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作者

Sanya Bery Mary Alice Haddad

来源

URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW,Vol.59,Issue5,P.

语言

英文

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作者单位

摘要

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that CO2 emissions must reach net zero by 2050 for global warming to be held to the 1.5°C threshold to prevent the most catastrophic consequences of global climate change (Rogelj et al. 2018).1 Because cities consume more than two-third of the world's energy, emit more than seventy percent of the global CO2 emissions,2 and contain 55 percent of the world's population (a share that is expected to rise to nearly 70 percent by 2050),3 their efforts will be critical to the world's effort to combat climate change. This article aims to identify factors that are the most important in helping cities move from verbal declarations that climate action matters to the development of ambitious climate action plans, with a special focus on the role that city-university partnerships can play in that process.We begin with a review of the literature on city-university partnerships related to environmental and climate policymaking and then move to a broader discussion of the factors that help cities develop ambitious climate policies. The literature review is followed by a discussion of our methodology. In brief, we first conduct a large-n study of the 169 cities in the United States that have signed the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy, analyzing the factors that enable some of those cities to move from public commitments about the importance of climate change to concrete actions to address it (data publicly available here (https://doi.org/10.25438/wes02.19669098)). We then supplement the large-n statistical analysis with a brief study of the experience of the City of Middletown in Connecticut and the development of its 2019 Net Zero Climate Action Plan, to help illustrate how the factors revealed as important in the statistical analysis (the presence of a university, and the existence of full-time paid city staff dedicated to climate/energy policy) work together to help cities move from talk to action on climate change. We conclude our article with some recommendations for how city and community leaders can use our findings to help promote the development of more ambitious climate action plans in their own communities.Explaining Ambitious CitiesIn the field of urban sustainability, city-university collaborations have generally been a side story, often taking the form case study anecdotes in which university partners play the role of helpful side-kick to the more important city mayor or international organization (Barber 2013; Berry and Portney 2014; Fischer 2000; John 1994; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Miller 2020). Thus far, academic research into city-university collaborations about urban policy making in general, and climate/environmental policy in particular, has largely consisted of illustrative examples of successful partnerships, for example, the City of Vancouver and University of British Columbia (Munro et al. 2016; Pauer, Pilon and Badelt 2020), Pennsylvania State and University Park, PA (Knuth et al. 2007), and MIT and Singapore (Redmond 2011) to name just a few.Perhaps the most comprehensive collection of city-university sustainability collaborations can be found in Ariane König's edited volume, Regenerative Sustainable Development of Universities and Cities: The Role of Living Laboratories (2013). In the volume, which consists primarily of case studies of city-university collaborations collected from around the world, König and her co-authors consider “living laboratories as a governance tool that links the academic capacity of universities with the sustainability challenges facing cities today” (König 2013).More recently, researchers have begun to branch out from single case studies to research that gathers together a small number of example partnerships to focus on how city-university collaborations have advanced particular urban sustainability policy issues such as spatial development (Benneworth, Charles and Madanipour 2010), heat island mitigation (Hamstead et al. 2020), sustainability policy transfer (Withycombe Keeler et al. 2018), and capacity building (Keeler et al. 2019).Additionally, a few teams of scholars have begun to place city-university partnerships into broader governance and public policy contexts, thinking theoretically and practically about how these partnerships fit into broader processes of urban policymaking. For example, one group of largely East-Asia based scholars discusses the role of city-university partnerships in “co-creating sustainability” (Trencher, Bai, et al. 2014; Trencher et al. 2017; Trencher, Yarime, et al. 2014; Trencher, Yarime and Kharrazi 2013). Another research team based largely in the United States has developed assessment tools and guidelines for city-university collaborations on sustainability policy (Caughman, Keeler and Beaudoin 2020; Caughman et al. 2020; Keeler et al. 2019; Withycombe Keeler et al. 2018).Shifting from the role of city-university partnerships in creating urban sustainability policy to factors that promote ambitious climate policymaking in cities, we find an extensive literature. As discussed above, cities are now home to a majority of the Earth's population, and produce most of its climate-changing emissions, so many researchers are closely examining the factors that promote pro-environmental policy making in cities. Since cities are complex places, it is not surprising that scholars have identified a number of different factors that can help cities become more ambitious in their climate policymaking.Of these, the economic explanations make the most intuitive sense, since they are rooted in the well-established (Sarkodie and Strezov 2019) (and sometimes-questioned (Dinda 2004)) concept