THE URBAN GOVERNANCE OF CLIMATE CHANGE: A COMPARATIVE SOCIO-INSTITUTIONAL ANALYSIS OF TRANSFORMATIVE URBAN RESPONSES TO CLIMATE CHANGE IN DURBAN (SOUTH AFRICA) AND PORTLAND (OR, USA)
by
Alexander C.E. Aylett
A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
in
THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES
(Geography)
THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
(Vancouver)
December 2011
© Alexander C.E. Aylett, 2011 ii
Abstract This dissertation investigates the socio-political dynamics of urban attempts to address climate change in a systemic, rather than project-based or piecemeal, fashion. It focuses on the actions of both municipal and civil-society actors, as well as their interactions through formal and informal processes of participation and collaboration. It contributes to the larger re-theorization of the urban scale as a potentially powerful locus for action on climate change that has arisen as international climate negotiations have faltered (Betsill 2001, Bulkeley Betsill 2003, 2005, Burch 2009, Bulkeley et al. 2003, Kousky & Schneider 2003). Focusing on two exceptional cities at the forefront of urban climate policy, this dissertation looks more closely at the difficult work involved in relocalizing meaningful climate action to the urban scale.
Based on comparative qualitative research conducted in Durban (KZN, South Africa) and Portland (OR, USA) this dissertation investigates how cities can make a transition from a limited project-based approach to more integrated and transformative responses to climate change. As I will show, systemic responses to climate change require, above all, a transition from climate government to climate governance (Bridge & Perreault 2009, Gonzalez and Healey 2006, Hajer 2003 Brownill & Carpenter 2009; Bulkeley 2010; Bulkely et al. 2011). Far-reaching transformations of urban systems lie beyond what any one actor can impose or direct. Effective climate responses therefore depend on the diffusion of policy making, management, and implementation along networks that draw together government actors traditionally isolated by bureaucratic silos, as well as private companies, civil-society groups, and citizens. Contributing to a clearer understanding of networks of urban climate governance, this dissertation focuses on two key facets of the creation of networks of urban climate governance. First it examines the institutional dynamics that take place within municipal bureaucracies, as policy leaders build support for integrated and ambitious climate policies. This contributes to the broad literature on organizational behaviour and change (Weber 1922, Veblen 1914, Merton 1940, March and Olsen 1989, Schoenberger 1997, Latour 1987, Haraway 1991). Second, contributing to the literature on public participation and governance (Arnstein 1969, Taylor & Fransman 2004, Holmes & Scoones 2000, Abrahamsen 2000, McGee et al. 2003 , Habermas 1987 , Foucault 1979, Silver et al. 2010 , de Souza 2006 ) it analyses the role of civil-society actors in shaping and even leading ambitious urban responses to climate change. iii
Preface
Portions of Chapter 4 have been published in:
• Aylett, A. (2011) "Bureaucracies and Low Carbon Transitions." In Cities and Low Carbon Transitions eds. Harriet Bulkeley & Simon Marvin. (Routledge)
Portions of Chapter 7 have been in:
• Aylett, A. (2010) “Participatory Planning, Justice and Climate Change in Durban, South Africa.” Environment and Planning A. 42(1) 99 – 115
• Aylett, A. (2010) “Conflict, Collaboration, and Climate Change: Participatory Democracy and Urban Environmental Struggles in Durban, South Africa.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34(3) 478–9
Research for this dissertation was conducted with ethics approuval from the UBC Research Human Ethics Board, Certificate Number H07-03185. iv Table of Contents
Abstract...... ii Preface...... iii Table of Contents...... iv List of Tables...... x List of Figures...... xi Acknowledgements...... xii Dedication...... xiii
1. Introduction: New Perspectives on Urban Climate Change Policy...... 1
1.1 Introduction: Climate Change Today, Where We Stand...... 1 1.2 Urban Climate Change Governance: a Research Agenda...... 3 1.2.1 (Don't) Blame Us!...... 9
1.3 Integrated Urban Responses to Climate Change: Governance vs. Government...... 12
1.4 Global Approaches to Climate Change: the Initial Global Scientific Framing and Subsequent Integrated Approaches...... 21 1.4.1 Global Scientific Approaches to Climate Change...... 22 1.4.2 Reframing Climate Change: Integrating the Socio-Political and Economic Dimensions of Global Climate Change...... 24
1.5 Cities and Climate Change: Scientific, Integrated, and Deeply Democratic Critiques...... 26 1.5.1 Local Scientific Approaches to Urban Climate Policy...... 28 1.5.2 Local Integrated Approaches to Urban Climate Policy...... 29 1.5.3 Urban Political Ecological Approaches to Urban Climate Policy.....32 1.5.3.1 UPE Core Concepts...... 33
1.6 Urban Climate Change: a Typology of Theory and Practice...... 38
1.7 Dissertation Road Map...... 43
2. Methodology and Study Sites...... 48
2.1 Introduction: the Case for Selecting Durban and Portland...... 48
2.2 Methodology...... 52 2.2.1 Interview Methodology: Profile of Respondents...... 54 2.2.2 Interview Methodology, Follow-up, and Triangulation...... 56 v
2.3 Durban: Introduction...... 57 2.3.1 Durban: Emissions Profile and Early Climate Policies and Projects...... 63 2.3.2 Key Adaptive and Mitigative Measures...... 65 2.3.3 Institutional History of Climate Change Policies and Programs in Durban...... 67
2.4 Portland: Introduction...... 74 2.4.1 Portland: Emissions Profile and Early Climate Policies and Projects...... 78 2.4.2 Institutional History and Context of Portland's Engagement with CC...... 83
2.5 Conclusions: Making Climate Policy Their Own...... 87
3. A Cultural Approach to Understanding Organisational Change...... 90
3.1 Introduction...... 90
3.2 Weber and the Modern Bureaucracy...... 94 3.2.1 Weber's Nightmare: the Cultural Costs of Bureaucratization...... 96
3.3 Veblen and Merton: beyond Rationality to Trained Incapacity and Organizational Culture...... 98 3.3.1 Merton: Instrumentalizing Trained Incapacity and the Creation of Organizational Culture...... 100
3.4 Steering Change (i): the Logic of Appropriateness and Path Dependency....103 3.4.1 Path Dependency and Lock in...... 105
3.5 Steering Change (ii): Elite Dominance and Self-preservation vs. Innovation...... 108
3.6 Empowering Change: Strategic Interventions and Decentralizing Empowered Creativity...... 111 3.6.1 Strategic Interventions (i): Bridging...... 112 3.6.2 Strategic Interventions (ii): Translation...... 113 3.6.3 Organizational Reform: Situated Knowledge and Decentralizing Empowered Creativity...... 117 3.7 Conclusions...... 119 vi
4. Durban from Path Dependency to Innovation...... 122
4.1 Introduction and Overview of Case Studies...... 122
4.2 Translating Climate Change: Attempts to Establish Institutional Legitimacy...... 124 4.2.1 Durban's Municipal Energy Strategy: an Attempt to Reconcile Mitigation and Development...... 127
4.3 Path Dependency in the Electricity Sector...... 132 4.3.1 Local Renewables: “It just isn't what we do!”...... 135 4.3.2 Responses One Year Later...... 140 4.3.3 Discussion: eThekwini Electricity and the Costs of Institutional Path Dependency...... 143
4.4 Water and Sanitation: beyond Departmental “Business as Usual”...... 146
4.5 Institutionalizing Climate Change Mitigation: Institutional Reform...... 153 4.5.1 Mainstreaming Climate Mitigation...... 154
4.6 Conclusions...... 156
5. Portland from Path Dependency to Innovation...... 160
5.1 Introduction...... 160
5.2 Early Challenges to Integrated Climate Change Policies: Green Streets vs. Big Pipes...... 162 5.2.1 Beyond Climate Change: Integrated Planning vs. Silos...... 164
5.3 Mainstreaming Climate Action across a Municipality...... 165 5.3.1 The Strengths and Weaknesses of Leading Decentralized Innovation...... 167 5.3.2 Green Building: a Failed Attempt at Leading the Charge...... 169
5.4 Mainstreaming Climate Change: the 2009 Climate Action Plan...... 173 5.4.1 Portland's 2009 Climate Action Plan...... 174 5.4.2 The Value of Internal Conflict...... 177
5.5 Institutionalizing Climate Change Mitigation: Development Planning and Institutional Reform...... 179 5.5.1 The Bureau of Planning and Sustainability...... 180 vii
5.6 Creating Change from the Middle...... 182
5.7 Managing for Innovation...... 185
5.8 Conclusions...... 187
6. Climate Change and Participatory Planning...... 195
6.1 Introduction...... 195
6.2 Mixed Visions of Public Participation, Democracy, and Sustainable Development...... 198 6.2.1 Hopes and Fears about Participatory Democracy: a Survey of Recent Literature...... 198 6.2.2 The Practice of Public Participation...... 199
6.3 Habermas and Foucault: the Influence of Process and Power on Participation...... 202 6.3.1 Foucault: Power and Struggle...... 204
6.4 Participation and Climate Change: a Survey of the IPCC Assessment Reports (2001 and 2007)...... 209 6.4.1 The IPCC and Participation...... 210 6.4.2 Beyond Institutional Participation: Pushing the Boundaries of the IPCC...... 213
6.5 Synergies Between Invited and Invented Participation...... 215
6.6 Conclusions...... 218
7. Durban – Conflict, Collaboration, and Climate Change...... 221
7.1 Introduction: Consensus, Conflict, and the Synergies of Local Climate Governance...... 221 7.1.1 Background to Participation and Protest in Durban...... 222 7.1.2 Civil-Society Mobilization and the Fight against Apartheid: 1955-1994...... 224 7.1.3 Public Participation in the Post-Apartheid Political Order...... 225
7.2 Case Study 1 – Institutionalized Participation and Climate Planning within the IDP...... 227 7.2.1 Early Participatory Planning: the First Integrated Development Plan...... 228 viii
7.2.2 Strategic Thinking: Bridging the Gap...... 231 7.2.3 Participation and the Environment (i): Big Mama's Shifts in High-Level Policies...... 232 7.2.4 Participation and the Environment (ii): the Limitations of Ward-Level Consultations...... 234
7.3 Case Study 2 – The Confrontational Contribution of Civil Society...... 238 7.3.1 Industrial Development vs. Environmental Justice: a Short History of Community Struggles in the South Durban Basin...... 238 7.3.2 Conflict’s Positive Contributions (i): “Klupping” and Counter-Balancing Local NeoLiberalism...... 241 7.3.3 Conflict’s Positive Contributions (ii): the Collaborative Science of Confrontation...... 244 7.3.4 Localizing Climate Change in the SDB (i): from Air Quality to the Global Climate...... 246 7.3.5 Localizing Climate Change in the SDB (ii): from Understanding to Action...... 250
7.4 Conclusions...... 253
8. Portland – Managed Participation and Autonomous Action...... 258
8.1 Introduction...... 258
8.2 History of Participatory Processes in Portland...... 262 8.2.1 Institution Building and Decline: the Arc of the Neighbourhood Association System...... 263 8.2.2 Early Successes, Decline, and Marginalization: 1970s - 1990s.....264 8.2.3 Civic Environmentalism: Expanding Engagement beyond NAs....266
8.3 Case Study 1 – The 2009 Climate Action Plan...... 268 8.3.1 Public Input to the CAP from the Municipality's Perspective...... 271 8.3.2 TPDX and Portland’s Climate Action Plan: a Companion in Uncharted Waters...... 273 8.3.3 Transition PDX and the 2009 CAP...... 275 8.3.4 TPDX and Sustainable Local Food Systems...... 276 8.3.5 TPDX's Impact on the CAP Process and the Final Plan...... 278 8.3.6 The Green Civic Dialectic (i): Synergies between Municipal Structures and Civil-Society Mobilization...... 280
8.4 Limitations of Consultation and Individual Action...... 282
ix
8.4.1 “Community Engagement” beyond Consultation to Implementation...... 284
8.5 Case Study 2 – Solarize Portland and the Challenge of Local Renewable Energy...... 287 8.5.1 Solarize: Early Days...... 289 8.5.2 Solarize Phase Two (i): Background to Municipal Involvement.....291 8.5.3 Solarize Phase Two (ii): Community-Led, Municipally Supported...293 8.5.4 The Challenges of Scale, Politics, and Bureaucracy...... 294 8.5.5 Culture, Structure, and Positionality...... 295 8.5.6 The Green Civic Dialectic (ii): Solarize and the Relay-Race of Urban Climate Governance...... 297
8.6 Conclusions...... 300
9. Conclusion: a Stronger Foundation for Hope...... 306
9.1 Introduction...... 306
9.2 Section 1: Summary of Key Findings...... 310
9.3 Section 2: Summary of Key Findings...... 317
9.4 Cross-Cutting Findings...... 322
9.5 Limitations and Lacunae...... 326
9.6 Future Research...... 327
9.7 Conclusions...... 331
Figures and Tables...... 334
Bibliography...... 356
Appendix A: Interviewees, Durban 2008-2009 ...... 388
Appendix B: Interviewees, Portland 2008-2010 ...... 390 x
List of Tables
Table 1.1 A Typology of the Localization of Approaches to Climate Change...... 336 Table 2.1 Multnomah County GHG Emissions by Sector...... 342 Table 7.1 Timeline of Public Participation Relevant Legislation and Policy in South Africa.....350 Table 7.2 eThekwini Ward Profile for Ward 18 – Pinetown Centre..…...... 351 Table 7.3 eThekwini Ward Profile for Ward 18 – Pinetown Centre (cnt'd)...... 352 Table 8.1 Portland 2009 Climate Action Plan, Individual Actions...... 355 xi
List of Figures
Figure 1.1 The Evolution of the IPCC Reports...... 334 Figure 1.2 An Integrated Approach to Climate Change...... 335 Figure 2.1 Estimated Annual Carbon Emissions for the eThekwini Municipality by Sector...... 338 Figure 2.2 eThekwini Annual CO2 Emissions by Energy Type...... 339 Figure 2.3 2008 Multnomah County GHG Emissions by Sector...... 340 Figure 2.4 2008 Multnomah County GHG Emissions by Energy Type...... 341 Figure 3.1 A Simplified Weberian Bureaucratic Structure...... 343 Figure 3.2 Department of Water and Sanitation, Organigram...... 344 Figure 4.1 A Networked and Integrated Bureaucratic Structure...... 345 Figure 7.1 Industrial / Residential Mix in the South Durban Basin...... 346 Figure 7.2 Nelson Mandela Addressing Protesters in Front of Expanded SAPREF Refinery, 1995...... 347 Figure 7.3 SDCEA Protest in Front of Shell Refinery, South Durban Basin...... 348 Figure 7.4 SDCEA Bucket Sampling Materials...... 349 Figure 8.1 Portland 2009 Climate Action Plan, Emissions Reduction Targets by Sector...... 353 Figure 8.2 Map of Solarize Portland installations...... 354 xii
Acknowledgements
Completing a doctoral degree is a long and difficult journey, and not one that you can travel on alone. I would like to thank Dr. Trevor Barnes, as well as all the members of my committee, Drs. Karen Bakker, Jim Glassman, and John Robinson, for their support in input all along this process. I would also like to thank the current and former heads of Sustainable Cities International, Dr. Nola-Kate Seymour and Jane McRae as well as all the Staff and Members of the SCI network. Their ideas and guidance had a significant impact on the course of my research.
This research would have been impossible without generous financial support from both SSHRC and the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation. To the Trudeau Foundation, in particular, I owe a huge debt of gratitude. Their provided far more than financial support and I deeply appreciated being part of the Trudeau community.
But beyond all these, I need to thank all the people close to me, friends and family, who put up with the arduous and cloistered habits of a graduate students. To my parents, thank you for being such wonderful supports through the long and bumpy road that has gotten me to this point. To my wonderful wife Luna, thank you for keeping me smiling and helping me to keep believing that this project was possible. To little Inara, your buoyant smiles were a lifeline on days of endless writing and rewriting. To Luna and Inara 1
Chapter 1, Introduction: New Perspectives on Urban Climate Change Policy
1.1 Introduction: Climate Change Today, Where We Stand
This dissertation is about urban responses to climate change. When I set out on this thesis in 2005, a growing number of municipalities worldwide were beginning to enact programs to improve energy efficiency under the banner of “climate action.” It was the era of picking the “low-hanging fruit:” energy efficient cross-walk signals, electric park maintenance vehicles, building efficiency programs. These projects were uninspiring. Their reach also fell far short of the scale of the challenge. Even though its impacts were still considered to be far in the future, climate change clearly posed a fundamental threat to the ecological, social, and economic conditions that make large cities viable. But at the same time, a handful of cities were beginning to seek out more ambitious action. It was these I wanted to make the focus of my dissertation, to examine the social and political dynamics involved in engaging in truly transformative urban climate responses. It was to be a study of “policy in motion” in two leading cities: Durban 1 (KZN, South Africa) and Portland (Oregon, USA). Both cities were attempting to move from a scattered project-based response to climate change to an integrated and coordinated strategy that cut across the municipality as a whole. My goal was to capture the dynamics involved as this process took place. As we will see, there were twists and surprises along the way that I recorded and attempted to tease out. This was the material I had hoped to gather.
What I had not expected was that climate change itself (and our understanding of it) would also
1 Following a merger with its extended metropolitan area, Durban became officially known as the municipality of eThekwini. ‘Durban’, however, is still the name most commonly used to refer to the city, while eThekwini is used for official municipal documents. This dissertation follows those conventions. 2 move into a period of rapid evolution. Things now are much worse than they were when I began. When I started this research, climate change was still a distant threat the impacts of which would only begin to be felt near the end of the century. This chronology was still widely held to be accurate when I landed in Durban to start my first case study in 2008. Two months later, as I prepared to leave, the World Health Organization released calculations showing that climate change had already begun to increase mortality in the Global South (WHO 2008). My initial reaction was scepticism; but these grim reports have since begun to arrive more frequently. Most recently, in May of 2011, a new paper published in Science has shown that changes in global temperatures between 1980-2008 have caused a drop in the total production levels of key crops like maize and wheat of up to 5.5 percent (Lobell et. al. 2011). One month later, at the end of June, the U.S. government released its 2010 “State of the Climate Report.” Its headline findings were: Greenland ice sheets were retreating at the fastest rate in recorded history; 2010 had tied 2005 as the warmest year on record: global sea surface temperatures in 2009 were the third warmest on record; and Arctic summer sea ice was at the third lowest level in recorded history (NOAA 2011). Climate change had gone from distant danger to a present reality.
Coinciding with reports about the present impacts of climate change were measurements of our total failure to reduce or even slow our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In May of 2011, estimates by the International Energy Agency (IEA) showed that during 2010 global emission increased by a record amount and now stood at the highest carbon output in history. Commenting on the implications of those figures, the IEA's chief economist described the prospects of keeping temperature increases within a safe range below 2°C as “a nice Utopia” (Harvey 2011). In June, BP published its 2010 “Statistical Review of World Energy.” By their calculations during that year the world consumed more energy than ever before. 2010 energy consumption was up 5.6% compared to 2009, a rate of increase not seen since 1973. Despite growth in renewable energies, fossil fuels (the source of most anthropogenic GHG emissions) accounted for 88% of that consumption, increasing their share slightly from the year before. Coal, at 30% of the world's energy use, had reached its highest share of global energy consumption since 1970 (BP 2011). Following a small dip due to the economic crisis, these sharp increases represented a rapid return to a pattern of voracious energy consumption that has seen global energy use increase by 320% since 1965. Carbon emissions follow a similar pattern, increasing 325% 3 between 1960 and 20072.
At precisely the time when the effects of climate change were becoming clear and tangible, humankind was rapidly moving in the most hazardous direction possible. If we are to meet the emissions reduction targets experts indicate are required to avoid “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” (Dessai et al. 2004, Hoegh-Guldberg 1999, Meehl et al. 2007, O'Neill & Oppenheimer 2002, Oppenheimer 1998, Ramathan & Feng 2008, UNFCCC 1992,) then industrialized countries3 will have to reduce emissions by 25%-40% below 1990 levels by 2020 and 80%-90% by 2050, with substantial reductions in all other regions of the world (den Elzen & Höhne 2008, Gupta et al. 2007). This will require a transformation of energy systems at an unprecedented scale and speed. If cities are going to play any significant part in changing the course we are on, we need to have a better understanding of the dynamics of moving from small-scale to transformative urban climate policies.
1.2 Urban Climate Governance: a Research Agenda
Over the past two decades cities have attracted an increasing amount of attention in discussions of climate change. With international climate negotiations faltering, cities have become sites of hope; places where climate change mitigation strategies can be mobilised. Increasingly, the urban scale is being theorized as a potentially powerful locus for action on climate change (Betsill 2001, Bulkeley & Betsill 2003, 2005, Burch 2009, Bulkeley et al. 2003, Kousky & Schneider 2003). Cities hold the promise of being able to act where countries have failed (ICLEI 1993, C40 2007). But it is misleading to assume that the local scale is somehow intrinsically a more appropriate or effective scale for climate action. In fact, notwithstanding many proudly
2 In 1965 the world consumed an equivalent of 3,766.91 million tons of oil, by 2010 this has risen to 12,002.35 million tons of oil equivalent (BP 2011). World Carbon emissions grew from 9.442 million kilotons in 1960 to 30.649 million kilotons in 2007 (World Bank, Development Indicators 2007). 3 I am using “industrialized countries” here to refer to Annex I countries of the Kyoto protocol, namely: Australia, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russian Federation, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and the United States of America. 4 announced commitments from municipalities4 around the world, favourable results have not materialized. Despite their control over key policy levers and their influence on the everyday conduct of the majority of people, the majority of cities have failed to make significant reductions in energy use or greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Focusing on two exceptional cities at the forefront of urban climate policy, this dissertation will look more closely at the difficult work involved in relocalizing meaningful climate action to the urban scale.
Early municipal climate policies often focus on reducing the municipality's corporate emissions. 5 This may be a logical starting point, but its impacts are necessarily limited: emissions from a municipality's own operations typically account for roughly one percent of the total emissions associated with residents, business, and industry within the city. As municipalities attempt to tackle these larger community-wide emissions, strategies have generally entailed atomized project-based initiatives: household energy efficiency campaigns, tree planting, “energy challenge” programs targeting industry and business, recycling, the purchase of carbon offsets or small amounts of renewable energy, and increased investment in public transportation.
These initiatives all have their strengths (transit investments most particularly), but they are reactive not transformative. They may help reduce emissions on the margins, but they do not engage with the larger processes that produce urban emissions in the first place. They have no impact on the policies and institutional practices that guide the city's decisions about infrastructure, land-use planning, or economic development. They also leave unchanged the social practices and individual and collective behaviours that are shaped by, and shape, these structural decisions.
Providing an integrated response to climate change that addresses the driving forces that guide urbanisation is essential if we are to transform the ways cities consume energy, resources, and
4 A note on terminology: Throughout this dissertation I use the term “municipal” to refer to a city’s government and bureaucracy. NGOs, community groups and associations are sometimes brought together under the umbrella term “civil society groups.” Business groups, industry representatives and individual companies are all referred to by name. “The city” is used as a general term to denote the combination of these various actors within the geographical boundaries, and built socio-technical systems that make it up. 5 Corporate emissions are those associated with municipal buildings, assets, and infrastructure. This is distinguished from “community” emissions, which include emissions associated with individuals, industry, and business within the city. 5 commodities (Robinson et al. 2008). As will be discussed in greater detail below (see sections 3 & 4), research on responses to climate change has moved away from a narrow focus on isolated adaptation and mitigation measures (Bernstein et al. 2007, Cohen et al. 1998, Nakicenovic and Swart eds. 2000, Robinson 2004, Robinson & Herbert 2001, Robinson et al. 2006, Swart et al. 2003). Decisions about the course of development can have as much influence over future rates of GHG emissions as targeted climate change policies (Fisher et al 2007, Moomaw et al 2001). At the urban scale, this can mean the choice between building dense, mixed-use, communities centred around transit use, for example, or sprawling auto-dependent residential suburbs, shopping centres, and office parks. That decision creates the underlying parameters that guide social practices of energy use and the production of GHG emissions. It is only by engaging with these more fundamental issues that climate policies can address the root causes of our GHG emissions, rather than attempting to modify them after the fact.
The aim of this dissertation is to investigate how cities can make that transition from a limited project-based approach to more integrated and transformative responses to climate change. As I will show, systemic responses to climate change require, above all, a transition from climate government to climate governance (discussed below in section 2). Far-reaching transformations of urban systems lie beyond what any one actor can impose or direct. On average, for example, 99% of the GHG emissions generated in a given city lie outside the direct control of municipal government. Effective climate responses therefore depend on the diffusion of policy making, management, and implementation along networks that draw together government actors traditionally isolated by bureaucratic silos, as well as private companies, civil-society groups, and citizens. This dissertation will analyse the ways in which issues of power, conflict, and coalition building within these networks of governance steer urban efforts to initiate transformative climate policies.
The case studies for this dissertation, Durban (KZN South Africa) and Portland (OR, USA), are part of a small number of truly innovative municipalities moving in that direction. This dissertation will investigate how each, with varying degrees of success, is trying to shift away from the limited project-based responses described above. Climate policy leaders within each city are driving a transition towards an integrated approach to climate change that cuts across 6 social, political, technical, and environmental systems that are the foundation of urban life. Rather than focusing on specific physical systems within a city (such as the technical details of district energy networks, for example), this dissertation analyses human systems: bureaucratic structures, civil society groups, and their webs of interaction that govern how cities are imagined, built, maintained, and transformed as both social and physical entities. As I will show, these socio-institutional dynamics have a determining influence over the ability of cities to pursue more integrated approaches to climate change.
This dissertation is divided into two major sections. The first (Chapters 3, 4, 5) deals specifically with the internal dynamics of climate policies and programs within municipal bureaucracies. The second (Chapters 6, 7, 8) looks at the role of community groups and civil-society actors in designing and implementing climate policies. In the first section, I approach cities from the point of view of the complex bureaucratic structures that manage them. As discussed at greater length in chapter 3, their concrete practices and built infrastructure are linked by iterative and co- creative relationships to the skills, social systems, and worldviews of the institutional actors that manage them (Veblen 1898, 1914, 1918, Merton 1944, March and Olsen 1989, 2004, Schoenberger 1997, Haraway 1991, Latour 1987). Similar to other large bureaucratic organizations, how cities are currently managed and built is intimately tied to the structures that govern them, and what people working within those structures perceive to be possible and desirable courses of action. The ability to respond effectively to climate change depends in part on the way policy leaders negotiate the inertia that arises from the reaffirming relationships that bind the practices of city building to the identities and worldviews that structure municipal bureaucracies, and generally works against creative or substantial responses to climate change..
What is a city? What are its functions and objectives? What is an individual’s role within it? Creating new answers to these questions is part of the work of devising more ambitious responses to climate change. Truly integrated climate policy requires a re-conceptualization of the way in which cities relate to: the production and consumption of energy, the shape and extension of urbanization, the place of urbanized space within local and global ecosystems, the regional and global hinterlands which supply their material and economic needs, and the internal structures that have so far guided urban management. Through a cultural analysis of municipal 7 bureaucracies, the first half of this dissertation will examine how to shift the practices, logics, and values that currently steer urbanization, networks of climate governance must bridge multiple fractured and path dependent actors within the municipality itself.
Municipal power however has clear limits, both in terms of formal jurisdiction and constrained resources. As I will show in section two, the type of shift attempted in Durban and Portland would be impossible without the support and participation of the urban population more generally. This goes beyond conventional discussions of behaviour change. Key interventions like the densification of existing neighbourhoods, radical increases in the energy efficiency of private buildings, the implementation of local renewable energy systems, or fundamental shifts in patterns of urban mobility are not areas under top-down municipal control. The design and implementation of these policies requires communities to be actively involved in urban climate governance. Similarly, the fundamental nature of the shifts being discussed calls for public engagement both to help break the inertia of municipal institutions and counter-balance the influence of industry and business on municipal policies.
What is public participation? What are its limits? What is the role of communities in designing and implementing climate policies and programs? A better understanding of the links between municipalities and their constituents is essential if we are going to create networks of urban climate governance that enable transformative responses to climate change. This calls for a re- evaluation of the formal public participation and consultation processes traditionally employed by some municipalities. Communities have more to contribute than their views and preferences. Their real capacities are only made visible when they are approached as legitimate partners or leaders of climate policies in their own right. Doing so calls into question the traditional dichotomy established between institutionalized state-led participation, and grassroots community-led forms of protest and direct action. Adopting an inclusive and relational analysis of public participation, the second section of this dissertation will look at how the synergies between state-led and community-based forms of engagement can help drive ambitious climate policies. This approach is part of a larger theoretical debate on the different approaches to public participation that will be discussed in detail in chapter 7. 8
At its core this dissertation is an inquiry into relationships of governance, the relationships that can either drive or hold back the fundamental changes needed for cities to take on a significant role in responses to climate change. The first half of this work will focus on conflicts and coalitions that arise within the municipal bureaucracy as key actors and departments negotiate changes to established practices, discourses, and distributions of power and agency. The second half addresses how similar dynamics affect the links between the municipality and civil-society groups both inside and outside of formal participatory democratic processes. I will discuss these sections in more detail in the road map to the dissertation that concludes this chapter.
Both halves of the dissertation are guided by their own specific theoretical frameworks (laid out in chapters 3 and 6). My aim in this dissertation is to facilitate a productive conversation between my theoretical and empirical material. The results of this research should be relevant to both urban sustainability practitioners, as well as scholars interested in the theorization of institutional change and public participation. This exchange between empirical and theoretical material moves both ways. At some points the content of my empirical material pushed me to search for novel and hybrid sets of analytical tools, and in so doing pushed forward theoretical discussions in new directions. In other cases insights from theoretical debates helped expose the nature and limits of existing urban climate responses in ways which would otherwise not have been visible. Often elements of both of these types of exchanges happened almost simultaneously as I worked through the collection and analysis of the material covered here. Throughout the dissertation I have attempted to ensure that theory and practice are continually interacting, rather than existing in compartmentalized units.
In the remainder of this first introductory chapter I will provide an overview of how cities have come to be seen as sites where it might be possible to begin to ameliorate, even turn back, some of the dire consequence of global warming. Shifting the discussion of climate change from the global to the local has challenged the established international climate regime based around the UN FCCC and put forward an alternate vision of climate change, the city, and who can legitimately participate in the creation and implementation of climate policies. It is a product of a larger political and scientific shift away from a narrow scientific understanding of atmospheric chemistry, to a broader view of climate change as a challenge inextricably tied to our social and 9 economic systems, and the underlying priorities that guide the direction of human development. I will trace that transformation first as it is manifest in the ongoing internationally-focused work on the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (Banuri et al. 2001, Nakicenovic and Swart 2000, Metz et al. 2007, Parry et al. 2007, Solomon et al. 2007 ) and then as is has become increasingly localised in research on the overlap between climate and sustainable development (SD) policy (Cohen et al 1998, Robinson 2004, Robinson & Herbert 2001, Robinson et al. 2006, Swart et al. 2003) and urban political ecology (UPE) (Keil 1994, 2003, 2005, Swyngedouw 2006). I will summarize this analysis by providing a typology of the theory and practice of urban approaches to climate change. The typology will summarise the progression towards increasingly localised and urban understandings of the issue, and provide a reference point and framework for the analysis which follows in the body of this dissertation. I will then conclude this chapter with a roadmap laying out the structure of the rest of the dissertation in more detail.
I would like to begin, however, with a short story. A small vignette drawn from the news headlines of 2008 that is a microcosm of the issues at stake in this transition from global to urban responses to climate change.
1.2.1 (Don't) Blame Us! In late September 2008 an argumentative headline made the rounds of the international press. “Don't blame cities for climate change,” it read. The headline’s mere existence showed that something fundamental was shifting in our understanding of climate change. A few years earlier, the headline would have made little sense. Climate change, for roughly the first two decades of its public life, had been defined as a global problem that required coordinated international action. Since the late 1980s,6 under the guidance of the United Nations, a complex scientific and political apparatus rapidly evolved around that vision, culminating in the signing of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. It was recognized that cities had some role to play as part of national strategies. But that they were so significant that they could be “blamed” for “the problem” would have seemed outlandish. A decade later, much had changed. Kyoto was in crisis, and the headline now reflected a geological shift in the terrain of understanding of climate change, both as a scientific
6 I am using the founding of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 as the beginning of this era. Other important dates include the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, which produced the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the signing of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. 10 phenomena and as a target for political engagement and technological management.
The story, picked up by Reuters and circulated through a variety of print and online media, reported on research by Dr. David Satterthwait of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). He critically examined claims by international organisations like the World Bank, the Clinton Foundation's C40 municipal climate initiative, Munich Reinsurance, and cities like London and New York, that cities were responsible for between 75 and 80 per cent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Those figures had become increasingly popular during the preceding year, reappearing again and again in municipal climate policies, mayor's speeches, and government reports. How those numbers were calculated was never explained. Satterthwaite's own more detailed estimates showed that municipal emissions were probably much lower.
But this was not a simple case of municipal politicians having an inflated sense of their own importance. Satterthwaite's (2008) more accurate estimates showed the complexities involved in meaningfully engaging with climate change at a municipal level. He concluded that total municipal GHG emissions fell somewhere within the range of 30 percent to 70 percent of total anthropogenic emissions. He arrived at such a broad range because drawing a boundary around what counts as “urban emissions” is a slippery pursuit. The lower end of Satterthwaite's estimates looked only at emissions physically produced within the world's cities. To reach the higher end of the range meant assigning responsibility for anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions to the location of the people whose consumption caused the emissions. This included for example, the emissions from deforestation, agricultural production, the manufacture of consumer goods, and international air travel.
It can't be said that one approach to inventorying urban emissions is objectively more valid than another. Choosing how to delimit urban emissions is an exercise in assigning responsibility that is as much a matter of politics as science. That political aspect is what Satterthwaite overlooked in his work; for those who used them, the high estimates were a discursive tool, not a technical one. Far from needing to be defended from “blame” with more precise science, cities were celebrating their environmental impact as a source of potential political legitimacy. They wanted 11 to be held responsible if it would help them to challenge the naturalization of the nation-state as the primary locus for political power and add weight to a political scale historically marginalized in climate debates. This can be seen for example in the words of then London Mayor (and chair of the C40) Ken Livingstone as he announced the entry of Hong Kong into the C40 in 2007: “Urban areas are responsible for over 75 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, so the battle to prevent catastrophic climate change will be won or lost in cities” (C40 2007).
More problematic than the five percent difference between Livingstone and Satterthwaite's figures, however, was the mismatch between the high level of responsibility cities were claiming, and the much more limited scope of their actions. Standard methodologies for calculating urban emissions – such as the one developed by the ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability – focus almost exclusively on emissions physically produced within the city (as well as those associated with the off-site generation of electricity). Municipal climate programs based on these inventories act on an even smaller subset of emissions, in some cases limited only to assets directly controlled by the municipality (Aylett 2006). While using an expansive definition of municipal emissions to win political capital, the majority of the C40's concrete programs, for example, have focused only on increasing the energy efficiency of large municipal and corporate buildings. Like a set of Russian dolls, the incommensurate scales of action, measurement, and discourse that define urban approaches to climate change co-exist nested one inside the other.
This discrepancy between the celebratory discourse that has been constructed around urban climate action and the mediocre results on the ground highlights the danger of idealizing the localization of climate policy. While the potential of urban climate responses is real, there is no reason to assume that cities are somehow inherently more able to resolve the deadlock which we have seen at the national scale. This idealization of the local can also be seen in some portions of the broader literature on the downscaling of social, economic, and environmental policies (Corry et al 2004, Gibbins 2001, Raco 2000, Raco & Flint 2001). As I will discuss further below, discussions of urban climate responses to climate change can easily fall into what Brown and Purcell (2005, 607) have called “the local trap” of assuming that “organization, policies, and action at the local scale are inherently more likely to have desired social and ecological effects than activities organized at other scales.” 12
Escaping the “local trap” means leaving behind aspirational idealizations to look in detail at the influence of socio-political, institutional, economic, and environmental factors on the course of local climate policies. Satterthwaite's article contributed to this pursuit by spelling out more precisely what it means to claim a role in mitigating 70 percent of the world's emissions. This debate was the first public sign of the growing pains of urban responses to climate change. In the words of prominent spokespeople like Ken Livingston, cities were attempting to reach beyond the low-hanging fruit, but their actions had yet to make it to the higher branches. Were they to manage it, there is a possibility that cities could have a powerful and positive impact. This chapter will tell the story of how discussions of climate change arrived at this point where a detailed critique of urban climate policies is not only possible, but relevant. The goal of this dissertation as a whole is to look the relationships of governance involved in bridging the gap between cities' actions and their ambitions.
1.3 Integrated Urban Responses to Climate Change: Governance vs. Government
As we have seen, the arena for truly significant urban responses to climate change is one that is much larger than the limited jurisdictions of any given municipal government. Some sources of urban emissions may be under the direct control of the municipality (as with emissions associated with municipal facilities), but by far the majority exist along a spectrum of agency where the municipality has more or less influence but no direct avenue for control. Curbing upstream emissions from food production, for example, or transforming the local renewable energy market (both issues discussed in Chapter 8), could significantly reduce a city's carbon footprint. But municipalities have no established tools for engaging with issues like these that depend primarily on the behaviors of households, communities, and local, national, and international businesses. To address them effectively means adopting strategies that acknowledge the agency of multiple actors, and engage them directly in policy formation and implementation. In other words, it means looking at issues of urban climate governance not urban climate government. This distinction between government and governance contrasts two difference 13 conceptions of how power functions in the modern state. Rather than socio-economic activities being regulated primarily by the direct exercise of sovereign state power, governance proposes a model whereby power and agency are shared between multiple public and private actors. Voluntary measures, incentives, and collaboration take on an important role alongside (and in relation to) more traditional regulatory and punitive powers of the state. These are by no means simple arrangements, and I aim to explore some of their theoretical and practical complexities in the case studies that follow.
The challenge of urban responses to climate change is one specific example of a more general situation that has pushed governments at all scales to consider involving an increasingly broad coalition of actors in the processes of governing. The complexity of socio-political and economic relationships in an era of globalization and constrained governmental resources has, it is argued, created a situation where the state requires the cooperation of other actors in order to govern effectively (see Stoker 1998, Newman 2001, Kooiman 2003, Swyngedouw 2005, Taylor 2007). Increasingly, formal and informal relationships have spread the tasks of policy making, management, and implementation within networks that draw together traditional siloized government actors as well as private companies, civil-society groups, and citizens.
At the same time however, the ascendancy of governance over government is by no means clear or uncontested. While some scholars (MacLeod & Goodwin 1999, Painter 2000, Wood & Valler 2001) emphasize the hollowing out of the state under neoliberalism, as non-state actors take over functions formerly the sole responsibility of government, others (Whitehead et al., 2007) emphasize the enduring importance of the regulatory powers of the state. Exploring these an other tensions in the theory and practice of governance (discussed further below) has been the subject of a large body of research (Hajer 2003, Healey 2006, Jessop 2002, Lemos & Agrawal 2006, McCarthy 2005, Moulaert et al. 2006, Pagden 1998, Painter 2000, Whitehead 2003, Rose & Miller 1992, Swyngedouw 2007).
One key distinction, laid out by Bridge and Perreault (2009) in their discussion of environmental governance, is between normative/prescriptive approaches to governance on the one hand, and critical/analytical approaches on the other. As they point out, the term “environmental 14 governance” (and I would argue “governance” more generally) has achieved broad popularity thanks to a vagueness and flexibility that, like “sustainable development” or “social capital”, has allowed it to contain a range of divergent and contradictory ideological positions and interests (477). Chief among these are normative/prescriptive approaches that promote systems of governance as efficient and effective ways of addressing social, economic, or environmental problems, like climate change, that cannot be effectively address by traditional regulatory means. This vision of governance has been promoted by international bodies like the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, as well as national governments like the United States, Britain, and South Africa. Proponents of this managerial interpretation of governance emphasis its ability to enable action by creating consensus and common purpose among actors with divergent interests and priorities (OECD 2001, Holmes & Scoones 2000, Melo & Baiocchi 2006, Pelletier et al. 1999, Taylor & Fransman 2004, World Bank 1997, 2000a, 2000b)
But by the same token, more critical appraisals (Swyngedouw 2007, Keil & Desfor 2003, Davidson & Fickel 2004) highlight the ways in which managerial governance contributes to the depoliticization of environmental regulation. The emphasis on creating consensus to address a given environmental problem obscures the political dynamics that have gone into the definition of that problem, and whose interests are served by defining and acting on it in one way rather than another. This more analytical stance on governance focuses on the importance of bringing these issues of power and politics to the surface by asking, as Bridge and Perreault (2009) succinctly summarize, “governance of what, by whom, and to what end?” (477). In addition, normative approaches to governance focus on intentional systems of governance designed to achieve a particular purpose (formal procedures of public consultation for example). Analytical studies of governance broaden the field of inquiry by exploring the immanent networks of governance that arise more organically and outside of centralized control as multiple actors react to contest the unequal social, economic, and environmental impacts of capitalist development (Bridge & Perreault 2009, cf. Cowen & Shenton 1996, Hart 2001). Adopting a critical approach to governance, this dissertation will examine both the underlying politics of intentional systems of urban climate governance, and the dynamics of immanent networks created as civil-society actors engage directly in reshaping urban socio-environmental relationships. 15
The inter-relationship between state, private sector, and civil-society actors in discussions of governance is therefore rife with tension, contradictions, and competing objectives. Are we looking at the empowerment of local communities or their further disempowerment through devolved responsibilities without concomitant resources, or perhaps even more objectionably Foucauldian systems of governmentalizing self-regulation that lead participants to internalize the interests of the state (Agrawal 2005, Swyngedouw 2005)? Is governance an approach that creates the possibility of collaboratively resolving problems of social inequality, environmental degradation, and sparking innovation? Or is it simply the vehicle for the further pursuit of neoliberal inter-municipal competitiveness that subordinates social priorities to economic objectives (Jessop 2002)? Does it create new political spaces that give non-state actors greater influence over the creation and implementation of environmental policies (McCarthy 2005)? Or its it means for engineering consent that further stabilizes established regimes of extraction and accumulation (Bakker 2003, Bridge 2000, Bridge & Jonas 2002, Palmer 2006, Zalik 2004)?
There is no definitive answer to these questions. As scholars move from discussing theories of governance to looking at the creation and evolution of systems governance in practice there is an increasing attempt to create interpretive frameworks that are able to account for these tensions. It is that perspective that I have adopted in the case studies that follow. Describing the ability of systems of governance both to empower local communities and potentially to subject them to greater degrees of state control, Swyngedouw (1991, 2005) describes this as the “Janus face of governance-beyond-the-state.” Making a related point, Whitehead (2003) discusses the hybrid nature of systems of governance that combine both networked partnerships and a continued role of hierarchical state power.
Cities in particular have emerged as one scale where multiple non-governmental actors are being increasingly engaged in policy formation and service provision. Intentional approaches to urban governance, in the form of participatory planning and development, have gained widespread popularity. South Africa has constitutionally entrenched commitments to forms of developmental governance that directly involve citizens in the creation of development strategies, particularly at the urban scale (see Chapter 7). Likewise, in the U.S. projects like the Clinton government’s 16 urban “Empowerment Zones” (and their precursors in the Model Cities programs of the late 1960s) have attempted to provide financial and institutional support for community-led revitalization projects (Johnson 2004, Taylor 2007, see Chapter 8). In 2006, New Labour in Britain instituted a Department for Communities and Local Government with similar aims.
There is a large literature criticizing these managerial exercises in urban governance for deepening inequalities and reinforcing the power of local elites, and co-opting community resources into a larger process of neoliberal government retrenchment. These critiques highlight the ways in which horizontal community partnerships can be used to devolve responsibility for service provision to local organizations without providing necessary financial resources, all while maintaining hierarchical centralized control over policy choices and the direction of local development (Cooke and Kothari 2001, Hickey and Mohan 2004, MacLeod & Goodwin 1999, Painter 2000, Taylor 2007, Wood & Valler 2001). In contrast to instrumental approaches to governance, critical studies of the issue highlight the ability of activists, NGOs, community organizations and other non-state actors to contest the socio-economic and environmental impacts of established processes of urbanization (Arnstein 1969, Barnett & Scott 2007, Ballard 2007, de Souza 2006, Rosol 2010, Sabel et al. 1999) . These debates over the potential benefits and dangers of various approaches to community-centered urban governance are not new. They have their roots in discussions of the theory and practice of public participation and deliberative democracy that stretch back to the late 1960s (see Arnstein 1969, Dahl 1961, Piven 1965). I will cover them in more detail in my discussion of public participation in urban climate governance in Chapter 6.
