Cities and governance

Cities have emerged as key players in the governance of climate change. While conventional political analysis has tended to neglect the role of these local actors with respect to the global problem of climate change, the proliferation over the past decade of city and city-network initiatives to address the problem is increasingly hard to ignore. Reflecting this trend, a growing body of research has drawn attention to the ways in which cities have engaged with the issue of climate change.1 This work has documented initiatives that are taking place at the city level and the challenges which have been encountered, primarily in relation to climate change mitigation and with a focus on cities in the “North.” However, in the main, this research has taken the urban as a relatively unproblematic category, and has not engaged with the shifts in urban governance documented in the wider literature on urban studies or emerging debates concerning critical readings of urban metabolism.