In June 2017, President Donald Trump announced his administration’s intent to withdraw the United States from the most sweeping international climate-change agreement yet devised between nations, adopted less than two years earlier in Le Bourget, France. With the impacts of climate change already being felt via extreme weather events and forecasts of far more dire consequences this century, US state and local governments have pledged to try and meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. Yet, surveys indicate that only a tiny fraction of US cities (less than 10% of those with populations larger than 30,000) have tried to measure their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. A much smaller proportion is able to demonstrate any reduction progress, known as mitigation. With perhaps a decade to avert the worst consequences of climate change, is urban climate action a lost cause?
Far from it, according to Sara Hughes, whose book provides a cross-case comparison of how three major North American cities—New York, Los Angeles and Toronto—have striven to mitigate climate change. The book relies on interviews with actors involved across the three cities and synthesizes governance approaches across them.
Theoretically, Hughes’s approach is a valuable contribution to the environmental policy and urban politics literatures, which have relied primarily on institutional, regime theory, and interest-group pluralism explanations for why cities commit to sustainability policies. In the book’s first chapter, Hughes lays out the recent history of urban climate-change mitigation. The efforts of cities today are reminiscent of actions taken in the mid-2000s, the last time the United States took a pass on exercising climate leadership. After President George W. Bush pulled the country out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, hundreds of local governments joined climate-change networks committed to inventorying their GHG emissions and developing their own “climate action plans.” This momentum stalled somewhat during the Great Recession and faces greater uncertainty in whatever post-coronavirus landscape takes shape for local governments. Hughes argues that the question of greater normative and theoretical importance is how cities move from policy adoption through the process of implementation and ultimately demonstrate progress. In other words, policy choices may not have as much leverage in explaining how cities move beyond the symbolism of adopting goals to mobilizing support and quantifying progress on their policy agendas.
Urban governance researchers have made considerable efforts to explore such commitments and have generally arrived at the unsatisfying consensus that cities aim for the “low-hanging fruit” of climate-mitigation projects with co-benefits and are limited by their contextual environments and organizational capacities. Hughes argues that cities overcome these limits by tailoring policy agendas to their individual contexts, developing governing strategies that mobilize actors and resources, and allowing for flexible “multidimensional” interpretations of performance. In doing so, what Hughes offers is more of a framework for exploring the determinants of urban climate-change governance than a content-full theory. Many of the individual components of the framework have been previously examined by management and policy scholars. Although it is an inductive approach, what Hughes attempts to pull off in the book is impressive given the scope of administrative, political, and economic transformations that must likely occur for cities to be significant players in climate action globally.
In the second chapter, Hughes details this framework in greater detail. She acknowledges that there are likely multiple causal pathways by which cities make progress and no way to predict which one they will take based solely on the context or characteristics of a city—although politically liberal communities tend to make more progress. That said, cities tend to make progress through institution building (making lasting administrative and governance arrangements internally), coalition building (determining who will be involved and framing benefits accordingly), and capacity building (finding resources).
Chapter 3 begins to lay out the book’s empirics by detailing the unique contexts and climate policy agendas of the cases. New York City generates 70% of its GHG emissions from building energy use and has greater control over land use than the other cities. Because most New Yorkers live in multifamily housing and walk or take mass transit to work, its GHG profile stands out compared to most other cities. Its policy objectives revolve largely around retrofitting buildings to be more energy efficient. Toronto, the world’s first city to adopt a climate-reduction pledge, has comparatively lower regulatory oversight. The province, rather than the city, oversees local building codes and standards. Unlike in New York City, Toronto’s mayor has very little power over city policy. And sprawling Los Angeles generates GHG more via transportation, but also stands out because it owns North America’s largest municipal utility— and thus has greater influence over the fuels used for electricity production. These types of distinctions have led each city to adopt climate or sustainability action plans born from their own energy and transportation patterns, political contexts, and forms of government.
Chapter 4 details the governing strategies each city has employed, covering the gist of the framework. Existing administrative and budgeting structures within cities are ill suited for climate-change mitigation, which is why climate governance requires building new institutional arrangements to help coordinate across departments or bureaucratic silos and to improve the longevity of such governing arrangements. Coalition building is necessary because a range of public and private actors will be needed to make substantive emissions impacts. New York did so through stakeholder advisory groups. Mobilizing voter support is a second method for increasing coalitional support for climate goals and has been central to Los Angeles’s efforts. Capacity building entails tapping not just financial resources but also building technical capabilities within city governments and knowledge and awareness within community groups or stakeholders.
Chapter 5 presents the difficulties each city has had in demonstrating progress in reducing carbon emissions. Although each city has demonstrated declines of between 12% and 26% since 2007, the protocols they use to conduct their own GHG inventories vary widely—including or excluding, for instance, some types of fuel used in built-environment emissions activities and sources—so these declines are not directly comparable. The cities have also done an uneven job of tracking emissions over time, with Los Angeles and Toronto lagging behind New York’s effort to monitor annual emissions. Moreover, the largest sources of emissions reductions have come from removing coal from their energy supplies and capturing methane emissions, which are supply-side approaches. Demand-side interventions intended to reduce contributions from individual household energy use or transportation will take much longer to realize.
The book’s reliance on three large cities as case studies for climate action presents limitations. It is unclear how the experiences and governing approaches of these three North American megacities can be generalizable to the 20,000 municipalities in the United States or developing urban regions globally. Most large US cities exist within systems of concentric suburban and exurban governments, which are largely racially and politically homogeneous. They also have strong incentives to free-ride on the environmental efforts of others, adopt exclusionary policies, and collaborate with similar-looking communities rather than confronting global externalities. That is a limitation Hughes acknowledges, noting in the concluding chapter that applying this governing framework “presupposes a commitment to address climate change” (p. 167). This is an assumption many communities appear to violate, with a majority of US cities indicating in the 2010 International City/County Management Association Sustainability Survey they did not consider climate change a priority of their community. A 2015 follow-up survey found that the majority of US local governments responding (N = 1,899) did not coordinate internally on climate-change mitigation or adaptation. Despite such tremendous heterogeneity, Hughes argues that “the need for city governments to build institutions, coalitions, and capacities in order to govern GHG emissions will remain the same” (p. 168). Ultimately, the book provides a useful organizing framework and guidance for researchers trying to build cumulative knowledge on the drivers and outcomes of urban climate action.