Systems of urban governance can also centre around partnerships with the private sector. This can take many forms including the creation of public-private partnerships (PPPs) to provide public services, partnerships between municipal agencies and property development companies to carry out urban redevelopment projects, or the increased participation of chambers of commerce and business associations in policy formation processes. In this way it can be one facet of a shift towards neoliberal or entrepreneurial local government (de Souza 2006, Harvey 1989). It has been criticized for the influence it gives to private companies over municipal decisions over land use, zoning and other policy decisions, and is seen as a component of the 17 inter-municipal competition that has led municipalities to out compete each other by offering generous tax cuts, lax regulations, and other incentives to attract and keep businesses and investment. This has definitely been a factor in Durban, as I will discuss in the chapters that follow. However Portland also offers examples of private sector focused system of governance that have increased the overall ability of the city to pursue ambitious policies, particularly in the area of green building.
Environmental sustainability and climate change have become integrated into the agendas of various actors within these contested and contradictory approaches to urban governance. Looking specifically at civil-society actors, concerns over the local environment have a long lineage that can be traced back to environmental justice struggles, community opposition to freeway expansions, and local environmental conservation battles from roughly the 1960s onward (initially in North America but also, following the end of Apartheid, in South Africa as well). As we will see in our case studies of both Durban and Portland, climate change and environmental sustainability have emerged as meta-issues which unify these previously atomized concerns through a deepened understanding of their interconnections and the larger global impact of collective local urban planning decisions.
At the same time, another interpretation of urban sustainability has worked its way into the narratives that guide municipalities' attempts to recreate themselves and to become desirable sites for investment and business activity. Joining a penchant for the “spectacular” construction (Harvey 1989) of sports arenas and convention centers, and investments in the arts and edgy urban redevelopments designed to be attractive roosting spots for the “creative class” (Florida 2004), the outward signs of green (new) urbanism (LEED certified condo towers, bike paths, and walkable waterfront redevelopments) have become part of the must have accouterments of a competitive modern city. This narrow vision of urban sustainability has been harnessed to the competitive entrepreneurial focus on local economic growth that since the 1970s has come to dominate urban politics and planning in cities around the world. Studies of urban environmental governance and climate policy provide an interesting parallel to the by now well established literature on the role of the local state and networks of local economic governance in mediating, or driving, powerful national and international economic trends (Cheshire & Gordon 1995, 18
Castells 1994, Harvey 1989, Jones 1998, Leitner 1990, 1993, Leitner & Sheppard 1999, Stone & Sanders 1987). There is also, on the part of some planners and municipal officials, a very real concern in climate-proofing the local infrastructure and protecting the population against the impacts of a more volatile climate.
These multiple drivers towards systems of urban climate governance is the subject of an emerging critical literature looking at the hybrid and contradictory objectives and actors contained within it (Aylett 2010a, 2010b, 2011, Brownill & Carpenter 2009, Bulkeley 2010, Bulkely et al. 2011, Cooke 2009, Kahn 2006, Raco 2005, 2007, Rosol 2010, Sabel et al. 1999, Silver et al. 2010, While et al. 2004). As Brownhill and Carpenter (2009) summarize, based on their study of the Thames Gateway sustainable community project in the U.K., the study of green urban governance highlights the tensions that arise from “the conflicting goals of economic competitiveness and [of] social and environmental sustainability, between horizontal, networked governance and ... requirements for hierarchical direction and between a focus on delivery and [a focus on] participatory governance” (253). This dissertation seeks to contribute to this nuanced study of urban climate governance, but also to engage more deeply with two of its key components: the local state and the nature of civic engagement and public participation in networks of governance.
On the first count, my opening focus on the internal dynamics of integrated climate change planning within municipal bureaucracies is aimed at supplementing studies of governance that often treat the local state as something of a black box (see Rutland & Aylett 2008). In section one of this dissertation, my aim is to dispel the portrayal of the local state as an internally unified actor pursuing a set of coherent goals and guided by a specific (often neo-liberal) ideology. Talking about “the interests” of “the city” is, as we will see, a gross oversimplification that marginalizes the fundamental differences and complex relationships that exist between different (sometimes competing) municipal bureaus and agencies. Climate change and sustainability mean very different things to municipal actors in departments dealing with economic development, sewage, housing, or transportation. Creating integrated urban climate policies that bridge these institutional enclaves requires feats of internal network building and coordination every bit as 19 delicate and contested as the external relationships between state, community, and private sector actors that are the focus of traditional studies of governance (see also Burch 2009).
In this section of the dissertation I make a number important contributions to the existing literature on municipal responses to climate change. Specifically, I provide the most highly detailed analysis of the path dependency of municipal agencies so far conducted and discuss the techniques used by policy leaders to steer municipal agencies towards a more innovative and effective engagement with climate change. This portion of my research contains both theoretical advancements and practical lessons learned. From a theoretical perspective, I demonstrate the validity of a socio-cultural approach to organizational analysis based on concepts of trained incapacity and organizational culture as a way of understanding path dependency (Veblen 1898, 1914, 1918, Merton 1940). Further, I show the relevance of applying concepts from actor network theory and organizational sociology and geography (March and Olsen 1989, 2009, Schoenberger 1997, Latour 1987 ) to make clear how inertia can be reduced and transformative changes brought about within complex organizations. This analysis yields several key lessons learned, including: • the central importance of individual policy leaders and small teams in the early stages of municipal engagement with climate change, • the key role played by action and communication taking place outside of formal organizational structures, • the importance of making responses to climate change relevant to core municipal agencies by translating them into their established logics and priorities; and • the gains to be had by decentralizing creative engagement with climate change and climate policy throughout the municipality, rather than confining it to a small sustainability team or bureau. On the the topic of civic engagement and public participation, I am going to push the boundaries of what are generally considered within analysis of public participation within systems of urban governance. The theoretical framework and case studies in section two will begin with discussions of intentional state-led participatory process that are often the focus of studies of urban governance. I will expand these discussions by looking specifically at the challenges 20
of applying managerial forms of governance to climate change. I will look specifically at how municipal-community relationships in participatory planning processes shape urban climate change policy, and how the limits of these processes reflect more general critiques of community-centred governance (elite-capture, cooptation, and shallow functionalist approaches to consultation). But I will also go beyond the bounds of these state-led processes to look at the role of immanent examples of protest politics and direct action as important components not only of community-focused, but in fact community-led networks of urban climate governance.
Here my analysis presents contributions to the existing theoretical literature on public participation and climate change, as well as valuable lessons learned for urban sustainability practitioners. My analysis of the participatory governance of climate change contributes to an emerging relational theorization of public participation that draws attention to the interaction between intentional and immanent forms of engagement. Rather than reify an existing dichotomy in the theorization of participation that juxtaposes community-led oppositional activism (Foucault 1984, Arnstein 1969, Pithouse 2006) to institutionalized state-led processes (Habermass 1987, Melo & Baiocchi 2006, Sabel et al. 1999) my work adds strength to the more recent argument that important synergies exist between community- and state-led processes (McAdam et al. 2001, Hickey & Mohan 2004, Mische 2008). This analysis also provides the following lessons learned of interest to both municipal officials and civil-society actors: • Communities have the capacity to go well beyond providing input and opinions into official participatory forums. They can in fact play a central role in directly designing and implementing transformative urban climate change programs. • A combination of intentional and immanent approaches to participatory urban climate governance yields a higher degree of action and mobilization around climate change than either approach in isolation. • Civil-society engagement can play a critical role in challenging municipal path- dependency both inside and outside of formal participatory processes. 21
• And finally, state-led participatory planning processes need to provide information and facilitation directly relevant to climate change, otherwise meaningful public engagement with the issue is impossible.
There is of course a third set of relationships that would benefit from a similarly open and critical analysis: the relationships between the local state and the private-sector. Existing narratives of ecological-modernization (Blowers 1997, Buttel 2000, Desfor & Keil 2004, Gonzalez 2005, Gibbs 2000, Hajer 1995, Mol & Sonnenfeld 2000) or neoliberal environmental governance (Bakker 2005, Castree 2008, Heynen et al., 2007, Liverman 2004, Prudham 2009, Slocum 2004a, 2004b), concerning the pursuit of efficiencies or the marketization of GHG regulation, go only so far in explaining the full spectrum of endeavours that exist in this area. Despite some compelling case study material in this area, it was not feasible to treat this third theme within the limits of this dissertation. I intend to address it in my future research.
Finally, as will become clear, my aim in this dissertation is to provide a sympathetic and constructive critique of green urban governance as it applies to climate change. The scale of the problem that we face, and the potential (but as yet still largely unrealized) contributions that cities can make to addressing it are both far too large for me to be content with pointing out inconsistencies and contradictions for their own sake. Taking Latour's (2004) challenge to heart, I hope to be able to provide a critique that in his words can be associated with “more, not with less, with multiplication, not subtraction” (248).
1.4 Global Approaches to Climate Change: the Initial Global Scientific Framing and Subsequent Integrated Approaches
The way in which climate change and responses to it have been defined, both as objects of study and the focus of political negotiation, has changed dramatically since the IPCC published its first assessment report in 1990. In this section and the following I will provide brief overviews of the various visions of the issue that have been proposed over the past two decades. I begin with the 22 initial focus on the science of the global atmosphere and international treaties, and then move through increasingly integrated and localized approaches that link the impacts, causes, and responses to climate change more closely to the environmental, socio-economic and political dynamics of specific people and places. This will help situate studies of urban responses to climate change, such as this one, within the recent analytical and political history that surrounds the issue.
1.4.1 Global Scientific Approaches to Climate Change There is a substantial body of literature critiquing the initial scientific and political approach to climate change that followed the International Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) first assessment report in 1990, and the creation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UN FCCC) in 1992 (Cohen et al. 1998, Wilbanks & Kates 1999, Demeritt 2001a, Adger et al. 2003, Wilbanks & Kates 2003, Pielke 2005). In the lead up to the creation of the Kyoto protocol, the UN FCCC established a particular understanding of the issue which rested on two key pillars. The first was that climate change itself was primarily an environmental problem best understood in terms of atmospheric and climatic science, specifically the impact that anthropogenic emissions of specific chemicals have on the radiative forcing7 in the earth's atmosphere. This reductive approach divorced early discussions of climate change from the socio-economic, moral, and political dimensions of the uneven creation of GHG emissions. The second was the assumption of a firm separation between science and politics, and that – following a linear transmission model8 – the increasing certainty of global climate science, effectively communicated to the public and to policy makers, could act as an apolitical foundation for international consensus and action. Together they form a discourse that guided the work of the IPCC and climate change negotiations until the first years of the new millenium.
7 Radiative Forcing denotes a change in the overall energy balance between incoming solar radiation that is absorbed by the planet and transformed into heat and outgoing infrared radiation that returns back out to space through the Earth's atmosphere. Positive forcing signals that more energy is entering the planetary system than leaving it, causing warming. Negative forcing signals a net loss of energy and cooling. see http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/explained-radforce-0309.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing 8 The “transmission” or “injection” model of communication, derived from the works of Shannnon and Waver (1949), dominated theories of mass media during the 1950s. It held that information communicated to a mass audience could influence opinions and behaviour in direct and predictable ways. A more nuanced view of these ideas were elaborated in related Marxist and Neo-Marxist theories of 'agenda setting' (McCombs andShaw. 1972) which distinguish between, public, corporate and policy agendas, but maintains the Newtonian model of effectively disseminated information's ability to directly influence beliefs and actions. 23
By thinking of climate change primarily as operating at the scale of the radiative balance of the earth's atmosphere, the first of these pillars invited policy interventions that operated at that same scale. This approach was embedded in the scientific work of producing global emissions models and scenarios whose lack of regional or local specificity made linking local actions to global emissions trends almost impossible (Wilbanks and Kates 1999). Instead, it gave rise to technocratic and managerialist attempts to reduce atmospheric concentrations of GHGs. These commonly produced national and international scale efforts to mobilize market forces to spur energy efficiency and speed the development and dissemination of new and more efficient technologies. This discourse also cut off any serious discussion of the deeply unequal economies of natural resource consumption and GHG emissions, as well as the messier social, cultural, and ethical questions raised by these inequalities. As Cohen argues in an early critique of this approach to climate change:
as a result of this narrow, natural science based formulation of the problem, the question of global environmental change has been reduced from a wide-ranging one about the uneven political economy of modern capitalist development and underdevelopment to a narrowly defined problem of global atmospheric emissions. ... [T]hereby largely excluding from [climate scientists'] analyses the underlying social factors causing the problem (Cohen et al 1998, 343). For its part, the focus on scientific certainty did not result in the desired apolitical consensus around climate policy. Instead, it contributed to an underdeveloped understanding of the difficult politics that surround climate policy (internationally, nationally, and sub-nationally). It has also raised unreasonable expectations about the level of “certainty”9 both the public and policy makers could expect from climate science. As Demeritt (2001) has convincingly shown, early 9 “Certainty” is in quotations marks to signal that the term itself is the subject of some debate and contention. It's different connotations in the spheres of science, politics, and public opinion is implicated in the difficult relationship that exists between climate science and policy. Whereas expressions of uncertainty are common place in the physical sciences as a way of indicating where future research is needed, these are not seen by researchers to undermine the overall authority or value of the research they have conducted. The idea of “certainty” in fact stretches the scientific method's abductive approach with aims to provide the best possible explanation of a specific phenomena given available data. Conversly in political and popular discussions of climate change, the scientific reticence to express absolute “certainty” is seen (by some at least) – not as a normal part of the scientific process – but as proof of weak science. Powerful lobby groups aside, this can be traced to a public perception that science is in the business of providing certainties, and a popular definition of certainty that is judged on less stringent criteria (see Boycoff 1997, Shackley and Wynne 1996) . In an effort to address this issue, the IPCC has created a graduated scale of certainty ranging from “virtually certain” to “extremely unlikely” based on expert assessments of the probability of occurrence of a specific phenomena. (UN IPCC (2007 )AR4 Summary Report, 6) 24 claims by key figures in the IPCC and the climate modelling community created expectations that Global Circulation Models (GCMs) would (eventually) provide predictive certainty and clear guidance. This reinforced a technocratic approach to global climate management that privileged scientific experts and processes of scientific judgement, which attempted to sidestep political debate with the seductive promise of being able to provide “unimpeachably scientific solutions to contentious political problems” (Demeritt 2001, 328). Ironically however, this focus on scientific certainty and the vast undertaking of the IPCC to make public the full extent of current understandings of climate change, has exposed climate science to a far greater degree of public scrutiny than any other area of contemporary science. This process has made visible the uncertainty and disagreement that exists on all such complex scientific questions, but which in other fields is generally invisible to the public and political realms.
While there is arguable less dissent in the climate sciences than in other fields in the environmental sciences, rather than depoliticizing climate policy the public focus on certainty has exposed climate science (and scientists) to political attack. This has particularly, but not exclusively, been the case in the United States. Republican politicians in there have argued that climate science is simply being used as a justification for “socialist” political policies aimed at increasing taxes, redistributing wealth, and limiting individual freedoms. U.S. Sen. James M. Inhofe, for example, has famously called global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" (Inhofe 2005). There is also a large effort, paid for by the fossil fuel industry, to cast doubt on the validity of climate science and block action so as to protect their own economic interests (Cohen et al 1998, Demeritt 2001, Pielke 2005). The failure of the Kyoto protocol and the increasingly unlikely prospects of finding a binding international agreement to succeed it can both be partly attributed to this way of defining the problem of climate change.
1.4.2 Reframing Climate Change: Integrating the Socio-Political and Economic Dimensions of Global Climate Change It would be wrong to portray the IPCC's approach to climate change as static – even if certain aspects of its initial framing of the issue have taken a long time to break down in the current political atmosphere. As summarized in Banuri et al (2001), the evolution of the IPCC's 25 assessment reports shows a fairly rapid expansion from a narrow focus on the physical science of climate change in the first two reports (AR1 1990, AR2 1995) to a broader interest in the socio- economic dimensions of the problem in later reports (see fig.1). The first milestone in this process was the release in 2000 of a Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) (Nakicenovic and Swart eds. 2000) that looked in detail at the socio-political and economic trends that were driving GHG emissions. One main conclusion of the report was that underlying decisions about the goals and aspirations that drive development and economic growth have a far greater impact on emissions than any form of targeted environmental policy (Bernstein et al. 2007, Cohen et al. 1998, Nakicenovic and Swart eds. 2000, Robinson 2004, Robinson & Herbert 2001, Robinson et al. 2006, Swart et al. 2003). In the words of the SRES authors “demographic change, social and economic development, and the rate and direction of technological change” will be the main drivers of climate change during the 21st century (Nakicenovic and Swart eds. 2000, 5). The second, third, and (most recent) fourth assessment reports (AR2 1995, TAR 2001, AR4 2007) have also highlighted the importance of an integrated approach to the study of climate change that takes into account the inter-linkages that exist between socio-economic development issues, climate change, and its impacts.
The opening figure (see fig.2) of the Synthesis Report of the Fourth Assessment Report maps out this approach. In a simplified form, this diagram illustrates the causal relationships between development priorities and patterns of consumption that earlier critics had accused them of overlooking. Its inclusive vision of climate change also represents the overlapping of climate policy with literatures on sustainability and sustainable development10. Rather than looking at climate change as a strictly scientific issue to be managed through technocratic and technological interventions, it approaches climate policy as a matter of balancing social, economic, and 10 “Sustainability” and “Sustainable Development” (SD) are related, but not equivalent terms. Both imply placing environmental issues within their larger social and economic contexts. Sustainable Development tends to take for granted that continued economic growth, if guided in the right direction, can be reconciled with efforts to solve environmental problems, and reduce distributional inequalities in wealth. It is a term rooted in the 1993 World Comission on Environment and Development report “Our Common Future” (commonly known as the “Bruntland Report”). It is often used by business and governments. Sustainability, a term more common among environmental academics and NGOs, challenges this assumption that future growth is possible and desirable. While still attentive to economic and social issues, sustainability replaces SD's focus on growth with a focus on discerning the course necessary to live within the natural limits of the Earth's ecosystems (see Robinson 2004). The SRES report presents scenarios which embody the principles of both Sustainable Development (for example scenario A1T), and Sustainability (scenarios B1 and B2). 26 environmental objectives (Bernstein et al. 2007).
Many of the same researchers whose critiques contributed to this shift also advocated for a move away from analyses of climate change centred on the global scale (Markandya & Halsnaes 2002, Adger et al 2003, Pielke 2005, Wilbanks and Kates 2003, Wilbanks and Kates 1999, Wilbanks 2003, Robinson J. et al. 2006, Van Asselt et al. 2005, Swart et al 2003). In this body of work, researchers argue that to fully realize the potential of an integrated analysis of climate change we need to look more closely at the physical and political dynamics of the issue at the local level. Approaching the study of climate change and responses to it at a smaller scale simultaneously addresses a variety of issues: it produces more fine grained scientific understanding of the complex causes and potential impacts of climate change; it helps to identify mitigation strategies overlooked at larger scales; it allows communication on the need for urgent action to be tailored to the interests of specific populations; and, finally, it makes it possible to avoid broad generalizations and address the local economic, socio-political, and cultural factors that determine rates of emissions and levels of vulnerability. Advocates of this integrated socio- political and scientific approach argue that its unavoidable complexity requires that it be firmly rooted in a place-based context. The specificity of the local provides the manageable parameters and concreteness necessary for meaningful study and action (Wilbanks 2003).
1.5 Cities and Climate Change: Scientific, Integrated, and Deeply Democratic Critiques
Focusing on cities and urbanization is not the only way to approach a more localized study and response to climate change. The research discussed here approaches “the local” from a variety of non-urban angles, including examples of: rural alternative energy projects (Van Asselt 2005), forestry and agricultural based communities (Wilbanks & Kates 1999), and subsistence hunters and farmers in West Africa, Asia and Arctic Canada (Adger 2003). Overall, however, cities are a recurrent focus of this literature for a variety of reasons. There are large potential emissions reductions inherent in the amounts of energy consumed by cities and metropolitan areas 27
(Wilbanks & Kates 1999). Working at the urban scale can identify important synergies between climate policy and urban development projects (Van Asselt 2005). And, as a venue for democratic debate and deliberation, cities hold the potential of mobilizing public and private actors collectively to rethink the goals and principles that have driven urbanization and related GHG emissions to date (Robinson et al 2006).
This literature de-naturalizes international treaties and the scale of the nation-state as the primary loci of political power and agency within systems of climate governance (cf. Agnew 1994, 1999). In so doing, it opens up a space for a series of interpretations and reinterpretations of climate science, climate policy, and the objectives and approaches of urban development. I will discuss three of these in more detail below.
This local turn in climate policy can be placed in the context of a broader literature “new localism” (Corry et al. 2004, Aspden & Birch 2005, De Loë et al. 2002, Gibbins 2001, O'Riordan 2004, Stoker 2004). New localism is optimistic that the strategic devolution “of power and resources away from central control and towards front-line managers, local democratic structures and local consumers and communities” (Stoker 2004, 117) will more effectively, efficiently, and democratically manage the provision of social services, steer economic development, pursue sustainable development, and oversee environmental regulation. But, as discussed earlier in reference to what Brown and Purcell (2005) have called “the local trap”, there is reason to be cautious about idealizing the local scale.
As studies of the local governance of climate change and other environmental issues such as water, resource extraction, and forestry have shown, devolution is far from being a panacea (Agrawal 2005, Betsill & Bulkeley 2004, Bulkeley 2005, Furlong 2006, Mehta 2001, Norman & Bakker 2008, Zalik 2004). In their study of transboundary water regulation between the US and Canada, for example, Norman and Bakker (2008) conclude that rather than being empowering or effective, devolution can be a synonym for the offloading of responsibilities onto local actors without the necessary powers or resources, while the federal state retains control over key 28 regulatory functions. To avoid the local trap, research on urban responses to climate change needs to be attentive to both the complexities of creating and implementing local climate responses, and the interrelationships between local actors and those at other (national and international) scales. The literatures reviewed below propose three distinct approaches to this research.
1.5.1 Local Scientific Approaches to Urban Climate Policy For some of the literature on local approaches to climate change, the issue of scale itself is the starting point and central focus of their critique (Gibbs et al. 2002, Wilbanks & Kates 1999, Kates et al. 2003). In one of the earliest analysis to articulate why attention to scale is important both to the practice of climate science, and to the process of creating climate policy, Wilbanks and Kates (1999) argue that:
[S]cale matters in studying global change, local dynamics are worth worrying about, and localities can make a difference. For instance, it is clear that some of the driving forces for global change operate at a global scale, such as the greenhouse gas composition of the atmosphere and the reach of global financial systems. But it seems just as clear that many of the individual phenomena that underlie microenvironmental processes, economic activities, resource use, and population dynamics arise at a local scale. (602) Like the early global climate regime, this portion of the literature on local approaches to climate change also reproduces the assumption that scientific certainty will enable the creation of more effective policy (discussed above). They argue that smaller scale studies will make clear local and regional variations in exposure, sensitivity, and coping capacities (Wilbanks 2003), and that more detailed local inventories of GHG emissions will make it possible to spot specific emission sources and trends leading to concrete reduction opportunities and a clearer understanding of a region's vulnerabilities (Kates et al. 2003). The local scale also offers an opportunity to bypass the international deadlock, and work specifically with local officials. There, it is hoped, more exact and compelling science, and a clearer understanding of the costs and benefits of specific policy responses, will lead to more rapid and effective action (Wilbanks & Kates 1999). This can also be seen in work by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research's work to produce more integrated and locally relevant climate models as part of the Community Integrated Assessment Systems (CIAS) project. But even in these more scientifically driven works on the local scale, something more transformative is at work, something which is picked up more specifically by 29 research situated at the overlap between local approaches to climate change and sustainable development.
1.5.2 Local Integrated Approaches to Urban Climate Policy For this second portion of the literature, attention to scale is a component of a larger discussion of the areas of common ground and mutual support between climate policy and other specific development goals (Gibbs et al. 2002, Pielke 2005, Robinson et al. 2006, Wilbanks 2003, Van Asselt et al. 2005). By integrating climate change considerations into pre-existing efforts to improve the security, health, wealth, and quality of life of a given population, synergies allow policy makers to sidestep the logics that have caused deadlock at the international level. In this pursuit of “no regrets” actions (actions that address climate change at no cost or even to the benefit of achieving other development priorities) the local or regional scale emerges as a key area for action (Pielke 2005).
The concrete specificity of the local context provides an opportunity to tailor climate relevant policies to address the variabilities of climate and topography, and the social, cultural, and economic realities of a particular place. Out of these synergies grows the ability to enact policies, not motivated by the altruistic pursuit of long-term global environmental objectives, but by the benefits they bring to specific constituencies in specific places. Climate policy is crafted taking into account, and sometimes subsumed by, the many other issues competing for political attention. Rehabilitating local waterways, for example, can decrease the breeding grounds for malaria, and improve local sanitation as well as the floodwater control systems that protect homes during coastal storms (Wilbanks 2003). Communities benefit immediately, while also increasing their long term resilience to the impacts of climate change. Coordinated transportation and land use planning – another common example – reduces GHG emissions, improves links between communities, and increases local air quality (Swart et al. 2003).
Overall, this literature makes a strong case for an integrated approach to local climate change policy: one that pursues climate policy not as a discrete and isolated issue, but as a key cross- 30 cutting variable implicated in the way in which local and regional governments carry out their responsibilities more generally. The functional overlaps between climate change and local development goals allows policy makers to approach climate policy and climate science from another angle. Here more precise local climate science acts as a useful guide to policy makers, but they do not depend on scientific certainty to justify their action. Political capital is generated not by being able to infallibly demonstrate causality or predict impacts, but through the value of the projects themselves. Investigating how far this rationale goes once it is put into practice will be part of the work of this dissertation.
Most recently, research on local integrated approaches to climate change have also begun advocating a for a comprehensive and inclusive GHG inventories. Following up on Satterthwaite's arguments covered in the introduction, Daniel Hoornweg (Lead Urban Specialist at the World Bank) and his co-authors (2011) advocate for a standardized approach to collecting urban scale emissions data. Adopting terminology developed by the World Resources Institute, the authors call for inventories that take into account both “Scope 1” emissions (those under the municipality's direct control) as well as “Scope 2” and “Scope 3” emissions (emissions from electricity production, and embodied in the goods and services consumed within the city, respectively) (Horneweg et al. 2011, see also Hillman & Ramaswami 2009, Ramaswami 2008, UN / World Bank 2010). Following this approach would allow municipalities to incorporate often overlooked sectors (such as food production11, extra-regional travel, water use, and construction materials12) into integrated climate policies. A city's responsibilities thus extend far beyond its physical boundaries to other regions, countries, and continents. Cross-cutting climate change plans, informed by inclusive inventories, offer a way for them to plan local development strategies while also reducing emissions.
This attention to local development priorities opens up a third avenue for the creation of climate
11 Food production accounts for 13 percent of U.S. emissions in 2006, for example. We will look at how Portland has engaged with these emissions in Chapter 8. 12 Cement manufacture accounts for 5 percent of global anthropogenic emissions (Mahasenan 2002), and cities are among the largest consumers of cement. In general however, cement is not produced within city boundaries. A scope 3 analysis of emissions would allow a city to measure and target these upstream emissions, as has been done by the city of Denver (see Ramaswami et al. 2008 ). 31 policy. Once you begin looking at the synergies between existing development goals and climate policy, it is only a short step to begin looking at the value of those goals themselves. As the IPCC's SRES report (discussed above) concluded, the underlying decisions about the goals and aspirations that drive development and economic growth have a far greater impact on emissions than any form of targeted environmental policy. As scholars like Demeritt, Rothman, Robinson, Swart, and Cohen have argued, cities and urban regions are ideal for engaging the public in informed deliberation about precisely those types of decisions (see Cohen et al. 1998, Robinson 2004, Swart et al. 2003).
Rather than relying on expert driven, closed-shop processes, a more profoundly democratic approach may be possible where citizens are given the tools, information, and space to make important collective decisions about the future of their neighbourhood, city, or region. While the outcomes of these processes cannot be determined in advance, allowing citizens to engage with large-scale collective decisions moves the focus off of atomised individual responsibility towards collective action. By making clear future local impacts of current modes of development, and involving participants in conversations about the trade-offs embedded in planning decisions (i.e. between continuing low-density development or preserving peri-urban agricultural and parkland, or between car centred transportation systems and walkable neighbourhoods) residents become aware of the contradictions implicit in current trends, and can manifest their values in more effective ways than limited individual actions like recycling or changing their light bulbs (Robinson 2004, Robinson et al. 2006). While the earlier stages of the urban climate literature have dealt with downscaling climate science and policy, and tracing the interconnections between climate change and other policy issues, this work on democratization opens up space to question and revise some of the values and goals that guide our lives (and our level of emissions) at a more fundamental level. These can be as simple (but as important) as how we plan our transportation systems, or as fundamental as considering the role that cities could play in creating alternatives to a global culture of capitalist consumerism. I will return to this literature in more detail in Chapter 6. 32
1.5.3 Urban Political Ecological Approaches to Urban Climate Policy The progression that we have followed through increasingly localized and integrated approaches to climate change policy already provides useful context for the body of this dissertation. But I would like to go one step further and engage with the literature on Urban Political Ecology (UPE) (Heynan et al. 2006, Keil 2003, 2005, Swyngedouw & Heynen 2003, Swyngedouw 2006). UPE takes these issues of localization and interconnectedness in a more radical direction and broadens the frame through which we can view the empirical work that follows. This is despite the fact that work in UPE has yet to directly tackle the issue of climate change. As we will see, given UPE's core concerns, this is a strange oversight but one that does not take away from the usefulness of UPE's analytical approach to a study of urban climate policy.
UPE is a growing and diverse literature that, like much of the work already discussed, arose over the course of the past fifteen years. Also, like the work covered above, it has treated the city as a key site for intervening in global environmental problems, and paid particular attention to democratization and the links between social and environmental issues. As Heynan, Kaika, and Swyngedouw argue in In The Nature Of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of the Urban, their 2006 introduction to the field, UPE seeks to fill gaps left in research and debate on both global environmental problems and urban sustainability. While the former has ignored the important role played by cities, the latter has focused too narrowly at technical interventions, ignoring the broader socio-environmental impacts of capitalist urbanization.
To overcome these limitations, UPE proposes a holistic approach to cities that synthesizes the social, environmental, economic, and political facets of urbanization into a coherent whole. This leads to an expansive definition of cities as “dense networks of interwoven socio-spatial processes that are simultaneously local and global, human and physical, cultural and organic” (Heynan et al 2006, 1). Its core concerns are with the role that cities play in the production of uneven socio-ecological conditions (wealth, air quality, and access to resources, for example) by late modern global capitalism, and the potential of radically democratic urban governance to unsettle these relationships of inequality, domination, and injustice, both locally and globally13.
13 Interestingly, UPE seems to pull its punches when it comes to its critique of global capitalism. Beyond these 33
This critique is at once outward and inward looking. It reflects an understanding of the city as a key node in global capitalist exploitation that is itself internally structured by these same logics and inequalities: a poor residential neighbourhood beside a petrochemical refinery, for example, mirrors larger global patterns that concentrate the negative impacts of resource extraction, industrial manufacturing, and waste disposal in countries too poor or politically unstable to respond effectively. Across scales, wealth, poverty, pollution, and health are spatially distributed following similar principles (Swyngedouw 2003). Although IPCC authors – understandably – shy away from such politically polarizing language, UPE's critique of the unequal distribution of the capitalist commodification and consumption of nature is in many ways a more radical restatement of the exploration of multiple development paths found in the SRES report (2000, discussed above). It argues forcefully that rather than extending current trends through a more efficient use of resources, a more fundamental reconsideration of the goals and processes of development is necessary (Keil 2003, Pellow 2006).
1.5.3.1 UPE Core Concepts: Radical Urban Democracy Confronts the Inequalities of Capitalist Metabolism and Circulation A number of central themes and perspectives hold UPE together as a field of inquiry (Heynan et al. 2006). UPE's critique of the socio-ecological impacts of capitalism rests on two key concepts drawn from Marxist and neo-Marxist works by authors like Marx, Engels, Grundman (1991), Benton (1996) and Foster (2000, 2002). Drawing on works by Marx and Engels, UPE focuses on the concepts of “metabolism” and “circulation.” At its most fundamental, “metabolism” is central to Marx's definition of labour (Marx 1971 [1867], Swyngedouw 2006, Foster 2000). It refers to the transformation of natural resources (what Marx calls “the materials of nature” (1971, 283) ) through human labour into products designed to meet human needs. Marx characterizes this “appropriation of what exists in nature for the requirements of man” as a “universal condition” (ibid, 290, cited in Swyngedouw 2006). But UPE is interested in a more historically specific form of metabolism: the process through which people (as labour) and nature (as resource) are controlled and mobilized within capitalism to produce commodities with
calls to create local exceptions to current global socio-economic systems, there is nothing in the literature reviewed for this section that calls for a larger revolution against capitalism. 34 both use and exchange value14.
By focusing on capitalist metabolism, UPE restores attention to nature (and control over nature) to discussions of historical materialism that have focused almost exclusively on labour and socio-economic relationships of production. As Swyngedouw summarizes:
[A]ctually existing socionatural conditions are always the result of intricate transformations of pre-existing configurations that are themselves inherently natural and social. This was, of course, recognised by Marx more than 150 years ago, but only recently regained the attention it deserves from both Marxists and non-Marxists. (Swyngedouw & Heynen 2003, 907)
UPE's move to bring nature back into the discussion is a related, but more radical, version of the critique made by the literatures on sustainability and sustainable development (WCED 1987, Robinson 2004). While they have opposed views of the value of capitalist economic growth, the principles of both sustainable development and UPE call for recognition of the inextricable inter- relationship between human society and natural systems. UPE pushes this critique further by explicitly targeting the dualistic separation of nature and society prominent in much of Western thought since the Plato, a critique that is itself the subject of a substantial body of work (see Smith 1996, Braun & Castree 1998, 2001, Demeritt 2001b, 2002).
As Smith (1996) argues, nature and humans are locked into a dialectic relationship of coproduction,15 in which human and non-human systems interact with and shape each other. Making this argument in a specifically urban setting, UPE rallies around Harvey's much cited quip that there is nothing fundamentally “unnatural” about New York City (Harvey 1996, 186). The urban world – like many other produced environments, from dammed rivers to genetically modified organisms – is a “cyborg world:” one where nature and society are inextricably blended through processes of metabolic circulation (see Heynan et al 2006, 12). Cities are simultaneously
14 Related discussion of metabolism can also be found in the literatures on non-equilibrium thermodynamics and theories of complex adaptive systems. Metabolism was also a central concern of early writings on industrial ecology (Ayres, 1989; Spilhaus 1967, 1971) 15 This co-determining relationship between ecological and social systems is similar in some ways to the interactions between human and non-human actants envisioned by Latour (1993). See for example Foster (2000, 15-16) who argues that “A dialectical approach forces us to recognize that organisms in general do not simply adapt to their environment; they also affect that environment in various ways by affecting change in it.” This is discussed in more detail in Swyngedouw (2006). 35 sites for the regulation of the global economy (a point that UPE also shares with World Cities theory, see note 13), the industrial transformation of nature into commodity, the consumption of natural resources in commodity form (from energy, to food, and consumer goods), and the creation and externalisation of waste and pollution. These processes modify the physical and social environments of cities themselves, and the larger socio-natural flows of global capitalism.16
UPE's interest in the circulation of capital, resources, commodities, and waste17 is two-fold. First, processes of circulation link multiple locations together, often spanning great physical distances. As Heynan et al. (2006, 6) argue, “the city is a metabolic socio-environmental process that stretches from the immediate environment to the remotest corners of the globe.” It is only by acknowledging these circulatory links that the larger human, economic, and environmental impacts of urban form and urban processes can be recognized.
Urban centres, particularly wealthy Northern cities, and the consumption patterns they embody are at the centre of massive inflows of commodities and outflows of pollution and waste (see Pellow 2006). These flows of resources and waste are themselves never equally distributed, benefiting some areas and harming others. and these inequalities are also not solely environmental for, as UPE takes pains to remind us, the social and the environmental are inextricably intertwined with each other. In the case of metabolism and circulation, this means that “while environmental (both social and physical) qualities may be enhanced in some places and for some humans and non-humans, they often lead to a deterioration of social, physical, and/or ecological conditions and qualities elsewhere” (Heynan et al. 2006, 12). Understanding the political dimensions of unequal socio-environmental processes therefore becomes one of the key pursuits of UPE, as Heynan et al. explain in a somewhat bashfully presented18 “ 'Manifesto'
16 These perceptions of the circulating flows of the global economy, and the role of cities within it, are foundational concepts in another body of literature: Global or World Cities theory. Works by Sassen (2002), Castells (1996), Knox and Taylor (1996) all deal with these issues, albeit from a generally more descriptive or even celebratory viewpoint. It is interesting that UPE literature has chosen not to engage with this body of research. 17 Attention to the circulation of waste is an addition that UPE makes to traditional Marxist analysis of capital, resources, and commodities. Attention to the environmental impacts of capitalism necessarily implies attention not only to the process of creating commodities (with both use and exchange value), but also the subsequent devaluation of commodities into waste and the patterns of circulation that are part of their disposal. 18 The authors explain that “Although manifestos are not really fashionable these days, they nevertheless often serve both as a good starting point for debate, refinement, and transformation, and as a platform for further 36
For Urban Political Ecology:”
Questions of socio-environmental sustainability are fundamentally political questions. Political ecology attempts to tease out who (or what) gains from and who pays for, who benefits from and who suffers (and in what ways) from particular processes of metabolic circulatory change. It also seeks answers to questions about what or who needs to be sustained and how this can be maintained or achieved. (ibid., 13).
To answer these final questions of “what,” “who,” and “how,” UPE calls for a profound democratisation of urban ecological governance. Democratisation here is used in its broadest sense to refer to the direct and meaningful engagement of local communities in urban-ecological issues of all kids. Specific examples discussed in the literature range from environmental justice conflicts over toxic waste and local air and water pollution (something this dissertation will look at more closely in Chapter 7), to more traditional environmental conservation and restoration movements organized around local river systems and parks carried out in collaboration with the municipal government (Desfor and Keil 2004, Keil 1994, Keil & Boudreau 2006, Brownlow 2006). These varied movements are held up as ways of counterbalancing or disrupting not only traditional liberal economic processes (which externalise environmental and social costs), but also the more recent discourse of ecological modernisation that focuses on technological innovation and the efficient use of nature as “resource” as the basis for continued economic growth and industrial development (see Keil & Desfor 2003). The explicitly political program of UPE is to disrupt narrowly economistic discussions of nature and society. Instead, it seeks to put in place “radically democratic” political projects that make possible more just and holistic constructions of the relationship between nature and society in the city (Heynan et al. 2006, 2). It is implicit in the examples discussed in the literature on UPE that direct citizen engagement in urban environmental issues can act to counterbalance the influence of business interest on local government, and defend both urban natures and marginalized urban communities from the excess of capitalism.
Overall, UPE restates many of the key preoccupations of the local climate change and sustainable development literature in a more radical form (one that is more explicit about the roots of many environmental and developmental problems in the current capitalist system). Both focus on the urban scale as a key place for engaging with a larger global critique. In the latter, it research.” (Heynan et al 2006, 11) 37 is the link between climate change and sustainable development at a local level that forms the foundation for a discussion of the need to redress global inequalities and reshape patterns of development. For UPE, a similar movement upwards from the local to the global occurs, but this time based around a multi-scalar Marxist critique of capitalist economic growth that ties the city into deeply unequal global flows of capital, commodities, and pollution. They both target the same symptoms: environmental damage, social marginalization, and inequality. What separates them is that in the local climate change and sustainable development literature these are distributional problems that can be solved by reforming and reshaping the current capitalist system. UPE, on the other hand, makes a larger claim about the need to find alternatives to capitalist urbanisation altogether. Interestingly, rather than proposing a sweeping replacement of global capitalism, UPE focuses instead on achieving change through the deep democratisation of cities and a broad understanding and engagement with their socio-environmental impacts.
For its part, the urban climate change and sustainable development literature also continues and elaborates on one of the central preoccupations of UPE. The far reaching metabolic impacts of cities and urbanisation are at the core of UPE's critique of modern capitalism, development, and environmentalism. But rarely are the shape, extent, and evolution of these impacts concretely defined or measured. “Urban Metabolism” remains an evocative heuristic device, but one which is hardly ever followed up by detailed empirical analysis. As Keil and Boudreau point out “while it is relatively easy to grasp that cities depend on inflows and outflows of materials, energy etc., it is more complicated (and rarely undertaken) to do a full empirical study of such outflows” (2006, 42). The holistic inventories proposed by Hornweg et al. (2011) and the larger debate over how to account for urban GHG emissions (Satterthwaite 2008) speak directly to this issue.
Although only a partial picture of the role cities play in consuming and structuring the flows of energy and commodities, GHG inventories are nonetheless a good proxy for the overall metabolic function both of individual cities, and of the unequal metabolic relationships that extend across the globe. Bringing the empirical focus of the urban climate change literature into UPE would provide it with an excellent focus for its analytical approach. How the UPE literature has developed such an evolved understanding of the role of urban metabolism in influencing 38 global environmental problems, all while ignoring the climate elephant in the room, is something of a mystery.
1.6 Urban Climate Change: a Typology of Theory and Practice
This overview of the evolution of urban approaches to climate change into an academic and scientific literature has covered a lot of ground. In order to distil some of the key characteristics of the literatures discussed above into a form which can be referenced during the remainder of this dissertation, I have summarized them in the typology which can be seen in table 1.1 Synthesising complex literatures into such a compact form necessarily introduces simplifications and generalisations. It is meant to highlight key similarities and differences and to serve as a tool for more detailed discussion and analysis, not as an exhaustive definition of the different streams of research covered so far.
Each approach to the study of cities and climate change contained in the table corresponds to one of the literatures that were discussed above. I have divided up the literatures covered into five types. The first two (Global Scientific and Global Integrated) deal with the initial framing of climate change as a global problem requiring international solutions. The final three (Local Scientific, Local Integrated, and the Urban Political Ecological) look more specifically at urban approaches to climate policy. Each type is described in terms of six variables:
1. The scale(s) at which it analyzes and proposes responses to climate change.
2. Its definition of the problem of climate change.
3. Its definition of the city and its role in contributing to the problem of climate change and its potential solutions.
4. Its perception of the political processes through which necessary policy responses will be enacted. 39
5. The overarching goal(s) towards which policies are directed
6. The types of policy interventions proposed to meet these goals.
For each type, key sources from the literature discussed above have been listed. For the three final types, I have also matched the typology with an organisation whose approach to urban climate policy is most similar, as judged by their published material, planning tools, and goals. There are a plethora of such organisations offering political and technical support to municipalities. It is not my intention to conduct and exhaustive review of these groups, their tools, or their membership. But to provide a small introduction to some of the central international networks working in this area, I have included these organisations in the typology.
Overall, as we move through the typology we see replayed the shifts in climate science, and the politics, actors, goals, and interventions linked to climate policy that have been discussed in more detail above. The image of the city itself also changes, from a largely overlooked sphere discounted as being the creature of national or state governments, to a key node within global capitalism with impacts and responsibilities that far exceed its geographical and jurisdictional limits. My goal here is to provide an analytical shorthand and system of classification that can be used in the analysis of the case study chapters which follow.
The “Global Scientific” approach to climate change represents the early stages of the work done by the IPCC. It is characterised by a narrowly global and scientific definition of climate change as a problem of the radiative balance of the Earth's atmosphere to be addressed by science-driven coordinated international policies. These (often market based policies) focus on mitigation, and are administered by national governments within the framework of internationally agreed upon conventions within structures established by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the IPCC.
The “Global Integrated” approach represents a second stage in the IPCC's work ushered in 40 nominally by the publication of the SRES report in 2000. Joining climate science to socio- political and economic research, this work looks at how development path choices influence both rates of GHG emissions and the vulnerability of given regions to the impacts of climate change. International policy responses are still prioritised. In this literature, increasing attention is given both to regional scale analysis and to the role of civil society groups in systems of climate governance. Proposed policies aim to reduce emissions, help regions to adapt to the impacts of climate change, and build local capacity to design and implement climate policies.
The “Local Scientific” approach to climate change shares with its global precursor a preference to see climate change through a more narrowly scientific lens, based on efforts to better understand and quantify local emissions as well as the local impacts of changes to the global climate. It also presumes a similar linear relationship between science and policy, where increasing exactitude and certainty is presumed to enable better and more successful policies. It stands apart, however, in two aspects: first, it gives more attention to the city as a scale for both study and intervention; and second, it looks at adaptation as well as mitigation. This approach also adopts some of the attention to larger socio-economic developmental issues found in the “Global Integrated” approach, although the emphasis of study and policy is still predominantly on climate change.