of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC). Named for Simon Kuznets, the basic hypothesis, drawn from observation, is that environmental pollution follows a curve pattern as a country becomes richer. The poorest countries tend to live low-polluting, subsistence-based lifestyles, and as they industrialize, their incomes and their pollution go up. When economies begin shifting to a service-based economy, and the level of environmental pollution becomes increasingly intolerable, citizens and consumers pressure their governments and companies to reign in pollution, and the curve shifts to a downward direction, so countries become cleaner again.Although originally developed to explain cross-national variation, many scholars have found that the basic framework of the EKC holds up at the sub-national level as well (Fujii et al. 2018; Halliru et al. 2020; Sinha and Bhattacharya 2017). Other scholars have found that too many factors influence a city's pollution such that the EKC is not a good explanation for environmental policy or outcomes (Fujii et al. 2018; Harbaugh, Levinson and Wilson 2002). One recent study by Farmer (2021) focused on a slight variation on the EKC model, examining how the availability of financial incentives from the state might push municipalities through their EKC curve faster. It found that state-level economic incentives helped encourage cities to engage in sustainable energy policies, which enabled them to adopt more ambitious climate policies faster than they might have otherwise (Farmer 2021).Other scholars have examined the role of city size. Although increasing population in poor cities can lead to environmental and human catastrophes caused by inadequate sanitation, waste, housing, transportation services (Azevedo, Scavarda and Caiado 2019; Klopp and Paller 2019; Gradus et al. 2019; Van Ginkel et al. 2018), these size-related problems are less evident in the United States. When studying US cities, as we are, scholars often examine the benefits of scale. Larger cities have larger budgets that they can use to make pro-environmental investments (Hsu 2018; Sun et al. 2017), they are in a better position to collaborate with other cities (Hawkins and Krause 2021), and they can take advantage of economies of scale for such investments as clean energy and transportation infrastructure (Sun et al. 2017; Wu, Levinson and Sarkar 2019). On the flip side, scholars examining smaller cities have found that they face both greater risk due to climate change as well as less capacity to adapt than larger cities (Paterson et al. 2017).A more focused version of the EKC and population size hypotheses emphasizes the role of a city energy manager, who can serve as the focal point for the development of a city's climate action plans. Several studies have found a dedicated energy manager, (or sustainability director, or sustainability officer or similar titles etc.) can help cities develop and carry out more ambitious climate policies because they provide in-house technical expertise as well as institutional know-how to the problem of climate policy (Homsy 2018; Knuth et al. 2007; Roseval 2019). Energy managers and sustainability officers can also act as “policy entrepreneurs,” encouraging their cities to enact cutting-edge policies (Teodoro 2011). However, other scholars have found that the relationship between a city's policy making capacity and its engagement on climate issues is non-linear (Krause, Hawkins and Park 2021). Relatedly, some scholars have found that cross-departmental collaborations are more important than dedicated staff (Kalafatis 2018).In the United States in particular, environmental policy has become increasingly politicized, and many scholars have investigated the relationship between party affiliation and environmental policymaking. Consistent with the mainstream media portrayal of the issue, scholars have found that Democratic-leaning cities tend to have higher citizen preference for clean-energy policies (Mayer 2019), higher support for water conservation policies (Gilligan et al. 2018), are more likely to adopt ambitious climate plans (Hui, Smith and Kimmel 2019), and engage in more robust enforcement of environmental regulations (Switzer 2019) than Republican-leaning cities. However, other scholars have found no relationship between partisanship and cities’ environmental policies (Berry and Portney 2017; Gradus et al. 2019; Portney and Berry 2014).Addressing climate change requires a concerted, collective effort, and cities are increasingly working together to seek solutions. Cities are joining international networks that provide access to the newest information about urban policy, case studies of success, connection to peer cities facing similar problems, and access to high-level research relevant to their own particular situations. Scholars are studying these international city networks, and some have found that participation in these networks enhances a city's capacity and willingness to engage in more progressive environmental policies (Gordon and Johnson 2018; Rashidi and Patt 2018; Steffen, Schmidt and Tautorat 2019).Our study aims to contribute to this rich literature on urban environmental policy making. To our knowledge, this will be the first study in which all the factors that might affect a city's ability to develop an ambitious climate action plan are combined into a single analysis. Additionally, it will be the first study to include the presence of a university along with well-researched factors such as city size, resources, partisanship, etc., to see whether a university might have an independent effect on a city's ability to move from a public declaration that climate change is important to the development of an ambitious, net zero climate action plan. Furthermore, our study will augment our statistical analysis with a case study to show how factors shown to be important in the large-n study interact with one another at a city-level to promote ambitious policy making.