Repowering Cities: Governing Climate Change Mitigation in New York City, Los Angeles, and Toronto

Cities have been widely promoted as an important political scale for addressing climate change. As Sara Hughes’ Repowering Cities rightly points out, however, much of the research on city climate efforts focuses on the adoption of greenhouse gas reduction goals. Hughes is interested in an even more pressing question: once goals are adopted, how do cities move forward with the complicated process of governing emissions? To answer this question, she offers an excellent synthesis of years of scholarship on cities and climate change, then builds on it with her own study of New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto. In doing so, Repowering Cities offers a useful illumination of the political challenges of achieving city climate goals.Hughes’ main argument is that cities share a set of governance strategies that help them overcome the complexity and uncertainty that define greenhouse gas reduction efforts. These strategies are institution building, coalition building, and capacity building. She argues that they can be seen across city climate initiatives, even as each city’s unique built environment and political context shape the details of its climate policies and the strategies’ implementation.The importance of her first governance strategy, institutional building, is well established. It may include the creation of a new department to oversee the implementation of a city’s policies but also often means that city climate leaders find ways to integrate climate goals throughout the existing sectors and departments of the city. This embedding of climate goals and policies into formal and informal institutions and decision-making is crucial, Hughes asserts, to ensure that implementation continues through changes in political leadership and staff turnover. In other words, though strong leaders are often important in establishing ambitious greenhouse gas reduction goals, it is how well these leaders are able to institutionalize their climate goals that in the long run facilitates emission reductions.The second governance strategy Hughes investigates is coalition building. She argues that coalition building across political bodies, the business community, and nonprofits is necessary for reducing strategic uncertainty in climate policies. As greenhouse gas emissions come from myriad sectors across urban areas, “the capacity and ability of city governments to govern is activated and strengthened by the partnerships and relationships they are able to generate” (p. 69). Coalition building fosters collaboration, communication, and support for the programs across constituents and interests. A failure to build coalitions, her cases make clear, can lead to opposition to climate policies from sectors vital to achieving emission reductions.Finally, capacity building reduces substantive uncertainty about how mitigation actions relate to outcomes. Capacity building can include gathering and understanding emissions data, creating new financial tools and regulations to reduce emissions, and learning from other cities through transmunicipal networks. As governing climate change is a new arena for cities, they often find themselves with ambitious goals they are not sure how to achieve. Capacity building is necessary for operating in this new field. The discussion of capacity building returns the book to one of Hughes’ main arguments: adopting greenhouse gas reduction goals is theeasy part; figuring out how to achieve these goals is the challenge that cities now face.Overall, Repowering Cities illustrates that, for proponents of city climate efforts, a shift needs to be made from sharing best practices in the realm of policy to sharing best practices in the realm of governance. Cities’ emissions come from different sources depending on their built environment, local climatic conditions, and existing infrastructure. Yet much of what needs to be done to reduce emissions, such as changing energy sources and reducing emissions from transportation and buildings, is well known. What needs deeper investigation, Hughes successfully argues, is how to establish city governance practices that facilitate achieving these changes over the long run. For scholars already steeped in the literature on cities and climate governance, nothing in Hughes’ book is particularly groundbreaking. Yet it does provide a useful framework for examining strategies of city climate governance and the challenges even ambitious and well-resourced cities face in achieving their goals.Hughes concludes with a decidedly hedged answer as to whether or not city climate actions are reducing carbon emissions. Indeed, though she holds her case cities up as climate leaders, her analysis of climate governance in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto shows, perhaps unintentionally, how often climate governance falters. It is clear that some changes have been made, most notably in city energy supplies and municipal operations. Yet Hughes asserts that emissions reductions are only one way of counting progress. Of perhaps even greater importance is the ability of these cities to facilitate and promote the new modes of governance that will be necessary for the “repowering” of city climate politics that is necessary for them to be important players in moving toward a low-carbon world.

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