The local scientific approach is best reflected in the European Covenant of Mayors (CoM) network which was launched in 2008. The CoM now has 2,600 member cities and towns that have committed to reducing their emissions to 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. Their Baseline Emissions Inventory (BEI) procedure however limits itself solely to Scope 1 emissions (see discussion of Horneweg et al. 2011 above). The CoM also pays attention to non-climate co- benefits that arise from climate policy, but only on the margins of its climate-related work.
The “Local Integrated” approach emphasises attention to the broader developmental context that surrounds a city's emissions and vulnerabilities. At times this perspective may even reverse the 41 relationship between climate and sustainable development policies, subsuming the former within the latter. Proposed policy responses therefore aim both at adaptation and mitigation, as well as at other more immediate local development priorities. There is also an interest in climate governance rather than government, and in the participation of business, civil society, and community groups.
ICLEI's CCP program is currently the dominant institutional manifestation of this approach. Founded in 1993, the CCP has over 1,000 members worldwide. It provides member cities with tools and guidelines for local inventories that encourage cities to include scope 2 and 3 emissions. Although initially focused on mitigation, ICLEI USA's “Climate Resilient Cities” program (established in 2010) provides cities with similar support for adaptation planning.19 ICLEI's overall approach also encourages cities to work in concert with community members, and promotes the many synergies that exist between climate policies and other local priorities (see Betsill 2001). Sustainable Cities International (SCI, discussed further in Chapter 2), which maintains another smaller urban sustainability network, also fits within this category. It promotes the integration of sustainability goals within a municipality's developmental priorities, and supports community-based visioning and project implementation. From a more limited and technical standpoint, the UN/World Bank International Framework for Reporting Urban GHG emissions also embodies some aspects of the Local Integrated approach to climate change. It also recognizes the importance of measuring scope 2 and 3 emissions ( UN / World Bank 2010).
The “Urban Political Ecological” approach is based on an extrapolation of UPE's core tenants to the issue of climate change. Adopting a similar but more explicitly critical framing of cities' role in the global circulation of resources and the production of waste, UPE distinguishes itself from the Local Integrated approach in the way that it envisions the political processes and actors most important to urban climate action. For UPE, civil-society groups would be the primary actors in making possible ambitious climate policies. UPE advocates for policies that address
19 See ICLEI “Cities for Climate Protection Program” on-line http://www.iclei.org/index.php?id=10828 and ICLEI USA “Climate Resilient Communities Program” on-line http://www.icleiusa.org/programs/climate/Climate_Adaptation/climate-resilient-communities-program [both retrieved 2011/05/16] 42 environmental problems at their root, creating more equitable low-impact cities through radically democratic processes of building and managing urban centres.
For its way of defining the environmental impact of cities, Ecological Footprint Analysis (EFA) (Rees, 1992, Wackernagel et al. 2006) comes closest to embodying the principles of UPE. EFA is based on a holistic estimate of the energy and material throughput necessary to satisfy a city's level of consumption. It focuses on the areas of energy, settlements, food and fibre, seafood, wood products, and estimates of the environmental resources necessary to process the waste it generates. EFA communicates the total impact of an urban area in terms of the land area necessary to satisfy its needs. This highlights global inequalities by making possible easy comparison of consumption levels in the global North and the Global South. For example, Torontonians consume the productive equivalent of 7.6 hectares per capita, which amounts to an area 287 time larger than the city itself. Bangladeshi's have a per capita ecological footprint of of 0.5 hectares. An equitable division of the Earth's resources would yield a per capita footprint of 1.8 hectares (see Wackernagel et al. 2006, and Onisto et al. 1996). EFA however does not advocate any particular political approach to addressing these issues, beyond a generalised appeal for the involvement of multiple actors across all sectors and scales.
No one city would fall squarely into the categories outlined above. Just as the academic literature and international sustainability organizations adopt a variety of approaches to urban climate policy, so do different actors within a city adopt their own versions of these approaches. Looking at the municipal agencies most closely associated with the climate portfolio in our case study cities (Durban's Environmental Management Department and Portland's Office of Sustainable Development), it could be argued that Durban pursues a Local Scientific approach, while Portland more closely parallels the Local Integrated vision of climate policy. But other municipal actors may put forward climate related policies that follow other principles: Durban's Department of Water and Sanitation, for example, have a series of projects that clearly fit within a Local Integrated approach. Likewise, leading civil-society groups in both Durban and Portland are motivated by a mixture of the Local Integrated and Urban Political Ecological approaches to 43 climate change. We will look at these examples more closely in the chapters that follow. Overall however, the typology is intended as a heuristic devise to help support more detailed analysis, not as a definitive classification system for municipal initiatives or approaches the climate change overall.
This typology, as with any attempt to synthesise and summarise such a large body of theory and practice, is imperfect. But when it comes to understanding the ways in which these different groups and programs interact, the typology is a useful heuristic tool. It provides a framework that makes it easier to look beyond the surface of specific policies, conflicts, or collaborations, and to see the underlying scientific, political, and epistemological approaches which are at their root. I will come back to these issues in the case studies in Section 1 and Section 2 of this dissertation.
1.7 Dissertation Road Map
In this first chapter I have laid out the broad context for my research by providing an outline of the way in which cities have come to be involved in discussions of “global warming.” My principal concern was to show how responses to climate change have moved from initially narrow scientific and technocratic approaches focused on international action (common in 1990s), to the present period where cities are more and more conceived of as key agents in reducing emissions and protecting local populations. As I discussed, this changing perception of climate change has moved through various stages. Each stage has modified our understanding of the issue itself, as well as which actors and processes are seen to be involved in addressing it.
In Chapter 2 I begin with an overview of how I selected Durban and Portland, as well as general contextual information about both cities, and a history of their climate policies prior to the period under study. This chapter also reviews the methodology that guided my research in both cities. I discuss how repeat in-depth interviews with a broad cross-section of key municipal and civil- society actors (n = 125) has allowed me to capture the dynamics and evolution of integrated approaches to climate governance. I will also briefly discuss the model of urban climate governance that I use for the case studies that follow. As mentioned above, the body of the 44 dissertation is divided into two sections. The first focusing on the internal dynamics of climate change planning and policy within municipalities and the second looking at the potential role of communities and civil-society groups in implementing ambitious climate change policy.
In Section 1 (Chapters 3, 4, 5) I focus on the inner workings of municipal institutions. In Chapter 3, I lay out an analytical framework for analysing the internal dynamics that both constrain and enable municipal bureaucracies as they attempt to create integrated responses to climate change. This framework needs to help analyse both the logic behind traditional bureaucratic design, the way established bureaucracies influence the course of change, and strategies and interventions that can be used to increase the pace and depth of innovation with existing structures. To do this, I will present a critical toolbox drawn from distinct but complementary critical perspectives on bureaucracies and complex institutions during the late 19th and 20th century. This discussion will bring together concepts from the sociological works of Veblen (1898, 1914, 1918) and Merton (1944), as well as more recent work in political science (March and Olsen 1989, 2004), geography (Schoenberger 1997), and science studies (Haraway 1991, Latour 1987). Rather than providing an exhaustive survey of this work, my aim will be to provide sufficient detail about specific concepts to prepare the ground for the analysis of the case studies that follows in Chapters 4 and 5.
In Chapter 4, I apply this analytical framework to case studies of Durban. In this chapter I focus my attention on the barriers that the municipality’s Environmental Management Department (EMD) had to face while advocating for a more integrated approach to climate change and sustainability. I will discuss their efforts to reframe climate policy so it could be integrated within approaches to urban development already established within the municipality. I will also discuss the advocacy for concrete institutional change within bureaucratic structures to provide a stable home for mitigation policy. This chapter will focus specifically on attempts to promote the roll-out of local renewable energy systems within the city. In order to explain the institutional context for EMD’s work, I will discuss internal dynamics of two specific Departments eThekwini Electricity (EE, the municipal electrical utility) and the department of Water and Sanitation (EWS) which have both engaged (though not always positively) with renewable energy. I argue that the opposition to local renewable energy in EE is an example of the type of 45 institutional inertia described in Chapter 3. EWS, in contrast, has actively engaged with the implementation of local renewable energy systems within the city despite having no mandate to do so. It will provide an example of the way in which institutional inertia can be broken when upper level management intentionally create an institutional culture that values innovation and decentralises critical and creative thinking.
In Chapter 5, I provide a comparable analysis of Portland, only in this case instead of looking within individual departments, I will focus on the relationships between departments and how these affect efforts to mainstream climate policies and programs across the municipality as a whole. To be truly effective, climate policies often require coordination across multiple isolated municipal agencies. Each agency may hold jurisdiction over some part of the larger issue in question. Even seemingly basic initiatives like putting in place green building policies, or creating greener streets can be test of inter-agency coordination. Chapter 5 begins by looking at some examples of these challenges. It then moves on to discuss the ways in which the city's Office of Sustainable Development (OSD) has positioned itself within the municipality, and used the city's Climate Action Plan process, to lead significant institutional changes. OSD’s success reinforces the value of inter and intra agency networking and decentralising empowered creativity also seen in Chapter 4.
Section 2 (Chapters 6, 7, 8) is focused what public participation and civil-society engagement can bring to in the creation and implementation of urban climate policies. Chapter 6 will provide an overview of how public participation in systems of climate governance can be understood through the large body of theoretical work written on participatory governance. I will provide a brief history of the evolution of participatory processes within both American urban renewal programs, the work of international development agencies (particularly the World Bank), and specifically in relationship to climate change in the recent reports of the IPCC. This will cover two main camps each with widely different normative and procedural definitions of what constitute true and desirable forms of “participation.” On the one hand, I will discuss the work of authors who advocate for autonomous, community-led forms of participation that are often premised on a conflictual relationship between civil-society and the sate ( Arnstein 1969, Dahl 1961, Piven 1965, Carr 2004). On the other, I will cover those who support state-managed 46 processes of participation and consultation that privilege the ability of institutional structures to enable consensus (Melo & Baiocchi 2006, Taylor & Fransman 2004, WB 1997). I will also rely on the works of Foucault (1986, 1991) and Habermas (1983, 1996) to help explore some of the more fundamental disagreements about the nature of power and political processes that underlay the two camps. But rather than accept a simplistic dualism between the two, this chapter concludes by investigating the ways in which conflict and collaboration can work in synergy (Barnett and Scott 2007, de Souza 2006, Heller 2001. This approach, I will argue, is both a more realistic depiction of how participation is carried out “on the ground” and increases the likelihood that cities will be able to create systems of participatory climate governance that enable rapid and creative responses despite the influence of limited resources and institutional inertia.
Applying this approach to Durban, Chapter 7 will explore the tensions and synergies that exist between consensus-based state-led processes and more independent and conflictual community- led approaches to environmental and climate change policy. I will first provide a brief history of the roots of institutionalised and community-led participation in the transition from apartheid to democracy. Following this I will analyse the formal state-led participatory processes that currently surround the municipality's Integrated Development Planning (IDP) Process. Here I will first look at the potential of public consultation processes to bolster the municipality's stated goal of addressing climate change in an integrated manner across all areas of the municipality. I will then turn to examples of confrontational civil-society activism in a residential/industrial area called the South Durban Basin (SDB). I will show that integrating climate change into pre- existing participatory practices is a serious challenge for both the municipality and civil-society groups. I will also argue that recognising the potentially positive impacts of conflict, and the synergies that exist between community-based and municipally-led initiatives is essential for creating truly enabling and innovative forms of urban climate governance.
Chapter 8 will look at how similar issues have manifested themselves in Portland. I will begin in the late 1960s with a short history of the growth of Portland's vibrant civil-society sector, and 47 the current explosion of urban environmental groups. This will provide the backdrop for an analysis of the impacts and limitations of the consultation processes that feed into the municipality's Climate Action Plan (CAP). I will then turn to a community-led residential solar program that has transformed the local solar energy market. I will argue that civil-society groups can provide valuable inputs to formal processes that guide policy formation. But beyond this, communities also have an often overlooked ability directly to design and implement transformational climate relevant projects. Here again, I will emphasise the ability of communities and municipalities to work in conjunction with each other and create networks of climate governance that enable rapid and innovative transformation of urban socio-technical systems.
In my conclusion I will summarize my results, and discuss some of the limitations of my research approach. I argue that the increasingly rapid and severe nature of climate change demands a re-prioritisation of the aims of research about climate governance. 48 Chapter 2: Methodology and Study Sites
2.1 Introduction: the Case for Selecting Durban and Portland
In the preceding chapter I provided an overview of how and why the urban scale has been re- theorized as a powerful locus for climate change policy. This chapter will: explore my reasons for selecting Durban and Portland as case study sites for this dissertation, provide an overview of my methodology and lay out the history and context for the creation of climate change policies and programs in both cities.
There is no question that support for climate action at the urban scale has grown rapidly in recent years. Within the UN FCCC the 2011 Cancun negotiations concluded with a set of agreements that, among other things, recognized cities and local governments as “governmental stakeholders” in the UNFCCC process for the first time (UCLG 2011). This was the culmination of pressure from multiple municipal climate organizations membership in which skyrocketed in the last half decade20. But despite this political victory, the mismatch remains between municipal rhetoric, the more limited scale of accepted methods of measuring urban emissions, and the even more limited scope of municipalities' actual climate plans and programs.
In 2006, for example, a review of the 41 North American cities with populations of over 500,000 people showed that the overwhelming majority either had only rudimentary GHG reduction plans, or no plans at all (Aylett 2006). Of the fifteen cities that did have GHG reduction plans, the majority (8 of 15) focused on basic public education campaigns and marginal energy efficiency projects. Fully two thirds of American cities and one third of Canadian cities with
20 Drawn by offers of institutional support, project funding, or simply the allure of producing positive media coverage for local leadership, membership in three key groups has grown rapidly. The European Covenant of Mayors (CoM), founded in 2008, now has 2,600 members; the U.S. Conference of Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement, founded in 2005, has 1051members; ICLEI's CCP program, founded in 1993 has over 1000. 49 populations over 500,000 had no emissions reduction plans in place. Later in 2008, investigative reporting done by Rob Davis (Davis 2008) for the The Voice of San Diego, showed similarly lackluster results for signatories of the US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement. Representatives of some Californian cities quoted in the article had even forgotten that they had signed up to the agreement. Looking at the low number of cities that have advanced past the initial milestones of ICLEI's CCP program tells a similar story. In Canada, for example, the program began in 1994. But by 2008, 85 per cent of the 157 cities and towns that had signed on to the program had not yet developed an action plan to reduce community GHG emissions. The story, in short, was that behind all the boisterous boosterism and ambitious declarations, cities overall were in fact doing very little to fight climate change.21
That rather startling gap between the widespread symbolic adoption of climate change goals and the actual implementation of substantive climate policies is what led me look for cities that took their climate commitments seriously. For while the majority of cities dragged their feet, some municipalities were out far ahead. Governments like those in London (UK), Toronto (Canada), Seattle (USA), or Malmö (Sweden), were experimenting with policies and programs that truly addressed some of the key sectors of urban emissions. Some efforts, like London's congestion charging, made headlines. Others, like the Toronto Atmospheric Fund's plan to finance the weatherization of rental properties – long a difficult nut to crack because owners had little incentives to pay to reduce their tenants' bills – worked quietly on important but unglamorous issues.
The interesting question was “why?” What separated the cities that took the lead from the rest? What had made it possible for them to creatively reshape established policies and structures to 21 See “PCP Members and Milestone Status” on-line at http://replay.web.archive.org/20080412042732/http://www.sustainablecommunities.fcm.ca/Partners-for-Climate- Protection/Milestone_Status.asp [retrieved May 5 2011]. Over the course of this study, this situation changed little. In the United States, a 2010 survey of 2,176 local governments by the International City/County Management Association (ICMA), found that only 8.9 per cent of respondants had conducted baseline greenhouse gas emissions of the community, even fewer had set GHG reduction targets for homes or businesses.
Subsequent studies such as Krause 2011 and Gordon 2009 have shown similar poor performance by networks like the U.S. Mayor's pact and the Canadian CCP program to have continued through the period under study. In May of 2011, 80 per cent of the 216 members in the Canadian CCP program had yet to develop an action plan to reduce community ghg emissions (see http://gmf.fcm.ca/Partners-for-Climate-Protection/Milestone_Status.asp consulted 2011/05/15] ). 50 address the new challenge of climate change? It was that desire to look at cities that were implementing innovative climate policy that led to the selection of Durban and Portland.
Both cities are recognized leaders in urban sustainability and climate policy. But even among other leading cities, something else distinguished them: where some cities adopt a project focused approach to climate policy (composed of multiple discrete programs that either side-step or make only minor modifications to the city's existing operational practices) both Durban and Portland were attempting to integrate urban sustainability and climate change into the operations and decision making structures of the municipality as a whole. At the same time, acknowledging that the bulk of a city's emissions lie outside direct municipal control, both cities were developing participatory and facilitative structures aimed at involving non-governmental actors in broader systems of climate governance. This dual commitment to integration and participation was discussed explicitly in prominent formal policies and reports. During fieldwork, however, it became apparent that other informal networks were at least as important to the mainstreaming of climate policy within the municipalities and to the establishment of broader systems of climate governance. This dissertation examines both the formal and informal elements involved in this work.
Pairing Durban and Portland was also attractive because it provided the opportunity for comparative research in two cities where key officials shared roughly similar aspirations and approaches to urban climate policy, but operated in drastically different contexts. Extreme poverty, HIV/AIDS infection rates of epidemic proportions, and a series of natural disasters (just prior to and during the period under study) all put enormous pressure on Durban's local government simply to maintain and expand basic services. Portland had no such difficulties. Both cities, however, felt the impacts of food and energy cost inflation, as well as the economic collapse of 2008 (this last felt much more strongly in Portland).
Following a discussion of my methodology (below), I will give a more detailed account of both these cities and their differences. Doing comparative research across different levels of development and exposure to the impacts of climate change gives us a fuller portrait of how attempts to mainstream climate policy across a municipality proceed under conditions of 51 multiple stresses and challenges (ranging, for example, from health and unemployment to infrastructure deficits and population growth). Attention to this is important given that in any given city urban climate change policy will never exist in a vacuum. It will always be influenced, aided, or sidelined by other priorities and challenges. Key actors in both cities responded by employing an approach to climate policy based on the holistic analysis and attention to synergies encompassed by the local integrated approach to climate change discussed in Chapter 1. This research helps test the effectiveness of that approach.
Also implicit in this dissertation is the argument that much can be learned from cities in both the Global North and the Global South. There is a bias in many development programs that assumes that ideas, like capital, flow from North to South (Robinson 2006). What this research shows is something quite different. And, indeed, given that the bulk of the world's new cities will be mid- sized cities in the Global South (UN-Habitat 2006), the lessons that developing cities like Durban can teach us may be the most important.
Beyond looking for climate leaders engaged in integrated climate planning, participatory governance, and located for cities both in the Global North and the Global South, the final consideration when selecting Durban and Portland was size. Central Durban has a population of 536,644 and just over 3 million for the amalgamated eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality. Portland has a population of 582,130 and just over 2 million for the Portland metro region. This makes them smaller, and perhaps less glamorous, than mega-cities like Lagos or New York. But as such, both cities fall into the category of mid-sized cities where most growth is projected to occur over the next 40 years (UN-Habitat 2006, 2008). While many other city pairings may have satisfied these five criteria, Durban and Portland are also members of the Sustainable Cities International (SCI) Network, which is maintained by SCI, a Vancouver based NGO. During the preparation phase of my research I became affiliated with SCI and this gave me open access to key informants in both cities.
In addition to these consideration, certain basic conditions exist in both cities that should not be taken for granted. Both exist within countries with functioning democratic systems and with broad constitutionally protected rights for citizens including freedom of expression. This last will 52 be particularly relevant as a basic precondition for many of the civil-society actions covered in chapters 7 and 8. The experiences of cities in authoritarian states, for example, would doubtless be very different. Similarly, both municipalities are also served by a well established and functioning bureaucratic system. Municipal staff face enormous demands with scarce resources, particularly in Durban. But despite these challenges, they posses high levels of local institutional capacity as compared to municipalities where rapid urbanization, corruption, or a lack of institution building in the past undermines the ability of the local state to steer the processes of urbanization.
Working in these other contexts would be fascinating and relevant, particularly given China's current position as the single largest emitter of anthropogenic greenhouse gasses. In this dissertation however I have chosen to work with democratic cities with a relatively high level of institutional capacity. These basic common parameters makes comparison between them more feasible, and provides a relatively stable research environment needed given the time constraints of a PhD dissertation. The results of this research are therefore most directly applicable to cities which share these basic characteristics (a large percentage of the high-emissions cities world- wide). But the analysis of bureaucratic and civil-society engagement with climate change contained here may also be relevant to cities currently in transition to higher levels of institutional and economic development.
2.2 Methodology
Fieldwork in Durban and Portland was conducted across a two year period between 2007 and 2009. Research funding from the Trudeau Foundation allowed me to conduct two field seasons in both cities: in Durban from 7 February – 12 April 2008 and from 3 February – 1 April 2009; and in Portland from 6 October – 7 November 2008 and from 30 May – 30 June 2010. My affiliation with SCI proved invaluable in giving me access to highly placed and well networked municipal officials and community organizers within each city.
In both cities, small teams had been assembled to run broad public visioning programs known as 53 imagineDurban and visionPDX. These programs collected input from thousands of local residents and representatives of municipal departments to craft a long-term vision for the city's development and identify medium term priorities. These types of long-term public visioning processes are one of the key focus areas of SCI, and both teams were linked in some way to the NGO. During initial week-long scoping trips in 2007 and 2008, these teams were my entry point into each city. The programs they managed placed these teams outside of, but in close contact with, multiple municipal and civil-society organizations. This gave them a uniquely holistic vantage point on their cities, and they were able to help me identify and contact actors who had a significant influence over their city's climate-related policies. These initial contacts and suggestions became the starting point from which I selected the rest of my respondents, following a targeted snowball sampling method.
The heads of both visioning programs (Margaret Mackenzie in Durban, and Stephanie Stephens in Portland) acted as gatekeepers who helped me to secure access to key informants and local experts. As can be seen in the complete list of interviewees (see Appendix A) I was able to conduct semi-structured in-depth interviews (between 45min and 1h15min) with both expert and elite respondents from the municipal, civil-society, research, and private sectors. These included high-ranking municipal officials, and the heads of local NGOs, community groups, and businesses. I also conducted interviews with a selection of relevant middle management and project level staff and community members. While relying on elite informants and gatekeepers could introduce a bias towards a sanitized version of events, I found respondents to be generally open about the dynamics that surrounded urban climate policies. I also conducted interviews across a broad range of organizations and triangulated the results to attempt to correct for any biases in individual accounts (discussed further below).
Although scheduling such a large number of interviews into a relatively short period of time and coordinating the schedules of often intensely over-committed people was a challenge, I found doors open to me in both cities. I am certain that this was due in part to the fact that I entered under the aegis of an organization with whom the cities were already affiliated. 54
2.2.1 Interview Methodology: Profile of Respondents The municipal officials, community members, and civil society representatives who I selected for the first round of interviews were those most involved with explicitly climate related programs and policies: the Office of Sustainable Development (OSD) in Portland, the Environmental Management Department (EMD) in Durban; and two leading community groups, ReCode Portland and the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA). Subsequently, I pursued informants in municipal departments that, while not directly tasked with climate policy, controlled key portfolios related to urban form, energy use, and emissions. Specifically this meant the heads, middle, and project level managers from the departments dealing with the Planning, Water, Transportation, Housing, Development & Permitting, Economic Development, and Treasury portfolios. Looking for a broader perspective on the municipalities' environmental records overall, I also interviewed representatives from local environmental NGOs working on regional or urban issues other than climate change, like Timberwatch in Durban, or the Audubon Society in Portland. Finally, I interviewed representatives from local businesses working in the green building sector. In total I conducted 125 interviews, 62 in Durban and 63 in Portland. This broad sample aimed to capture both the intra- and inter-departmental external dynamics of official climate policies, their reception in the broader community, and their relationship to other civil-society-driven climate initiatives.
In addition, in both cities I positioned myself as a participant observer in municipal events ranging from formal consultation processes, to community events, protests, and departmental meetings. During my second visit to Durban in 2009, I volunteered part of my time to work as a consultant for the city's Environmental Management Department helping to draft a strategic plan for the next phase of their climate policy work.
By far the majority of respondents during my fieldwork were municipal employees and representatives of civil society groups. This is appropriate given that questions that form the heart of this research focus more at the institution of the bureaucracy itself and the way it 55 interacts with local communities and NGOs, than with the political leaders of the city. This was a choice based on information and input collected during initial visits to both cities, personal communication with SCI local project officers and local staff and community members. During this exploratory phase of my research, it was apparent that while political support was a key component in certain stages of the climate policy process the people shaping policies and driving programs lay either within the bureaucracy or civil-society groups, not city council. Where relevant, I have provided an account of how that support was obtained, but I have not made that a focus of my research.
As a result, politicians and political staff members make up only a very small percentage of my sample (6 out of 125). This does not mean that the urban political context has been overlooked however. The history of climate change policies and programs in both cities (covered in sections 3 and 4 of this chapter) clearly shows the way in which political support – or the lack of it – can shape the institutionalization of climate change response planning. Likewise, at specific moments during my fieldwork politics and politicians helped or hindered specific climate projects or pushed forward key institutional reforms. To understand some of this larger political context, I spoke to a small number of key political informants. In Portland, I met with Tom Miller, the Mayor's Chief-of-Staff, as well as with Amy Trieu, the Policy Coordinator for Commissioner Dan Saltzman, who oversaw OSD. In Durban, I met with Dr. Michael Suttcliff, the city's municipal manager – an uncommon position which grants him oversight over the municipality's bureaucracy as well as a gate keeping role between it and city council. I also spoke to Krish Kumar, head of the city's Treasury Department, who like Dr. Suttcliff is a powerful bureaucrat with an important influence in city council. I used my time with these key political informants to gain their perspective on political decisions that directly affected the outcome of specific programs or projects that form part of this study: for example, Portland's failed early green building policy or the creation of Durban's Energy Office. I have left a more detailed investigation of the political dynamics that happen between elected officials over these issues for future research. 56
2.2.2 Interview Methodology, Follow-up, and Triangulation Interviews often centered around specific projects, ranging from campaigns to reduce industrial emissions to large residential green energy projects. I will cover a selection of these projects in more detail in the chapters that follow. These individual projects were used as concrete examples around which to structure questions covering the two core themes of this dissertation: the institutional dynamics that surround attempts to integrate climate change policies across a municipal organization, and the role that public participation (in all its various forms) plays in extending a municipality's capacities to design and implement ambitious climate policies. In preparation for these interviews I read extensively within the municipal reports, best-practice notes, and other publications produced by staff in both cities. This provided me with useful starting information on municipal departments already engaged in specifically climate-related policies, as well as a sense of their institutional history and results to date (this institutional history is covered in more detail below).
Conducting two distinct field seasons in each city allowed me to capture the evolution of climate initiatives in motion, rather than a snapshot of a single moment in time. This gave me the opportunity to conduct follow-up interviews with key informants in both cities, and to monitor the progress of specific programs through what proved to be a tumultuous period politically, economically, and environmentally. This yielded several surprising results. Policies that seemed doomed from the start (such as Durban's attempts to use integrated planning and budgetary procedures to force inter-departmental collaboration) proved to be more successful than expected. Other policies (like Portland's innovative fee/rebate or “fee-bate” green-building program) that seemed all but a certain success crashed spectacularly – only to be replaced by other initiatives that had seemed far less likely at the outset.
Finally, the reliability of sources when it comes to a politically charged issue like climate change is a major concern. Neither interviews nor written sources can be expected to provide a disinterested view of what is being done, or how past programs have been carried out. On the one hand, there are those who seek to downplay certain aspects of climate policy because of worries over the impact they may have on outside investment or political support important local 57 industries. On the other, municipal officials and community groups alike stand to gain by exaggerating the coherence, scope, and achievements of their climate projects if it will bring them increased funding, recognition, or help to brand the city as a “green” metropolis.
To correct for possible biases in individual sources, interviews and publications were triangulated against each other to create a more balanced view of events as they were unfolding. In some cases this was easy, as with Debra Roberts, head of Durban's Environmental Management Department, who was very candid about the fact that written reports exaggerated the unity and coherence of her department's climate related initiatives. In other cases it was more challenging and amorphous; this was the case in Portland, where respondents who were closest to the climate agenda affirmed that “people are just supportive of green policies here,” which was a simplification that overlooked the complex and at times confrontational nature of green politics in the city. Both of these examples will be discussed in the more detailed introductions to each city which follow.
2.3 Durban: Introduction
Durban is an interesting site for studying urban climate policy for a variety of reasons. Durban's mitigation projects are examples of how emissions reductions can proceed in a municipality where they play second fiddle to adaptation planning and other more immediate development concerns. More specifically, Durban’s experiences with the Cities for Climate Protection Program (CCP) and the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) show how these internationally coordinated mitigation frameworks function within the context of municipalities in developing countries that are subject to multiple stresses. These competing priorities were made more acute by a triple crisis of energy, food and extreme weather related problems that hit the city during the period under study. This offered some taste of the impacts that climate change may have on developing coastal municipalities. 58
The city's responses to these challenges has highlighted the way key actors within the municipality negotiate institutional barriers to effective mitigation, and the way in which civil- society groups, working within broader networks of climate governance, can push those efforts even further. Durban's EMD has engaged actively in creating municipal mitigation plans, and there are other examples of institutional reform, and the integration of climate change policy being led by various other municipal departments. Politically, addressing climate change has the official support of key actors like the Mayor and the Municipal Manager. But at the same time local climate programs must operate in a context where, unlike many cities in developed countries, climate policies generate little in the way of local political capital for those involved. Environmental policies of any kind are also perceived by many (both inside and outside of the municipality) to pose a threat to social and economic development goals. Climate change and sustainability policies also fit uneasily with both social-democratic redistributive policies that characterized the early post-apartheid era, and the neo-liberal approach to development that has recently come to dominate South African politics. This introduction will cover all of these dynamics in more detail.
Durban is South Africa’s second largest municipality, and is strongly aligned politically with the dominant national party – the African National Congress (ANC). With over 3 million people, the city is home to the busiest port in Africa. Its industrial and chemical sector is the economic hub of the province of KwaZulu-Natal, and the source of 8 per cent of the national GDP (DEAT 2007; eThekwini 2004). This sector includes two petrochemical refineries (the SAPREF refinery owned jointly by BP and Shell, and the Malaysian-owned ENGEN refinery) that produce 60 per cent of the petrol refined in South Africa. The vast majority of these activities, as well as an airport, pulp mill, sugar cane processing plants, and various other small industries are concentrated in a 100 km2 area known as the South Durban Basin (SDB) discussed in more detail in Chapter 7. Its beaches, casinos, and hotels have also made it a longstanding top destination for internal tourism in South Africa. The city's economic development plan is based around an expansion of both its shipping and industrial infrastructure, large scale event-led development that surrounded the 2010 football World Cup, and consumer and business infrastructure in the form of hotels, beach-front redevelopments, shopping malls, and a large international conference center. 59
The distribution of the benefits of these economic activities is highly uneven: 27 per cent of black households are located in informal settlements (compared with 0.4 per cent for Whites), and over 50 per cent of the black and coloured population is unemployed. Access to key infrastructure like sewerage, running water and electricity follows similar patterns (Statistics South Africa 2001). There are also serious health challenges, with an AIDS infection rate of over 34 per cent and concerns over TB, diarrhea, and the potential spread of malaria (eThekwini 2005, 38).
These tensions between deeply urgent and uneven socio-economic challenges and the growth imperative of the local economy is characteristic of the country as a whole. The local municipality, as well as civil-society actors, negotiates these tensions within the larger context of a fundamental shift in the national ANC's approach to democracy and development. The party rose to power on the shoulders of a broad-based popular liberation movement and institutionalized participatory democracy within multiple government processes (discussed further in Ch.8) after coming to power in 1994. It began its tenure as the country's de facto ruling party in 1994 by implementing a redistributive Reconstruction and Development Policy (RDP). The RDP focused on reducing staggering inequalities within the country by directly addressing issues of poverty and a lack of essential social services by redistributing agricultural land, building low-cost housing, increasing access to health and educations services, and dramatically expanding water, sanitation, and electrical systems. But the text of the RDP also highlighted the need for larger macro-economic reforms that would bring the country’s economy out of crisis and help the new government deal with large budget deficits inherited from the apartheid era (Terreblanche 1999).
In 1996, responding to persistently poor economic performance, rising rates of unemployment, and pressure from a coalition of large South African corporations, the ANC introduced the Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR) macro-economic strategy. GEAR represented a fundamental shift away from the re-distributive focus on equity and empowerment that had been the focus of the RDP. In its stead, GEAR set the stage for a neo-liberal focus on growth-led development that prioritized attracting foreign direct investment, downsizing government, the 60 privatization of service provision, and reduced social and environmental regulation (Terreblanche 1999, Heller 2001, Scott & Oelofse 2005). Designed with input from World Bank staff, GEAR was a clear manifestation of the principle tenets of the “Washington Consensus” (Williamson 1989), and a surprisingly orthodox one given that South Africa had not, unlike many other African countries, been subject to any formal structural adjustment processes (Heller 2001).
This process was also linked to a movement away from the ANCs roots in popular mobilization and participatory democracy towards an increasingly technocratic and managerial approach to government. At a national level it has marginalized powerful national civil-society players (like the independent labour federation COSATU), and has led to the preoccupation with increasing the efficiency of government agencies producing a technocratic and expert-driven approach to institutionalized participatory processes. This superficially fulfills the institutional requirements for participation, but marginalizes the specific concerns or priorities of local communities, neglects the larger goals of empowerment or community-led development, and de-legitimizes social protest as a legitimate form of democratic engagement (Scott & Oelofse 2005, Bond 2002, Heller 2001). GEAR's policies have largely failed to deliver on the expected economic growth and job creation (Terreblanche 1999, Wiley et al. 2002, Natrass 2009).
Despite adopting GEAR's neo-liberal macro-economic politics at the national level, the ANC continued to put forward ambitious targets for increasing access to adequate housing, health care, education, food, water and social security. In fact, these goals were enshrined in the new constitution adopted in 1996 (the year GEAR was introduced), of which the associated Bill of Right includes a package of socio-economic rights that declares access to housing, healthcare, food, water, and social security to be individual rights. To deliver on these rights, “[t]he state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realization of each of these rights” (South Africa 1996, Sections 26-27). Between 1994 and 2001, for example, the government has funded the construction of 1 155 300 new homes, housing close to 5 776 300 people (UN 2001). In 2001, the national ANC also introduced a policy guaranteeing “free basic services” guaranteeing certain basic levels of water, electricity, 61 and waste collection to all South Africans (DWAF 2002).
The ANC's neo-liberal macro economic policies therefore coexist uneasily with a continued emphasis on national development policies based on direct government engagement with repairing the inequalities engineered by the apartheid system. South Africa's cities are the central mediators of this seemingly schizophrenic situation. A 1998 White Paper on Local Government devolved responsibility for meeting national developmental goals to municipalities (South Africa 1998, Section B). In Durban, for example, the municipality is responsible for addressing health issues such as AIDS and TB, providing access to basic infrastructure (electricity, water, and sewage), and providing housing. Each year, for example, Durban builds over 16,000 houses to help meet the national target of eliminating informal settlements by 2014 (Goldstone 2007). The national government plays a supporting role, but primary responsibility rests with the municipality. Likewise, the White Paper and the subsequent Municipal Systems Act (MSA, 2000) made local governments the primary level of government responsible for carrying out meaningful processes of participatory democracy (discussed further in Chapter 8). Earlier precedents set during the transition from apartheid (discussed below) also made municipalities responsible for local environmental management and protection.
This arrangement is an example of the inadequately funded “downloading” of responsibilities from the national to the local state highlighted by critics of the turn towards “new localism” (discussed in Chapter 1, Cochrane 1986, Bakker 2005, Steytler, de Visser, Williams 2011). As Powell (2010) summarizes in an overview of intergovernmental relations in South Africa, while legislative proceedures exist to protect municipalities from unfunded mandates, “mandate creep” has meant that “in practice, additional expenditure mandates have been assigned to local government, but often without appropriate funding” (12, 20; see also Hetherington 2011).
At the same time, however, the city's own economic development plans are a clear manifestation of urban neo-liberalism (de Souza 2006), or what David Harvey referred to as “entrepreneurial” urban governance (1989, 1). The ANC dominates local politics, and municipal development strategies are in many ways a mirror of neo-liberal national policies, manifested in the pursuit of investment in high-profile facilities (convention centers, sports stadiums, and coastal 62 development) designed to make the city attractive to international capital, and to preserve its competitiveness against other similarly “entrepreneurial” municipalities. This has significantly weakened the pursuit of environmental programs and regulations – for fear of appearing to be an unfriendly business environment (discussed further below). Harvey describes how in the American context the drive towards “entrepreneurial” urbanism has led cities to abandon providing services and reducing inequalities within the urban population (Ibid.). In Durban's case rather than one form of governance superseding the other, both developmental and entrepreneurial forms of governance exist in a constant dialectic with different actors (both municipal and within civil-society) attempting to either square the circle, or pull the city to one side or the other (Wiley et al. 2002).
These considerable developmental challenges and complex local politics form the backdrop for a triple crisis of energy shortages, food price hikes, and extreme weather that hit the city just prior to and during the period under study. In January 2008 while I was beginning fieldwork in Durban, the combination of a decade of rapidly growing electricity demand and no growth in generation capacity pushed the national grid into collapse. Plant failures spread uncontrolled blackouts across the country. In the month that followed, a schedule of managed rolling outages (load shedding) was put in place. Electricity cuts affected everyone from residential users (and visiting researchers) to merchants and large industries. The total losses to the South African economy are estimated at R50 billion ($US 5.6 billion) and thousands of jobs were lost. Electricity prices shot up by 26 per cent and labour protests spread throughout the country (SAPA, 2007). This occurred in the context of a global food price crisis and rapid increases in the cost of other fuels. In South Africa, the cost of staple foods like bread and cornmeal rose by 25 per cent during the first 6 months of 2008, the cost of petrol rose by close to 16 per cent, and inflation was at 11 per cent, a five year high (Hurd 2008).
One year earlier, a major coastal storm had severely damaged both municipal infrastructure and private property. Costs of repairing infrastructure for Durban and the surrounding province of Kwa Zulu Natal were estimated at R2.4 billion ($US310 million [Mail & Guardian 2009]). Record rainfall caused several major floods, hitting informal settlements and poor communities particularly hard, as well as flooding local refineries. Neighbourhoods built on slopes and near 63 river banks suffered severe losses. Six people were killed, 1,000 displaced, and roads, bridges, and other infrastructure damaged (de Costa et al 2008). Both local communities and the municipality have seen these extreme weather events as signs of the city's vulnerability to the impacts of climate change. In combination with the economic stresses of rapid cost inflation due to global supply shortages of basic commodities (exacerbated by financial speculation) these have created in Durban a microcosm of the heavy social and economic costs that climate change could exact on municipalities during the rest of this century.
2.3.1 Durban: Emissions Profile and Early Climate Policies and Projects In some ways, Durban appears as a model city when it comes to mitigation. The municipality was one of the first African cities to participate in ICLEI’s Cities for Climate Protection (CCP) program. Using software tools and methodology developed by ICLEI, the city conducted its first CCP-guided corporate inventory in 2003 and its first community inventory in 2007.22 Two reports followed on the impacts of and potential responses to climate change within the municipality (eThekwini 2006b, 2007a).
These inventories showed that industry accounts for 44 per cent of the city’s overall annual emissions (23 million tons of CO2; eThekwini, 2007a).23 Transport related emissions account for 25 per cent, while household emissions account for 17 per cent (see Figure 1). The bulk of both household and industrial emissions come from electricity use. Approximately 90 per cent of South Africa’s national electricity supply is generated by coal-fired power plants (ESKOM 2009). By energy type, electricity accounts for the majority of emissions in all but the transportation sector and is the source of 54 per cent of Durban’s total emissions (see Figure 2).
22 Corporate Inventories tally emissions from municipal facilities (buildings, vehicles, and infrastructure directly owned and operated by the city). Community Inventories add to this other emissions produced by businesses, industries, and residents. As discussed in chapter 1, exactly what falls within the scope of a community inventory is the subject of important debate. 23 This level of emissions is comparable to those of similar sized cities in North America. Vancouver, for example, emits approximately 17 million tons/year. Exact comparison is not possible because of the fact that North American inventories tend to include a group of greenhouse gasses, whereas Durban has only inventoried CO2. In Vancouver, non-CO2 emissions accounted for roughly 10 per cent of total 2005 GHG emissions (Metro Vancouver, 2007). 64
The city is seeking to address these emissions as part of its stated commitment to sustainable development. This commitment is written into the municipality’s Integrated Development Planning (IDP) process. The IDP processes involves yearly public consultations that steer the city’s development goals. These goals are linked to departmental budgeting processes, as a way to mainstream a set of key priorities (including sustainable development and greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation) across previously separated municipal departments. Discussion of climate change responses also forms a key part of the extensive participatory long-term visioning program known as imagineDurban that, as mentioned earlier, is run in partnership with SCI. Overall, the municipality’s approach to the creation of mitigation plans follows many of the accepted international best practices promoted by ICLEI and the SCI.
However, as we will see below, specifically Chapters 4 and 7, the inclusion of climate change in high-level policy documents and processes has not led to the mainstreaming of climate change, either as a common concern across the municipality or during processes of public consultation. The overall municipal response to climate change is split across multiple initiatives run by a variety of departments and non-governmental partners. There is no central coordinating body for climate related work, and existing initiatives are coordinated by the Integrated Development Plan in name only. This failure is a sign of the uneasy relationship between environmental issues and the competing “developmental” and “entrepreneurial” discourses that motivate municipal policies. As we will see, key municipal actors have struggled to make the case that environmental action is not either anti-development or anti-business.
This dynamic was clearly manifest in the municipality's engagement with the CCP program. The second milestone of the CCP was the adoption of an emissions reduction target. As ICLEI's website explained, following the type of baseline emissions inventory and forecast that Durban had done the municipality is supposed to adopt a concrete reduction target that “fosters political will and creates a framework to guide the planning and implementation of measures” (ICLEI, undated). ICLEI's guidelines however drastically underestimates the politically charged dynamics that could surround the creation of this kind of target. In Durban, far from generating political support, creating a target was seen as a liability. Jessica Rich, who worked coordinating the EMD's participation in the CCP program, explained that setting a concrete emissions target 65 was going to be seen as a threat to the city's economic development goals (Interview, Rich 2008/03/12). As I will discuss below, this same problem had affected the EMD's earlier attempts to engage the municipality with the more general issue of sustainable development.
So rather than an overarching climate change strategy working towards a definite target, Durban's municipal responses to climate change have been more fractured and project-based. Actors within the city have undertaken ambitious climate-related projects (discussed further below) and produced comprehensive reports on both mitigation and adaptation. But when this study began, there was no larger framework in place to steer the municipality’s response to climate change. Even more importantly from an institutional point of view, no office had the mandate to produce one. It was only as this study progressed that the institutional structures necessary to carry one forward came into being.
2.3.2 Key Adaptive and Mitigative Measures Durban's initial mitigation efforts have focused on two initiatives: emissions reductions at three landfill sites (eThekwini 2006a) and energy efficiency gains made through changed management practices in municipal buildings. As hosts for the 2010 World Cup, the city also undertook a variety of mitigation initiatives to offset emissions generated by the games. Combined, these produced annual reductions of approximately 362 914 tons of CO2eq per year, or 1.6 percent of the city's annual emissions. World Cup related reductions are not counted in this total; as event- specific offsets, these measures do not reduce the city's overall annual emissions. Removing emissions sold as CDM credits as well leaves us with only the annual building efficiency reductions of 914 tons of CO2eq, or 0.005 per cent of total annual emissions (eThekwini 2006a, 26). The impact of these initial efforts is therefore small and has left untouched the main sources of eThekwini’s GHGs, the industrial and commercial sectors, and electricity use more generally (see Figures 1 and 2 above). As we will see in Chapters 4 and 7, addressing these has been a thorny issue involving a variety of both state and civil-society actors.
