in the UK and US, respectively, have explored a significant region of the new world of sustainable development: the way that cities are undertaking climate protection initiatives. The results are both disappointing and hopeful—as one might expect from stories of pioneers in strange lands.

Urban populations now equal those in rural areas, and urban centers account for far more energy use and economic output than does the countryside. Cities in the developed economies drive greenhouse gas emissions worldwide through the consumption and investment choices of their residents, and it is logical to look to these places in the effort to contain and to mitigate climate change.

Cities and Climate Change is a policy evaluation of the Climate Change Program (CCP) of the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), a transnational nongovernmental organization created in 1990 to provide linkages among local governments committed to global sustainability. The CCP is examined not in itself but through its effects in six local governments: Newcastle, Cambridgeshire, and Leicester in the United Kingdom, Newcastle in New South Wales, Australia (all based on empirical studies by Bulkeley), and Denver and Milwaukee in the United States (done by Betsill). These cities include declining industrial centers (both Newcastles, Milwaukee, Leicester) and growing service-based economies (Cambridgeshire, Denver). The former are seeking to join the ranks of the latter. For all, the financial advantages and political cachet of mitigating global warming provide incentives to local government leaders.

Surprisingly, the quantitative performance of the governmental programs is not evaluated, so the reader cannot compare the tonnes of greenhouse gases that were not emitted, nor the percentage reductions from baseline projections. Instead, Bulkeley and Betsill focus on organizational change. Australian Newcastle and Denver are judged to be successes: "climate change considerations have been integrated into the institutional structure of local government . . . [including] policy and financial decisions" (p. 172); targets have been set and there is monitoring to measure progress toward them; and both cities have spread their lessons learned through the CCP network. The good news is that dozens of cities have innovated, without prodding from higher levels of government and sometimes in quiet opposition to them.

But the record is mostly mixed or negative. Local governments do not control much energy use beyond public buildings and some public transport. Governments' influence through land-use planning, building codes, and regulation turns out to be inadequate, especially when faced with pressure to facilitate economic expansion. Even mayoral leadership does not, by itself, suffice to create long-lasting commitment. And CCP itself "has not had any significant impact on . . . the . . . attention given to local initiatives within international policy arenas" (p. 183).

The authors trace these shortcomings to a misunderstanding of the job to be done. CCP and its participating cities imagine that better information and decision-making hold the key to managing greenhouse emissions. Spreading information about best practices, facilitating monitoring and modeling of energy use, and building networks of colleagues in city governments around the world are given priority in CCP. While such a technocratic approach is de rigueur, Bulkeley and Betsill say, even more important are governmental authority, financial resources, and the recognition that climate policy is being fashioned in a chaotic, opportunistic multi-level process, in which governance has displaced government. "The CCP network has not recognized the shift from government to governance, of which...