Harriet Bulkeley: Urban Climate Governance and Sustainability

Urban climate governance is the set of actors, rules and practices through which cities decide and implement responses to climate change, and the British geographer Harriet Bulkeley, a professor at the universities of Durham and Utrecht, is the researcher who has done most to turn it into a field of study. Her thesis, developed in Cities and Climate Change (2013) and Accomplishing Climate Governance (2016), is that cities are not mere implementers of national policy but climate actors in their own right, governing carbon through experiments, networks and partnerships with business and communities, and that this way of governing carries as much potential as risk of inequality.

City networks and multilevel climate governance

Bulkeley began by studying transnational city networks. With Michele Betsill she showed in 2003 how organisations such as ICLEI, the Covenant of Mayors and later C40 allowed local governments to commit to emission reduction targets, share methods and pressure states, creating a multilevel governance in which the urban scale gained autonomy. Her conclusion was that climate policy is made in many places at once, and that cities, through their control over transport, buildings, waste and planning, have real capacity to act even without formal powers.

Urban climate experiments: innovating and fragmenting

Her most cited contribution is the notion of urban climate change experiments. With Vanesa Castán Broto she analysed in 2013 more than six hundred interventions in a hundred cities worldwide, low-carbon districts, efficiency programmes, community energy, flood adaptation, and found that most were not formal policies but pilot projects driven by coalitions of local governments, firms, universities and organisations. That experimental governance allows innovation and learning, but it also fragments action, depends on external funding and rarely scales up to the whole city.

Climate justice: who benefits from the transition

Bulkeley pays special attention to justice. Experiments tend to concentrate where technical capacity and economic return exist, business districts and middle-income neighbourhoods, and to leave out the peripheries that suffer most from heat and floods. The low-carbon transition can also make housing and energy more expensive for vulnerable households if it is not designed with them. Her later work on energy poverty and on nature-based solutions, in the European NATURVATION project, insists that just climate governance requires sharing benefits and costs and giving voice to affected communities.

Policy influence and the gap between promises and emissions

Her framework has influenced policy. The city networks she studied now govern climate neutrality commitments in hundreds of metropolises; the European Union has adopted the model of missions and urban experiments in its climate-neutral cities programme; and UN-Habitat and the IPCC recognise cities as central actors in mitigation and adaptation. Bulkeley has warned, however, that the proliferation of commitments and pilots does not equal emission reductions, and that the gap between what cities promise and what they achieve is the main problem of climate governance today.

Bulkeley's lesson is that governing climate in the city is a matter of politics and power as much as technology: who decides, who funds, who benefits and who is left out. Cities can lead the transition, but only if they turn experiments into policies for the whole population, integrate climate into housing, transport and budgets, and measure success by emissions avoided and the justice of the distribution, not by the number of projects announced.