The majority of these early projects (waste methane capture, building efficiency, and the greening of high profile events) are fairly common to cities engaging with climate change. Most pose no real challenge to Durban's developmental goals. They also put a green shine on the 66 city's entrepreneurial developments, something that has become increasingly de rigueur as a superficial engagement with climate change and sustainability have become harnessed to the municipality's competitive entrepreneurial focus on economic growth. Durban sets itself apart, however, in two ways. First, linked to emissions reductions, the EMD has designated a large amount (23 per cent) of the total municipal territory as part of the Durban Metropolitan Open Space System (D'MOSS) established to protect biodiversity within the city. While protecting this land from development does not directly reduce the city's annual emissions, it does prevent land- use change from becoming a major source of future emissions. In 2006, a carbon inventory found that this protected territory contained the equivalent of 24.3 million tons of CO2 – approximately one third more than Durban's total annual emissions – and sequestered 31 thousand tons of CO2 (or 0.2 per cent of the city's annual emissions [eThekwini 2007a]). These and other related projects are discussed in more detail in the introduction to Chapter 4.
Second, while international best practices on municipal climate policy focus overwhelmingly on mitigation, Durban is among a small group of cities to have put significant resources into modeling and attempting to plan for the impacts that climate change will have on the municipal area. Under the banner of a Municipal Climate Protection Program (initiated in 2004), the EMD has been carrying out and coordinating adaptation programs within the municipality. In collaboration with Golder & Associates (an international consulting firm with a local office in Durban) and the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research (based in the U.K.), the EMD has pursued the downscaling of global climate models to produce locally specific projections for the impacts of climate change. These include a 1.5°C-2.5°C increase in mean annual temperature by 2065, increases in the volume and concentration of rainfall, and the potential for between 300mm and 1000mm sea-level rise along the cities coastline. The potential impact of these changes is momentous, ranging from increased stress on the city's storm water infrastructure to increased incidences of heat stress, cholera, and malaria; and including the flooding of industrial, residential, and commercial areas (eThekwini 2010).
To plan better for these impacts, the EMD is creating a GIS based Integrated Assessment Framework. When complete, the framework will make information on changes in temperature, precipitation and sea level available in a form easily integrated into other municipal planning, 67 engineering, and budgeting processes. This is a highly developed engagement with the “local scientific” approach to climate policy and Durban is one of only a handful of city's worldwide to be working on such a detailed downscaling of global climate models. As discussed more generally in Chapter 1, a fundamental motivator of this “local scientific” work is the assumption that better scientific data will form the basis for more effective climate planning and increased political support for climate policy.
Simultaneously pursuing programs that draw from a more “local integrated” response to climate change, the EMD has also partnered with the Health Department to better research the impacts that climate change will have on a population already hard hit by the AIDS epidemic (and so with compromised immune function and more vulnerable to heat induced mortality), and dependent on local agriculture for a large part of their diet. Most recently, between 2008 and 2009, the EMD coordinated the development of Municipal Adaptation Plans for the Water, Health, and Disaster Management sectors (see eThekwini 2010). These adaptation programs are not covered in detail in this dissertation, but they are important to understand the context for the city's mitigation work. Durban's efforts to reduce emissions must share resources with this equally important adaptation agenda. At the same time, both adaptation and mitigation efforts contend with institutional politics not always sympathetic to either climate or sustainable development policies.
2.3.3 Institutional History of Climate Change Policies and Programs in Durban The institutional history of environmental policy in Durban reveals the difficult internal and external dynamics that surround a relatively fractured and project-based engagement with climate change. This engagement that has only recently been guided in a more coherent and integrated direction, while at the same time the outlines of a broader local network of climate governance have begun to emerge. The groundwork for Durban's climate programs was laid during the post-apartheid restructuring of municipal governments and the city's participation with the Local Agenda 21 (LA21) program between 1994-2001. During the transition period that followed the end of apartheid in 1994, national legislation24 made the planning and implementation of local environmental management regulations the responsibility of local-level
24 Schedule 2 of the Local Government Transition Act [No 209 of 1993]. 68 authorities. In Durban, this was reflected in the establishment of an Environmental Management Department (EMD) the initial mandate of which was to shoulder this newly devolved strategic function, and to ensure that the city was acting in accordance with the national and provincial environmental regulations that were passed during the early years of the post-apartheid government.
During the same period, international attention was drawn to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, and the Local Agenda 21 (LA 21) program that arose from it.25 The voluntary LA21 program provided a useful framework for South African municipalities to structure their newly acquired sustainability mandate. In 1994, Durban became the first city in South Africa to formally commit to the LA 21 process, followed by the country's other two large cities (Johannesburg and Cape Town; eThekwini, undated). Debra Roberts, then the director and sole staff member of the newly formed EMD, saw LA21 as a politically neutral and internationally credible platform that she could use for building an environmental function within the city (personal communication, Roberts 2011/08/02).
Under the guidance of the EMD, which was staffed during this period, the municipality undertook an initial scoping study to gather information and to identify the main areas of concern for the city's social, economic, and environmental health. The resulting report went through a process of public consultation that produced a list of five priority areas for the city's sustainable development policies that included: public safety; water quality and sanitation management; housing; the coordination of land use, transportation, and environmental planning in the metropolitan area; and institutionalizing national level environmental management procedures.
25 The 1992 Rio Earth Summit produced a plan of action for implementing policies that balanced social, economic, and environmental goals. Known as “Agenda 21” it was adopted by 178 governments who attended the Summit. Targeting participation from multiple levels of government, chapter 28 of Agenda 21 called on local governments to implement their own “Local Agendas 21” (or LA21)(see http://ww2.unhabitat.org/programmes/agenda21/defaulten.asp [consulted: 2011/06/01). The inclusion of local governments in the Agenda 21 document was in large part the result of ICLEI, who proposed the LA21 program, and helped raise the profile of local governments at the summit. It subsequently established a series of guidelines and an inter-municipal LA21 network to aid cities in designing and implementing their LA21 programs (see http://www.un-ngls.org/orf/documents/publications.en/agenda21/04.htm [consulted: 2011/06/01]) 69
This and subsequent processes of public participation and consultation where rooted in the emphasis that the LA21 process places on securing citizen and community involvement in policy formulation and implementation. This transition from government towards governance is at the heart of the second of five LA21 guiding principles laid out by ICLEI (1998)26. Under the heading of “the integration of interests” the principle on governance is striking for both its vagueness and scope: “in a culture of dialogue and participation, all groups in society are to be involved [in the LA 21 process].” This principle follows a problematic integrative impulse common to many normative state-led approaches to governance (see Chapter 1). As an extensive review involving 230 of the 800 European cities participating in LA21 later concluded: “The concept of ‘the integration of interests’ is not unproblematic in that it tends to imply a potential for consensus, which is not always achievable. On the basis of the responses it is not possible to suggest that there has been any substantial movement towards an ‘integration of interests’” (Evans & Theobald 2003, 789). They further observed that overall non-governmental participation in the process was low, with the exception of established local environmental NGOs who tended to dominate participatory forums. Durban's experience with LA21 follows this pattern highlighting some of the very real difficulties that intentional approaches to environmental governance can face in practice.
Making progress in the five priority areas identified during the first round of public consultation proved to be challenging. As the municipality went through continued restructuring (including a merger with several smaller municipalities to create a larger metropolitan uni-city known as eThekwini) the initial momentum for the sustainable development agenda waned. A key LA21 project to address some of the social and environmental problems in a mixed industrial- residential area (discussed further in Chapter 7) ran into conflicts with a coalition of local community environmental organizations which dominated public participation in the process. Conflicts arose when a strategic environmental assessment (SEA) (conducted by the
26 The five principles are: 1) the integration of issues: environmental objectives are linked with economic and social objectives; 2) the integration of interests: in a culture of dialogue and participation, all groups in society are to be involved; 3) its long-term character: measures and projects are based on long-term objectives keyed to the precautionary principle; 4) its global dimension: impacts of local action on global development are measured, and ways of counteracting the global uneven distribution of consumption and wealth are identified (the local contribution to global sustainability is an explicit goal) ; 5)sustainable management of resources: utilization of natural resources is based on the rate at which new resources are formed; substance inputs into the natural regime are based on its capacity to degrade them. (summarized in Evans & Theobald 2003, 787) 70 municipality in partnership with industry and community stakeholders) recommended improving environmental performance in the area by upgrading and expanding industrial infrastructure. This future development would result in the loss of existing residential areas. Citing the embedded nature of industry in the area (and they could have added its importance to the city's economy) EMD referred to this as a necessary but difficult “win-lose” scenario:
The SEA also helped dispel the myth that a 'win-win scenario' is a logical end to all Local Agenda 21 processes. The SEA project suggested that in reality there will be instances when 'win-lose' might be the only option left to achieving improved sustainability. Tough and unpopular decisions may therefore be required to break unsustainable development patterns. (Roberts and Diederichs 2002, vii-viii)
These recommendations were indeed unpopular, and they caused the major civil-society partner (a coalition of local civil-society groups known as SDCEA, see Ch.7) to turn against the SEA and block a second round of LA21 projects that had been planned to address disaster response planning in the area (Roberts and Diederichs 2002). As we will see in chapter 7, SDCEA is a key actor in the immanent networks of environmental governance that have arisen more organically in Durban outside of formal processes under centralized municipal control (see discussion Chapter 1, cf. Bridge & Perreault 2009, cf. Cowen & Shenton 1996, Hart 2001). SDCEA's campaigns against the unequal social, economic, and environmental impacts of industrial development have led it to make critical contributions to local environmental regulatory capacity. But this early experience with LA21 cemented a distrust of municipally run processes that would surface again during my case studies. The SEA's recommendations also alienated politicians – particularly scandal averse given that it was in an election year – by exposing thorny conflicts between the municipality's developmental and entrepreneurial priorities.
Somewhat ironically, while having lost civil-society support for one of its main initiatives for being seen as too pro-industry, the rift between EMD and the rest of the local government and bureaucracy grew because it was unable to make the case that the LA21 process, and “sustainability” more generally, was not anti-industry or anti-business. The EMD reports that this was a problem from the very beginning of the LA 21 process. They trace it back to the perception among politicians and other departments that EMD was primarily a “green” environmental conservation unit that valued the environment over social or economic 71 development. Given that they were the main drivers of LA21 within the city, the process itself was also tarred with the same brush. This drained away political support for the program within the municipal government and bureaucracy.
LA21 had thus lost the support of both key NGO actors and elected officials. In a 2002 publication summarizing the city's experience with the LA21 program, EMD head Debra Roberts highlighted the need for LA21 to directly tackle its perceived opposition to development and “demonstrate how sustainability can help meet people’s basic needs and improve quality of life” (Roberts and Diederichs 2002, 198; see also Freund 2001). EMD's difficulties in making that case and its experiences with the SEA show that despite the concrete specificity of the local level, synergies and “no regrets” policies (discussed in Chapter 1) are not as easy to identify and put in place as some parts of the literature might imply (Gibbs et al. 2002, Pielke 2005, Robinson et al. 2006, Wilbanks 2003, Van Asselt et al. 2005).
In 2001, the EMD – which had been chronically understaffed since the beginning of the LA 21 process – was poised to hire seven new staff members to take on the expanded workload that came with the establishment of the new uni-city of eThekwini. City Council revisited this decision however and cut the number of posts from seven to two (Roberts and Diederichs 2002). In 2002, the sustainability agenda was removed from EMD's mandate and housed instead in the Corporate Policy Unit (CPU) and the Integrated Development Plan process that the CPU directed. In theory this meant that the values of sustainable development were to be mainstreamed across all municipal agencies. The EMD had itself advocated for this type of mainstreaming (ibid). In practice, those closest to the LA21 program felt that, rather than being everyone's concern, sustainability had become no-one's responsibility (Interview, Roberts 2008/04/26).
This highlights a problem experienced in Portland as well: because of their newness within municipal structures, the bureaus that house staff with knowledge and understanding of the principles of sustainability are often relatively small and politically and financially weak. More powerful bureaus that are in a position to mainstream environmental considerations – 72
Infrastructure, Water, and Planning Bureaus that control considerable amounts of the municipal budget – have their own long established modes of operation and only a low level of understanding (if any) of integrated sustainability planning. Adding to this mismatch of agency and understanding is the fact that cross-cutting adoption within the municipality also requires receptive and comprehending ears in all municipal departments, most with little history of engaging with climate change.
Following the transfer of the sustainability portfolio to the CPU, the EMD's mandate was limited to managing the newly established D'MOSS open space system with a focus on protecting biodiversity.27 In interview, Roberts ascribed this significant narrowing of EMD's mandate to a power struggle within the municipality: the cross-cutting nature of Sustainable Development policy was perceived to put the EMD in a position to play a supervisory role over all other municipal functions. This was not something other departments and council members were ready to accept (Interview, Roberts 2008/04/26).
It was in this politicized context that the EMD began its engagement with climate change. Initial discussions in 1999 about forming a climate program were abandoned because of a lack of human and financial resources. But in 2000, US AID partnered with South Africa's national Department of Environment and Tourism to fund the participation of South African cities in ICLEI's CCP program. Durban was engaged in the program until its conclusion in 2006. Managed by the EMD, the USAID funded CCP initiative led to the city's first emissions inventory, as well as the beginning of its municipal building efficiency program. Running parallel to the CCP program was the city's engagement with the Kyoto Protocol's CDM program. This began in 2002, and would eventually lead to the city implementing a landfill methane-gas capture project to generate carbon credits that could be sold to signatories of the Kyoto protocol. Both the CDM and CCP programs were highly technical and managed by only a small number of
27 The establishment of D'MOSS was one area where the EMD had managed to convince municipal officials of the links between social, economic and environmental sustainability. Using the language of ecosystem services, the EMD undertook a study to estimate the financial value of the goods and services (i.e stormwater remediation, improved water supply, improved air quality) provided by the cities open spaces, often particularly crucial to the wellbeing of the city's poorest communities. The total replacement value of these services was estimated at R 2.24 billion per annum (Roberts 2002, 193). This allowed them to successfully lobby for the creation of the extensive open space system discussed above. 73 municipal employees. A lack of specialized skills within the EMD, together with the need to meet tight funding and performance deadlines, meant that the majority of the work was in fact done by consultants hired by the EMD. Driven largely by the objectives of external funders, these projects did little to develop internal understanding of climate change within the municipality (Interview, Roberts 2008/04/26, Roberts 2008).
A more internally rooted effort to create a coordinated response to climate change within the city only truly began in 2004. It was the result not of external funding, but of EMD director Debra Robert's own growing understanding of the impact that climate change could have on the city, and her determination to address the issue despite limited resources. This more locally relevant framing of the issue drove a deeply under-resourced initiative undertaken outside of the EMD's official mandate and regular working hours. “Quite literally,” Roberts summarized, “[work on climate change is] something that gets done after hours and on weekends”(Interview, Roberts 2008/04/26). At the time when this study started, the city's engagement with climate change rested on a very loosely linked set of one-off mitigation projects and a nascent Municipal Climate Protection Programme (MCPP) focused on adaptation. Despite passing mentions in the city's IDP, there is no overarching strategy to address climate change. Neither were there any municipal processes in place to intentionally involved citizens or civil-society groups in broader systems of climate governance. But as we will see, over the course of the study changing perceptions of the (local and national) political currency of climate change have led to more resources and significant institutional reform in some areas.
Beginning in 2005, the EMD attempted to reframe climate change within the municipality's around the issues of energy efficiency and renewable energy. Given the municipality (and all of South Africa's) reliance on coal-fired electricity, addressing the issue of energy would directly reduce the city's emissions. At the same time, energy held the possibility of being seen as a more neutral topic around which municipal actors could converge, without being hampered by the “green” anti-development associations that had dogged both the LA 21 and CCP programs. As we will see in Chapter 4 this effort met with mixed success.
Near the close of this research, international attention (arising from the World Cup and the city 74 being chosen to host the 2011 UNFCCC climate negotiations) had spurred interest within the municipality around establishing Durban as a “green metropolis,” positioning it competitively within the emerging discourse around competitive “green” urbanism and urban ecological modernization. It remains to be seen whether this will allow the city to move beyond the “anti- development” legacy of LA21 to strike a more successful balance between environmental responsibility and socio-economic development.
2.4 Portland: Introduction
Portland has made being a “green” or “sustainable” city a central element in its municipal brand. Widely cited as one of the leading American cities when it comes to innovative approaches to urban sustainability, it is one of the very few to have to reduced its emissions below 1990 levels (aiming to, but not succeeding at, matching or beating the Kyoto Protocol targets that the US federal government so famously rejected). At the same time, through a combination of well designed policies and a persistent commitment to public engagement and awareness-raising, the city has nurtured public support for climate and sustainability related projects. Portland's experiences show the mileage and the limitations of the “green growth” mantra in steering a city's development. But even more interesting, perhaps, are the multiple partnerships that underlay both city- and community-led sustainability projects, and what they say about the dynamics of urban climate governance.
Portland does not face the same type of development pressures as Durban. But it too has had to contend with institutional resistance to urban sustainability projects and with policies that call into question established municipal practices. In addition, like all US cities, Portland was hit hard by the 2008 financial crisis. The collapse of the housing sector in particular undercut several large green urban redevelopment projects, led to massive layoffs within the municipality, and scuttled hopes of more effectively regulating construction standards. 75
With a population of 582,130 in a metro region of 2.2 million, Portland is America's 30th largest city, and the 4th largest city on the West Coast. High-tech manufacturing defines the local economy of the Portland Metro Area. Intel is the largest employer (16,740 employees) and acts as an anchor for 1,200 other technology companies that make up what is know as “The Silicon Forest,” in reference to both Silicon Valley and the many trees in the metro area. The manufacturing and heavy manufacturing sector is also key to the economy of the city of Portland, with large employers in aerospace and infrastructure (including Boeing, Precision Cast Parts, and Northwest Pipe Co.), lumber products (Columbia Forest Products), computer technology (Siltronic), and sportswear (Nike, Adidas). Higher education (PSU, Oregon Health and Science University) is also a major employer, as is insurance and health care (Kaiser Health Plan, Providence Health Systems; PDC 2007).
Despite the statistical dominance of other economic sectors, the “green economy” and green economic growth has become the overarching narrative that frames the city's economic development strategies. Beginning with work in the late 1990s and early 2000s OSD, along with the Portland Development Commission, and with strong backing from elected officials and mayors, pursued an aggressive strategy of stimulating the green building sector through a combination of capacity building, incentives, regulations, and efforts to expand market demand (Portland 2003). This has helped build two local real estate development firms into national players in the green building market as well as a host of other smaller local companies active in the green building sector (discussed further below). Success in the green building sector has been the nucleus around which Portland has come to define its competitive strategy in terms of sustainability and green growth. As one municipal website boasts, Portland “has long been considered a living laboratory for urban innovation. In fact, that work has made sustainability our most powerful brand” (POSI undated). Much of this work is explicitly based on a hybrid form of entrepreneurial green governance that aims to bring together local communities, businesses, researchers, and government both to reduce local GHG emissions, improve quality of life, and secure Portland's place as a center for innovation in the new green economy (see POSI 2011). 76
Not all local economic actors are comfortable with this approach – the Oregon Home Builders Association (OHBA), for example – has vocally and effectively opposed attempts to create a more ambitious green building policy within the municipality. They argue that it constitutes undue government interference in the building sector and OHBA leadership oppose it on political grounds as part of a larger neo-liberal campaign against 'big government' (Interview, Jon Chandler CEO OHBA 2008/11/05). Their views are echoed by another large company in Portland's development and real estate sector (Interview, Byron Courts, Director of Engineering Melvin Mark Companies 2010/06/28). Overall, however, local companies are active and supportive participants in the city's green growth strategy. The strategy has also been successful in attracting outside interest: in 2009 the city was selected to be one of four pilot cities for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund's national Climate Prosperity Project (which aims to showcase “how innovation and economic development can move our society to a carbon-free future” (CPP, undated)). In 2010 Danish Vestas (the world's largest wind turbine manufacturer) announced that it would site its North American headquarters in Portland.
This basic strategy of ecomodernisation (linking environmental initiatives with economic growth) began with the municipality's work on energy efficiency and green-building (discussed further below and in Chapter 5). Recently however, Portland has begun setting increasingly ambitious goals that have pushed it beyond the limits of this focus on the green economy. This is most clearly visible in the 2010 Climate Action Plan (discussed further in Chapter 5 and 8). The plan has adopted a broad and ambitious strategy that applies the more holistic vision of local climate policy outlined in the discussion of “local integrated” approaches to climate change in Chapter 1.
Politically, Portland has a long tradition of being strongly aligned with the Democratic party at both a national and state level. All city elected representative at both levels are Democrats. Local party politics is non-partisan, but the majority of Portland elected officials and mayors have been Democrats. A significant number of them have also been drawn from civil-society organizations (discussed below). These left-leaning local politics have created a generally sympathetic context 77 for climate-change- related policies. (They have also earned the city the nickname of “The People's Republic of Portland” among more conservative neighboring municipalities.) At the same time, regardless of the political party in power at the national level, the city has been effective in mobilizing external financial resources from a variety of sources to support local green initiatives. This includes diverting federal funding for freeway expansion to local public transit in the 1970s, finding federal seed funding to establish the city's green building program and OSD in the late 1990s, taking advantage of G.W. Bush era home renewable energy subsidies, and competing for portions of the federal funding dispensed under Obama's 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act28.
Municipal politics follows a now uncommon city commission government system (it is in fact the last large U.S. city to still employ this system). The Mayor is one of five non-partisan elected city commissioners who make up city council. Each Commissioner oversees a portfolio of municipal bureaus, offices, and other agencies. In this capacity, the Commissioners exercise a combination of legislative, administrative, and quasi-judicial powers. On the first count, City Council passes the laws policies and regulations that govern the city, and also approves the municipal budget. Administratively commissioners are also responsible for directly overseeing the work of the bureaus which they have been assigned, and ensuring that policies approved by council are carried out. Their quasi-judicial powers come from the fact that they also hear land- use and certain other types of appeals.
The mayor in this system – unlike “Strong Mayor” and Council system used by a large majority of U.S. cities – does not wield a veto over council decisions. Their one distinction is that it is the mayor who assigns municipal bureaus to the various other Commissioners. It is common, therefore, for the mayor to claim oversight over high-profile departments like the Bureau of Planning, Police, Transportation, and the Portland Development Commission. Overseeing departments with large budgets and direct influence over the municipalities development grants
28 ARRA Funds are being used by various projects throughout the city, including a US$135 million green retrofit of a downtown federal office building, a net-zero emissions campus project at Portland Community College, and investments in public transit, and green energy infrastructure and energy efficiency programs through the ARRA's Energy Efficiency Block Grants Program. 78 the mayor marginally more power than other Commissioners. But given that city policy is determined by majority vote in City Council, the mayor is still heavily constrained by the necessity to negotiate with other Commissioners (Portland undated, “City Government Structure”).
Following its creation, OSD was seen as a minor agency within the municipality, far beneath major capital bureaus like Planning and Transportation in the hierarchy of municipal agencies. Nonetheless, the ecomodernist approach to 'green growth' that OSD has promoted has been largely supported by City Council, as well as the city's green-building community. This has allowed addressing climate change to become one of the drivers behind the city's development strategy. At the same time, active civil-society engagement with climate change and urban sustainability (discussed below and in Chapter 8) have helped to push the city beyond narrow discussions focused on ecological modernization and the pursuit of ecologically efficient economic growth. Both private sector and community focused forms of governance had therefore created a much more uniformly supportive (although not completely uncontested) context for integrated climate change planning than was present in Durban during the course of this research.
2.4.1 Portland: Emissions Profile and Early Climate Policies and Projects Portland's engagement with climate change dates back to the early 1990s, when it became one of the first cities in the world to commit to specific, citywide reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and was part of the initial cohort of cities that helped to found ICLEI. Portland's 1993 “Global Warming Reduction Strategy”29 (Portland 1993) was the first municipal climate change policy in the United States. In preparation for the 1993 plan, the city conducted its first community-wide GHG emissions inventory in 1990. It carried out a second one in 2000, and began annual inventories in 2005. Like Durban, its inventories follow guidelines and employ emissions tracking software developed by ICLEI.
29 Also sometimes called the “Carbon Dioxide Reduction Strategy.” 79
The transportation sector is the predominant source of the Portland area's30 emissions, accounting for approximately 3.3 million tons of CO2e per year, or 38 per cent of Portland's 2008 total of 8.5
31 million tons of CO2e emissions. This is followed by emissions from energy used in commercial (25 per cent) and residential (21 per cent) buildings, and industry (15 per cent) (Portland 2009; see fig. 3). When looked at by fuel source, electricity accounts for 41 per cent of Portland's emissions with 44 per cent of the County's electricity coming from coal (Portland 2009, fig. 4). Thanks to multiple regularly conducted inventories (something not available for Durban) it is also possible to note that, following a spike in 2000, Portland's emissions have decreased to 1.2 per cent below the city's 1990 levels by 2008, this despite population growth of over 18 per cent during the same period (table 2.1).
Portland's initial “Global Warming Reduction Strategy” called for a 20 per cent reduction
32 (relative to 1988 levels) in citywide CO2 emissions by 2010 (Portland 1993). The overall reduction target was spread across six broad areas: transportation, energy efficiency, renewable resources and co-generation, recycling, tree planting, and advocacy at other levels of government. Of the six areas, energy efficiency was assigned the most ambitious objectives: through increases in energy efficiency, emissions were to be cut 25 per cent in residential uses, 20 per cent in commercial, and 15 per cent in industrial. Actual reductions have not matched these objectives. The most recent inventory shows a 1 per cent and 2 per cent increase in emissions from building energy use and transportation respectively. But if population growth is taken into account, the city's achievements in these areas are still important.
Emissions reduction projects in each of these sectors have been balanced between broad
30 The municipality of Portland does not maintain its own discrete carbon emissions inventory. Rather, an inventory is conducted that covers Portland and the surrounding Multnomah County. The majority of the County's population, economic, and industrial, activity are located within Portland.
31 CO2e (or equivalent CO2) is a measure of GHG emissions based on a mathematical conversion that allows quantities of non-CO2 GHG emissions (methane for example) to be given in terms of the amount of CO2 that would have the same impact in terms of radiative forcing. In the case of municipal emissions inventories, expressing emissions in CO2e allows for the creation of one unified total which brings together a variety of GHGs. 32 This ambitious emissions reduction target was scaled back to 10 per cent reduction in GHGs in a subsequent update to the strategy (Portland 2001). 80 educational and awareness-raising campaigns (aiming to build capacity and engagement within the city) and targeted incentives and regulations. Embodying a Foucauldian model of dispersed, omnipresent, and facilitative power, the city provides a range of programs targeting more specific segments of Portland's population33. For developers, designers, and builders, the city provides a clear and user friendly metric for gauging and improving the emissions efficiency of their projects (Portland LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design34]), as well as incentives, education, and technical assistance to help achieve reductions. For homeowners and tenants, fix-it fairs and neighbourhood energy-efficiency workshops provide the resources and materials necessary for residential efficiency retrofits. Businesses receive education, assistance, incentives, and an annual award (the BEST award) to incite them to reduce their carbon emissions. Finally, religious groups, city employees, students, community groups, and cooperatives are all targeted by specific outreach initiatives (Rutland & Aylett 2008). Through these efforts, OSD has sought to help create broader networks of climate governance that extend the reach of local climate responses beyond the reach of municipal policies.
More direct regulations have primarily been implemented in the Green Building sector. A
33 Although much discussed in certain circles, facilitative power is itself still something of an intuitive oxymoron. It fits uneasily in the simple opposition between individual freedom and coercive state power to which we have become accustomed. A good deal of Foucault's later work aimed to show that power did not need to be coercive, or be embodied in the clenched fist of an authoritative state, to be effective (Foucault 1991, 2007). And yet Foucauldian analyses often retain a vague sense of conspiracy and intrigue. Could Portland's approach not simply be interpreted as a city's efforts to educate and empower its citizens? Yes, to a point. My argument in referencing Foucault here is that empowerment is not a neutral, entirely liberating, or directionless process (Cruikshank, 1999); Portland empowered its citizens to do certain things and not others. No tools, for example, were provided to assist citizens in lobbying for more effective regulation of large corporations. Power in this sense is productive, rather than repressive. It produces, or attempts to produce, specific types of action, and in so doing steers us away from other courses of action. For a more detailed discussion, see Rutland & Aylett 2008. 34 Portland is one of many municipalities to employ the US Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) accreditation system. As explained in the city's 2001 Green Building Policy: “The City of Portland Green Building Policy is tied, in part, to the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design(LEED) rating system developed by the US Green Building Council (USGBC). The USGBC was formed in 1993 to accelerate the adoption of green building practices, technologies, policies, and standards. The USGBC developed LEED to help stimulate green building market transformation. USGBC membership consists of more than 400 organizations including product manufacturers, environmental non profit organizations, building and design professionals, building owners, and local and state governments. The City of Portland joined the USGBC in 1999. LEED is a third party certification system designed for rating new and existing commercial, institutional, and high- rise residential buildings. The use of LEEDhelps to establish minimum performance levels, create a common design and construction practices framework, and allows Portland to measure its sustainable building performance relative to other jurisdictions using LEED. In addition, USGBC provides technical rulings, training, networking and marketing to members. ” (Portland 2001 Green Building Policy Exhibit A, p. 2) 81
Municipal Green Building Policy was introduced in 2001 (and updated in 2005 and 2009) that first required all municipal buildings to seek basic LEED certification, then stipulated a minimum LEED Gold rating for new municipal construction, and finally, in 2009, expanded the Policy to place standards on the operations and maintenance of existing buildings (LEED EBOM Silver). The 2001 policy also stated that the Portland Development Commission35 (the agency responsible for urban renewal, affordable housing, and economic development) had to require that private sector developers achieve LEED certification for all buildings that had received municipal assistance as part of urban revitalization projects. In 2005, the requirement was increased from basic certification to LEED Silver (see Portland Green Building Policy 2009, Policy # BCP-ENB-9.01). This helped prompt a major shift in two of the city's major developers (Hoyt Realty, and the Gerding Edlen Development Company) who have since become leaders in LEED certified development (Interviews, Dennis Wilde CEO Gerding Edlen 2010/06/16, Doug Shapiro Vice President of Construction Hoyt Realty 2010/06/17). A new green -building policy is currently the subject of ongoing debates. It would use a combination of fees and rebates to encourage broader adoption of green building practices among smaller private developers and homebuilders (Interviews, Vinh Mason OSD 2008/11/03 & 2010/06/11).
Tackling the 41 per cent of Portland's emissions that come from its electricity supply have proved much harder. As part of the 2001 Climate Change Action Plan, the municipality committed to purchasing 100 per cent of its electricity from renewable resources (wind, solar, geothermal, wind, ocean wave, and small hydroelectric) by 2010 (Portland 2001). Because of unexpectedly high costs and a shortage of supply, the municipality has fallen far short of this goal. The actual level for 2010 was only 9 per cent, and the 2009 Climate Change Action Plan deferred the 100 per cent goal to 2012. The 2009 plan, reacting to this regional shortage of
35 Created in 1958, the Portland Development Commission provides funding and planning support for affordable housing, neighbourhood revitalization, and services to businesses seeking to expand or relocate to the Portland Area. It is governed by its own Commission, appointed by the mayor, but distinct from City Council. After projects are approved by PDC they are also reviewed and approved by city council. PDC has overseen high- profile urban redevelopment of former industrial land, including projects such as the Portland's Pearl district (similar to Vancouver's Yaletown), and the city's South Waterfront area. PDC also provides smaller loans to individual low-income homeowners to help with home maintenance and renovations. PDC is funded by a combination of grants from federal and other agencies, income earned on assets, contracts for services, tax increment financing, allocations from the City of Portland General Fund, and private sector donations and lending agreements. 82 renewable energy, has also broadened its focus on purchasing green energy to include targets for the production of energy within Multnomah county. By 2030 the city is pledging that 10 per cent of the total energy used within Multnomah County will be produced “from on-site renewable sources and clean district energy systems” (Portland 2009, 35). Short-term targets include the installation of 10MW of on-site renewable within the city, and the establishment of a $50million investment fund to provide low-interest capital to residents and businesses. This fund would facilitate energy efficiency retrofits and the installation of renewable energy generation systems. As we will see in Chapter 8, so far it has been community groups – not the municipality – that have led the push to install local renewables. Their efforts emerged from immanent networks of climate governance that the city has since helped to support.
Given the wide array of programs that the city is running, it may come as a surprise to learn that to date they have had relatively little impact on the city's emissions. The reduction of Portland's emissions below 1990 levels is in fact due to five discrete factors that lie almost entirely outside of the municipality’s control: a 1970s state-mandated urban growth boundary that has prevented urban sprawl, a shift away from heavy industry in the local economy, an increase in electricity costs and a decrease in the carbon intensity of the regional energy grid, and increased methane- gas capture at local landfills (Portland 2009). This is not to say that Portland's initiatives are ineffective, but that their results will not be seen for some time. Green-building standards, for example, will have a significant impact on the emissions profile of the city over the next 40 years. But these impacts will be cumulative and incremental as residential and commercial building stock is slowly renewed or replaced. The city's many programs have also helped build a public support and demand for green projects. But as research began for this dissertation, the city had yet to turn that into significant reductions.
Unlike Durban, Portland has almost completely overlooked the issue of adaptation. This is partly due to relatively mild predicted impacts of climate change for the Pacific Northwest. The possibility of millions of people flooding into the region as “climate refugees” displaced from the American Southwest is the one issue that had garnered a fair amount of public discussion 83
(Lang 2008) during the period under study. But while not as extreme as the risks faced by Durban, by the end of the century Portland may still have to contend with an increase in average temperatures of between 3° to 10° F. Lower winter snowpack will reduce streamflows and strain water supplies; increased wildfires and insect outbreaks may put pressure on the region’s important forestry sector; and rising water temperatures will decrease habitat for salmon and other cold water fish (NOAA 2009). The city's lack of engagement with adaptation may be related to a more general mis-perception among North American cities that the impacts of climate change will only be felt elsewhere and that mitigation is the real priority for Northern cities.36
2.4.2 Institutional History and Context of Portland's Engagement with CC As discussed, the city of Portland was an early adopter when it came to municipal climate policy. Portland's experience decades earlier with energy and environmental issues, as well as a supportive state level context, helps explain the city's early engagement with climate change. In the 1970s, rapidly rising demand coupled with major droughts meant that energy use began to outstrip the capacity of the region's primarily hydro-based electricity supply. Nuclear power was seen as the solution, but colossal mismanagement of the project resulted in regional utilities defaulting on $2.25 billion in debt and an eight fold increase in energy prices over a period of months. During the same period, the number of Pacific Salmon returning to spawn in the Columbia river dropped dramatically. This was attributed, in error, to the impact of hydro dams on the river. These two issues brought together a diverse group of environmental, business, and ratepayers groups around the common cause of energy conservation. Conservation, it was argued, would both reduce energy costs and environmental pressures on the river system by making it unnecessary to build future hydro installation (see Rutland & Aylett 2008 for a more detailed account of these events).
In 1979, following the OPEC embargo and shortages, Portland passed its first municipal energy
36 ICLEI's CCP program is a perfect example of this, and in fact has helped spread this view of climate change among North American and European cities. The CCP program, founded in 1993, deals exclusively with mitigation. It was only in 2010 that ICLEI released it's adaptation focused Climate Resilient Communities Program. 84 policy that, like the 1993 Carbon Strategy, aimed to reduce energy consumption and to increase energy efficiency in residential, commercial, and industrial sectors. That same year the city founded an Energy Office to help manage the policy. One year later Congress passed a similar policy, the Pacific Northwest Electric Power Planning and Conservation Act, establishing efficiency as the first priority of the energy system for the whole Pacific Northwest Region.38 Henceforth, new investments in supply could be undertaken only if no cost-effective conservation projects could be identified.
At a state level, Oregon adopted its first carbon reduction goal in 1989. In 1997 the state passed the first state or federal U.S. law explicitly focused on reducing carbon emissions, and in 2007 the legislature passed House Bill 3543 and adopted an official target of reducing state emissions to 10 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, and 75 percent below by 2050. Although it does not impose any specific policy responses or performance standards from local governments, it has required that major electrical utilities increase their supply of renewable energy. The state is also a signatory to a now uncertain attempt to create a cap-and-trade system involving six U.S. States and four Canadian Provinces.39
The measures covered above are all important supporting context for Portland's engagement with climate change. But the single most important piece of legislation, the one that has helped make possible Portland's current emissions reductions, is the state-wide land-use planning policy adopted by the Oregon Legislature in 1973. Led by then Gov. Tom McCall, Senate Bill 100 (also America's first land-use planning law) required all municipalities to create a comprehensive development plan that coordinated future development and delimited an urban growth boundary around the municipality. The effect of the boundary was to concentrate development within
38 The Act defines the Pacific Northwest region as: “the area consisting of the states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho; the portion of the state of Montana west of the Continental Divide; the portions of the states of Nevada, Utah and Wyoming within the Columbia River drainage basin; and specified contiguous areas.” [online: http://www.nwcouncil.org/library/poweract/summary.htm , downloaded 2011/04/07] 39 Known as the Western Climate Initiative, the project began in 2007. The fate of the project is uncertain however as little progress has been made in recent years, Arizona has withdrawn from the agreement and British Columbia has expressed uncertainty about its participation. Current WCI membership includes the U.S. States of: California, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington. Canadian Provinces who have signed on include: British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec. 85 existing city centers, prevent sprawl, and preserve farm and forest land. Portland's urban growth boundary was adopted in 1979, and helped make possible high density, mixed use and transit oriented development, all of which has held transportation related emissions in check within Portland's urban area.40
Portland's early work on energy efficiency and dense transit oriented urban planning also had important institutional ramifications. These early initiatives helped create the groundwork for a series of reorganizations which have brought energy and climate policy ever closer to the heart of the city's approach to planning. The Energy Office was the initial home of climate-related policies and programs within the city. Between 1979, when the Office was founded, and the CO2 Reduction Strategy that it put forward in 1993, the discourse that surrounded the Office's focus on Energy Efficiency had shifted. Concerns over energy costs and the health of the Columbia River system were replaced by a focus on Portlanders' broader impacts on the global climate.
Despite this change of framing, the focus remained very much on energy efficiency, as can be seen, for example, in the very similar goals of the 1979, and 1993 policies. By 1998 however, Energy Office head Susan Anderson had developed a variety of ideas which did not fit into that narrow frame. She found herself with $25,000 leftover from a US Department of Energy grant, which had funded a commercial energy efficiency program. Anderson then approached the city's commissioners – in particular Eric Sten (who oversaw the Energy Office) and Dan Saltzman (a second commissioner very engaged with environmental issues in the city) – with a proposal that the extra money be used to fund a green building program. That program would go beyond increasing the efficiency of existing buildings and promote new design principles that integrated techniques for energy, water, and resource conservation into the underlying designs of public and private buildings in the city. The commissioners were supportive and in 1999 the Energy Office kicked of a two year “Green Building Initiative.” The Initiative set about to mainstream green building techniques within the city by providing training to local tradespeople, building
40 Portland Metro Government provides more information on on the Urban Growth Boundary and Senate Bill 100 on-line see http://www.oregonmetro.gov/index.cfm/go/by.web/id=277, [consulted 2011/05/09]. See also Oregon Encyclopedia “Senate Bill 100” http://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/entry/view/senate_bill_100/ [consulted 2011/05/09]. 86 consumer demand through public education campaigns, and reducing barriers by streamlining regulatory procedures and providing technical assistance to industry professionals (SPC 1999). This approach to market transformation embodies the facilitative role that would later become the hallmark of Anderson's work within the municipality.
The conversations about the green building program (which proposed a more holistic way of addressing building performance) provided Anderson and Commissioner Sten with an opportunity to raise more general questions: was there not also a more holistic way of approaching the city's various sustainability related programs? In the end, one year after approving the new green building program, the municipal government decided to merge the city's solid waste and recycling program with the Energy Office, the Green Building Initiative, and an existing advisory Sustainable Portland Commission to create the Office of Sustainable Development (OSD). As well as a solid institutional home, this arrangement also gave Anderson and her team a small but reliable source of funding derived from the fees and revenue associated with the waste and recycling functions they now supervised (OSD 2002)41.
The idea for OSD itself was not a new one – Anderson recalls discussing it with Commissioner Sten as much as 10 years earlier – but between 1998 and 2000 the political will coalesced to take it to fruition (Anderson, Interview 2008/10/29). Likewise, OSD found ready partners in the Bureaus of Planning and Transportation, where the creation of the Urban Growth Boundary had helped establish approaches to urbanization very much in keeping with OSD's goals for creating a low-emissions city. As we will see however, there were clear limits to OSD's role as facilitator within the municipality, and orchestrating a transition to a more direct leadership role was not without problems. More on OSD and how it functioned within the city will be discussed in Chapter 5.
41 In 2002, for example, of the US$3million received into the Solid Waste Management Fund, roughly US$600,000 ( 20%) was transferred to activities outside of OSD's waste management division. (OSD 2002) 87 2.5 Conclusions: Making Climate Policy Their Own
“I was appointed in 1994 and there was no Environmental Management function. .... When I got here they didn’t have an office for me and they had no idea what to do with me at all. I don’t think there was any clarity about what my mandate was going to be. I think they thought that I would going to plant flowers outside city hall or something.” - Debra Roberts, Head Durban Environmental Management Department. 2008/04/26
"[When I started] I was still not really hired by the city or anything, I was this little intern person who was walking around and talking to city council members saying 'global warming is real' and they began to really believe that it was too.” "I wouldn't say 'sustainability', no one knew what it meant, it had too many syllables, people would ask 'what the hell is she talking about?" - Susan Anderson, Head Portland Office of Sustainable Development, 2008/10/29
During fieldwork, I came upon moments of almost uncanny parallelism between the experience of the people closest to the climate agenda in both Durban and Portland. These were times when, across enormous distances, people seemed to speak with one voice. The quotes above, from the two people most central to their city's climate programs, are one of those moments. Each started their work in the early 1990s, inside of a municipal context with only a very limited understanding of what their role and influence was going to be. Both are now power players within their municipalities; nothing could be further from their current positions than the image of a “little intern” “planting flowers.” Rather than narrowly applying imported methodologies to create minor changes, through their commitment and skill both women put into motion a process of defining approaches to sustainability and climate policy firmly rooted in local conditions and concerns.
In their initial phases, Durban and Portland's responses to climate change took root in ground prepared by preceding environmental programs, larger state or federal level influences, and international networks. Outside influences have therefore played a key role in establishing environmental sustainability as an urban policy issue. In Durban, the influence of LA 21, the federal devolution of environmental responsibilities to municipalities, the best-practices 88 promoted by international organizations like ICLEI and SCI, and the funding offered by both development agencies like USAID, and international mechanisms like the Kyoto protocol's CDM carbon credit market have all left clear influences on the city's climate projects. These have not always been positive influences, however, as the controversial course of the LA21 process clearly shows. In Portland, the state mandated Urban Growth Boundary, the ICLEI and SCI methodologies, and state (mis)management of the regional electricity supply have all had their impact on climate policy. As each city negotiated these multiple influences, they began with a scattered project-based engagement with the issue. Slowly through a process of institution building, orchestrated largely by the persistent leadership of EMD and OSD, these projects gave rise to a desire to create a more strategic and coherent climate response strategy. While outside programs and agencies may have started the ball rolling, it is this dedication on the part of a few municipal staff members that has allowed the game to continue to evolve and embed itself within the municipality.
Anderson and Roberts (and their small staffs) steered climate policy through initial periods of political indifference or opposition, to slowly position them as an established (if not uncontested) variables within the larger municipal policy discourse. In the case study chapters that follow, we encounter Durban and Portland as they move away from marginal and unfocused beginnings. Distancing themselves from an initial period heavily determined by outside influences and past experiences with urban environmental policies, municipal officials and civil-society leaders in both cities are making climate change their own. On the part of municipal officials in OSD and EMD, this has meant a shift from scattered projects to a focus on creating systemic shifts towards a low-carbon future for the municipality. For community groups (whose history is covered in Chapters 7 and 8), this shift can be seen in significant environmental achievements (both on their own and in collaboration with the municipality), notably in areas where the city itself was having trouble achieving results. Far from being complete, both cities are still actively in the process of developing integrated local responses to climate change. It is at this point that the case studies that follow pick up the thread of Durban and Portland's engagement with climate policies and programs. This research has not been designed to isolate what variables make Durban and Portland distinct from other cities whose engagements with climate change have 89 been shallower. I have not conducted comparative case studies of lower performing cities. But in what follows I hope to provide some detailed insights into the specific circumstances and approaches that have contributed to both cities successes and failures. It is my hope that beyond being of academic interest, these may help other cities as they to attempt a transition from project-based to integrated approaches to urban climate policy.
