Understanding how city networks are leveraging climate action: experimentation through C40
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RESEARCH
Urban Transformations
Open Access
Understanding how city networks are leveraging climate action: experimentation through C40 Thi Minh Phuong Nguyen1* , Kathryn Davidson1 and Lars Coenen2,3 * Correspondence: thiminhphuong. [email protected] 1 Faculty of Architecture, Building and Design, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
Abstract Climate change is one of the most challenging environmental and social problems for contemporary urban planning. In response to this phenomenon, city networks have emerged as new configurations of urban climate governance that encourage the implementation of experiments such as testing new solutions regarding sustainable transport. While city networks are gaining momentum and influence as effective platforms to transform and scale up pilot experiments into city-wide schemes, little is known regarding their role in conditioning and leveraging such urban experiments Our paper investigates the underexplored nature of urban experiments within city networks and provides a better understanding of how these networks condition urban experiments. To this end an analytical model has been developed and applied to the case of the C40 Climate Leadership Group (C40) and its Climate Positive Development Good Practice Guide. Our findings suggest that the C40 encourages variation in local climate experiments and the generation of new and innovative climate solutions in member cities. In particular they reveal that the implementation of climate positive experiments has passed the ‘variation’ stage, is currently in the ‘selection’ stage, and likely to move towards the ‘retention’ stage in the near future. Potential experimentation outputs of the case are identified as built environment change, new citizen practices, policy change, infrastructural change and new technology. Noticeably, we consider that the C40 plays an important role in providing fundamental institutional support to implement and leverage climate projects within its member cities. Keywords: Experimentation, City networks, C40, Climate action, Governance
Policy and practice recommendations 1. Urban policymakers and practitioners should understand the role of city networks in conditioning and leveraging urban experiments to derive more benefits from engaging in networking activities. 2. ‘Good-practice’ climate experiment programmes are often not set-up to test solutions in tightly controlled environments, but rather to encourage the generation of new and innovative solutions. © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article'
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