90 Chapter 3 : A Cultural Approach to Understanding Organisational Change
3.1 Introduction
In this chapter I lay out the theoretical framework that I will use to analyse the internal dynamics that both constrain and enable municipal attempts to create integrated responses to climate change. As I discussed in chapter one, accounts of the creation and operation of systems of local climate governance tend to depict the local state as an irreducible unitary actor. The historical context for climate policy in both Durban and Portland, however, clearly shows that municipalities are themselves deeply internally divided. There are often fundamental differences over how environmental issues are interpreted both within and between municipal agencies. Enacting local environmental policies, therefore, means negotiating the multiple (and sometimes oppositional) relationships that exist between those urban institutions. It is impossible to understand municipal climate policies and approaches to climate governance without understanding – even if only partially and imperfectly – the complex internal context of municipal bureaucracies.
To do this, I need to provide a theoretical tool kit able to explain: first, the principles and goals which have guided the structure and logic of modern bureaucracies; second, how these structures steer institutional responses to changed conditions; and finally, the tactics used by specific actors to challenge the inertia of established departmental practises and (attempt to) put the municipality on a new course. This is not an easy task. I have approached it by bringing together distinct but complementary critical perspectives drawn from the study of bureaucracies and complex institutions during the late 19th and 20th century. Rather than providing an exhaustive survey of this work, my aim will be to provide sufficient detail about specific concepts to prepare the ground for the analysis of the case studies that follows in chapters four and five.
I will begin with a short discussion of Weber's (1922 [1946]) idealized vision of highly efficient, rational, and hierarchical bureaucratic structures. Weber argued that the effectiveness of these 91 structures at managing the complex realities of the modern state and capitalist economies was such that they would ultimately redefine all of western culture. While many critiques and alternatives to his model have been proposed, it remains a useful summary of the types of institutional structures used in many municipalities to pursue the rational management of urban life.
With Weber as a guide to understanding the intended function of municipal structures, I will turn to a larger body of work beginning with Veblen (1898) that calls into question both the rationality and the efficiency of the Weberian civil service. This discussion will bring together concepts drawn together from the sociological works of Veblen (1898, 1914, 1918) and Merton (1940), as well as more recent work in political science (March and Olsen 1989, 2004), geography (Schoenberger 1997), and science studies (Haraway 1991, Latour 1987).
This eclectic and broadly defined approach to the analysis of bureaucratic structures is based in part on the critical framework employed by Erica Schoenberger in her 1997 book The Cultural Crisis of the Firm. In this work, Schoenberger studies the inability of large American companies to respond effectively to changing conditions, despite the fact that the need for change was glaring and the costs of failure were high. Why would powerful organizations pursue outdated or ineffective practices to the point of near or total extinction, despite abundant signals that a change of course was necessary? To approach an answer Schoenberger argues that we need to look – not at why organizations fight against change – but rather at how the existing technical and cultural arrangements within organizations shape their responses to new circumstances, and determine which response strategies are accepted or rejected.
There are clear parallels between her research and the challenges faced by municipalities as they engage with climate change. As I have discussed in chapters one and two, cities are beginning to adapt their existing practices to the new challenge before them. But various institutional factors shape the direction of this change, and establish the parameters within which struggles over the shape of climate policy take place. Following Schoenberger, I am going to approach municipal institutions as dynamic entities. Their responses to the need for change are determined by processes of interpretation founded on established technical practices, social structures, and 92 worldviews. New courses of action are the outcome of this process of interpretation that attempts to reconcile two conflicting imperatives: the need for innovation, and the desire to preserve the assets and hierarchies of power grounded in the old order.
Asking simply why bureaucratic organizations resist change is already to head off in the wrong direction. Organizations are not entirely reactionary. They clearly do change, but they do so in specific ways. The analytical approach adopted here focuses on the processes that determine why some (but not necessarily the best) strategies gain acceptance while others do not.
To guide this cultural analysis of municipal organizations, the analytical concepts that I will be using begin by examining bureaucracies from the point of view of individuals working within them. I will discuss Veblen's concept of “trained incapacity” (and its subsequent elaboration by Merton) as a way of understanding how institutional structures shape the way individuals see their work, their identity, and create the worldview through which they judge and act on the world around them. From this focus on the individual, I will expand to the level of the institution as a whole to examine how institutions intentionally cultivate an “organizational culture” (a common worldview composed of shared technical, ethical, and ontological frameworks) as a way of establishing unity and consistency across large and complex organizations. Both trained incapacity and organizational cultures contribute to the overall path dependency of an organization. I will then draw on March and Olsen's (1989, 2004) concept of the “logic of appropriateness” to show in more detail the process through which individuals fall back on established worldviews to guide their responses to changed circumstances.
But not all members of a bureaucracy experience these processes in the same way. Completing the arc of the core of this chapter, I will return to the analysis of individuals, but this time with a focus on the most powerful. Senior management are both the most empowered and the most constrained when it comes to guiding organizational change. They hold a monopoly over the power to creatively envision an organization's objectives and direction, and they are central to establishing the technical practices, social structures, and underlying organizational culture which grounds and naturalizes them. At the same time, as the founders of the existing institutional order they have much to lose if fundamental shifts make their personal skills and 93 approach to management obsolete. This section will draw on Schoenberger's analysis (1997) of how the power to create corporate strategy is centralized under directors whose personal identities are both formative of and formed by the institutional structures they create.
It is not enough though to simply provide better insights into the dynamics that constrain innovation. In the concluding section of this chapter, I will discuss two different approaches to reducing organizational path dependency and enabling more innovative responses to changed circumstances. The first, based on Latour's analysis of how the “translation of interests” (1987) can enable coalition building among disparate actors, will look at strategies for guiding change within existing organizational cultures and structures. It proposes ways of working within current constraints to achieve more productive ends. The second, based on works by Schoenberger (1997) and Haraway (1991), argues for broader organizational reforms based on a radical decentralization of the power to craft organizational strategy. Throughout this chapter I will provide brief examples, drawn from my case studies to help ground these theoretical discussions and make clear there interrelations.
The case studies in this section of the dissertation (chapters 4 and 5) will examine how contested responses to climate change (or climate relevant policies) have played out both within and between municipal departments. In Durban (chapter 4), I show how the implementation of renewable energy technology was held back by the internal dynamics of the local energy utility. I focus specifically on senior management who were unable to see beyond established organizational practices and relationships established through their role in the hierarchical distribution of coal-fired electricity. Unexpectedly, renewable energy has instead been most aggressively pursued by the bureau responsible for water and sewage. This is thanks in part to a management dedicated to fostering decentralized innovation and collaborative problem solving that echo arguments made by Schoenberger and Haraway. The discussion of Portland (chapter 5) will pull back one level to look at the way in which a relatively marginal institutional actor, the Office of Sustainable Development (OSD), promoted the mainstreaming of climate change by negotiating competing priorities within the municipal bureaucracy as a whole. Here again, established organizational cultures were a significant barrier. But as I will discuss, through a process of translation and by enabling a loose network of decentralized innovation, OSD has 94 helped orchestrate significant change within the municipality.
3.2 Weber and the Modern Bureaucracy
Writing in the early years of the 20th century, Weber argued that bureaucracy was the most efficient and effective organisational form for guiding human affairs. He held that it was the only approach to administration capable of addressing the complex tasks that arose as modern states centralized control over increasingly large territories and populations, and regulated the modern capitalist economy. In Economy and Society (1922 [1946]), Weber defined an ideal bureaucratic structure composed of a cascading hierarchy of expert bureaucrats (produced by programs of technical training), who take action in clearly bounded areas of authority by neutrally implementing written rules. These systems depend on constant processes of rational categorization and calculation, which are used to classify individual problems, assigning them to the appropriate unit within the institution, and producing suitable responses by applying pre- established rules and procedures. Information flows up the hierarchy, and directives flow down (see fig. 1).
This division of labour and its rationally determined systems of rules ensures stable and predictable behaviour across all levels of an organisation. Individuals are placed within these highly formalized structures according to their specialized training which has given them the skills necessary to fulfil the duties of their office. Their performance is ensured through systems of rewards (incremental salary increases, promotion, and retirement pensions) and if these are not sufficient formal systems of review exist to hold them to account (Weber 1922 [1946], 337- 340, see also Merton 1940).
For Weber, bureaucracy – among public, private, religious, and social organizations of all kinds – was the defining characteristic of modern society. “Without it,” he argued, “a society like our own – with a separation of officials, employees, and workers from ownership of the means of production, dependent on discipline and on technical training – could no longer function” (1922 95
[1947], 338). Bureaucracy was unavoidable precisely because of it effectiveness:
Experience tends universally to show that the purely bureaucratic type of administrative organization...is, from a purely technical point of view, capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency and is in this sense formally the most rational known means of carrying out imperative control over human beings. It is superior to any other form [of organization] in precision, in stability, in the stringency of its discipline, and in its reliability. It thus makes possible a particularly high degree of calculability of results for the heads of the organization and for those acting in relation to it. …
[I]t is sheer illusion to think for a moment that continuous administrative work can be carried out in a any field except by means of officials working in offices. … For the needs of mass administration to-day, it is completely indispensable. The choice is only that between bureaucracy and diletantism in the field of administration. (Weber 1922 [1946], 337).
March and Olsen (1989) provide a further explanation of the underlying assumptions of this administratively approach to controlling complex situations by dividing them into small manageable parts, divorced from each other, and guided by predetermined prescribed rules which seek to insulate bureaucratic objectivity from political interference:
The premise of organisation is that not everything can be attended to at once, though, in principle such attention is required for a comprehensive solution. A central anomaly of institutions is that they increase capability by reducing comprehensiveness. ... Politics is uncoupled from administration, and various parts of administration are uncoupled from each other. ... The uncouplings are justified not by a judgement that the aspects are independent but by the assumption that the errors introduced by treating them independently are less than the errors introduced by trying (and failing) to treat them as interdependent. (March and Olsen 1989, 17)
[S]ome of the major capabilities of modern institutions come from their effectiveness in substituting rule-bound behaviour for individually autonomous behaviour. Routines make it possible to coordinate many simultaneous activities in a way that makes them mutually consistent. Routines help avoid conflicts; they provide codes of meaning that facilitate interpretation of ambiguous worlds; they constrain bargaining within comprehensive terms and enforce agreements; they help mitigate the unpredictability created by open structures...by regulating the access of participants, problems, individual identities, interests, values, and worldviews, thus constraining the allocation of attention, standards of evaluation, priorities, perceptions, and resources. (March and Olsen 1989, 24) 96
Both within and across institutions, problems are reduced to their component parts and organisational units are created to address them. Rules are then derived which guide action across the entirety of the organisation. It is this correspondence between organisational structures and rational rule-bound behaviour, as determined by senior leadership (who are the only ones with influence over the aims of the organisation), that yields a coordinated whole from these individual units of jurisdiction, calculation, and action.
The structure of municipal bureaucracies, like Durban's Department of Water and Sanitation for example (illustrated in fig. 3.2), follow many of these Weberian principles of rule-bound specialization and the pursuit of administrative efficiencies through separation of complex problems into discrete areas of intervention. It should be noted that Fig.3.2 stops at the level of managers; in a full organogram a further hierarchy of command and specialization would descend down through various units to the level of individual line-function employees at their desks or, as the case may be, in the city's sewers flash-light in hand.
3.2.1 Weber's Nightmare: the Cultural Costs of Bureaucratization Although celebratory of bureaucratic institutions' ability to effectively govern complex modern societies, Weber was critical of the costs that bureaucratization imposed in terms of loss of individuality, autonomy, and freedom (Weber 1905 [2002], 1909 [1944], 1922 [1946]). Weber saw the ideal bureaucrat as the personification of a cold rational process of calculation that was inexorably coming to dominate modern society. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) he used the now famous metaphor of the “iron cage” to describe how devotion to rationalism and specialization had come to replace other religious or ethical ideals, and reshaped western culture. In a 1909 lecture delivered in Vienna, Weber speaks with horror of a “passion for bureaucracy” which is driving the comprehensive rationalization of all human life and reshaping individual identity so that “each man becomes a little cog” dedicated to the pursuit of ever greater technical efficiency (Weber 1909 [1944] quoted in Sica 2004, 120).
This idea of a “passion for bureaucracy” is a contradictory one. The very essence of bureaucracy, after all, is the disciplining of passion. Systems of rule-bound technical proficiency serve to replace passion with more dependable and efficient process of rational calculation. Weber's 97 nightmare of a world populated with “little cogs,” however, show his fears that rationalism would exceed its intended purpose and – in the pursuit of more efficient administration – eclipse broader systems of value which give life meaning. Efficiency, in other words, rather than being a means to an end (determined through religious, ethical, or political reflection) would become and end in and of itself. Bureaucracy, rather than serving broader social or cultural aims, has become culture. In this Weber's fears contain an echo of the broader cultural analysis of bureaucratic structures which I will turn to shortly.
For Weber, this called into question the value of bureaucracy's impacts on society, but not its rationalism. To say this another way, the costs of this over-development of technical mangerialism are born by society – and not by organizations themselves which would develop into what Weber hauntingly describes as “faultless”, “irresistible”, and “soulless” hierarchies driven solely by the goal of providing precise, objective solutions to concrete problems (Weber 1909 [1944], quoted in Sica 2004, 120).
Weber's fear that bureaucrats would come to pursue their specialized functions as ends in and of themselves is prefigured in the works of American sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen. Veblen however draws very different conclusions which call into question the underlying rationality and effectiveness of bureaucratic specialization, particularly in times of change. Over the course of three separate publications (1898, 1914, 1918) Veblen develops the concept of “trained incapacity” to discuss how the same forms of specialized training that Weber places at the core of bureaucratic control can limit individual judgement in important ways. With specialized training, he argues, also comes the inability to understand or effectively respond to phenomena outside of one's area of expertise. This thread is further developed by American sociologist Robert K. Merton (1940). Merton makes clear that trained incapacity is a component of larger organizational cultures intentionally created to provide cohesion over large organizations. But, as he goes on to argue, they also limit an organization's ability to respond adequately to changing circumstances. I will discuss both Veblen and Merton in greater detail before moving on to more recent engagements with this cultural critique of bureaucracy. 98
3.3 Veblen and Merton: beyond Rationality to Trained Incapacity and Organizational Culture
Veblen's critique of bureaucratic rationality, and the “trained incapacity” at its heart, is rooted in his vision of human nature. He argued that the human species is innately industrious and driven to define and pursue goals. This “instinct of workmanship”, as Veblen calls it (1914, 27), has been essential to human survival. In the pursuit of these goals, we develop habits (reinforced according to Veblen by processes of natural selection) to guide our actions and increase our efficiency. These habits in turn give rise to patterns of thought and systems of value based on what we are most accustomed to seeing and doing:
What men [sic] can do easily is what they do habitually, and this decides what they can think and know easily. They feel at home in the range of ideas which is familiar through their everyday line of action. ...What is apprehended with facility and is consistent with the process of life and knowledge is thereby apprehended as right and good. (1898, 195)
Habitual practises create and embed the individual within larger ways of knowing the world (epistemologies) and ways of judging it (values and ethics). Epistemologies and worldviews are both produced by our activities and the necessary condition for undertaking them. In the first instance this linked co-creation of actions, epistemologies, and worldviews is driven by the pursuit of efficiency. But the embeddedness of habitual actions within these broader socio- cultural structures also makes it harder to veer from established courses of action – or even to perceive the need to do so.
Firstly, as habitual actions create and reinforce systems of value they come to have an innate legitimacy (their “right and good[ness]”), quite apart from their intended function. In addition, while habit may facilitate established patterns of thought and action, by the same token it blocks unfamiliar courses of action or ways of understanding, or 'apprehending', reality. Habitual practices act as blinders, embedding the individual within the realm of the familiar and hiding other realities and courses of action from view. 99
While this basic tendency was innate at the individual level, Veblen went on to argue that its was exacerbated by the specialized training needed for the management of business in the industrial era. He argued that technical specialization, rather than simply increasing effectiveness and efficiency, left individuals unable to see or understand realities that lay outside their area of expertise. This is an argument that Veblen first makes in The Instinct of Workmanship and the Industrial Arts (1914) and then develops further in Higher Learning in America (1918).
In both cases, Velben's is primarily preoccupied with business people's narrow focus on profit, and their disregard for the negative impacts of industrial expansion on what he calls “community welfare” (1914, 351). He attributes this to the influence of “a trained inability 42” that prevents the businessmen who control industry from apprehending anything other than “the immediate pecuniary bearing of their manoeuvres” (1914, 347). Four years later he traces the route of this trained incapacity to the specialized training given to business students, while at the same time making clear that it is a problem common to all specialized professions:
[Business schools'] specialization on commerce is like other specializations in that it draws off attention and interest from other lines than those in which the specialization falls, thereby widening the candidate's field of ignorance while it intensifies his effectiveness within his specialty. (1918, 152)
This disinterest in subjects that lie outside of the scope one's formal training is particularly relevant to the case study of Durban in chapter four. As I will discuss, the municipal utility's response to the energy crisis was profoundly determined by their rejection of renewable energy systems which fell outside of their established practices and areas of expertise.
While Veblen is clear about the negative effect that trained incapacity have on industrial society, he is less specific about both the coordinating function that it serves within large bureaucratic organizations, and the costs that it imposes in terms of hindering institutional adaptive capacity. It is Merton, in his essay “Bureaucratic Structure and Personality” (1940), who clarifies and expands on these points.
42 In The Instinct of Workmanship and the Industrial Arts Veblen alternately uses the phrases “trained incapacity” and “trained inhability” to denote the same phenomena. 100
3.3.1 Merton: Instrumentalizing Trained Incapacity and the Creation of Organizational Culture Merton's essay “Bureaucratic Structure and Personality” is an extended critique of the Weberian model of bureaucratic efficiency. Merton opens his critique by highlighting the way in which Weber's ideal-type emphasizes the positive attainments of bureaucracies while overlooking their “internal stresses and strains” (1940, 561). Veblen's concept of trained incapacity, Merton argues, opens the door to the study of the negative aspects of bureaucracy. He then begins by making clear the bureaucratic resistance to change which is implicit in Veblen's work on in this area but never stated directly:
Trained incapacity refers to that state of affairs in which one's abilities function as inadequacies or blind spots. Actions based upon training and skills which have been successfully applied in the past may result in inappropriate responses under changed conditions. An inadequate flexibility in the application of skills will, in a changing milieu, result in more or less serious maladjustments. … In general, one adopts measures in keeping with his past training and, under new conditions which are not recognized as significantly different, the very soundness of this training may lead to the adoption of the wrong procedures. (1940, 562, emphasis in the original)
But Merton's contribution goes beyond his ability to synthesis the implications of Veblen's work on the impacts of specialized training. In the remainder of the essay he goes on to argue that – far from being unintentional – this type of individual inflexibility and blindness is instrumentally employed within bureaucratic structures. To do this, he picks up on a point developed to different ends by both Weber and Veblen: the fact that within bureaucratic structures adherence to rational rule-bound processes of interpretation and action comes to be seen as “an end-in-itself” (Merton 1940, 563).
The basic outlines of this process have already been described above. What is interesting here is that unlike Weber or Veblen for Merton this “displacement of goals” as he calls it isn't a sign of bureaucracy conquering western culture with its “soulless” efficiency, nor is it the simple outcome of fundamental human traits. Rather, he argues, it is the product of specific institutional strategies designed to reinforce desired forms of conduct by grounding them in a broader social system. This process, which he equates to the creation of a “culture,” ensures the stability and consistency necessary for complex bureaucratic organizations to function. 101
In Merton's analysis, the creation of an organizational culture involves several elements. At the level of the individual, it depends on instilling a deeply personal sense of devotion to organizational procedures. Organisations, Merton argues, modify the identities of those who work within them by putting in place clearly articulated systems of rewards, and encouraging both the creation of feelings of group belonging between bureaucrats, and the self-identification of individuals with the larger aims of the organisation. As a result, for those who apply them rules and proceedures come to have a symbolic power. They are objects of emotional attachment and even devotion (he speaks of the “sanctification” of bureaucratic symbols) that are rooted in a reinforcing relationship between the identity of the individual bureaucrat and the formal structures of the institution (Merton 1940, 563-565).
Foreshadowing a point made in more detail by Schoenberger (discussed below), Merton explains that creating this type of cohesion depends upon “infusing group participants with appropriate attitudes and sentiments” (ibid., 563). This is another way of describing the dissemination of a broader worldview that reinforce the correctness of established practices, and shapes individual thoughts, actions, and identities by reinforcing shared technical and ethical systems, and establishing a deep personal devotion to one's role within the system. As he summarizes: “The official is tacitly expected to and largely does adapt his thoughts, feelings, and actions to the prospect of this career” (ibid.). People make organisations, but organisations also – quite directly – make people.
Despite theses insights, Merton's account is missing any discussion of dynamism or power. By this I mean that, on the first count, Merton portrays both individual and institutional reactions to changed circumstances as being entirely reactionary. His discussion of the maladjustments arising from trained incapacity and the established culture of an organization focuses almost entirely on the ossification that these create. He describes, for example, how the rigid pursuit of rules for their own sake leads to a “punctilious adherence to formalized procedures” that makes bureaucratic officials, and the organizations they make up, resistant to change (ibid. 563, 563-5).
This emphasis on resistance will be useful as I discuss how certain municipal actors in Durban and Portland engaged with climate change. An opposition to adopting new practices, grounded in 102 the defence of established organizational cultures, was one of the challenges encountered by climate policies in both cities. But it does not tell the whole story. Beyond their apparent intransigence, organizations clearly do change. IBM no longer makes typewriters, and Bombardier has come a long way since the inventing the snowmobile. Cities as well, and the municipal departments that govern them, are in a process of sometimes rapid, sometimes gradual, transformation. Missing from Merton's account is any detailed account of how existing institutional worldviews not only resist change, but shape it and drive it down some courses but not others.
The issue of power is equally important. Merton's account is populated only by bureaucrats, and the faceless structures which shape and guide them. He writes, for example, the fact that “there are definite arrangements in the bureaucracy for inculcating and reinforcing these sentiments [of devotion to institutional procedures]” (ibid. 562-3). But he never discusses who exactly puts these “arrangements” in place. His account is haunted by an unseen force which animates the bureaucratic structure, but is never revealed. As he makes clear in his conclusion to “Bureaucratic Structure and Personality” he is primarily interested investigating the influence of the organizational structure on the formation of personal identity. As a result, he overlooks the impact of the centralization of power within bureaucracies, and the very different position occupied by senior management within the organizations which they have created and manage.
It is for a more complete account of the power of senior management and the dynamic ways in which institutions respond to changed circumstances that I will now turn to the work of James March and Johan Olsen (1989, 2004), Erica Schoenberger (1997), Burno Latour (1987), and Donna Haraway (1991). I will not provide an exhaustive analysis of this diverse body of scholarship. Rather, I am interested in isolating specific concepts and analytical approaches that build on the work discussed above and enable the institutional analysis that I will carry out in chapter four and five. 103
3.4 Steering Change (i): the Logic of Appropriateness and Path Dependency
Later studies of institutional bureaucracies (DiMaggio 1988, March and Olsen 1989, 2004, Powell 2007, Schoenberger 1997) move away from an emphasis on the resistance of bureaucratic structures to change to look at how established institutional procedures and worldviews selectively steer change. They argue that what needs to be understood is the way in which institutions interpret changing circumstances, and how those interpretations lead to some kinds of change and not others. As Schoenberger (1997) argues, “[w]e need to look more closely at how and why particular changes [are] selected and others resisted” (227).
Examining these processes, recent work on bureaucratic institutions in the Political Sciences has argued that institutional practices are adopted or modified not through rational means-ends calculations, but according to the ways in which they reaffirm or enhance the social legitimacy of the organisation or its participants (Hall and Taylor 1996). Specific practices are adopted because they have value within the broader cultural environment within which they operate. Responses to perceived threats or challenges are designed in such a way as to uphold the organisation's worldview. In doing so they reaffirm the co-constitutive processes through which individual agents within that organisation express their identities as rational and effective actors by fulfilling established roles and applying accepted principles. March and Olsen (1989, 2004) refer to this as a “logic of social appropriateness,” in contrast to a “logic of consequences” (or expected utility).
As they explain, rather than calculating the most direct route to a desired outcome, determining responses to new situations is the result of linked processes of interpretation that positions both the new reality, and the actor's role in relation to it, within the established worldview of the organization:
Most of the time humans take reasoned action by trying to answer three elementary questions: What kind of a situation is this? What kind of a person am I? What does a 104
person such as I do in a situation such as this? (March and Olsen 2004, 4)
The process [of taking action] involves determining what the situation is, what role is being fulfilled, and what the obligations of that role in that situation are. When individuals enter an institution, they try to discover, or are taught, the rules. When they encounter a new situation, they try to associate it with a situation for which rules already exist. Through rules and a logic of appropriateness, political institutions realize both order, stability, and predictability, on the one hand, and flexibility and adaptiveness, on the other. (March and Olsen 1989, 160-1)
It is important to note that March and Olsen are using “the rules” as a shorthand for something that goes beyond simple procedural requirements to include “the roles, identities and belongings, common purposes, and causal and normative beliefs” (March and Olsen 2004, 5) that I have been referring to as an organizational culture.
The logic of appropriateness therefore provides another vantage point from which to view the co-constitutive relationship, discussed above, that links organisation culture and individual identity. It is a description of the interpretive process through which individuals refer to established procedures and identities to first understand a given situation, and then to determine the most appropriate course of action. As well as clarifying the mechanism through which that link operates, this kind of logic explains how existing structures adapt to new circumstances. Change, therefore, is characterized by a process of interpretation where individual actors (and, through them, institutions as a whole) seek to respond to novel conditions while preserving as much of their current legitimacy and position within their institutional context as possible.
The case studies in chapters four and five contain a variety of examples of how the logic of appropriateness constrained creative responses to climate policy. But more interesting, as I will discuss in chapter four, is the way in which innovation and creativity can be integrated into the “appropriate” actions of departmental officials. Durban's Department of Water and Sanitation is an excellent example of the way in which organizational cultures can be designed to play up the flexibility and adaptiveness, while still maintaining order and predictability. 105
3.4.1 Path Dependency and Lock in Organisational culture is therefore not an edifice of statically embedded values and unchanging practices. It can more accurately be described as the dynamic application of established values to new conditions. The technical, social, epistemological, and ethical elements which constitute the culture of an organisation form a constellation which helps it chart a course through a changed world. Organizational culture provides the framework governing a constant process of evaluation, judgement, and decision-making. It is through the application of this framework to interpret, classify, and respond to new situations that the legitimacy of existing socio-technical structures is maintained. The worth of material investments (built infrastructure), individual identities, social relationship, and hierarchies of power are all stabilized by finding “appropriate” courses of action within changed circumstances. The result is a situation of path dependency, where organisations change but in ways that protect the investments they have already made in the current institutional system.
Path dependent change can involve being constrained by, or motivated to preserve, specific material infrastructure and the institutional structures that have grown up around them. There is a significant body of research on how technologies embedded within institutional and regulatory systems (or “technological regimes”) limit the pace and determine the direction of change (David 1985, Dosi 1988, Arthur 1989, Cowan and Gunby 1996, Leibowitz and Margolis 1999, Walker 2000, Berkhout 2002). Also discussed in terms of technological 'lock in,' a commonly sited example from this literature is David's 1985 study of the continued use QWERTY keyboard. He examined how increased proficiency with an established technology, economies of scale, and the interrelatedness a various technologies can make changes to existing technological regimes all but impossible.
Institutionally embedded technologies undoubtedly steer change along specific courses and block more substantial shifts. But, as Berkhout (2002) also argues, while these technologically focused accounts help explain one aspect of path dependency, they provide very little to helps us understand what makes broader change possible. For that it is necessary to look beyond technology and examine the socio-cultural assets of an organization. These are manifest in the hierarchies, divisions of labour, specialized skills, administrative procedures, protocols and even 106 the more intuitive relationships that employees have to their sector best labelled perhaps as “professional judgement.” Protecting these socio-cultural assets can involve incrementally adapting existing practices and roles to make them better suited to new circumstances. It can also mean adapting the problems themselves, through processes of interpretation, so that they become understood in a way that is complementary to the institutions existing capabilities.
Schoenberger elaborates on this point by showing how a long list of U.S. companies like GM, Ford, Chrysler, IBM, Xerox, and RCA struggled to adapt to new competitive challenges. GM, for example, addressed competition from Asian automotive companies by integrating those strategies which fit with established corporate values (i.e. adopting advanced automation as an extension of a traditional focus of efficient mass production) but ignored other lessons around the processes of “just-in-time” production and labour relations that challenged existing relationships with workers, suppliers, and markets.
Schoenberger's examples are powerful because they show how organizational culture can blind institutional actors to crucial problems even when they are presenting a clear and present danger. This situation is further complicated in the case of climate change because of the multiple interdependencies, uncertainties, and conflicting stakeholders involved in any effort to address it. Because of this scholars in Planning, and the Social Sciences more generally, have classed climate change as a “wicked” or “super wicked” problem (Levin et al. 2007, Lazarus 2009, cf. Horst & Webber 1973, Conklin 2006). Its complex characteristics elude traditional approaches of rational and scientific management and planning. This complexity only exacerbates institutional tendencies to resist fundamental changes to established practices. Rather than presenting a clear and present threat, reacting to climate change requires organizations to make significant shifts to a problem whose specific effects on the organization are still uncertain, and whose impacts are still in the future (and thus subject to heavy even “hyperbolic” discounting; Levin et al. 2007, Ainslie 2000, Speth 2004). Another characteristic of wicked problems like climate change is that those in the best position to address them also have the least to gain by doing so. This conflict between interests and agency is true of global petrochemical companies driven to protect their profits, as well as national and municipal governments dependent of tax revenues and royalties from by various forms of economic growth, resource extraction, and property development. 107
When looked at in terms of real people (as opposed to a relatively abstract “individual” or a collective “institution”) these considerations become all the more powerful. Changing the underlying values that ground the logic of appropriateness would call into question the self- image, and goals of specific people as well as the worth of entire social networks within an organisation. Reorienting urban mobility around public transit as opposed to the private automobile, for example, could in certain cities undermine the collective identities of an entire generation of transportation planners who careers have been (figuratively and literally) built on free-ways, ring-roads and expressways. Profound change can cause a crisis not only in the material assets of an institution but also a crisis in the identity of the corporation – and most particularly of the powerful elite who guide it (Schoenberger 1997).
Up to this point, this discussion has focused on the impacts of organisational culture on a rather vague and undifferentiated body of the rank-and-file members of a bureaucracy or corporation. But clearly there are important internal differentiations within institutions. As I have indicated above, senior management in particular occupy a privileged place in terms of their ability to determine the objectives of an organisation, its social and material practices, and the larger worldview through which these practices are justified. Power, particularly who has the power to engage in these processes of institutional creativity, therefore becomes a crucial consideration in our understanding of change within complex organisations. This also emphasizes that institutional transitions are fundamentally political processes – political in the sense that they involve struggles to preserve or redistribute power through alliance building, exclusion, and the negotiation of interests and objectives.
Understanding the role of institutional elites in creating, maintaining, and modifying existing structures will be central to my case studies of Durban and Portland that follow. Schoenberger's case studies of management elites pay particular attention to these issues, which justifies a more detailed discussion of her work before I move on to the final section and discuss the opportunities and approach to institutional reform that arise from these institutionalist critiques. 108
3.5 Steering Change (ii) : Elite Dominance and Self- Preservation vs. Innovation
Schoenberger is not the only contemporary scholar whose work addresses issues of power within institutional structures. There is of course Foucault's work (1981a, 1981b, 1991, 2007) and the large body of scholarship it has inspired. Attention to asymmetrical distributions of power and the impacts that these have on institutional genesis and function is also a common theme among new institutionialist work in sociology and the political sciences. For example, Hall and Taylor (1996) emphasize the way in which institutions give some groups or interests disproportionate influence decision-making processes. In a more recent review of sociological research on institutions, Powell (2007) underscores the importance of attention to power and agency. He argues that, as can be seen in the heterogeneous ways in which organisations respond to outside pressures, “institutionalization is a political process, and the success of the process and the form it takes depends on the relative power of the actors who strive to steer it” (Powell 2007, 4, see also DiMaggio 1988). Attention to power dynamics in systems of urban governance is also a central concern for urban political ecologists (Heynan et al. 2006, Keil 2003, 2005, Swyngedouw & Heynen 2003, Swyngedouw 2006).
Seen in this way, the process of organisational change is a constant and contested negotiation of tensions that emerge as established practices meet new realities. It is the resolution of these conflicts in practice that determine the trajectory of adaptation to a changed environment. Processes of organisational transformation are therefore both structured by existing arrangements of power, but also open to shifts as these arrangements are renegotiated. They are, in Schonberger's words, “both path-dependent and path-breaking” (1998, 122).
What Schoenberger brings to these discussions of power is an insightful analysis of senior management through the lens of organisational culture and trained incapacity. Executives, Directors, and Department Heads create the dominant culture, or social reality, through which change is evaluated and within which other actors must operate (whether they are supportive 109 members of the dominant culture, or countercultures seeking to change it) (cf. Williams 1977, Gramsci 1971). Their exclusive prerogative to determine the goals and culture of their organization lies at the core of their power, and defines their role and identity within any hierarchical organization.
Given this, it would perhaps seem reasonable to suppose that senior management are themselves somehow above or outside of the systems that they have created for ensuring reliability and efficiency. Schoenberger argues quite the contrary: elite members of organisations are equally, if not more, embedded in the organisational cultures which they set in motion. The links between their personal identity and the institution's worldviews are even tighter, and they are in a position of particular vulnerability when faced with circumstances which could devalue the established socio-technical assets of the organisation.
The position and identity of top management is principally defined by their monopoly over specific types of power. They possess immediate forms of power in their ability to exert their authority over other people. But their most important privilege, Schoenberger argues, is their power over the conceptual and strategic visions that guide the institution as a whole and in reference to which employees come to govern themselves. Although Schoenberger does not reference Foucault, there are clear parallels here to his discussion of “governmentality” and the ways in networks of self-regulating actors are created as individuals come to view themselves through the metrics of the state and internalize the worldviews embodied within these metrics (Foucault 1991, Miller and Rose 1990). As a shorthand, I call this ability to establish the goals and worldview of an organization the power of “empowered creativity.”
Empowered creativity is by its very nature a scarce resource. Senior management's monopoly over it allows them to shape the organisation which they lead according to their own competencies and worldview. Their identity, in other words, is both reflected in and reinforced by the practices which they have put in place. Change contains the triple threat of devaluing current assets and practices; undermining the larger skills, logics, and values upon which practices are based; and challenging the continued relevance of the expertise and strategy 110 embodied by senior management. Fighting their own obsolescence, management's instinct of self-preservation can therefore be at odds with the best interests of their organisation:
As managers seek, then, to reassert their own asset structures [when faced with changing circumstances], certain kinds of strategy, however appropriate, may be foreclosed. That is to say, information or knowledge about what to do to remain competitive may be available but not usable, to the degree that using it requires acceding to alternative (and unfavourable) processes of valuation of one's own assets. In this way, the manager's need to defend his own world view and sense of self may come seriously into conflict with his need to defend the competitive position of the firm. (Schoenberger 1998, 146)
Those most empowered to steer an organisation on a new course are also those most unlikely to propose any radical change that would undercut their position of authority. While fighting to preserve their own power and assets, as well as the social order which they have created, senior management can bar the way to fundamental change or innovation. Although perhaps more restricted than their counterparts in private corporations, senior managers in municipal departments hold a similar monopoly over empowered creativity. Both consciously and unconsciously they engage in the formation of organisational cultures that structure their own actions and identities as well as those who work for them.
Schoenberger is clear about the fact that this authority is not internally uncontested. In the case of Xerox, for example, she describes how lower level management in specific departments within the company waged “a kind of guerrilla warfare” from within the organisation. They successfully challenged senior management and brought about the changes necessary for the company to both recognize and then respond to the threat of its new Japanese competitors (205). This type of internal contestation will also be an important theme in the case studies that follow, most particularly in the case of Portland's Bureau of Transportation and the internal conflicts between established automobile centred planning, and factions seeking to develop a more serious engagement commuter cycling.
Overall, this discussion of trained incapacity, organizational culture, path dependency, and the elite monopoly over empowered creativity has provided a set of linked analytical concepts which will be useful in the institutional analysis of climate policies and programs in Durban and 111
Portland. Climate change represents a profound challenge to many practices that were current within each municipality during my research. The concepts covered so far will help make clear some of the internal dynamics that characterized the creation and implementation of various climate relevant strategies. In the concluding section of this chapter, I would like to extend this line of analysis to isolate some key interventions for creating larger systemic change that have been intimated but not fully developed in the literature covered up to this point.
3.6 Empowering Change: Strategic Interventions and Decentralizing Empowered Creativity
Issues of identity formation and meaning making are at the core of the approach to institutional analysis that I have outlined in this chapter. These themes are also central to the proposals I will cover here for pushing organisations beyond incremental path dependency and enabling shifts that are more innovative and proactive. Some of the interventions I will discuss are strategic and project focused: they can be applied to ease the introduction of a specific program or policy by minimizing the resistance it faces from established organizational structures. Others are more transformative: they aim to create organisations that are fundamentally more responsive and innovative. They do this by proposing radically different organizational cultures, and a more open, non-hierarchical, and collaborative approach to recognizing and responding to threats and opportunities.
I will begin by discussing how strategically bridging the institutional fragmentation and specialization advocated by Weber can facilitate certain climate relevant policies. I will then discuss at further length how the concept of “translation” developed in actor network theory (ANT, cf. Callon 1986, Latour 1987) can guide interventions into the processes of interpretation that are central to finding institutionally appropriate responses (vis. March and Olsen 1989, 2004) to changed circumstances. This section will then conclude with a discussion of how, drawing on the work of Schoenberger (1998) it is possible to envision organizations that are both more open, more adaptive, and more able to learn from and respond creatively to changing 112 circumstances.
3.6.1 Strategic Interventions (i): Bridging As discussed in my outline of the Weberian bureaucracy earlier in this chapter, the process of institution building involves a fracturing and simplification of complex realities into manageable units which are then coordinated by the overarching institutional structure. These processes of fracturing and simplification are necessarily imperfect and incomplete. Dividing up what is in fact an integrated system into isolated units creates tensions within bureaucratic structures. It introduces distortions and inefficiencies at the same time as it enables the management of highly complex systems. The divisions between departments block communication between actors and makes integrated problem solving in certain interstitial areas difficult, if not impossible.
Strategically linking departments around certain issues can dramatically change outcomes by allowing the free flow of relevant information, without challenging the pre-established structures and identities of its participants. Increasing integration between departments of land use planning and departments of transportation planning at the municipal level is a perfect example of the efficiencies that can result from this approach. Rather than plan in a reactive manner, each department can coordinate their actions to complement each other. This can dramatically improve the overall efficiency of land use and transportation systems by creating patterns of settlement that are more easily serviced by systems of public transportation.
These processes of refocusing and linking departments are not without their challenges. Their success depends in large part on “guerrillas” within the bureaucracy, where the involvement of a group of workers willing to invest the time and effort necessary to see them through. But they also depend on there being at least some manifestation of the desired change in the existing institutional structures. For more substantial changes, it becomes necessary to begin looking at the way in which meaning is socially constructed and politically contested within institutional systems. 113
3.6.2 Strategic Interventions (ii): Translation Within each unit of a municipal bureaucracy responses to new policy issues – like climate change – are reached through processes of interpretation guided by the logic of appropriateness. Confronted with an unfamiliar issue or program, departmental employees and leadership must determine what the issue is and how it relates to their established practices. Intervening in these acts of interpretation in ways that render the new issue intelligible and complementary to existing objectives can be an effective technique for steering change, but it is also not a simple process.
As discussed above, the creation of meaning through processes of interpretation is central to the way in which institutional worldviews come to influence individual and collective action. Acts of interpretation filter external realities and internal capacities through established worldviews. Through this process individuals arrive at appropriate and legitimate courses of action, which also reaffirm their own identities as specific types of actors. But it is not necessarily the case that there is only one interpretation of a proposed change which will be seen as legitimate within a given institution. Likewise, it is also not necessarily the case that all institutional actors need to share the same interpretation of what is at stake.
Strategically engaging with how meaning and value is ascribed to a proposed change can enable the same policy to gain support from a variety of actors for very different reasons (see March and Olsen 1989). The literature on Actor Network Theory (ANT), describes this as a process of “translation” (Callon 1986, Latour 1987). Through specific types of negotiation and coalition building, the seemingly divergent interests of multiple actors can become aligned behind a given initiative because it is seen by each as contributing to their own distinct goals.
ANT proposes a relational theory of agency deeply at odds with the vision of hierarchical and exclusive vision of power embodied in hierarchical institutions. Rather than sovereign actors imposing their will from above, ANT envisions the capacity for action as the result of working with, or through, various other actants. Agency, in short, is acquired and relational, rather than inherent and individually possessed. If actants end up working together, it is not because of any inherent alignment of their goals, but rather because potentially quite different interests have 114 been translated. That is to say that compromises have been made, and actants have come to see collaboration with other parties on a given project or policy as the most effective route towards achieving their own objectives.
These abstract arguments can be made more concrete by referring back to part of the historical context of Portland’s climate policies discussed in chapter two. As noted, the roots of the city's current climate initiatives can be traced back to an early engagement with energy policy. This was in response to both dramatic mismanagement of the regional energy system and a collapse of the population of Pacific Salmon returning to spawn in the Columbia River. A diverse coalition of environmentalists, business owners, and citizens came together to back energy conservation measures and their pressure eventually led to both municipal and federal policies emphasising the primacy of energy efficiency over the construction of new generation capacity in the region.
In this example, each group within the coalition had very different goals. For businesses and ratepayers, efficiency measures represented a more cost-effective way of dealing with electricity supply shortages. Avoiding investments in new generation infrastructure would help keep energy prices low. Environmentalists, in contrast, were primarily concerned with protecting sensitive river systems and spawning grounds from the impacts of further hydro-electric of nuclear generation. Different as their goals might have been, these groups came to see their interests as aligned. As Latour points out, interests are not the same thing as goals; rather “interests are what lie in between actors and their goals”(1987, 108). As a result, very different goals can be achieved by advancing the very same interests – in this case the shared interest of keeping investment in new energy supply to a minimum. “Translation” in this context is used to denote the process through which this alignment of interests is created (Latour 1987, 108-121).
Latour refers to actors seeking to win support for a new technology, approach, or form of knowledge as “contenders.” He outlines five specific translation strategies through which they can gain the support other parties and align their interests with the contender's goals: identifying ways in which your goals can be met by simultaneously catering to others' interests; convince 115 others that their usual course of action is cut off and that your preferred course is equally desirable; putting forward your course of action as a shortcut which will allow them to reach their end goal more quickly; attempting to directly transform interests and goals; and, finally, positioning yourself so that reaching your goals become indispensable to others reaching their goals as well.
While I will not discuss them all in detail, I would like to touch briefly on three that are particularly relevant for the case studies that follow. Catering directly to others' interests is the first strategy discussed by Latour: “the easiest means to enroll people,” he points out, “... is to let oneself be enrolled by them!” (1987, 110). Key players in both Durban and Portland followed this path, with varying success, by enrolling climate related energy efficiency projects into pre- existing institutional goals to reduce the costs of building operations. Even when effective however, this strategy has limited reach. Used alone it requires that the contender's goals be completely subsumed within the priorities of other actors, and gives the contender little or no say in the overall course of action.
To more directly transform interests and goals so that they align with the contenders' interest, Latour describes a process he refers to as “displacing goals43” (ibid, 114). In this scenario, the contender transforms the existing interests of a more powerful agency by convincing them that conditions have changed and that – if they wish to reach their stated goals – they must pursue new interests. Latour gives the example of how atomic physicists approached the Pentagon and convincingly redefined the Second World War, not as a conventional armed conflict, but as a race to create and control atomic weapons. The physicists' research, and funding for it, thus became central to the Pentagon's goal of winning the war.
Advocates of urban climate policies in both of my case-study sites used this approach (although I should say with much less objectionable goals). Climate Change will affect cities so profoundly that the process of maintaining municipal operations and objectives in all areas can convincingly be redefined in terms of climate relevant policies. Economic development and job creation become about reducing the carbon liability of the local economy or creating “green-collar” jobs.
43 Unrelated to Merton's similar phrase, used to denote the transformation of means into ends in-and-of themselves. 116
Creating or maintaining urban green-space (despite budget cuts) becomes linked to reducing the urban heat island effect. Or, to draw specifically from the case study of Durban, the municipality's health services function becomes focused on protecting the already ill from the impacts of climate change. In all gases the goals (jobs! parks! health!) stay the same; but the interests used to pursue them have become aligned behind climate policy.
Finally, Latour's last approach to translation is “becoming indispensable” (ibid., 119). What becomes indispensable, in Latour's analysis, is not the efforts and activity of the contender themselves, but rather the necessity of pursuing the course of action which they advocate. This is, in other words, the description of a state where the contender's goals have become integrated into the operations of other agencies to the point that they have become a necessary part of doing business. In this new arrangement “[n]o negotiation, no displacement would be necessary since the others would do the moving, the begging, the compromising and the negotiation. They are the ones who would go out of their way” (ibid., 120).
Latour's account focuses on entrepreneurs, inventors, and scientists scrambling to find markets or funding for their work. At this point in his text though, there is an almost comical portrait of these actors finally sitting back watching as the world come to them. This underlying drive towards “indispensability” or total integration was also the holy grail for individuals and departments engaged with climate planning in Durban and Portland. Although, unlike Latour's entrepreneurial scientists, many respondents in my fieldwork envisioned this moment as one where – rather than finally reaping some kind of personal benefit from their work – they would simply no longer be necessary.
By this point it may have begun to seem that these processes of translation sit uneasily in category of “strategic intervention” where I have placed them. Catering to others' interests is clearly a limited intervention designed to win acceptance for new initiatives by subsuming them within the existing objects of established organizational cultures. It may carry a specific project (say an energy efficiency campaign) into implementation, but it will not challenge any of the tenants of an organizations practices, values, or worldview. But as we move towards “displacing goals” and becoming “indispensable” more fundamental shifts are clearly at work. I have kept 117 this discussion in this section however because even these more profound acts of translation still only serve to implement individual technologies, policies, or analytical approaches. This may happen on an increasingly ambitious scale, but the strategies so far discussed propose nothing that would increase how flexible, adaptive, or innovative an organization – or a city – is overall.
Latour's contender may have succeeded in winning support for their aims. But the next contender will still have to face the same series of hurdles. If the goal is to create a new organizational culture that is more open to change and more able to learn from and respond to an unpredictable environment – to increase institutions’ adaptive capacity, in the language of climate policy – then a different approach is needed.
3.6.3 Organizational Reform: Situated Knowledge and Decentralizing Empowered Creativity The ability of an organisation to perceive and respond to changed circumstances is crippled by a combination of the limits of the knowledge produced from within it and the tight monopoly over empowered creativity. As discussed above, methods of analysis and the ideas generated within the organisation (at least those which are acknowledged and valued) are deeply and intentionally homogenized. Truly creative responses to changed circumstances are unlikely to travel very far within the organisational hierarchy. This is the cost imposed by the Weberian approach to creating cohesion and dependability.
In her conclusion to The Cultural Crisis of the Firm Schoenberger (1998) proposes a solution to this that involves a profound redistribution of empowered creativity. She basis this on the reflection that it would be a step in the right direction for senior management to recognize the “situated” nature of their own knowledge, and the limitations this imposes on their strategic imagination. Referencing the work of Haraway (1991) and other scholars who have made related arguments (Gadamer 1976, Harvey 1989, Rosaldo 1989), Schoenberger explains that:
[O]ne's social reality … tends to produce the interpretive schema through which all information is processed. Information is, thus, transformed into knowledge, but this knowledge is structured by the position of the knower. As knowledge within the firm is transformed into strategy, these structured constraints narrow the available terrain for 118
action. In this way, certain kinds of initiatives become more available than others. (Schoenberger 1998, 146)
Linking this to the work discussed earlier, senior management's creation of an organizational culture is therefore an attempt to homogenize and regularize performance by creating a common social reality within which the knowledge of individual employees is situated. But the knowledge of senior management is also situated knowledge. This manifests itself in specific ways of seeing the world, reading or (more importantly) misreading evidence, and systematically ignoring information that falls outside of their interpretive framework. Combined with their monopoly over empowered creativity, this can produce a toxic situation where maladaptive and narrow-minded strategies lead organizations to their demise44.
Senior management conscious of their own situatedness would perhaps be more able to recognize the limits of their established strategies. But, in and of itself, this elite self-awareness would not allow organizations to respond more effectively to new challenges. For that Schoenerger argues, something more radical is needed45:
[I]ndividual enlightenment is better, but it's not enough. The strategists need help from others whose social and cultural locations and mix of social and material assets are different.
This implies a profound reordering of power relations within the firm and between the firm and other social actors (communities, unions, other firms, etc.). It also implies going
44 In some ways this is argument is related to the discussion earlier of the path dependency that arises as organizational elites fight to preserve their own social and material assets in the face of change (see page 105). Schoenberger herself, in her discussions of how senior executive hamper adaptive change, seems to treat self- preservation and situated knowledge as two sides of the same coin. Perhaps that is true. But there are also important differences; self-preservation can be the object of conscious and deliberate strategy, while the situatedness of knowledge is the inevitable outcome of our existence as thinking animals who come to understand the world through our experiences of our place within it. The other key difference, is that while self- preservation is a defensive reaction which must be planned for, attention to situated knowledge contains within it the seeds of a more fundamental re-envisioning of organizational dynamics which I discuss below. 45 Here Schoenberger is making a related claim to arguments also made in relation to the adaptive natural resource management. In an influential article Holling and Meffe (1996), for example, argue that to avoid the loss of ecosystem resilience brought about by an overly managerial approach to natural resources it is crucial to “develop ways for agencies to innovate and learn, and allow them to do so. An example is the application of actively adaptive environment management approaches, where policies become hypotheses and management actions become the experiments to test those hypotheses”(Holling & Meffe 1996, 332, cf. Holling 1978, Walters 1986, Lee 1993, Gunderson et al. 1995). 119
well beyond such current ideas as recruiting more women and minorities into management to get a better sense of the segments of the market or the workforce they are thought to represent. By the same token, devolving power and authority to make decisions about discrete problems on the shop floor is only a start. The kind of power that needs to be redistributed is the power to envision and construct the social order. (Schoenberger 1998, 229)
Coming as this does at the close of her book, Schoenberger provides no discussion of how this redistribution could take place, or the impact that it would have on institutional structures or management practices. Her argument begs the questions of why decision makers would want to do this, how much power can be devolved and to how many people, before the cohesion of the organisation and its ability to produce coordinated action in complex environments is put in jeopardy. There needs to be some balance between centralized coordination and leadership and decentralized and empowered innovation and creativity. How this balance is struck is something that needs to be examined in practice. This dilemma was manifest in the internal dynamics of municipal organisations in both Durban and Portland in the following two chapters. But as I will also discuss in section two, which covers public participation, these same questions of balance between centralized control and decentralized empowered creativity will emerge as we consider the external relationships that exist between the municipality and communities.
3.7 Conclusions
It is common to hear complaints about the inflexibility of bureaucracies. The strength of the set of analytical concepts I have provided here is that it makes clear that this inflexibility is the result of specific mechanism and serves an important purpose in coordinating the actions of large and complex organisations. These contributions are particularly relevant to discussions of urban climate policies because of the fundamental institutional shifts required for effective action. In the case study chapters which follow, I will analyse concrete examples of how trained incapacity, organizational culture, and elite intransigence have shaped the interpretations and responses to climate change within the municipal bureaucracy. I will also examine how key actors, primarily in Durban’s EMD and Portland’s OSD, have used a strategic understanding of the impacts of organisational culture to enable innovation and change. Although not always successful, their 120 experiences show the deep impact of how the meaning of climate change (or related policies) is constructed in relation to existing institutional worldviews, and the individual identities that are intertwined with them.
My aim in this chapter has been to assemble a pallet of interpretative concepts that I will carry forward into the two case study chapters that follow. As I have demonstrated, adopting an analytical approach attentive to the social processes through which institutional rationality and identity are constructed provides important insights into how institutions adapt to changing circumstances. Moving into chapters four and five, the concepts of trained incapacity and organisational culture will help clarify how the recursive relationship between departmental practices and worldviews influenced the course of specific climate initiatives.
More generally, these theoretical tools allow us to go inside the black box of the municipal bureaucracy. The complex internal dynamics of municipal institutions are often overlooked in accounts of urban climate governance (and urban governance more generally). But, as discussed in chapter 1, understanding them is essential to any accurate analysis of urban responses to climate change. The cross-cutting, wicked, nature of climate change means that conflict and coalition building between multiple actors is just as critical within municipal institutions as it is between municipal, civil-society, or private sectors representatives. Engaging with this complexity is a necessary step if we are to avoid the local trap (cf. Brown and Purcell 2005) of idealizing the urban scale, and begin to understand the difficult work of establishing effective and far reaching networks of urban climate governance.
Following Schoenberger (1997), March and Olsen (1989), and Latour (1987) I also want to argue that it is possible for us to influence the inertia that comes from these structures. It is not inevitably the case that large social organisations like firms and municipal departments will suffer to the same extent from their tendency to harness and amplify trained incapacity. By intervening in the organisational culture of an institution, it is possible to increase its responsiveness and manoeuvrability. This reorganisation can be as profound as the radical redistribution of imaginative power, or more strategic “translations” that move specific policies forward without challenging existing socio-technical assets. 121
Over the course of this chapter, I have used small glimpses of my case studies to ground what would otherwise have been a rather abstract discussion. These short examples have of course provided only a fragmentary picture. To summarize its general outlines, the vision of the municipal bureaucracy that emerges from this approach is of a series of complex, specialized, and internally divided units. Each is attempting in their isolated work to meet their own objectives, while also contributing to what they see as their portion of the larger process of urbanization within their municipality. These units are guided by their own technical strengths and organizational cultures, but also limited in their understanding and actions by the trained incapacity and homogenization of knowledge that arises from a shared (situated) institutional worldview. Senior management in these departments play a crucial role in determining how their institutions will respond to change. Some are clearly held back by the practices and worldviews which they uphold. Others have managed to use the power of organizational culture to enable a more decentralized and open approach to problem solving and innovation.
Within these complex municipal systems are key actors, “contenders” to borrow Latour's term, seeking to advance both individual programs and policies and larger institutional reforms. Each of them employ various strategies of bridge building, translation, and enabling decentralized networks of creativity to attempt to move climate policy from its position as a marginal and narrowly defined environmental policy issue to a defining element of the way in which their municipality as a whole pursues the process of urbanization.
In the case studies chapter that follow I will expand on this highly compressed account, and look in more detail at the complex institutional dynamics that have affected approaches to climate governance in both cities. The history of specific projects in both Durban and Portland provides clear examples of organisational trained incapacity in action, as well as ways that this inertia can be overcome. My analysis of Durban's experiences will focus on the internal dynamics within specific municipal departments, and how these affected the EMD’s attempts to create an overarching mitigation strategy for the municipality and promote municipal engagement with local renewable energy. In Portland, by contrast, I will look primarily at the dynamics that exist between (rather than within) individual bureaus, and how OSD strategically engaged in encouraging collaborative and innovative climate policy across the municipality as a whole. 122 Chapter 4: Durban from Path Dependency to Innovation
4.1 Introduction and Overview of Case Studies
In this first case study chapter I will apply the analytical framework covered in Chapter 3 to a variety of renewable energy and energy efficiency related project and programs in Durban46. The city's Environmental Management Department (EMD) had lead Durban's climate related programs almost single handedly. To broaden these efforts, they needed to find an issue around which they could mobilize support and engagement among other departments. As I will discuss, energy emerged as a potentially apolitical vehicle through which they could create a space within the municipality for mitigation policies. The EMD attempted to coordinate a process of translation (cf. Latour 1987) where, by catering directly to existing departmental interests, climate policy could be recast as a complementary component to the worldviews which guided the municipality's approach to development. This process, and the negative reception that it received from the municipal energy utility reveal how deeply institutional cultures can influence the course of municipal climate policies.
This chapter begins as a story of defeat. But as I will show, there are also powerful examples of organizational change and innovation within the municipality. Internally, the department of Water and Sanitation (EWS), emerged as an unlikely leader in the installation of local renewable energy technology. Here too organizational culture was a determining factor. Through management's willingness to break with structures that encourage trained incapacity, the EWS has decentralized empowered creativity in a way that echoes some of the more radical reforms suggested Schoenberger (1998).
46 A version of this chapter has been published as Aylett, A. (2011) "Bureaucracies and Low Carbon Transitions." In Cities and Low Carbon Transitions eds. Harriet Bulkeley & Simon Marvin. (Routledge) 123
In what follows, I will begin by focusing on the EMD's work on energy efficiency and renewable energy. This energy work was part of a three pronged approach to reframe climate policy that the department began in 2005. The other two prongs focused on creating more reliable models of the impacts climate change would have on municipal infrastructure, and creating adaptation strategies to protect vulnerable populations. Of these, the energy work advanced more rapidly and thus had already yielded concrete results during the period of my case study. As the only mitigation related component of the EMD's strategy it also fits within this dissertation's overall focus on mitigation. But several other factors make this a fascinating illustration. Institutional path dependency within the municipality's electricity utility (eThekwini Electricity, EE) deprived EMD's work of crucial support. This was despite concerted efforts to translate, first climate change, and second, energy policies, into the discourses of legitimacy that surrounded the municipality's existing development priorities.
EMD's efforts to win legitimacy for energy policy within the municipality will be the focus of the first section of this chapter. The second section will look in more detail at the way in which trained incapacity within EE prevented senior management from engaging with, or even truly perceiving, the role that they could play in encouraging the development of a local renewable energy sector. EE's defensive protection of existing socio-technical assets is an example of the way in which organizational culture can block desperately needed responses to changing circumstances.
Unexpectedly, though, a leader on renewable energy did emerge quite independently of EMD's efforts. It was the department of Water and Sanitation (EWS). They were the home of multiple innovative renewable energy projects, despite the fact that they had no mandate to produce electricity. They will be the focus of the third section. I will argue that the different strategies adopted by EWS and the municipal utility in relation to renewable energy can be traced back to the distinct cultures of both organizations. While technical, financial, and institutional barriers placed constraints on both agencies, the determining factor was the ability of senior management to adapt the identity of their organizations, and their employees, to accept new challenges.
All of this occurred in the context of the 2008 energy crisis that began only weeks before I 124 started my fieldwork. The crisis sparked concern over energy security, and energy efficiency throughout the country. The national energy system was in a state of collapse, and no large-scale generation capacity was expected to come on-line before 2012. Local renewable energy, therefore, represented a potential way of meeting pressing needs (important above and beyond any larger relationship to climate change or sustainability). While the crisis did not lead directly to the expansion of local renewable energy, it did catalyse a significant institutional shift: the creation of an independent Energy Office tasked specifically with addressing energy efficiency and renewable energy within the city.
My concluding case study in this chapter will discuss the new Energy Office, which was created during my second field season in Durban. Its establishment was too recent for me to comment on its impact within the municipality. Instead, based on the other case studies in this chapter I will briefly discuss this agency's potential to reshape the municipality's approach to energy policy, as well as the barriers that stand in its way.
4.2 Translating Climate Change: Attempts to Establish Institutional Legitimacy
As discussed in Chapter 2, there was an engrained perception among municipal politicians and other departments that environmental programs would complicate the city's economic development and hamper its ability to compete for investment. This view had crippled the EMD's earlier LA21 program and made it impossible to establish any concrete emissions reduction targets or a municipal climate change response plan. Despite the inclusion of climate change as part of the Integrated Development Plan's (IDP) commitment to sustainability, the EMD had found that making that commitment concrete in any kind of overarching climate change policy was impossible. As Debra Roberts, the head of EMD, recalls, this view was apparent from the first presentation that she gave to municipal departments on the topic of climate change: 125
One comment that stuck in my mind was from that first presentation to the Economic Development and Planning committee. The position adopted by the politicians was: “we will not tolerate climate change as another environmental hurdle in the city’s development path! So don’t think that you are going to [use it to block development].” And that is the problem. (Interview, Roberts 2008/02/18)
From the beginning, therefore, EMD's climate program was frustrated by the inability to successfully link climate policy with either of the two competing discourses which guided the municipality's approach to development. Mirroring schizophrenia also visible in national policy, Durban's development goals were driven by a contested mix of redistributive developmental policies and neo-liberal entrepreneurialism. The EMD had been unable to convincingly translate climate or sustainability policy in a way that appealed to either of these discourses. Both community activists and municipal agencies had come to see municipal climate and sustainability policy as a narrowly environmental concern that stood in opposition to repairing the social injustices of apartheid, and increasing the municipality's ability to compete for national and international business investment.
Roberts however was a resourceful, persistent, and strategic operator within the municipal system. She had a dedicated staff who, despite being deeply overworked, found time to contribute to a climate change program that was well outside their official line of duty. And Roberts also had good relations with Northern development agencies (particularly Denmark's DANIDA), which gave her access to project funding. She mobilized these resources to carry out a three-pronged strategy to try (again) to win legitimacy for climate policy.
First, she initiated the detailed scientific work needed to downscale global climate models to the municipal scale. This would form the foundation of the GIS-based Integrated Assessment Framework (IAF) that would present information on local climate impacts in a format infrastructure planners could understand and use (see Chapter 2). This project aimed to reduce some of climate change's “wickedness” (cf. Horst & Webber 1973, Levin et al. 2007, Lazarus 2009) by reducing uncertainty and making the municipality's vulnerabilities clear to local officials and bureaucrats. In a situation where they were being marginalized, Roberts decided use science to redefine their relevance: 126
[I]f we want to get in there and talk about the economic strategy of the city and where we are going in its development path – and suggest that those things need to be changed – we have got to buy that credibility with science. Whereas in a place like London it has already been bought through political champions. It is a totally different kind of environment. (Interview, Roberts 2008/02/18)
Robert's and her team, in Latour's language (1987), were therefore attempting to 'displace the goals' of municipal departments. By making clear how climate change would impact municipal operations (in areas such as storm water management, health, and the threats of coastal developments and infrastructure) the IAF would attempt to establish that integrating climate change into municipal planning was essential to meeting existing service provision goals. The goals themselves would not necessarily change. The city would still, for example, create and maintain storm water drainage systems to protect against flooding. But, thanks to the IAFs detailed projections, preparing for climate change would become integral to the city's storm water strategies. In and of itself, the creation of the IAF would be an intense multi-year process that involved collaborations with the city of London, the UK based Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, and a team of local consultants. But in addition Roberts had identified other important work that could also help broaden support for climate policy in the city.
Pursuing a second source of legitimacy, the EMD partnered with the Health department to carry out the first of what would become the Municipal Adaptation Plans for the Water, Health, and Disaster Management sectors (see eThekwini 2010). These plans made the impacts of climate change concrete not simply for Durban's infrastructure, but for its inhabitants. Here again, the underlying logic was one of displacing established goals. The work tied climate change into existing concerns over the well being of the local population, and the vulnerability of the local coastline following the coastal storms that had battered Durban's coastal infrastructure in 2007.
Finally, in response to the political impossibility of setting GHG reduction targets as part of the CCP program, Roberts and her staff decided to tackle energy efficiency and renewable energy as a substitute for mitigation policy. This would directly tackle the 54 percent of the city's emissions that came from its dependency on coal-fired power. But by focusing on the immediate economic benefits of improving efficiency and energy security, it was hoped that the issue would prove less 127 contentious. This was part of a larger political strategy to smooth a future re-engagement with creating GHG reduction targets:
The stage just wasn’t right for our council to accept targets. They would never have accepted targets at that point in time. So we decided to avoid the politics of targets and to see if rather we could move into implementation phase, whereby you demonstrate some gain and that provides a platform then for going back into the more politically tense environment. (ibid.)
As I will discuss, however, Roberts' hope that energy would prove less contentious was misplaced.
4.2.1 Durban's Municipal Energy Strategy: an Attempt to Reconcile Mitigation and Development The EMD's efforts to side-step the deadlock that existed around climate policy began in 2005. In collaboration with the Architecture department, it initiated a program to improve the energy efficiency of municipal buildings. Over the course of the program, energy audits were performed on 11 city- owned and operated buildings. A pilot project targeting two of these showed that low or no-cost interventions (largely by running the building air conditioning systems for shorter periods of time) could generate annual energy savings of over 15 per cent and pay for themselves in under five months. This was projected to reduce ghg emissions by 128 tonnes (a marginal but still measurable amount) and save the municipality R53,400 per annum (roughly US$8,400) (Roberts 2008). These small but concrete projects, it was hoped, would demonstrate that climate relevant policies could also be in the municipality’s economic self-interest. By piggy-backing on existing imperatives to reduce operational costs, the hope was that this very limited process of translation would dispel some of the negative associations that surrounded climate change policy and open to door to a deeper municipal engagement with the issue.
Despite the rapid payback and ongoing savings, Jessica Rich (then managing EMDs energy program) reported that outside of the two pilot buildings, uptake elsewhere had been virtually non-existent. Even in buildings where audits had been done, building managers simply seemed uninterested in taking the relatively simple steps needed to reduce energy use and emissions (Interview, Rich 2008/03/12). Roberts ascribes this to the fact that, like much of the work before, 128 the work of doing the audits had ultimately fallen on a small group of municipal staff and consultants, and so generated little internal institutional support or understanding of the issues (Roberts 2008)47.
The lead consultant in the buildings energy project recommended attempting to scale up the internal energy efficiency work. Creating a larger municipal energy strategy was the logical next step. This project aimed to engage the municipality on the potential and benefits represented by a coordinated effort to pursue energy efficiency, and implement renewable energy technology throughout the municipality. In this way it was both more consequential than the buildings energy program, but still on a smaller scale and less politically charged than proposing a municipal climate change policy. The strategy was to begin with initial research to establish a scientific understanding of current energy use and alternatives, and then to use this information to create a less technical document able to win political support and buy-in within the municipality.
This work began with the preparation of two research-driven publications produced – again – by local consultants who were overseen by the EMD. They prepared a State of Energy Report (eThekwini, EMD 2006a), and a catalogue of local renewable energy potential (eThekwini, EMD 2007b). These were lengthy highly technical reports, aimed principally at expert municipal officials. They provided detailed calculations about how energy was used in the municipality (by the municipality itself as well as households, commerce, and industry). They also identified where the most potential existed for energy efficiency and renewable energy to reduce reliance fossil fuels and coal-fired power.
47 Throughout interviews with EMD officials, it became clear that the department's reliance on private consultants was a double-edged sword. On the one had, EMD was chronically understaffed. While the core team in the office were dedicated and highly skilled, they already worked more than full time to meet their core function of biodiversity protection. The municipality had no money forthcoming for hiring additional staff. Consultants therefore were essential to the department's ability to carry out its climate and energy related work. They could be paid with money from northern development agencies (DANIDA – the Danish International Development Agency – in particular had a longstanding relationship with EMD), therefore liberating the EMD from the constraints imposed by the municipal budget. At the same time however, the transient nature of the consultants, and their location outside of the municipality itself, meant that again and again projects were carried through to completion without building any significant capacity within the municipality to engage with climate change. The work would have been impossible without them. But because they were the ones doing the work, its impact on the municipality was significantly curtailed. (Interviews, Roberts 2008/02/18, Rich 2008/03/12). 129
These documents made a concerted effort to translate energy issues in the terms of the two competing discourses that guided the municipality's approach to local development. Appealing to the municipality's role as a developmental local government, the reports emphasized the fact that renewable energy could address issues of energy poverty and health by offering poorer households accessible, clean sources of fuel. To catch the attention of those within the municipality more concerned with economic competitiveness, they outlined how implementing an energy strategy would improve the city's energy security, and buffer both the municipality and local industries and consumers from the impacts of an unstable national grid and volatile international petrol prices. They also appealed to both developmental and entrepreneurial approaches to Durban development by highlighting how renewable energy technology could expand the city's existing manufacturing sector and drive green economic growth and job creation (eThekwini, EMD 2006a, 33–34, 2007b, 42).
Couched in the context of these multiple synergies, the 2008 Energy Strategy provided a plain language summary of the complex technical information of the two earlier reports packaged into a plan aimed at winning broader support within the municipality. In addition, as well as involving a private consultant, the strategy was designed through a participatory process centred around an Energy Advisory Committee (EAC) which was created to support the EMD in the creation of the Energy Strategy. The EAC pulled together representatives from a variety of private sector and non-governmental organizations, as well as local and national government, the local utility, and renewable energy companies. Their role was to attend meetings and provide feedback on drafts of the Strategy as it was developed. This collaborative process, based on an intentional approach to climate governance (cf. Bridge & Perreault 2009), helped to draft a better strategy, but it also created some sense of ownership of the strategy outside of the EMD itself.
The high level objective of the Energy Strategy were to create a diverse portfolio of Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency projects across four key theme areas: 1) residential; 2) local authority & public; 3) industry, commerce, agribusiness; 4) transport. For example, for the residential sector, proposed actions include the proactive early adoption of increased energy efficiency standards for residential construction (based on a new national standard that was then in development), and the establishment of residential green power purchasing programs that 130 would allow households to pay a premium to support renewable energy generation (eThekwini EMD 2008, 52-3). For industry, the Strategy proposed (among other measures) a comprehensive plan to promote renewable energy purchase and generation, as well as an industrial energy audit program to identify opportunities for increasing industrial efficiency (eThekwini EMD, 55-58).
Trying to create as many institutional anchors for the Strategy as possible, its 'Vision Statement' directly incorporated a quotation from the 'City Vision' which guided the municipality's IDP:
-Vision Statement: “By 2020, eThekwini Municipality will be Africa’s most caring and liveable city.” (IDP, eThekwini Municipality, 2006-2011)
-In support of this City vision eThekwini Municipality will: Encourage sustainability in energy sector development and energy use through efficient supply-side and demand-side practices and increased uptake of renewable energy sources,
-Thereby: Minimising the undesirable impacts of energy use upon human health and the environment, particularly climate change and contributing towards secure and affordable energy for all. (eThekwini, EMD 2008, 15)
The entire process of drafting the strategy and its guiding principles aimed to divorce it from any narrow association with environmental issues, and to link it to broader worldviews that held sway elsewhere in the municipality. In the language of the literature covered in the preceding chapter, this was an exercise in both policy formation and conceptual translation. Recognizing that the same basic policies could be justified according to a variety of different priorities, the Energy Strategy set out to establish renewable energy and energy efficiency within the competing conceptions of the municipality's core responsibilities (Interview, Rich 2008/03/12; see March and Olsen 1989, Callon 1986, Latour 1987, Rutland and Aylett 2008).
But the Energy Strategy was never passed. The volatile national energy grid was one step ahead. On January 25th, less than two weeks before the draft strategy was to be released, the national energy grid collapsed. The country's economy stopped in its tracks, industrial and residential consumers were left without power, and all levels of government scrambled to contain the 131 damage and restore service. But EMD's unrelenting work to put green energy on the municipal agenda was not altogether lost.
The Energy Strategy concluded with a section entitled “Cross-Cutting and Institutional Issues.” The text of the section occupied less than a page, but in the short term it was possibly the most important element of the strategy. In it, the EMD spelled out the institutional limitations of basing work on energy in a department mandated to address biodiversity. Coordinating the creation of the plan had already put the EMD far outside its official jurisdiction. For EMD to oversee implementation of a municipal energy strategy was out of the question. The municipality, the draft Strategy concluded, needed to establish an independent “Energy Unit” specifically tasked with addressing energy issues, and coordinating this work across multiple municipal agencies (eThekwini, EMD 2008, 80).
Considering the emphasis on efficiency gains and renewable energy in the Energy Strategy, the EMD had early on identified eThekwini Electricity (EE, the municipal electricity distributor) as a key partner in implementing the plan. During the preparing of the strategy, and the two technical reports that preceded it, EMD had attempted to engage EE in the process. The utility however saw things very differently. As a reseller buying electricity from the national grid and selling it to local customers, the utility resisted any involvement with implementing the Energy Strategy. They argued that local renewable energy generation was not within their mandate. On efficiency, prior to the crisis EE had partnered with ESKOM (the national electricity generator) to the extent necessary to satisfy the requirements of a National Energy Efficiency Strategy passed in 2005 and revised in 2008. Their initiatives were largely limited to a series of energy efficiency publicity campaigns and an initiative to replace household light-bulbs with more efficient compact fluorescent bulbs. EE showed no interest in adopting some of the more ambitious and proactive approaches to efficiency outlined in the energy strategy. After the electricity crisis, this did not change. They did however support EMD's call for the creation of a separate energy agency.
Between the onset of the energy crisis in 2008, and my second field season in Durban in 2009 EE's refusal to engage with renewables would stay steadfast, as would their deferral to national 132 initiatives to guide any engagement with efficiency. But their shared call for institutional reform bore fruit. In what follows I will look in detail at EE's refusal to promote renewable energy, as well a highly contradictory public position that it adopted on climate change. I will argue that at its root this aversion to renewables was grounded in an entrenched institutional culture, centred around the utility's identity as an energy distributor and reseller. This identity was adamantly defended by senior management who could not reconcile the identity of their organization with the new challenges represented by local renewable energy production. Despite controlling key policies tools and infrastructure that could smooth the introduction of renewables into the local grid, and a pressing need for more electricity, the culture of the organization made it impossible for EE to act effectively.
4.3 Path Dependency in the Electricity Sector
To understand EE's position on renewable energy and climate change, as well as its responses to the energy crisis that began in 2008, it is first necessary to understand the role that the distributor plays within the local and larger national electricity systems. At its most basic level, EE is the municipally managed reseller of electricity bought from ESKOM. It holds the monopoly on the sale of electricity within the municipality. It is also responsible for building, managing, and maintaining the local energy grid, and extending infrastructure to serve new commercial, industrial, and residential needs. In the case of disruptions to the national grid – as in the case of the energy crisis – EE technicians were also responsible for managing the rate at which electricity was consumed by local customers. Using complex switching systems they could even shut off entire sections of the city if necessary to protect the stability of the national system.
But in this role, EE was more than a simple energy distributor. It was an active agent in implementing both sides of South Africa's uneasy neo-liberal/redistributive development strategy (see Chapter 2). On the one hand, it was through EE's work that electrification was being extended on a massive scale to previously marginalized communities within the city and to newly constructed social housing. In this way it was a key to the local realization of the 133 electrification, housing, and free basic service targets set by the national government. On the other, it was the local supplier to industrial and commercial customers of the cut-rate electricity that was central to South Africa's national economic development strategy. EE staff actively pursued large energy consumers in the city, attempting to draw them away from other energy sources that they may have been using (coal and gas), thus creating more demand for ESKOM. Both they and ESKOM had staff working directly with corporate clients advising them on ways in which a switch to electricity, coupled with energy efficiency measures, could reduce their costs, boosting their profits and enabling growth. (Interviews, Govender 2008/03/12 & 2009/03/13, Singh 2009/03/24, Anonymous).
In 2005, when ESKOM first began discussing with EE the fact that demand growth was soon going to outpace the available supply of electricity, new links were made between the various components of EE’s technical and developmental mandates. Directly facilitating energy efficiency among clients, which had initially served as a sweetener to net new industrial customers, was refocused to target residential clients. Through awareness-raising campaigns as well as a program that installed millions of high-efficiency compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs), EE aimed to reduce residential consumption as a way of preserving supply for industrial clients. Likewise, following ESKOM's lead, research began into ways of using different forms of “smart” infrastructure to reduce home energy consumption, in particular by extending the reach of EE's switching system right down to the level of individual households. The goal was to further reduce household energy use by using “smart switching” technology that allowed the utility to remotely switch off large household appliances (principally hot water heaters, air conditions, and pool pumps) during periods of peak energy use. Here again, residential efficiency served as a means to protect the supply of electricity for the large industries that were central to the country's economic development (Govender 2009/03/13).
EE's strategies are an excellent example of the path dependent responses change discussed in Chapter 4 (cf. Berkhout 2002). The unprecedented strain on the national energy grid presented EE with a challenge diametrically opposed to its traditional role: rather than increasing electricity consumption it had to reduce it. But it responded to these changed circumstances by finding a course of action that could easily be integrated into its existing organizational culture. 134
By re-purposing and expanding tactics and techniques already in use within the utility, EE's response also protected the value of its own social and technical assets, and the identities of those who controlled them. While EE was comfortable with a switching-based approach to demand side management that preserved their relationships to both their commodity (electricity) and their clients, they rejected the more diverse and innovative efficiency and renewable energy programs proposed by the Energy Strategy.
During interviews with upper and middle-management representatives of EE (Interviews, Govender 2008/03/12 & 2009/03/13, Singh 2009/03/24, Anonymous), all showed a strong attachment to a specific vision of the utility's role and identity both locally and within the national grid. They were, as was often repeated, a distributor responsible for providing electricity to local customers, and managing supply to enable current and future growth. They had defended this identity even in the face of a building national supply crisis. But as we will see, it also deeply constrained their willingness to engage with, or even clearly understand, options that lay beyond social and technical methods of increasing efficiency and controlling demand. In addition, despite being intimately involved with the bulk of the municipality's emissions, climate change appeared on their agenda in only the most rudimentary and instrumental form.
The energy crisis, and the larger opportunity that it presented for rethinking the municipality's dependence on a polluting and unstable national grid, occurred at a time when EE was already in a period of transition. Awareness of impending supply problems had begun a shift within the organization that placed increased importance on the utility’s role in managing demand and energy use, particularly among residential clients. But as discussed above, the utility's actions were limited to fairly superficial programs, except proposed (but so far unrealized) changes in the area of switching technology. EE's response provides a succinct example of the protective forms of institutional adaptation described by the literature covered in the previous chapter (March and Olsen 1989, Merton 1940, Schoenberger 1998). As in Schoenberger's (1997) study of GM, for example, EE responded to the energy crisis by integrating those strategies which fit with established corporate values (i.e. adopting more advanced switching technologies) but ignored other options (such as renewables or more ambitious efficiency measures) that 135 challenged existing relationships with workers, suppliers, and markets.
In what follows I will first cover EE's initial responses to the energy crisis in 2008. These interviews were conducted less then a month after the collapse of the national grid at a time when organized blackouts (known as “load shedding”) were implemented to prevent the kind of cascading failures that caused chaos on the national grid (see Chapter 2). I will then pick up the thread one year later and see how, in the context of a lull in demand created by the global economic collapse, EE's approach to energy efficiency, demand management, renewable energy and climate change had evolved.
4.3.1 Local Renewables: “It Just Isn't What We Do!” Even though it was widely known that ESKOM had allowed their electricity supply to become severely overstretched, the onset of the crisis took everyone by surprise. For EE, in the months that followed, this would mean intensifying its efforts to become both a supplier and a manager of demand for electricity. In the short term, however, it required the utility to take drastic action. In coordination with ESKOM it was necessary to reduce load on the national grid. In the early days of the crisis, EE would receive word from its national counterpart that a certain number of megawatts needed to be shed from the city's power consumption. It then had 5 to 10 minutes to use the switching system built into the local grid to select and shut down entire portions of the city. Technicians had to meet the needs of the national grid while also doing the least damage to the needs of local residents and businesses and not unfairly closing off power to some sections of the city more than others (or being seen to unfairly target previously marginalized communities). It was a tricky balance of precise technical actions and a complex socio-economic and racially charged context of energy politics within the city (discussed further below). After some delay, these rolling blackouts where orchestrated, and load-shedding schedules were published in local papers.
In interviews in 2008, one month after the onset of the crisis, the main concern of the key spokesperson within EE was the need to increase the reach and complexity of their switching system. Deena Govender, Manager of Commercial Engineering and Marketing, was effectively second-in-charge within the utility. He was tasked with developing the response to the energy 136 crisis. As it stood, the switching system only gave EE control down to the neighbourhood level. Govender's main goal was to accelerate efforts to increase the precision of their switching control by rolling out the household level “smart switching” technology mentioned above. Under his direction, the utility also later pursued a large public energy efficiency campaign, and considered time-of-use metering (TOU) as a way to reduce the spikes of electricity usage at peak times.
These programs followed the lead of ESKOM, which studied the use of smart switching and created targets and incentive programmes to reduce electricity demand by 3,000 MW by 2012 and 5,000 MW by 2025. The high variability of electricity demand creates sharp peaks at specific times of day. Supply capacity has to be able to meet these peaks, even though for the majority of the day much of this capacity is not needed. By reducing non-essential energy use during peak times, both smart switching and TOU (which increase the cost of electricity at peak times) help shift energy use to off-peak hours. This smooths the profile of energy use, allows generation capacity to be used more efficiently, and can help accommodating growth in demand without building new power stations.
Smart switching and time-of-use metering have been used by other states and municipalities as components in a smart-grid able to synchronize and create incentives for the introduction of local renewables. These technologies, and the general modernization of the grid that accompanies them, can facilitate the introduction of locally generated renewable energy onto the municipal grid. The Canadian province of Ontario, for example, has pursued smart switching and TOU, in combination with grid modernization and preferential tariffs paid for renewable energy, to help increase the supply of wind and solar energy and to reduce the provinces' dependence on coal and nuclear power. In Durban's case they would have had the added advantage of providing a partial alternative to the volatile national grid, relieving load by reducing demand for conventional power, and creating an electricity supply more resilient to climate related disruptions. This would have had the dual economic benefit of creating a large pool of new jobs generated by installing and maintaining these systems, and partially insulated local businesses from the instability of ESKOM's power supply. 137
Despite this potential – and its compatibility with the smart-switching systems already being considered – Govender and others within EE had only a passing understanding of decentralized renewable energy technology, or the systems used to manage it. When asked about the place of alternative energy sources in Durban, Govender explained that particularly for low-income and remote peri-urban clients some discussions were under way about providing a mix of energy sources. In this context however, it emerged that the only sources of alternative energy that EE was considering were propane canisters and gel fuels for household cooking (Interviews, Govender 2008/03/12 & 2009/03/13). This was despite the fact that decentralized wind and solar power has proven to be a cost effective way of supplying power to off-grid communities in Africa and elsewhere around the world (see CURES 2009).
When asked about their ability to engage in some way to encourage the growth of a local renewable energy sector, the EE representatives interviewed during my two case study visits were adamant that they could play no part in it. They were explicit about the fact that they were not “in the business” of generating power:
Energy generation is not one of our responsibilities. That happens at a national level, with ESKOM. And for renewables, you know, that too needs to be driven nationally too. It's not something that we want to encourage at the moment. You have to be careful about the quality of the electricity. You would need some some kind of device to monitor that, to deal with harmonics filtering, specific voltage levels... Small scale renewable energy in particular, household scale, we are not interested in that. How do we control it? (Interview, Anonymous eThekwini Electricity Official)
These supposedly unresolved technical issues, and concerns over the quality and safety of the power that renewables would put into the grid48 are red herrings. Reliable mechanisms to regulate both are readily available on the market.
This blockage was not caused by a lack of information. As discussed above, the EMD had produced a detailed Municipal Energy Strategy. The document both outlined the potential for renewable energy within the city, and linked the development of local green energy to a
48 When feeding electricity back into the grid, providers have to ensure both that it is cycling at the right speed and that it shuts off if the grid goes down. This is to make sure the electricity does not disrupt the grid, and that it does not electrocute linemen going out to fix technical problems. 138 proactive approach to climate change. With its control over both the local grid, tariffs, and billing, EE had jurisdiction over key levers that could be used to create incentives for local renewable generation and facilitate its coordination with other sources of energy. However, in discussion with EE employees, Jessica Rich (then managing EMDs energy program) reports that she was frequently met with the same refrain: “You don't understand, they would tell me, this [renewables] just isn't what we do!” (Interview, Rich 2009/03/30). As Schoenberger (1997) argued, as discussed in the previous chapter, it was not that information was scarce. It was that established habits of thought and action made it impossible to accept that information and transform it into a new vision or strategy that was seen as appropriate within the skills, practices, and worldview of the organization.
When pressed about EE's reaction to the EMD's work on renewable energy, Govender's reply illustrates his desire to align EE with two conflicting sources of legitimacy: external pressure to associate EE with progressive renewable energy policy49, and the internal legitimacy associated with EE's historical mandate and identity as a supplier of affordable electricity:
DG: We can... we will support something like that (the Municipal Energy Strategy). We are always looking at alternative energies as well. Obviously we will throw our full support behind that. But ...
AA: What does that mean?
DG: We will actually buy it. We will encourage the generation of alternative energy, buy it, and distribute it to our clients. We can be the sales and transport mechanism to our clients. We can go up to Mondi [a large South African pulp and paper company with global operations] and say: “Do you want to buy green energy?” And, “This is what the cost is: it's not 20 cents a kWh its 50 cents a kWh.” And there is interest from customers out there to buy at a premium. But the funding mechanism behind that... who is going to....
The other problem with this is that according to the Municipal Systems Act, we buy electricity and sell it to our clients. It won't be in our customers best interest if we decided as a municipality, “Sorry, I am buying green energy at 30 cents [a kWh] whereas ESKOM is providing at 20 cents.” They want the most cost-effective energy.
Unless of course I get a willing buyer and a willing seller at a certain price, and all I am 49 Pressure that was represented by EMD's work, larger discourses around climate change, and possibly a researcher asking probing questions. 139
doing is transporting it for them and charging them the transport costs. An agreement like that we will fully support and encourage.
And obviously it [associating the municipality with green energy] is a good marketing tool as well. (Interview, Govender 2008/03/12, ellipses indicate pauses.)
There is a richness of information that can be seen by looking more closely at the movement that occurs in this exchange back and forth between the desire to express enthusiasm and the limits of what Govender perceives to be possible. From the start, the utility's engagement with renewable energy is tightly defined to fit within its established role as an energy distributor. EE's contribution is solely to act as an intermediary between (an unnamed, and currently non-existent) supplier and potential corporate clients for green energy. EE's clients are likewise narrowly defined as simple consumers of electricity.
The idea that their clients might also have the capacity to become energy suppliers – thus potentially addressing both issues of supply and of their “best interests” – is completely excluded from this account. This is despite the fact that large clients already generated significant amounts of their own power. Mondi, for example, (far from needing to by power) was in the process of expanding its local generation capacity. At its Russian facilities the company was already selling energy (generated through high-efficiency gas-turbine co-generation systems) back to the national grid.50 That EE's “clients” might benefit if given the opportunity to sell less-polluting energy back into a grid that was desperately in need of new generation capacity did not enter Govender's calculations. This was not because Govender, or other EE officials interviewed, lacked the necessary information to see this potential, or the skills or resources to act on it.
Rather, Govender's position reflects how a sincere attempt to think through EE's ability to encourage renewable energy could be totally dominated by the limits imposed by deeply ingrained perceptions of the identities and appropriate roles of the various players involved (cf. March and Olsen 1989, 2004). Generation. Distribution. Consumption. Each of these stages in the energy system was linked clearly to a specific agency or set of actors. Transcending them was, literally, unthinkable.
50 It would, as it happened, announce that it was considering similar plan in Durban five days after my interview with Govender (see Creamer 2008). 140
The one area where Govender was able to resolve this conundrum was when it came to public relations and marketing. EE even before the energy crisis began was making superficial references to climate change and greenhouse gasses within its public energy efficiency campaigns. In fact, when asked about the significance of climate change to its business, marketing and public relations was the only area where EE had any concrete engagement with the issue. Similarly, it had produced a series of publicity posters celebrating the municipality's landfill gas capture and electricity generation projects as proof that the municipality was behind green energy (Interview, Govender 2008/03/12).
4.3.2 Responses One Year Later One year later, the global economic crisis had significantly reduced industrial demand for electricity. Load-shedding had stopped. Fundamentally, though, the nation's electricity supply remained the same. To prevent future blackouts once the economy recovered, EE was under pressure to continue to produce residential energy savings. Their focus on energy efficiency had also grown to include the beginnings of a solar hot water program and a plan to replace high pressure sodium street lights with LED lights. Many things had changed, but the core focus on energy efficiency and a fine-grained switching system remained (although it had yet to be implemented).
The value of climate change as a public relations tool, however, had increased significantly as a possible solution to an unexpected contradiction that EE had to confront. The economic downturn had produced an artificial drop in energy consumption across the country. As a result both EE and ESKOM's revenues were down. This was at a time when both needed to invest in local infrastructure and national generation capacity (respectively). But each also needed to keep residential consumption low to safeguard against future shortages once the economy recovered (the timing of which neither could predict). To make up the revenue shortfall, while keeping demand down, the only solution was for tariffs to be increased. Household consumers, as Govender summarized, were not pleased with this equation: “The public is panicking. They say you asked us to save, and now you want to charge us more because we are saving. So I might as well use extra!” (Interview, Govender 2009/03/13) 141
In response, climate change had become their primary tool in justifying continued savings to the public. EE and the municipality as a whole had associated themselves with the international “EarthHour” campaign51 as an effort to encourage behaviour change among the public (the strengths and weaknesses of this kind of approach to behaviour change are discussed in more detail in Chapter 8).
Govender described this as part of a larger effort to encourage people to rethink their perception of energy consumption: “We still struggle to change peoples’ mindsets, but we have got to keep hammering away until something gives” (ibid.). Ironically, his frustration closely paralleled what other municipal employees had felt about trying to encourage EE to engage with renewable energy. There was, however, a more important tension in EE's position: energy efficiency was being used to create a margin of security within the national grid to ensure supply would not again be disrupted to major industrial clients (see Chapter 2 for the costs of initial disruptions to the South African economy). This was a stop-gap measure designed to protect the grid in case an economic recovery occurred before the first of a fleet of new coal-fired power plants came on- line in 2012. Given this, there was no credible way to make the case that household energy savings reduced individual ghg emissions. They were simply protecting the use of those emissions for more economically valuable actors.
This contradiction was something that the public was made bitterly aware of by the fact major industrial clients had been exempted from ESKOM's tariff hikes. This continued apartheid-era arrangements that gave certain larg corporations access to electricity at rates of up to 500% below what was paid by residential consumers (Hattingh 2010). That these once secret agreements continued after the electricity crisis was the focus of major civil-society led resistance to the new tariffs in Durban and elsewhere in South Africa. Rather than “panicking,” as Govender put it, the public was in fact protesting (Bond & Ngwane 2010, EarthLife Africa 2008, Hattingh 2010). A variety of local and national groups, including the University of KwaZulu Natal's Centre for Civil Society, Earth Life Africa, Climate Justice Now SA, SDCEA, 51 The Earth Hour campaign, run the the World Wildlife Foundation, is a public relations campaign designed to show international public support for action on climate change. Taking place every year at the end of March, participants turn off their lights for an hour to signal their support. Cities around the world have affiliated themselves with the movement, leading to high profile 'darkenings' of landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty. In Durban the beachfront Casino, among other corporate and municipal buildings dimmed its lights for the event. 142 and national trade unions organized rallies and demonstrations in opposition to the rate hikes. They charged that the hikes were unfairly foisting the financial burden of building new generation capacity on those least able to pay, while perpetuating South Africa's reliance on highly polluting coal-fired power.
ESKOM applied for annual tariff increases of 35% every year following the 2008 energy crisis, and protests continued to grow into 2011. As this dissertation was in preparation, tariff protests had become a focal issue around which local NGOs, like SDCEA, rallied the local population around a larger Climate Justice campaign (discussed further in chapter 7). As well as opposing increased costs and the expansion of coal-fired power generation, these campaign promoted local renewable energy as a solution to South Africa's linked social, electrical, and environmental problems. As well as reducing emissions, they argued that local renewables were a cost-effective way to address energy poverty, while providing electricity to marginalized and difficult to service communities (see CURES 2009).
But despite these growing external pressures, EE's position on renewables in 2009 was the same as it had the year before. Concerns over safety and quality remained, although both apparently had gone uninvestigated. And an insistence on the limits of their “core mandate” persisted: “How much can we do? Our core business function is to buy electricity and to distribute it as effectively as we possibly can. We are not generators of electricity. Our core business is to not generate electricity, it is to distribute and to transmit electricity. From that perspective how much can we contribute to reducing our carbon footprint?” (Interview, Anonymous eThekwini Electricity Official).
The one area where there had been a small shift was the mention of the potential of buying electricity from large corporations like Mondi. Throughout the interviews it became clear that electricity officials related strongly with their corporate clients, shared similar sets of skills and training, and worked with them closely. There was, on the other hand, a tangible aversion to small-scale renewables and the new relationships that they would have to construct to create incentives to manage them. Nothing concrete had been done, however, to pursue or encourage purchasing power from local industries. 143
When asked what factors stood in the way of EE engaging more effectively with local renewable energy, Govender highlighted the very real capacity constraints that EE was working under. A review done two years earlier had showed that the organization had 300 critical vacancies out of 1800 posts. In addition, as with smart-switching, Govender felt that local energy generation was something that had to be driven by ESKOM. As he reiterated EE had one and only one key role within the municipality: “We are here to provide electricity and that is our full time job” (Govender 2009/03/13).
EE however was not the only municipal agency to be struggling with staff vacancies. The transition from apartheid led to vacancies through Durban, and South Africa more generally, as old officials left their posts. Replacements with the necessary skills were in short supply. In addition high AIDS infection rates were also taking their toll on the ranks of municipal employees. More specifically, renewable energy generation, as a recent arrival on the municipal agenda was not included in the mandate of any municipal body. It arguably had even less to do with the EMD's core focus on biodiversity protection than EE's jurisdiction over energy supply.
4.3.3 Discussion: eThekwini Electricity and the Costs of Institutional Path Dependency While common, EE's strict adherence to official job descriptions is avoidable. As we will see, important changes often come from actors who see their stated mandate as the starting point, and not the limit of their work. What it points to here is the need to look beyond the technical solutions proposed by the EE to the organizational culture that selected some solutions while excluding or ignoring others (cf. Berkhout 2002, March & Olsen 1989, 2004, Schoenberger 1997). The focus on switching and efficiency are strong examples of the way in which an organization that fosters trained incapacity responds to shocks – even in this case radical ones – by re-purposing and adapting established tools and practises.
Switching systems and the skills and response capacities linked to them have always been central to the utility. Efficiency also has a long lineage in the utility. As a former sales officer explained, electrical efficiency was one of the tools they used to encourage large industrial customers to 144 switch from coal or gas (Interview, Sing 2009/03/24). Working with clients to improve their efficiency would reduce their costs, making it more likely that they would electrify more of their operations. The repurposing of a tool originally used to increase demand, therefore, doesn't raise any real challenges to established social or material practises.
Through their focus on switching and efficiency, upper level EE management acted to protect the socio-technical assets of the utility that were embodied in its existing procedures, specializations, divisions of labour, and the relationships these established between itself, ESKOM, and its customers. To do so, they adapted existing assets to a new situation. But they also adapted the situation itself to their established practices by defining it as primarily a problem of managing instabilities in the existing system to protect industry, as opposed to seeing it as an opportunity for more profound changes in the electricity sector.
Further, EE's role as local reseller of electricity to local customers is solidified through powerful professional (and no doubt on an individual level, personal) relationships with the national energy supplier, ESKOM, and the energy generation model that they represent. There is the perception that local engagement with renewables must wait for the national level to take the initiative: “It is not driven nationally. Municipalities do not have resources to go and investigate these things (Interview, Govender, 2009/03/13). Officials repeatedly emphasized a particular hierarchy of generation, bulk purchase, local distribution and final consumption that to them was an immovable aspect of how they did business: “In terms of generation we as a municipality do not have direct control. [...] Our core business function there again is to distribute and transmit as effectively as we possibly can. You guys talk about mitigation, but how much can we do within our core business function to support mitigation? The real mitigation stuff has to happen at the top [ESKOM] .” (Anonymous eThekwini Electricity Official, Interview 2009).
EE, as a department, is deeply embedded in social and technical networks that involve both built infrastructure and relationships with other powerful players. The inertia built into these social and technical networks complicates change and innovation. But it would be wrong to paint EE as completely without options. As we have seen, it has the ability to modify both physical infrastructure and to tailor energy tariffs to influence patterns of consumption and to encourage 145 local generation. These are two key levers by which municipalities can facilitate and create incentives for decentralized renewable energy.
That this potential has stayed dormant brings us back to a point made by Veblen in the late 1890s about the links between actions, knowledge, and values. As he argued above, habits of action (ways, for example, of managing a complex power grid) embed practitioners in ways of knowing and understanding the world, and from this understanding also comes a sense of values or, in his words, of what is “right and good” (1898, 195). This argument would be elaborated a century later by March and Olsen (1989, 2004) in their discussion of the “logic of appropriateness.” This question of values and appropriateness was a strong current in my interviews with EE employees. There seemed to be an underlying sense that it was simply not appropriate, not “right,” for them to be involved with promoting the generation power at the local level. Further (as highlighted by Merton (1940) and elaborated by Schoenberger (1998)) adherence to these established worldviews, particularly by senior management, held the utility in a pattern of action that protected established socio-technical assets, but at great cost to the underlying objectives of the utility.
The narrow interpretation of the EE's mandate is further reflected in the lack of connections it has made between energy projects and other local development objectives. The thousands of installation and maintenance jobs created by the adoption of technologies like solar hot water, for example, could be an enormous benefit to the local economy. Decentralized energy projects can also facilitate access and improve the quality of service in difficult-to-service areas. They can simultaneously answer linked environmental, energy and quality-of-life related development goals. Although discussed by other municipal employees, laid out in the EMD's Energy Strategy, and voiced in the streets in protests against tariff increases, none of these potential synergies came up in interviews with electricity officials. Similar synergies were laid out in the Energy Strategy for demand-side management, but here again (apart from the pressing need to reduce consumption to protect energy supplies to industry) EE was mum about the broader benefits of ambitious energy efficiency policies.
Faced with a sudden crisis, the department responded as many of us would by using the tools 146 familiar to them and attempting to extend and modify past procedures to new conditions. This is, as shown by the work of institutionalist , is a predictable and very human response. But it also leaves key opportunities unrealized. It will not generate the change that Durban needs to see for it to resolve its energy problems, decrease its emissions, or become more resilient. We need to look for ways in which this institutional and personal path dependency can be overcome.
4.4 Water and Sanitation: beyond Departmental “Business as Usual”
There are in fact a variety of alternative energy projects being run by municipal departments. These range from in-pipe hydro and micro hydro in the city's water reticulation system, to biodiesel from algae projects, to the already mentioned methane gas capture at two of the city's landfill gas sites. All but the latter are run by the department of Water and Sanitation (EWS).
In terms of actual energy yield, Durban's flagship programs are a complementary pairing of biogas and hydro power projects that could criss-cross whole sections of the city. The city's hilly terrain generates excess pressure within the fresh water distribution system. Water from dams descends into the city building pressure that needs to be cut by as much as two thirds in some parts of the system. It is currently dissipated as noise and heat by mechanical pressure release valves. To make better use of it, hydro and micro-hydro generation turbines are going to be integrated directly into the piping system. In total they will yield enough power for between 10 000 and 30 000 low-cost houses (7 – 22 megawatts) depending on the extent of the roll out.
During the period under study EWS also had plans to upgrade and expand the existing generation systems that capture gas produced by the biodigesters that break down sewage. While continuing to meet the needs of the treatment works themselves, the plants will store biogas to generate electricity, which can then be sold to the grid at peak times. In partnership with AGAMA energy (a South African renewable energy consulting firm), EWS was also putting in place smaller scale applications of the same system in peri-urban communities. These setups made it possible to provide low-cost waterborne sewage, to treat effluent on site, produce gas 147 that can be used for cooking, and generate a high grade fertilizer for local agriculture. This reduced the city's environmental footprint, increases its energy security, and boosts the economies of its poorer communities.
These projects were only two out of a long list, including plans to create biodiesel from algae grown on sewage. While they are interesting, more interesting is how a department with no mandate to generate energy came to see these opportunities and act on them. While many of the officials that I talked to in the city were generally interested in “doing something about climate change” many – and not only those within EE – explained that it was not part of their job description. In EWS, the answers were different. This is not for lack of an overarching responsibility, and similar in some ways to that of EE. It was required to roll out the infrastructure necessary to repair apartheid era backlogs and enable economic growth. In interview Neil McLoed (head of EWS) was clear, even terse, about the core mandate of the department: My job is to run this thing as best as I can and to deliver. I have a clear mandate to deliver. Water and Sanitation to everybody, at the lowest price, and by yesterday. That is our total focus.(Interview, McLoed 2009/03/27)
But the difference was that EWS employees and senior management perceived their core mandate as the beginning of their work, not a limiting factor. Your job description was “the boring part of your job” (ibid.), and from management on down there was an organizational culture that rewarded innovation and risk taking. Speedy Moodliar, EWS's Manager of Planning, told me laughing:
I can design a water main with my eyes closed. There is nothing more anyone can teach me about infrastructure planning in terms of water or designing for water. I can do it. In life you need more than that, you need something that is going to interest you and stop you from yawning. (Interview, 26/03/2009)
So how can we account for this difference between EE and EWS? There are a few relevant contextual facts. Unlike EE, EWS is not tied into business relationships with other powerful agencies. There is no equivalent to ESKOM within the field of water and sanitation, and as such changes to EWS operations do not implicate anyone else's business plan. Secondly, EWS is not 148 caught in the type of national level crisis that EE experienced. Instead of responding reactively and under extreme pressure, EWS has the room to think and plan more calmly and creatively. Finally, EWS has raw materials (water pressure and effluent) that can be used as the basis for energy generation.
Beyond these differences, there is something else at work here. Neil McLoed made it clear that his organization was managed very differently from other municipal departments. Significant changes had been made to encourage innovation and to fight the overspecialization that creates trained incapacity. At an individual level, employees are pushed to see their job descriptions as the minimum level for their work. Beyond that, the organizational culture of the department encourages employees to think critically about how to achieve their objectives and how to address problems:
[Y]ou are expected to take responsibility and to challenge everything that you do about your job. If you see an opportunity for innovation but can't initiate the solution yourself then come and talk to me and let's find a way to break down the walls out there that are stopping you from achieving it. ... There's something else, I always tell people 'don't come with a problem, come with a solution'. 'Here is the issue, here is how we can solve it. What do you think?' 'OK, try it out.' Always going to your boss for a solution becomes very limiting both for you and for me and the other top management. (Interview, McLoed 2009/03/27)
At the level of the organization as a whole, similar principles are applied. Cross-level meetings bring staff together to share challenges and collectively brainstorm solutions: “we get everyone from clerical right up to senior management in the same room looking at the same problem and bringing their own perspectives in.” EWS also holds a monthly sustainability lecture series, with three or four invited speakers covering a very wide range of sustainability related topics 52. Space for discussion at the forums is open and informal and brainstorming here was the starting point for EWS's biodiesel projects.
Taken together, these initiatives created a very particular structure within EWS. The standard organizational structure of a municipal department approximates a hierarchy of siloized sub-units
52 The forum I attended had presentations on seed swapping and food security in India, green building design principles, and the sanitary composting of sewage material to create agricultural fertilizer. 149
(see fig. 3.1). As discussed in Chapter 3, this type of organization closely parallels that described by Weber (1922). Senior management determine the direction and mandate of the organization as a whole. Responsibility for fulfilling parts of that mandate cascades down through different units, divisions, and individuals, each with their own sub-area of action and influence. Communication flows primarily (but not exclusively) from top to bottom, and employees have little chance to communicate between units or to influence the direction of the organization as a whole. The boundaries of the organization are also relatively solid, offering little chance for collaboration with outside organizations or departments.
Although on paper EWS organizational structure remained quite traditional (see fig. 3.2) if the interactions that take place within the department are mapped out, a very different structure emerges. Distancing itself from this siloized and closed model, EWS created an internal structure that is both more integrated and more open (see fig. 4.1). Although still hierarchical, inclusive intra-departmental forums encourage communication and exchange between sub-units. Encouragement to form partnerships and think creatively means that individual influence extends beyond the confines of official divisions and can spread out, potentially contributing to the mandate of the organization as a whole. This makes it possible to identify synergies and shared interests with other actors both inside and outside the organization. A more permeable organizational border brings in outside input and information to allow for the creation of a strategic vision that incorporates input from a variety of situated knowledges. These exchanges can also develop into partnerships around specific projects that bring increased resources and expertise to the organization while meeting a variety of other developmental goals. This model has its costs in terms of staff time, the risk of failure and wasted resources, and the loss of staff uncomfortable with this type of work environment. But in this specific case, those costs seem more than justified by the results.
The inclusive re-distribution of empowered creativity encouraged by EWS is a significant shift from the way that municipal departments are traditionally run. McLoed's approach to leadership is representative, as well as a more general shift documented in management literature from mechanistic and regimented Weberian rationalism to a more open and organic institutional culture (Burns and Stalkker 1961, Morgan 1997, Wheatley 1992). In this view the role of 150 management moved beyond a simple focus on efficiency-maximization and, as Baker and Branch (2001) summarize,
“[T]he central role of management was increasingly defined as encouraging motivational practices, facilitating creativity and innovation on the part of its employees, customers, and stakeholders, and ensuring the development of leaders throughout the organization. In other words, management’s role was to unleash creativity and passion and harness these forces to promote the success of the organization” (Baker and Branch 2001, 6, see also Kotter 1996, Deming 1994).
EWS's practises also embody a more modest version of Schoenberger's call (1998), discussed in the previous chapter, for the profound reordering of power relations within organizations, and between them and other social actors.
Officially, senior management like McLoed justify all of this by pointing to their bottom line: “all our energy from waste projects, they are purely to try and minimize our electricity bills. Right, Debra (Roberts, the head of EMD) likes it. But the fact that it benefits climate change is incidental to us” (Interview, McLoed 2009/03/27). This is not because McLoed is uninformed about climate change. He was knowledgeable about both the science of climate change, and the broader institutional costs and benefits of climate-related programs like the Kyoto protocol's Clean Development Mechanism. Their core function of treating human waste gives them a key role in protecting the health of local waterways (something McLoed spoke about with detail and clarity), and he reported that this commitment to the local environment also translates into larger concerns about climate change among EWS staff:
We do have an environmental conscience... surprisingly. We like to tease Debra, but there are enough people here who appreciate the importance of dealing the gas and the emissions, so we have to do something about that. So there is a moral side. (Ibid.)
But for McLoed, this environmental interpretation of the issue was not an effective driver for the projects he wanted to pursue. Locally, as the EMD had experienced repeatedly, being associated too closely with a green agenda was a liability. On a different scale, the CDM mechanism was a bureaucratic nightmare and more trouble than it was worth. Overall there were other institutional logics that provided more legitimacy and power. As well as emphasizing synergies between their 151 energy projects and EWS's core objectives, McLoed and Moodliar both stressed the opportunities that exist to produce benefits that help meet broader municipal objectives in areas of economic development, improved health and quality of life. Climate relevant policies, therefore, are re-framed in a language that confers legitimacy and mobilized support within EWS and the municipality more generally.
EWS had, in fact, managed to do what had eluded the EMD (see Chapter 2): it had clearly linked environmentally beneficial programs to the municipality’s larger developmental goals in a way that was seen to be both socially and economically advantageous. A few factors played in EWS' favour. It had both a much larger budget, and a much larger staff with the engineering and technical skills to design and implement new and innovative project. Rather than attempting to influence the conduct of others, EWS managed a network of its own facilities where it had the jurisdiction to modify both management practices and built infrastructure. (This autonomy, as I will argue below, is a double-edged sword that also limits the agencies overall impact within the municipality.) And, crucially, unlike the EMD, EWS did not have to struggle against an anti- development legacy resulting from the LA21 process. Being directly involved in the roll-out of sanitary services shielded it from being pigeon-holed in that way. And, perhaps recognizing how important this was, the EWS studiously avoiding identifying itself as a “green agency.” Claiming green credentials would have been easy. Many of EWS projects applied principles which were at the time heavily promoted by major international green developers like U.K. based ARUP. But McLoed was not interested in associating himself with the emerging celebration of “green cities”:
I don't go into that. ... That is a total irrelevancy to our core business, but we are doing it because it happens to fit in with other things. ... [And] I don't see my guys saying “it's not in my job description” they are excited by doing something different. (ibid.)
This excitement shared by senior management like McLoed and Moodliar who are themselves motivated by the rewards of innovation itself. Rather than create an organization culture that encourages specialization and trained incapacity, they have engineered it to do the reverse. McLoed speaks explicitly about the need to create a culture of innovation within the department. There are still strong pressures on employees to conform to certain norms, but innovation has 152 become one of them: “you tend to find people that like change and innovation and that kind of life stay [in EWS]. (...) There are lots of people who don't, and they either leave or are asked to leave” (ibid.). The strength of the department came from the fact that it empowered individual creativity within the organization, rewarded risk taking, and actively sought out diverse opinions and viewpoints to feed ideas into its projects. Instead of a creating recursive loops between skills and practise, EWS was a learning organization capable of taking on board new ideas that in turn guide new material practises.
Schoenberger discusses the negative impact that defensive and inflexible senior management can have on an organization. Although the EWS example stops short of the radical dissemination of “the power to envision and construct the social order” (Schoenberger 1998, 229), their story does illustrate the profound influence leadership can have if they adopt a more open leadership style. By creating an organizational culture that encourages multiple actors to seek out and develop alternative courses of action, EWS has positioned itself as a uniquely innovative department within the municipality. It has done so while reducing its own costs, linking itself collaboratively to other local and international non-governmental agencies, and supporting the municipality's broader social development goals.
In context, however, these projects represent only a small portion (1.4 per cent) of Durban’s total electricity use (a maximum of 154.2 GW hours out of 11,000 GWh). As innovative as EWS’s projects may be, the department has neither the position nor the ambition to collaborate or coordinate a larger scale transformation in the municipality’s electricity system. Apart from a few amicable jabs at the EMD, McLoed was guarded about his perception of other municipal departments. When asked about the uptake on renewable energy elsewhere in the municipality he said simply, “I don't go there.” He was slightly more open about the recently created Energy Office, revealing a desire to keep a certain distance from the complexities of inter-agency collaboration:
I know that they are there. But all they seem to be doing is watching what we are doing. Because all the energy projects happen to be here. Other than the solid waste one. So they are changing light bulbs and things like that. It's fine. They can exist, I'm not going to mess in their territory and they don't mess in ours. (Interview, McLoed 2009/03/27) 153
Although EWS did collaborate with other agencies on specific projects, it was clearly not going to be the municipality's champion when it came to an integrated renewable energy strategy. Implicit in many of McLoed's responses on inter-agency work there seemed to be an argument that to maintain the high level of innovation and adaptability within his department, he also felt the need to buffer it from other (perhaps less effective) departments.
4.5 Institutionalizing Climate Change Mitigation: Institutional Reform
The EMD, which produced the city's Energy Strategy, was willing to respond creatively to energy and climate issues up to a point, but refused to become involved with implementation. They saw their role as providing information to catalyse action in other departments. In the months that followed the publication of the Energy Strategy (eThekwini, EMD, 2008), and the onset of the energy crisis, it was clear to city officials and the consultants who had worked on the report, that neither EMD nor EE were the appropriate home for a more far reaching plan for the city’s energy use.
With the backing of the Municipal Manager, the Treasurer and the Head of Procurement and Infrastructure (three of the most powerful individuals within the city bureaucracy) a special 6 person Energy Office was launched in February of 2009 (shortly after the start of my second field season in Durban). Its mandate is to centralize and accelerate the roll-out of energy efficiency and renewable energy activities within the municipality. More specifically, the office has been tasked with studying and implementing efficiency and renewable energy projects, as well as sourcing funding (from the CDM as well as other sources), to raise awareness, and to train energy professionals.
Also in February of 2009, the EMD was granted a small budget to create an internal Climate Change Branch. In the future, the Energy Office will take on responsibility for mitigation efforts and GHG inventories and the Climate Change Branch will focus on adaptation efforts. The EMD's efforts had therefore finally paid off: the municipality had formally integrated climate 154 change planning into its institutional structure.
The EMD, with its long history of engaging with climate planning, seems well placed to take full advantage of its new status as the official home for adaptation policy. The Energy Office, on the other hand, will take more time to become an influential force. Its early days were hampered by a lack of strong leadership and a difficulty in attracting qualified staff. In addition, the initial head of the department was seconded to the Energy Office from EE. He was chosen for his experience working on large industrial energy efficiency projects, and as a result brought with him EE's lack of interest in renewable energy (this would subsequently change with the appointment of a new director one year later).
For the foreseeable future, the Energy Office will only be able to act as a coordinating body for projects already being undertaken by other agencies. Counting in its favour was the fact that it had clear support from powerful players within the bureaucracy. Counting against it was the fact that given that no other departments have the mandate to engage with renewable energy projects, the new Energy Office will find few partners. Officials in EE saw the creation of the Energy Office primarily as a way of deflecting responsibility for innovative energy projects elsewhere within the municipality. Even EWS, with its intentionally cultivated culture of innovation, did not look like it was going to provide any support to the fledgling office. Without willing partners and some kind of leverage to break through the larger inertia within the municipal bureaucracy it was hard to see how the new office was going to mobilize support and participation in larger projects.
4.5.1 Mainstreaming Climate Mitigation One possible approach that the new Energy Office could use to catalyze more widespread mitigation efforts could be the integration of climate change as a component of the municipality’s development objectives. As discussed in Chapter 2, the municipality, conforming to national requirements, already produces integrated development plans (IDPs) every five years. IDPs are directly linked to the role that South African cities play in repairing apartheid era backlogs in essential service delivery while also managing economic growth in the context of globalization (Ballard et al, 2007). 155
Participatory plan reviews are conducted every year and bring together representatives from civil society, local communities, and local businesses. The aim is collaboratively to define the municipality’s development goals and apportion the municipal budget, not by department, but according to each department’s contribution to meeting cross-cutting municipal goals. The process aims to set a course for the city, and to build bridges between departmental silos as a way of achieving its objectives as effectively as possible. Nonetheless, many department heads and senior officials expressed scepticism about how effective this would be: “In the end, we'll do the [IDP budgeting] paper work. But I don't think it will change how we set our priorities.” (Interview, Anonymous eThekwini Official 2008)
In the second IDP, released in July of 2006 (eThekwini 2006), the sustainability of the natural and built environment became the municipality’s top priority. Near the end of the section on developing a municipal pollution and climate protection program, the municipality commits to promoting “the development of non-polluting and renewable energy sources as a medium to long term alternative to the current reliance on coal and oil based energy” (eThekwini 2006, 28).
To do so would require coordinated action between EE, EMD, the Department of Architecture, and the new Energy Office. As the IDP process became established, during my second field season, it appeared that initial resistance to silo-breaking efforts was waning. The close link between the municipal budget, senior management’s performance management contracts and IDP objectives also pushed departments to align themselves with it. Nirmala Govender, Head of the city's Performance Management Unit, ascribed part of that shift to a series of workshops with municipal departments that her unit had been running in 2008-9 to help deepen the alignment between internal budgets and the IDP:
It's still not 100%, it's still not where we would like it to be. But they [individual departments] are responsible for [the objectives contained in] their budgets. At the end of the day if they are not successful in doing what they are supposed to do they are going to be held responsible. It make take a few more years, but I am hoping that eventually it will sink in. (Interview, Govender 30/03/2009)
Specifically on the topic of local renewable energy, EE's Deena Govender initially reported (in 156
2008) that the IDP had had no effect on inter-departmental coordination around energy issues. He felt that the document needed to be backed up by dedicated staff who could coordinate the process of integration. In 2009 he was optimistic that the Energy Office might eventually fulfil this function (Interviews, Govender 2008/03/12 & 2009/03/13). By the end of these case studies the likelihood of this was unclear. If it does sink in, the IDP could well become a powerful vehicle for mainstreaming climate change considerations. But beyond alignment between the IDP and individual departments, the IDP's own coverage of climate change and sustainable development also needs to be made more detailed and concrete.
4.6 Conclusions
Creating integrated responses to climate change is a contested process. Attempting to bring multiple departmental actors together across barriers of conflicting organizational cultures is a significant challenge. EMD's experience attempting to translate climate change policy into established worldviews within the municipality shows that even actors who are aware and engaged with the broader cultural dynamics of creating organizational change are not necessarily more successful at doing so. Looked at at the level of the municipality as a whole, these case studies tell the story of how difficult it can be to introduce a new collective challenge into a highly path dependent and balkanized organization.
Looked at the level of individual departments (EMD, EE, & EWS), this chapter is a critical account of the different ways in which the creation or defence of an organizational culture can take shape. Those perhaps best positioned to act, EE, refused to engage with any facet of the design, implementation, or creation of incentives for renewable energy. Senior management were unable to reconcile renewable energy with an institutional culture focused around EE's identity as a distributor of electricity. Despite readily available information, and possible benefits to EE, the municipality, and local consumers, EE's interpretations of renewable energy consistently marginalized both the technologies themselves, and the utility's potential role in facilitating their implementation. Their engagement with the issue of climate change more generally was 157 instrumental and superficial, serving only as a public relations tool to further EE's core priority of protecting energy supplies for industrial clients.
In all of these things EE can be seen as a typical example of the type of path dependency and trained incapacity discussed by institutionalism (Veblen 1898, 1914, 1918, March and Olsen 1989, Merton 1940, Schoenberger 1998). This path dependency persisted despite a national electricity crisis that clearly showed the instability of the current energy system. At the same time ample locally produced information was available detailing alternative courses of action. But, echoing an observation made by Schoenberger (1998), it was not the lack of information that prevented action, but the inability to turn that information into a strategy that was acceptable within the confines of the existing social and technical assets of the utility.
The EMD was the department with the best understanding of the local potential of renewable energy, and the impacts of climate change. But it lacked both the resources and the mandate to act on that knowledge. Their attempts to facilitate engagement with EE had been repeatedly rebuffed by the same institutional path dependency that shaped the utility's overall perception of renewable energy. Their broader work attempting to reframe climate change policy shows how challenging it can be to translate various actors understandings of specific initiatives once strong associations have been formed. Despite well conceptualized attempts to re-cast climate change policies according to the logics and values of post-apartheid community development, on the one hand, and competitive entrepreneurial urbanism, on the other, it met with little success. This shows that the process to the translation described by Latour (1987) is a challenging and not always successful approach.
The department that had been the most active up until that point, EWS, while effective in making change in their own systems, did not have the desire or the reach to catalyse broader changes. Senior management within EWS had effectively created an organizational culture that enabled creativity and fought against trained incapacity and path dependency. Senior management had created a structure that promoted collaboration across internal divisions and decentralized the power to facilitate creative thinking and risk taking. This positioned EWS as one of the most innovative departments within the municipality. This process involved a far reaching shift in the 158 conventions and structures that traditionally govern large organizations. It also required a willingness to break senior management's monopoly on empowered creativity, to foster risk taking, and a diversity of opinions with the organization, and to seek actively outside input from partners whether they be communities, consultants, universities, or international agencies. The contrast between the organizational cultures in EE and EWS shows that not all agencies will be as comfortable or interested in carrying out these types of reforms.
But as interesting as EWS' projects were, they remained marginal within the municipality's overall approach to energy and climate change. Senior management, for their part, wanted no part in attempting to create a broader movement towards renewable energy within the municipality. There was therefore debilitating division between the understanding of the issue, the ability to innovate, and the capacity to push large scale systemic shifts in municipal systems. This is something that we will see again in the case study of Portland that follows in Chapter 5.
The fact that these issues are currently being dealt with by the newly formed Energy Office, even if it is only in its earliest stages, shows the value of having an independent institutional home for issues like energy reform and climate change. Climate Change related policies are challenging precisely because they cut across the jurisdictions of multiple municipal institutions – all already embedded in their own institutional cultures, epistemological structures and material practises. Deena Govender perceptively critiqued the superficial “on paper only” integration proposed by the IDP. As we will also see when it comes to public participation – another issue which the IDP engages with – municipal commitments can remain only on paper unless there are specific people and systems in place to drive their implementation (see Chapter 7).
Overall, this chapter shows how at the level of individual departments organizational culture can be a determining factor in an institution's ability to recognize and respond creatively to new challenges and opportunities. EE is an example of how a senior management locked in a defensive protection of existing social and technical assets can overlook promising opportunities despite clear and present threats to their practices. EWS, on the other hand, shows how senior management actively engaged with creating a different kind of culture can enable creativity and innovation. Central to this, however, is the willingness to decentralize empowered creativity, and 159 allow employees to propose new courses of action, take risks, and make mistakes.
The implications of this research for an understanding of larger institutional change at the level of the municipality as a whole are more ambiguous. The advent of the electricity crisis pre- empted whatever reactions other municipal actors would have had to the EMD's energy strategy. Certainly, their work shows the necessity of being attentive to the cultural associations that surround climate policy, and being careful to consider the ways in which it aligns with or challenges existing worldviews that guide processes of urbanization. The support of powerful municipal figures for the creation of the Energy Office suggests that the work the EMD did to establish the relevance of climate change to both of the city's conflicting approaches to development may have paid off. Whether this new institutional body will be able to pull together a coalition in support of broader mitigation policies remains to be seen.
The Energy Office holds the promise of driving integration and collaboration by bridging the silos that isolate individual departments. Achieving this despite a small staff and relatively marginal position within the municipal bureaucracy is a challenge faced by most new sustainability related municipal agencies. In the next chapter I will look at the tactics and techniques used by Portland's OSD to mainstream climate change as an issue of concern and an area of activity within the organizational culture of the municipal bureaucracy as a whole. Its success shows that it is possible to lead change from below. But at this larger scale an important challenge becomes visible: How can this type of decentralized network of innovation and action be guided and coordinated to ensure that it is producing results that are proportional to the scale of the challenge? What is the right balance between centralized control and decentralized innovation to make the leap from creativity at the margins to something more fundamental? In short, what type of municipal governance is necessary to channel multiple complimentary efforts to the same larger goal, while at the same time not constraining creativity and flexibility? 160 Chapter 5: Portland from Path Dependency to Innovation
5.1 Introduction
This chapter will treat many of the same issues of trained incapacity, institutional path dependency and senior management inertia that defined the course of municipal climate policies in Durban. Here again I will focus on the strategic applications of processes of bridge building and translation. I will also look at the ways that supporting decentralizing creativity, and employing processes of translation and bridge-building can allow institutionally marginal sustainability leaders to bring about substantial changes. But these tactics also have their shortcomings. I will address these by discussing the uneasy balance between control and freedom required to lead decentralized networks of innovation, and the challenges of scaling up from marginal facilitative approaches to translation to larger more transformative interventions.
In Durban, the focus of my attention was on the internal dynamics of specific Departments (EE and EWS) and what these dynamics told us about the barriers the EMD had to face while advocating for a more integrated approach to climate change and sustainability. In this chapter on Portland, I will reverse this focus. The majority of the material discussed below will look at the way in which the Office of Sustainable Development (OSD) attempted to create organizational change across the municipality as a whole. Some discussion of the internal dynamics of individual bureaus will be included, but the emphasis will be placed on what goes on between bureaus rather than within them.
Established in 2000, OSD was a small agency on the margins of the municipal bureaucracy. From this position, OSD leadership realized that they could only accomplish change by aligning themselves with existing priorities in other bureaus. These early years were characterized by processes of translation, refocusing bureaucratic attention, and bridge building across institutional barriers (cf. Latour 1987). Inherent in this approach was an explicit 161 acknowledgement of the necessity of strategically negotiating with existing organizational cultures, processes of interpretation, and worldviews (cf. Veblen 1898, 1914, 1918, Merton 1944, March and Olsen 1989, 2004, Schoenberger 1997, Latour 1987).
These programs were successful at building positive relationships between OSD and other more powerful bureaus, but their impact on Portland's emissions were limited. The challenge for OSD was how to make the transition from the low-level accomplishments that came from acting as a facilitator within existing structures to taking on the more direct leadership required to steer municipal practices along a fundamentally more sustainable path. As I will show, the strategies it employed all directly engaged the construction of the legitimacy and meaning of climate change policies within the municipality. Their objective was not to drive one narrowly environmental interpretation of climate policy into the mandates of other city bureaus. Rather, OSD strategically facilitated a process of translation through which other bureaus came to perceive climate policy as a valuable adjunct to their existing mandates. Although largely successful, OSD's story is also a cautionary talk about both the perils of being overly satisfied with marginal changes on the one hand, and the risks of underestimating the delicate politics of leading systemic change on the other.
Before beginning this examination of OSD's evolving approach to mainstreaming climate policy, I want to present a short example of how inter-agency division can hamper attempts to implement new climate smart policies. This opening section focuses on how the municipality attempted to create innovative solutions to a pressing storm water problem. This may seem like an issue that is more relevant to discussions of adaptation than mitigation. But it is exemplary of the combined inter and intra-agency path dependency that can frustrate attempts to put in place local integrated approaches to climate change. In that way, it will help provide some sense of the dynamics that existed within the municipality early in OSD's existence. It will also frame some of this chapter's larger questions about how to carry out integrated climate change planning in the context of heavily divided municipal bureaucracies. 162 5.2 Early Challenges to Integrated Climate Change Policies : Green Streets vs. Big Pipes
The struggle to introduce natural rainwater remediation into city streets is a clear example of the challenges that established organizational cultures can face in undertaking innovative multi- departmental initiatives. Building and maintaining storm water sewers is a costly affair. But the enormous amount of impermeable paved surface in a city generates large quantities of runoff that must be dealt with to prevent flooding. In Portland, the cost of maintaining the storm water system was increasing at above the rate of inflation year on year and the system also needed to be expanded to take-up increased load from current and projected future development. Traditional development and infrastructure provisions models were locked in an expensive cycle of continually expanding paved surfaces, which generated increasing amounts of run-off that then needed expanded sewer infrastructure. One alternative promoted by Portland's Bureau of Environmental Services (BES) was catching and reprocessing rain water on site rather than piping it into the sewers. Engineered natural systems like rain gardens (technically known as bio- swales53) present a cost effective solution with a variety of other benefits. In relation to climate change, they can significantly reduce the urban heat island effect by replacing dark heat-trapping paved surfaces, increasing rates of evapo-transpiration, and providing a growth medium for shade trees. Swales also act to increase air quality and provide wildlife habitat.
Recognizing the situation they were in and the need to find alternative solutions BES (which manages the city's sewer system) began developing a Green Streets program centred around swales and a variety of other bio-remediation approaches. But the Green Streets program was a significant divergence from traditional storm water treatment practises. Putting it in place required collaboration between BES, the Water Bureau and the Portland Department of Transportation (PDOT). The Water Bureau has its pipes under the streets, BES manages and builds sewers, and PDOT controls standards for street construction. All were hesitant to make the needed changes, but PDOT in particular resisted revising road construction standards to allow
53 Rain gardens are composed drought hardy and toxin filtering plants growing in ground-level basins built into sidewalks or gutters. These basins are designed to filter rainwater and increase infiltration and water retention in the surrounding soil. Rainwater is diverted, through curbside openings into these swales instead of into storm water sewers. 163 for new materials and techniques. Lana Danaher, a municipal employee of over 30 years and a manager in BES, describes initial encounters with them as being a confrontation with a rigid and defensive organizational culture. Their position, in brief was “you can't mess with our standards” (Interview, Danaher 2008/11/06/). Their chief engineer was particularly resistant in a way that almost perfectly echoes what Schoenberger (1997) observed about situated knowledges marginalizing new information that runs counter to established interpretive frameworks:
The chief engineer at the time simply would not accept that there was evidence that a vegetated swale was as good as standard technology. He simply would not accept it. (Interview, Danaher 2008/11/06).
In Portland as in Durban the problem was not a lack of information, but the difficulty of valuing and interpreting new information that went against the established training of senior officials and the culture of the organizations that they controlled. Other municipal employees, such as Mike O'Brien of the city's Office of Sustainable Development (OSD), report a similar resistance to environmental action in departments across the municipality. There was an established view on the part of high-profile employees that their responsibility was to their core mandate: putting pipes in the ground or building streets. Environmental initiatives, when they were done, were done somewhere else by somebody else (Interview, O'Brien 2008/11/04). This creates a catch-22 that hobbles large scale environmental initiatives because they require collaboration between agencies, but the existing organizational cultures and capacities of these agencies make them resistant to participating in anything that is perceived to be too “green.”
In the case of Portland's storm water system, it was only after the unexpected death of the Senior Engineer and a push from city council that Green Streets became a reality (Interviews, Danaher 2008/11/06/, Mike Obrien 2008/11/04). This new approach has now become so accepted that the current $1.4 billion dollar expansion of the storm water system (affectionately known as the East Side “Big Pipe”) has intentionally been built under capacity, committing the city to natural remediation solutions to meet the remainder of projected increased load. 164
5.2.1 Beyond Climate Change: Integrated Planning vs. Silos But clearly, the unexpected death of key players cannot be a mainstay of integrated responses to climate change. Besides storm water remediation, the inter-departmental impacts of trained incapacity affect other key urban sustainability portfolios like integrated land use and transit planning, decentralized local renewable energy, food security, and sustainable economic development. In fact, these impacts are not limited to environmental issues at all. Holistic approaches to issues like crime, health, poverty reduction and economic development all require collaboration between multiple departments54. But the necessarily collaborative and interdepartmental nature of many climate change projects and policies highlights organizational problems within the municipality exceptionally well. This is a clear example of a case where the uncoupling of interrelated issues within a Weberian bureaucracy introduces important errors and inefficiencies (vis. March and Olsen 1989).
Efforts to reform municipal structures rest on the hope that this kind of intentional institutional path dependency is not inevitable. As we will see in the case studies that follow, it is possible to create organizational practices that encourage innovation and collaboration rather than holding them back. This is especially the case when, as Schoenberger (1997) argued above, senior management's monopoly on empowered creativity is broken and multiple actors are given input into the organization's priorities and practices. In Portland, attempts to mainstream sustainability and climate considerations across all municipal departments rely on a drive to spread innovative engagement with climate change among as many agencies as possible, rather than attempt to centralize it under OSD control. These efforts are far from uniformly successful however. The challenge they pose to existing geometries of power is significant, even to those most closely involved and directly supportive of efforts to change how the cities approach sustainability and climate change policy.
54 This is a problem that has been identified in Durban as well. There, to help facilitate interdepartmental collaboration and reduce infrastructure duplication, the city has implemented a system of community access mapping. This brings together information about a variety of infrastructure types and services and maps access to them spatially (as opposed to on an isolate neighbourhood by neighbourhood level). More on this is discussed in Chapter 7 below. 165
5.3 Mainstreaming Climate Action across a Municipality
How to facilitate broad based and creative engagement with climate change across the municipality as a whole became OSD's overarching goal. “Over time,” Susan Anderson, founder and head of OSD, explained, “you want this just to be a taken for granted as part of the way the world is. Something so normal that you don't even need to think about it” (Interview 2008/10/29). The challenge for OSD as it began was how a small office with two staff and a small budget could have that kind of impact (see Chapter 2).
The initial approach was simple: “We worked with everybody” (ibid). Putting into place the most basic of Latour's strategies of translation, Anderson met with the heads of all the municipal bureaus early on and tried to figure out ways that OSD could help them with their own mandates while beginning to integrate climate change and sustainability considerations:
One of the first things that I learnt [was that] we were nothing unless someone wanted us. So the first thing that I did when I had the job there was that I went around to each Bureau Head and got an hour or a half hour of their time and said 'what do you need? What are your aspirations. Not from us, but what are you trying to get done?'
And then we would go and try to figure out how we could help them get their mission done. It has nothing to do with our missions, necessarily, but say they care about affordable housing. Well, we can work on that. Well they care about transportation modal splits, well we can work on that. (ibid)
As Latour argued, this strategy of catering directly to others' interests is the most basic form of translation. As he argued, “the easiest means to enrol people .... is to let oneself be enrolled by them!” (1987, 110). Summarizing this approach, OSD staff and senior officials describe the department as a “facilitator” or a “convener”, even a “concierge.” In this early stage of their work, this supportive role positioned OSD as a hub within the municipal bureaucracy. It had partners in all the city's major bureaus and worked hard to maintain open communication and collaborative relationships between them. In exchange OSD began to see its own objectives of 166 promoting energy efficiency and emissions reductions finding their way into other departments' work. They acted as a facilitator guiding creation and implementation, but the departments themselves did much of the work, providing funding and receiving most of the public credit. OSD in fact strategically avoided claiming ownership of the projects.
Latour identified this kind of marginalization as one of the dangers of pursuing translation by catering to others interests: “will [the contender's efforts] not be appropriated by others who say they did most of the work” (Latour 1987, 110)? Yes. But in this case it served OSD's larger goals to avoid the spotlight. Placing the focus on the bureaus helped develop their own internal capacities and slowly began to change their organizational culture. Mike O'Brien, of OSD's Green Building Program, described this shift: “Once they have to start thinking about sustainability as part of their job, it starts to change the culture of the agency. It starts to be OK to be concerned about sustainability.” (Interview O'Brien 2008/11/04).
At the same time, starting with the 1993 City Energy Challenge that she ran while heading up what was then Portland's Energy Office, Anderson had successfully coordinated energy efficiency and building retrofit programs within the other municipal bureaus. Unlike Rich's experiences in Durban, Anderson found bureaus with an interest in taking advantage of efficiency related saving, and the capacity to implement them. This gave the bureaus hands-on experience with a concrete sustainability project that had tangible economic benefits.
This kind of concrete project opened the door to introducing the more complex synergies and overlaps between environmental objectives and other municipal priorities like health, walkable neighbourhoods and quality of life. At a departmental level, OSD was then able to move beyond serving established priorities and to begin to more openly advocate for its own interests, but always on the basis of shared benefits. Describing her current approach, Anderson explained that:
In other words, I don't feel like I need to convince everyone that global warming is real. I have to convince them that it is in their self interest to take this action that I want them to take. (Interview, Anderson 2008/10/29) 167
Initially OSD's work had depended on its ability to cater to existing departmental needs. But here, Anderson is describing in general terms a shift towards a strategy of “displacing” established goals by showing (as with the green streets program for example) that climate relevant policies had redefined the strategies which bureaus needed to use to achieve their goals. This process of translation helped established climate change as a bridge issue that brought together various departments on the ground of common interest (see March and Olsen 1989, Callon 1986, Latour 1987, Rutland and Aylett 2008). Anderson's basic appeal to institutional self-interest managed, at least superficially, to lift the issue out of a narrowly environmental category and establish its broader relevance (Interviews, Armstrong 2008/06/11, Anderson 2008/10/29).
5.3.1 The Strengths and Weaknesses of Leading Decentralized Innovation By 2008 the end result of OSD's work had been that engagement with climate change extended across the city as a whole. Tom Osdoba, who worked as a consultant for OSD and is currently director of the Centre for Sustainable Business Practices at the University of Oregon, summarized his view of this shift:
It is all very delicate, and it is all about relationships. I think Suzanne [Anderson] has a lot of success in figuring out those relationships and navigating that water from a position of relative weakness from an organizational perspective, to be able to put [ideas and policies] forward. And now we are reaching a point where even the most recalcitrant bureaucrats are realizing that they have to figure this out. So they are far less "I don't even want to talk to you." [We have moved on to] "yes, yes, yes we have got to figure it out" to "oh, we have these three ideas, isn't that great" to "what else can we do." So you can see the kinds of ways that cultural change is starting to take root. (Interview, Osdoba 2008/10/22)
Projects run the spectrum from the initiatives of single individuals (like Tom Ullman in the Maintenance Bureau, who installed solar panels on his own van to power his tools and then converted the bureau's entire fleet) to large collaborative projects (like the Clean Energy Works energy retrofit and job creation program that involve OSD, the Portland Development Commission and 12 other public, private and non-profit partners in a city-wide effort to improve home energy efficiency). 168
Although falling short of Schoenberger 's (1997) call to redistribute control over organizational culture, this diverse and often disorganized body of projects is one possible example of what her vision of decentralized empowered creativity looks like in practice. Innovation is bought at the price of centralized coordination and efficiency. But Mike Armstrong, OSD's deputy director and the principle coordinator of Portland's Climate Change Action Plan, spoke positively of what he called a state of “creative chaos” that surrounded sustainability initiatives in the city. For him the costs of inefficiency were far outweighed by the benefits of decentralized innovation (interview, Armstrong 2008/11/06).
Here, as we also saw on a smaller scale in Durban's DWS, the challenge is how to coordinate and lead decentralized innovation without limiting people's creativity. OSD fosters this open and unconstrained engagement with climate relevant policies by feeding departments with a variety of sustainability options, and providing support and recognition for their accomplishments. But this approach comes at the expense of efficiency and the rapid integration of successful practices uniformly across the municipality.
Rather than “strategic planning” OSD's head Susan Anderson calls the department's approach “strategic grabbing”: finding ideas and projects that at specific moments have traction with specific politicians or departments and facilitating their implementation. All of this depended on a relatively limited refocusing of various Bureaus' attention on the financial rewards of energy efficiency and green building policies and programs. These tactics of translation are well documented in the literature reviewed in Chapter 3. But ultimately, these approaches were designed to push individual policies through existing organizational structures. They were not intended to create larger systemic shifts.
During my first season of field work in 2008 there was a sense that the usefulness of OSD's facilitative approach was coming to an end and something more strategic and long term was needed. Mike Armstrong, who oversees the city's climate change planning efforts, put it succinctly: 169
Portland is a cautionary tale of how you can do the right things for ten years, and still be nowhere near where you need to be. We are only just barely making our 1990 targets and that is a joke compared with where we really need to be. (Interview, Armstrong 06/11/08)
As the person with perhaps the most detailed understanding of Portland's carbon footprint, Armstrong knows better than most what needs to be done if Portland is to go beyond the gains the city has made by defending its urban growth boundary (see Chapter 2).
All the work that OSD has done within the city itself has been setting the stage for more coordinated and ambitious action. But the question is: how to make that shift? How do you move from being a sustainability “concierge,” to heading up measures and policies that will put the city on track to reduce its emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2050, or to cut energy use in existing buildings by 25% by 2030 (two targets from Portland's 2009 Climate Action Plan; Portland 2009, 10)? And moreover, how do you do so in a situation when top-down centralized control of municipal bureaus is not only undesirable (because of the stifling effect it would have on innovation) but impossible (because of Portland's commission form of government which divides power equally between the mayor and commissioners)? How, in short, can a city move from opportunistic and incremental initiatives based on multiple modest processes of translation to integrated and long term climate response planning which requires more fundamental shifts in the operating procedures and organizational cultures of the city's various bureaus? As I will discuss in the next section, when they did try to take a more centralized approach to policy making they were firmly put back in their place.
5.3.2 Green Building: a Failed Attempt at Leading the Charge The fate of the city's recently abandoned green building policy is a clear example of how difficult it has been for OSD to move from being a facilitator to being a leader. As discussed in Chapter 2, the green building sector has been central to the creation of OSD, and to Portland's image as a leading green municipality. In 1998 Anderson used a small amount of funding leftover from a commercial energy efficiency program to parley first, the creation of the city's Green Building Initiative, and second, to win support from city Commissioners for the creation of OSD. 170
Following the creation of OSD, Anderson elaborated and honed the organization's role as a facilitator of green initiatives within the municipality, and in relation to local businesses and developers. She first institutionalized this approach as part of the guiding principles for the Green Building Initiative. The initiative was based on two overarching principles: (1) using education to increase demand and uptake of green building principles among the public and professionals, and (2) facilitating implementation of green building techniques by reducing regulatory and financial barriers and providing technical support to construction professionals (SPC 1999).
After its creation, OSD continued to function by these general principles of educating, facilitating, and providing support. These methods defined the identity OSD crafted for itself as it established its place within the larger municipal bureaucracy. Occasionally they also brought about larger victories. In 2005, for example, OSD successfully negotiated the inclusion of building performance standards for any urban development project funded by the Portland Development Commission (PDC) (a provision that would jumpstart the city's green building sector). Returning to the discussion of the logics of “appropriateness” and “consequences” covered in chapter 3 (March & Olsen 1989, 2004), OSD's expected or “appropriate” role within the municipal system was to facilitate incremental changes within other bureaus.
But the limits of this facilitative approach were also clear. Despite success in nurturing the local green building industry, and greening some large private downtown developments, OSD staff recognized that the majority of the urban landscape was left untouched by the PDC requirements. Most new commercial and residential construction did not qualify for PDC funds, and so was unaffected by its policies. In addition, the city lacked any kind of instrument to increase energy efficiency in the vast number of existing residential and commercial buildings.
To address all these issues, a green building team of seven people within OSD and 82 external stakeholders worked for over two years to put together a draft Green Building Plan. The core of the plan was a provision that allowed the city to leverage its control over permitting fees (administered by the Bureau of Development Services) to encourage developers to adopts green 171 building practices. Here OSD moved away from the appropriate facilitative role that it had played up to that point. Instead, they acted based on the rational calculation that to meet its GHG reduction targets the municipality needed to adopt a more aggressive stance towards building related emissions. They moved, in other words, from a course defined by a “logic of appropriateness” to one guided by a “logic of consequences” (March & Olsen 1989, 2004).
OSD chose to release the policy at a high profile green building expo in Chicago in 2007. The policy generated positive coverage there, but at home other Commissioners and Bureau Heads felt sidelined when they learnt about the policy in press coverage of the Chicago event. They were caught by surprise by the announcement and felt that OSD was trying to impose a plan on the city as a whole without their consent or involvement.
The internal backlash that followed forced OSD to go back to the drawing board and redraft the policy in collaboration with other bureaus and interest groups in the building sector. But the attempt was unsuccessful. By June of 2010 (when I began my second season of fieldwork) the revised policy – which seemed to be a done deal when I had left in November of 2008 – was dead in the water. Michelle Crim, a program manager within OSD, described how the Office's attempt to exert more direct control backfired:
Essentially we were creating policies for [things that we did not directly control]. That was received in a way that gave OSD a reputation for being a cowboy organization in the rest of the city. An organization that was out making work for other bureaus and sticking our nose where it didn't belong. (Interview, Crim 2010/06/29)
OSD had strayed from its role as a facilitator to a conductor. This challenged hierarchies of power and established jurisdictions, something neither other municipal bureaus nor members of Council supported. The implicit and explicit rules and codes of conduct that guide calculations of “appropriate” action are necessarily about power. Institutional rules function by allocating power and agency is specific ways, and it is to those allocations that individuals and organizations refer to when determining what their role is in a given situation. Asked another way, “[w]hat does a person such as I do in a situation such as this? (March and Olsen 2004, 4, see chapter 3) becomes “what legitimate forms of power and agency do I have, and how do I apply them here?” 172
By focusing on outcomes (or consequences), OSD moved away from the facilitative legitimacy it had won for itself. Instead, it attempted to chart the most direct course to needed emissions reductions. The hope was that the validity of the outcome (which, beyond emissions reductions also entailed energy cost savings and further securing Portland's place as a leading “green metropolis”) would trump concerns over whether OSD could appropriately propose this kind of policy. Vinh Mason, a former Oregon State University Professor who headed up the team that developed OSD's green building policy, described how the green building team and particularly the Commissioner Saltzman (an Engineer by training) assumed that the strength of their policy and the scientific and technical expertise that had been used to create it would be sufficient to win people to their side (Interview, Mason 2010/06/09). But it did not work out that way. In the end appropriateness trumped outcomes.
This story is reminiscent of the resistance Debra Roberts faced in Durban when other influential municipal departments saw the power that control over sustainable development policy would give EMD (see Chapter 2 and 4). In both cities, the politically and institutionally powerful reacted defensively to a move which destabilized established hierarchies of power and control.
What makes this more than just a sobering anecdote is the fact that its underlying dynamics are likely to be part of the experience of many municipal sustainability teams as they pursue their work. Even in a city like Portland that is relatively supportive of climate policy, disagreement can still exist about which projects to put first, and at what speed action needs to be taken. Responding to climate change requires coordinated action throughout the city. But in-depth knowledge of the issue is concentrated in the hands of a small group of sustainability-focused staff with little or no direct control over municipal operations. Understanding the issue and the ability to act on that understanding are divided by an established municipal structure within which sustainability and climate change teams are a recent (and usually relatively weak) addition.
March & Olsen (2004) highlight the fact that external circumstances have a defining influence over individual and collective choices between logics of rule-bound appropriateness and logics 173 of rationally calculated consequentiality. More specifically, they argue that “rules are likely to be abandoned when rule-following creates catastrophic outcomes, and in periods of radical environmental change, where past arrangements and rules are defined as irrelevant or unacceptable”(2004, 22-3). This may be an increasingly apt description of where we stand. But another aspect of the “wickedness” of climate change lies in the fact that perceiving the threat it poses requires high a level of understanding and comfort with its complexities. Those with that understanding – and so first signal the need to move from logics of appropriateness to logics of consequences – are also rarely in a position to bring that switch into the mainstream of municipal operations.
In Portland's case, this episode served as a reminder that OSD's role up to that time had been one of leading from behind: using processes of translation based on networking, education, program support, and gentle persuasion to get programs and policy in place. Reaching further would require changes in both its own tactics and procedures, and the nature of its relationships with other municipal agencies.
5.4 Mainstreaming Climate Change: the 2009 Climate Action Plan
In interviews with staff in OSD and the Bureau of Planning, two processes were consistently identified as being central to the potential mainstreaming of integrated and ambitious climate responses across the city: the creation of the city's third Climate Action Plan (CAP); and the drafting of its second citywide Comprehensive Development Plan. In both cases, those involved felt that the process of writing these plans had served a dual purpose. In the first instance the plans themselves provided high-level integration around the direction for the city's development. The programs and targets they contained made this direction concrete and created a framework for inter-agency collaboration. But beside these end products, the process of drafting the plans was described as having established and maintained collaborative relationships across departments that would enable their coordinated implementation. In this section, I will look in 174 more detail at the CAP processes, and the way in which OSD used it to strategically engage with reshaping the organizational culture of the municipal bureaucracy.
5.4.1 Portland's 2009 Climate Action Plan Led by Armstrong, Crim, and John Tydlaska (from the Portland Development Commission) the drafting of the third iteration of Portland's CAP took two years longer than expected. But the document that emerged from the process was – at the time of writing -- one of the most ambitious municipal climate change action plans in North America. The plan commits the city and county to reducing their overall emissions by 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. While not unique, that target places them among a small group of climate leaders (including the states of California and Florida, as well as the E.U.) that were considering or had adopted the same target. This target was also endorsed by President Obama and proposed by the (now failed) federal Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act (Sanders-Boxer) S.309 and Safe Climate Act of 2007 (Waxman) H.R.1590.
Beyond its targets, Portland's CAP distinguishes itself by having established measurable 2030 objectives in eight key subject areas55 each with actions to be completed by 201256. To implement such an ambitious plan, its targets needed to be supported by the departments and staff who would be responsible for enacting them. To secure this support, OSD had to avoid the kind of process that lead to the rejection of its Green Building Plan. Pursuing what Armstrong called “a tricky balance between too much control and not enough,” it needed to create a document that was both ambitious enough to address the true scope of the climate challenge, and also widely supported.
55 The eight focus areas of Portland's 2009 CAP are: Buildings and Energy, Urban Form and Mobility, Consumption and Solid Waste, Urban Forestry and Natural Systems, Food and Agriculture , Community Engagement , Climate Change Preparation, Government Operations. 56 For example, 38 percent of the Portland and Multnomah county's emissions come from transportation. The CAP set a goal of an 81 percent reduction by 2050, with interim targets of 10 percent by 2015 and 25 percent by 2020. To meet these goals it set out five 2030 objectives and a series of 2012 actions within each. One of the 2030 objectives, for example, is to “reduce per capita daily vehicle-miles travelled (VMT) by 30 percent from 2008 levels.” To meet that goal it proposes that by 2012 revisions be made to the local Transportation Systems plan, as well as to policies and programs at the metro and state level. It puts its support behind projects already underway to build 3.3 miles of new street car and 15 miles of new bicycle paths. It also calls for an “aggressive implementation” of the city's Bicycle Master Plan (Portland 2009, 38-46). 175
Authorization to begin work on Portland's third CAP was granted in 2007 by the Board of County Commissioners for Multnomah County (see Resolution No. 07-173). From the beginning, OSD's approach was to involve other municipal departments in the creation of the plan from the earliest stages. Crim described the type of shift that was involved:
The other two [earlier Climate Action Plans] were essentially OSD plans. It was the carbon and climate plan for the city but other bureaus didn't have ownership over it. They probably didn't even know it existed, or if they did they certainly didn't think that they had any responsible to implement any of the actions. It was very much: 'That's what OSD does.'
This update actually took us a year or more than we had originally anticipated. .... But I think one of the benefits of taking a longer time is that we had a lot of city staff involvement. We were purposely really responsive [to internal feedback]. ... Ultimately what ended up happening is a lot of the actions that are in that strategy helped to further the bureaus' own priorities. (Interview, Crim 29/06/2010)
Successfully engaging key municipal bureaus (like Water, Transportation, Parks, and Environmental Services) in the creation of the CAP created a sense of ownership that, in turn, had a positive impact on implementation:
When Michael [Armstrong] and I had run through the plan probably about two months ago, when we sat down we were a little nervous about how we would get them to implement all these different actions. At the end of the day we were amazed with how many of the actions were either almost done or at least well underway in terms of being acted on. Most of those actions belonged to other bureaus who have systems in place and they have meetings and they have teams and people who are focused on implementing those actions. (Ibid.)
This success was partially due to a well thought-out organizational structure and process that guided the drafting of the CAP. Working with a Latourian logic similar that used in Durban as part of EMD's three pronged approach to reframing climate policy (see chapter 4), Armstrong and Crim used the process of creating the CAP to translate climate change in such a way that it 'displaced' already established goals within major municipal departments (cf. Latour 1987). This time however, this process of translating climate change had to be grounds for programs that went beyond OSD's initial partnerships around energy efficiency. Therefore, they also needed to 176 engage with more complex processes of coalition building than simply showing that changing light bulbs would save departments money.
For each of CAP's eight key subject areas technical groups assembled, made up of both municipal employees and outside experts. These groups created individual action plans which were then formally given to the CAP's steering committee for comment. From the start, the plan was the result of broad-based efforts and so could not be narrowly pigeon-holed as “what OSD does.” The process of coalition building necessary for a far reaching CAP was built into the formal processes of its creation. As a result, this ensured that multiple perspectives would be incorporated into the finished document. This helped avoid a plan which reflected only the situated knowledge of a limited constituency within the city (vis. Haraway 1991, Schoenberger 1998).
At the same time, a more informal process vetted each action with the Bureaus that would be most impacted by it. For each area of the CAP, Armstrong, Crim, and Tydlaska would identify the most relevant program managers within municipal bureaus and work with them on the objectives and the text of the plan. Crim describes this as an assiduous process requiring them to work in close contact with other bureau representatives:
We made sure that we didn't put any action in the plan that we hadn't really vetted with the other bureaus that would be impacted by that action. We really worked formally and informally with the bureau staff to shape those actions and to wordsmith them and make sure that they really were the priority action. ... It was a lot of back and forth and a lot of editing. That's why it took so long! (Interview, Crim 2010/06/29)
The goal of this process was to ensure that both the objectives and the way in which the objectives were expressed resonated with established institutional priorities and discourse. In doing this, Armstrong, Crim, and Tydlaska benefited from the positive relationships that OSD had cultivated with other departments during their earlier energy efficiency work.
Durban's EMD had attempted something similar, but they were limited by the legacy of conflicts around sustainable development, and a lack of capacity and interest within other 177 departments. As a result, EMD staff and consultants had to attempt to translate climate change in isolation from (or opposition to) the departments whose support they needed. OSD in contrast, by enrolling multiple bureau representatives in the process of crafting the CAP, could work from within various organizational cultures to tailor the plan so as to achieve the broadest possible support (cf. Merton 1940, Schoenberger 1997). Following this process of vetting the CAP, once a full draft had been prepared, a lengthy public consultation process was carried out (discussed in Chapter 8). The CAP was then revised to incorporate public feedback, and jointly passed by the City of Portland and Multnomah County in October of 2009.
5.4.2 The Value of Internal Conflict But scratch beneath this seemingly smooth and collaborative process and a second grittier and more conflictual dimension emerges that helps explain the presence of strong advocates for the Plan in certain departments. The objectives proposed in the CAP are a significant diversion from the standard approaches of the city's bureaus. Practices like a modal shift in transportation from private vehicles towards public transit and cycling had their supporters within the bureaus concerned. But they were still the subject of internal debate and conflict. The CAP played into these conflicts. It provided an opportunity for staff already engaged in efforts to change bureau practices to gain legitimacy and leverage by embedding their position in a high-profile city-wide policy. OSD therefore also tactically applied the CAP process to support contested processes of organizational transformation already taking place within other municipal agencies.
Crim pointed to two areas: (1) the inclusion of a discussion of natural resource and ecosystem services preservation, and (2) the objectives established for the transportation sector, where this dynamic was particularly present:
[Within the Transportation Bureau there is] an internal struggle that they have had around the priority of cars versus other modes of transportation. .... Their traditional mission is to make sure that cars can get from A to B and as quickly and efficiently as possible. But there's another segment there that needs to get people from A to B in something other than a car. Before the cars were always the priority and that was the focus. They [transportation planners trying to reduce the role of the private automobile] came to a place where they saw the Climate Action Plan as a tool that can help to strengthen their side of the argument. 178
There were disagreements like these within other bureaus as well. By having this longer process we were able to deliver what's essentially a policy document for the city that furthered these priorities at least among certain programs and staff within those bureaus and added [to their] legitimacy. As a result of that I would say this plan has tons of shared ownership. I've constantly been amazed to hear not only other city bureaus talking about the Climate Plan as their plan -- not just the city's plan. (Interview, Crim 2010/06/29)
This is an interesting situation where the shift in bureau practices, and the organizational cultures that support and arise from them, was far enough along that the CAP found strong allies eager to collaborate. The presence of internal conflict meant that the CAP was valuable to those pushing to shift the organizational culture and technical practices of their bureaus, rather than either being uniformly resisted by bureaus unprepared for change.
This outcome sits at the overlap between the dynamic but contested process through which bureaucratic organizations respond to changing circumstances (cf. Schoenberger 1998, March and Olsen 1989, 2004) and Latour's (1987) discussion of the greater impact that a contender can have if they manage to establish their goals as 'indispensable' to the objectives of other agencies. The situation within the Transportation Bureau appears to have been similar to the “guerrilla warfare” that Schoenberger (1998) described at Xerox (see Chapter 3), with a faction fighting to shift the established methods and organizational culture of the organization. Recognizing the significance of these moments of contestation, OSD allied itself with key actors in those internal conflicts. They presented the CAP as a powerful overarching municipal document which could provide legitimacy for the changes that departmental “guerillas” were seeking to create. Bringing together these two bodies of theory expands on Latour's original conception of the function of processes of translation. It highlights that fact that acts of translation can target counter-cultures within existing organizational cultures, not only dominant actors and established objectives.. In so doing it can help shift the ongoing acts of interpretation and strategy formation that apply established practices to new situations.57
57 This argument needs to be qualified, given that I was not able to secure an interview with a representative from the Transportation Bureau before the end of my field work. 179
Both the CAP process, and OSD's earlier work had established numerous partnerships between the office and other bureau's within the city. To provide more detail on one of the most central of these partnerships, and an unexpected and significant reorganization of Portland's bureaucracy, the next section will look specifically at its relationship with it the Bureau of Planning.
5.5 Institutionalizing Climate Change Mitigation: Development Planning and Institutional Reform
The relationship between OSD and the Bureau of Planning was often cited during my 2008 interviews as a second area (beside the CAP process) where OSD had an opportunity to help mainstream and coordinate climate relevant policies and objectives (Interviews, Armstrong 2008/06/11, Kelley 2008/11/07). With responsibility over Portland's five year plans and a close working relationship with OSD, the Bureau of Planning was in a position to incorporate climate smart principles into major decisions about the city's spatial development and infrastructure choices. It was also responsible for managing the creation of the city's second Comprehensive Plan (or “Comp Plan”) and the large public consultation process (known as the “Portland Plan”) that would help steer it.
Oregon state law requires all municipalities to produce a comprehensive plan which sets out the long-range policies that will govern land use planning, economic development, and ensure a “desirable quality of life” and the protection of the local environmental (Oregon ORS 197.015[5]). These plans are legally binding and have a long term impact on the shape of municipal development in the state. In Portland's case, the first Comp Plan has been in effect since 1980. The second Comp Plan will not be completed until 2013, but there is no doubt that it would be a powerful vehicle for climate policy if it integrated parts of the CAP.
In 2008, many municipal officials spoke about the work that was going on to do just that (Interviews, Anderson 2008/10/29, Armstrong 2008/11/06, Kelley 2008/11/07, Dearth 180
2008/10/17). Gil Kelley, the then Head of the Bureau of Planning and an eloquent supporter of the city's climate change policy, described the relation between the two departments as follows:
OSD's primary role to date has been as an effective agitator. They are kind of at the margins of the bureaucracy. But they have been effective at doing some demonstration projects and engaging the private community in pilot projects. I think that that has been their primary role.
In many ways I think that we can, in this bureau, lift up what they are trying to do. Because we can make it city policy, we can put it in the comprehensive plan. We can drive it into the capital systems planning that goes on here. We can drive it into the zoning and development codes.
The issue is one of prioritizing, and not waiting for the Commissioner who is in charge of the tiny little Office of Sustainable Development to take care of things. That is not going to work. So the opportunity with the Portland Plan is to say [to the Commissioners], "you are the board of directors of this corporation. You have to commit together to make the following list of things a real priority. And this [climate change policy] should be one of them."
That is the big opportunity, to have a corporate body that sees it [the importance of climate policy]. As opposed to saying “oh yeah, but that's in his portfolio. I'm going to worry about something else." (Interview, Kelley 07/11/2008)
While overlooking OSD's impact as a networking agent and facilitator, Kelley's comments make clear both OSD's historically marginal place within the hierarchy of the municipal bureaucracy and the role that Planning could play as an advocate for OSD's principles by weaving them into the regulatory fabric that governs the city.
5.5.1 The Bureau of Planning and Sustainability But in the Fall of 2008, the newly elected Mayor Sam Adams did something that unexpectedly changed the municipal landscape. Deciding to approach the issue of mainstreaming sustainability more directly, on 18 December 2008 he announced the merger of OSD and Planning to create a new Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (BPS). Adams was paraphrased in the local media as saying that the move was “meant to ensure that sustainability principles are at the core of everything the city plans and builds,” and to promote the council's long-term objective of “position[ing] Portland as the global epicentre of sustainable practices and commerce” (Mitchell 181
2008). Susan Anderson (head of OSD) was chosen to head up the new bureau and Gil Kelley was offered a severance package. This sudden move was received with guarded optimism about the potential of the new bureau and a sense of loss at the departure of a skilled and committed planner (Kitch 2009).
The merger created a new and powerful agency that brought together the staff of the two former organizations (90 from Planning and 50 from OSD). By the time I had returned in the Fall of 2010 for my second round of interviews, the new BPS had also incorporated staff from the Bureau of Development Services (which had been forced to lay off half of its staff due to a drop in revenue following the collapse of the US housing market). Eric Engstrom, originally a Division Manager for Planning and now continuing on with BPS, and another OSD employee who asked to remain anonymous, both characterized the results of the merger as the combination of two “toolboxes” with the activist approach of OSD meeting the more consensus- and mediation-based role that Planning had played reconciling the multiple objectives of the city's other bureaus within municipal plans (Interviews, Engstrom 08/06/2010, Anonymous 2010). Agreeing, Anderson described it as a mixing of organizational cultures between “[p]eople who are very action oriented and people who are more thorough and methodical thinkers” (Interview, Anderson 2010/06/25).
At this point it is still to early to tell what the results of the merger will be. Different as their approaches are, people like Eric Engstrom and Steve Dotterer who knew the history of the Planning Department (Dotterer had worked with Planning for over 30 years) saw it as a return to a successful period of the bureau's past. Both men talked about the advocacy role that planners had played within the city during the 1960s and 70s. The successful coordination of transportation and land use planning, and the introduction of Portland's streetcar network (which reduced sprawl and protected the city from the urban decay then affecting other US downtowns ) are two key successes of this more activist era of the Bureau of Planning (and, as we will see in Chapter 8 of community groups within the municipality). Dotterer and Engstrom felt that this new merger might herald the return of what had been a productive balance of strong principles with the successful facilitation of joint action between bureaus. 182 5.6 Creating Change from the Middle
As discussed in chapter 3, the highly specialized and compartmentalized nature of traditional bureaucracies (cf. Weber 1922) makes effective coordination across organizational silos difficult if not impossible. To confront this challenge OSD and Planning had independently adopted the same unconventional approach. Both had broken with official hierarchical channels for inter- departmental communication. Rather than working exclusively with bureau heads and attempting to cascade change down from that level, they had found an alternative route that allows them to help create change by working directly with middle management. This approach was central to the processes of translation that helped create the CAP and continued on in the operations of the new BPS.
To understand the context for BPS's approach to engaging middle management, it is necessary to look briefly at the limitations of the official forms of coordination that bring together Bureau Heads. The highest level of coordination within Portland's bureaucracy happens in an inter- bureau Development Directors Group that was convened originally by Planning, and now by BPS. Begun in 2000 (when Gil Kelley became the new director of the Planning Bureau) the aim of the group was to coordinate planning and development functions among the main city bureaus that oversee infrastructure, development permitting, city finances, and planning. Similar in intention to the work done by Durban's Performance Management team as part of the city's IDP process, the goal of the group was to create high level coordination across bureaus around a common set of planning and development goals, one of which is enacting effective climate policy.
This top-down approach fit nicely with traditional Weberian organizational models . It credited with facilitating problem solving, cascading collaboration to lower levels within bureaus, and coordinating the delivery of traditional municipal services (Interviews, Glascock 2010/06/28, Dotterer 2008/10/23, Kelley 2008/07/11). But taking the step from traditional services to innovative programs proved difficult. In 2008, Kelley explained how the separate bureaus were wary to propose new projects – specifically ones related to climate change or sustainability – lest they funnel off money from other core bureau functions. While the Director’s Group had created 183 some space for senior management to engage with long term planning, overall they remained focused on their core mandates of “putting out fires, or fixing potholes, or running the sewer system” (Interview, Kelley 2008/11/07).
Two years later, Tom Osdoba, who had worked extensively with Planning, OSD and PDC as well as being the Manager of the Sustainability Office for the city of Vancouver (BC), said something remarkably similar. Discussing his experiences in both Portland and Vancouver he summarized the conditions that leave senior management leery of innovative new programs:
Mostly they resisted because they didn't want to think about another thing. The classic comment was “we only have so much appetite for innovation.” Now, they are working 10 or 12 hour days and every single minute of that is meetings and decisions, meetings and decisions. You come in there [with a new idea] and they just say “no, I don't want to think about it.” So part of it is just inherent in the fact that senior management's job is to broker decisions. Not to think strategically about what is next. Even though it should be part of it, they just have no bandwidth left to do that. (Interview, Osdoba 29/06/2010)
This is a concrete example of the way that senior management can hold in place the existing practices and culture of an organization. Interestingly, unlike the corporate CEOs described by Schoenberger (1997) who intentionally preserve existing arrangement of socio-technical assets as a way of securing their own personal identities and positions of privilege, in this case even senior municipal officials become caught up in systems of trained incapacity where they rely on established practices because they lack the time to assess new modes of operation. The end result is similar, however. Larger organizational change is impossible unless senior management can be recruited to the cause or replaced.
Working around this institutional inertia requires engaging at another level. Comparing the practices used by OSD, Planning, and BPS, it becomes clear that staff who regularly have to coordinate problem solving and innovation between bureaus rely heavily on direct engagement with lower level staff, particularly at the Division Manager and Project Manager levels (Interviews, Crim 2010/06/29, Glascock 2010/06/28, Osdoba 2010/06/29). Michelle Crim, for example, describes how the CAP's policy making process began first at a staff level and then worked its way up to senior management: 184
We usually began with the management of the program that it [a given CAP objective or policy ] was most closely related to. Then each of the bureaus has their own process for 'putting things up the food chain,"' so we would work with them for however long that needed to happen. (Interview, Crim 2010/06/29)
Crim went on to say that this is also good practice because the staff themselves can be a source of resistance if they feel that something is badly designed, or being imposed on them from above. For key relationships – such as those between OSD, Planning, the permitting function at the Bureau of Development Services, and the Portland Development Commission – full time staff were hired (occasionally at OSD's expense) to work within those bureaus to design and implement specific projects (Interviews, Debbie Cleek Bureau of Development Services 2008/10/15, Chris Dearth Bureau of Planning 2008/10/17). The CAP process also created more general opportunities for conversation and debate that lay outside established channels of communication. Central to this was bringing people together physically, which both established more tangible relationships between players, and allowed for informal conversations to take place around scheduled meetings.
This approach is employed within the Planning Bureau and now BPS for other issues besides climate policy. Bob Glascock, Senior Planner responsible for infrastructure coordination, runs a number of cross-bureau groups within the municipality to oversee various planning and management functions (synchronizing infrastructure projects so as to minimize roadway disruptions, or monitoring evolving international best practices for example). These groups also operate at a staff level and then move new ideas up the departmental hierarchy. Describing their work, Glascock emphasized the suffocating impact of bureaucratic hierarchies, and the importance of creating informal opportunities for direct communication:
[W] hen you call somebody up or you send them an e-mail, you know that it is on the official record. You have got to check in with your manager before responding because the stakes are higher: you are speaking for the Bureau. As opposed to seeing someone and informally checking in and saying, "Well, I think that generally this is what's going on and maybe we can get together and pull in this other person and maybe we could figure something out." (Interview, Glascock 2010/06/28) 185
Glascock here draws attention to something that is omitted from the institutionalist analyses covered in Chapter 3. Modern critics of bureaucracies like March and Olsen, and Schoenberger argue that organizational culture, rather than being static, is in a constant process of application and recreation, a process that can be contested by outlying members of the existing structure. This questioned the picture of a homogenised sea of bureaucratic automatons critiqued by Veblen (1898), and both celebrated and feared by Weber (1922). But just as tensions exist within institutions, they also exist within individuals. The perception of the unitary individual consciousness is a stable element of institutionalist criticism from Veblen through to the New Institutionalists (Di Maggio 1988, March & Olsen 1989, 2004, Powell 2007, Schoenberger 1997). In their accounts people within institutions are either formed by their embeddedness within the organization's worldview, or (as in the case of some of Schoenberger's case studies) they emerge as guerrillas fighting to bring change to the organization.
Glascock's comments draw attention to the fact that individuals are able to function on multiple levels simultaneously. They can maintain a perception of collective objectives outside their Bureau's core mandate, without necessarily wanting to directly challenge the internal worldview and procedures of their own organizations. Creating informal spaces of contact is a simple but seemingly effective way to capitalize on this and to introduce flexibility into otherwise rigid bureaucratic systems.
5.7 Managing for Innovation
Interestingly, while having to check-in with more senior management was identified as an obstacle to open communication, problem solving, and innovation, strong direction from management, council, and influential documents like the Portland Plan, was also commonly identified as an important factor determining the effectiveness of cross-bureau staff collaborations. Collaboration is more likely when there is a strong message to staff that: "We [senior management] expect you to be part of the solution, even if it does not at first appear to be your responsibility, or if it involves something that's more lateral” ( Glascock 2010/06/28)) 186
This echoes the management approach used in Durban's DWS, where staff where expected to think critically about their work and go beyond the narrow definition of their job description. As in Durban, it points to the need for a new form of management that, while still maintaining a certain amount of control and direction, encourages staff to innovate, and gives them the freedom necessary to do so.
Of the Portland interviews, Tom Osdoba provided the most succinct summary of the type of managerial shift necessary to allow a transition from a strictly hierarchical organization (one that concentrates empowered creativity in the hands of a very small number of elites) to a more open, networked and innovative organization:
I would say that part of that story is literally about transforming how senior management envision their job. They have to be more comfortable with people striving to innovate and working across discipline and really coming up with new ideas. And they have to free themselves to keep up so they don't become a drag on the organization. That means delegating, and not being threatened when their staff get out ahead of them on the issues that they are dealing with. (Interview, Osdoba 2010/06/29)
As in Durban, this view reflects models of “organic” management that have become increasingly common in the private sector since the 1990s. It represents a shift from visions of leadership which focus on increased efficiency, control, and enforcement, to one that prioritizes creating the circumstances necessary for individuals and the organization as a whole to learn and innovate (Baker & Branch 2001, Morgan 1997, Wheatley 1992).
Even with high level support, the work of middle management trying to shift departmental practices can be difficult and tiring. Osdoba referred to it as becoming a “friction agent” within the organization: “to create change you have to be borderline intolerable from an institutional perspective" -- something that can be draining both personally and professionally (Interview, Osdoba 2010/06/29). Looked at from the perspective of institutionalist theory, this tiring work is necessary to constantly remind other members of the organization of the limits of their own trained incapacity. It consists of persistently and creatively finding ways of revealing the social- constructed nature of naturalized or taken for granted practices, and providing examples of how and why things could be done differently. 187
5.8 Conclusions
This chapter has summarized the changing tactics and techniques used by OSD to scale up climate change responses within the municipality, from their marginal beginnings to more integrated and systemic changes. In so doing OSD also established itself as an increasingly powerful actor within Portland's municipal bureaucracy. The initial stages of this process fit fairly comfortably within the analytical framework of relatively basic translations (cf. Latour 1987 outlined in chapter 3. But as OSD's goals became more ambitious, the changes needed to realize them became more threatening to established practices and distributions of power within the municipality. Their success or failure depended on the ability of key actors to negotiate far more challenging inter- and intra-agency dynamics, which occurred at the intersection of multiple efforts to both protect and transform existing organizational cultures and practices. From an analytical point of view, this challenge also tested the hybrid analytical structure that I have assembled for this work. At some points, the intricacies of attempting to shift Portland's bureaucracy showed the necessity of employing a theoretical framework of the kind I have assembled. One that is able to explain both the social and structural roots of institutional path dependency, as well as how marginal actors can intervene to create change. At other points the course of events pointed to the need to expand existing theorizations of organizational path dependency and transformation.
OSD entered onto a municipal stage defined by the hierarchical, specialized, and compartmentalized institutions typical of a modern bureaucracy (cf. Weber 1922). The city's past experiences with energy conservation and integrated land-use and transportation planning may have provided a supportive context for OSD's work (unlike LA21 fractious legacy that dogged EMD's work in Durban). But, as the struggle to implement green alternatives to established storm water infrastructure illustrated, the municipality was still subject to the divisions and defensiveness typical of the way in which complex rule-bound institutions react to challenges to their established procedures and identities. Other policies issues, such as holistic approaches to health or poverty reduction, also test the boundaries that exist within established bureaucratic 188 systems. However, the costs and inefficiencies imposed by the uncoupling of interdependent issues within the administrative divisions of a Weberian bureaucracy are brought into stark relief by the inherently cross-cutting nature of effective responses to climate change.
As OSD's trajectory illustrates, these problems are not inevitable or insurmountable. In its early years, Anderson built OSD's profile around simple and non-confrontational acts of translation that allied marginal climate initiatives with the established goals of larger departments. By allowing themselves to be enrolled in other agencies' agendas, OSD created small shifts within the bureaucracy. These helped begin a process of cultural transformation within the municipality, as noted by multiple respondents. The result was a broad, but still project-based, atomized, and unfocused, engagement with climate change.
At one level, this was a significant success. OSD had catalyzed a significant cultural shift that saw sustainability and climate change become, at least at a superficial level, accepted variables across the municipality. But concrete emissions reductions lagged. For those closest to the climate agenda, the limits of a strategy based on opportunistic translations and displacements (cf. Latour 1987) became increasingly clear. This emphasizes the fact that early successes with basic processes of translation may not necessarily lead to large scale transformations. In Portland's case, something different would be needed if climate policy was going to move beyond opportunistic and incremental changes to strategic integrated systemic change.
OSD's first attempt at leading such a shift was a marked failure. Their defeated green building policy had been a modest effort to move beyond facilitation to direct larger shifts within the city. But this transformation from “concierge” to “cowboy” backfired. Rather than following the appropriate course of action determined by their identity within the municipality, OSD attempted to drive the green building policy by focusing attention on the important outcomes which it would achieve. In the language of March & Olsen's approach to institutional analysis, OSD attempted to switch from a “logic of appropriateness” to a “logic of consequences” (March & Olsen 1989, 2004). Other agencies within the municipality acted decisively to block both the policy and the challenge that OSD's course of action posed to established jurisdictions and divisions of power. 189
While the policy died, something interesting can be learned from its failure. As March & Olsen (2004) argue, external conditions can play an vital role in deciding whether institutional actors justify their actions based on their appropriateness or their consequences. Times of deep social or environmental change, such as the one we are entering into, call into question the validity of established practices. This has the potential to push actors and institutions to adopt new courses of action to achieve different and more appropriate outcomes. As other institutional analysis has argued (Veblen 1898, 1914, 1918, Merton 1944, Schoenberger 1997) established organizational cultures can block this impulse. But something else also mitigates against this kind of shift in the case of climate change. Perceiving the threat posed by climate change requires high a level of understanding and comfort with its complexities. Municipal actors with that understanding are rarely in a position to steer mainstream municipal operations onto a new course focused on outcomes rather than appropriateness. This highlights another facet of the “wickedness” (cf. Horst & Webber 1973, Levin et al. 2007, Lazarus 2009) of climate change: a deep disjuncture between the understanding of the issue an the agency required to address it. Given that most urban responses to climate change begin from a marginal position within municipal systems, this is likely to impact the early stages of climate work in most cities.
OSD's next efforts to pick up the pace of climate action in the municipality were more successful. Mirroring many of the principles advocated in discussions of participatory planning (which I will discuss in chapter 6) OSD ran a deeply collaborative process to draft the 2009 CAP. One one level, this approach succeeded because it managed to integrate the interests of various agencies into the policy itself. Working closely with bureau representatives, OSD staff ensured that the CAP was framed in ways that resonated with the established worldviews and objectives of other agencies. This, in turn, meant that bureaus were more supportive of the CAP and engaged in its implementation.
At another, less visible level, something more contentious was at play. Recognizing that organizational cultures are themselves often internally contested (cf. Schoenberger 1997), OSD aligned the CAP with factions within individual bureaus already attempting to modify existing practices. Hovering somewhere between what Latour (1987) refers to as the “displacement of 190 goals” and “becoming indispensable,” OSD positioned the CAP as a powerful pathway through which other “guerrillas” in the bureaucracy could realize their objectives. Latour's explanations of translation focus on the way in which “contenders” can court the favour of the already powerful. What is novel about this finding is that it shows that processes of translation can be equally effective when they strategically align contenders with other change agents in a given organization.
It is still far too early to judge how well Portland's CAP will perform in practice. But in its initial stages at least these various approaches to alliance building, translation, and organizational change have produced a plan that is both ambitious and widely supported.
At all these different moments in OSD's trajectory within the municipality, skirting bureaucratic hierarchies to work directly with middle management was an important component of its ability to link siloized agencies and catalyze change. And here, as in Durban, respondents emphasized the importance of new approaches to management that create the space for creativity, collaboration and risk taking. This case study of Portland builds on what was seen in Durban, by showing that this ability to work collaboratively can extend beyond individual agencies and link officials across departmental divisions. Further, the emphasis placed by respondents in both Planning and OSD on the importance of informal face-to-face exchanges highlights something poorly explained by the theoretical framework established in Chapter 3. The literature reviewed there portrays institutional actors as either being indoctrinated by institutional practices (Weber 1905, 1909, 1922, Veblen 1898, 1914, 1918, Merton 1940) or alternatively having the potential to rebel internally against them (Schoenberger 1997). Experiences in Portland show that, perhaps not surprisingly, individuals have the capacity to occupy a third state that is both inside and outside of their institutional context. This ability to move from formal to informal spaces of negotiation may be an important point of flexibility from which to create larger institutional shifts, and it warrants further study and theorization. 191
Recent analysis of existing emissions inventories (not projections) for the years 2000-2008 show annual CO2e emissions to be increasing at more than twice the rate assumed in the scenarios of earlier work such as the Stern Review (Anderson and Bows, 2008) 58. Anderson and Bows warn that even with annual global emissions reductions of over 6% keeping average warming to 4°C by 2100 will be a challenge. Taking into account continued growth in the developing world, this would entail reductions for OECD countries (which account for over 50% of global emissions) that surpass even those that resulted from the collapse of the former Soviet economy in the 1990s. As Armstrong pointed out, it is important not to celebrate success at the margins when what is needed is a fundamental shift.
It is clear that neither Durban nor Portland, despite being leaders in municipal climate policy, are achieving results within their jurisdictions that are on the scale needed to help significantly alter our emissions pathway. That said, their success in promoting communication and innovation are valuable examples of how municipalities can overcome the inertia of trained incapacity that is built in the culture of municipal departments.
Comparing the two case-studies brings to light a common list of organizational and conceptual approaches:
• Both the internal dynamics of Durban's DWS and OSD's influence over Portland as a whole rest on the use of an open network structure to break down trained incapacity and organizational path dependency. This collaborative openness brings in new ideas and promotes learning, experimentation and creative problem solving.
• In service of this, both organizations positioned themselves as hubs that facilitated communication and collaboration between multiple partners across the institutional divisions and hierarchies of the existing bureaucracy.
• They also helped change existing organizational cultures and put in place structures that developed skills at multiple levels, and rewarded people who identified and pursued opportunities outside of a department's established socio- technical procedures.
58 The rate of increase as calculated by Anderson & Bows is 2.4% growth mean annual CO2e emission as opposed to 0.95% as assumed by the Stern Review. (Anderson & Bows 2008, p. 4) 192
• While increasing the connections between multiple actors, both agencies also increased the conceptual linkages around the issues of alternative energy and climate change. By emphasizing synergies and co-benefits, they strategically engage in a processes of conceptual translation that sought to legitimize climate related policies within the established worldviews of influential municipal agencies.
• In both cases, the creation and implementation of innovative projects depends on a fine balance between a staff that is given the freedom to go beyond their basic job descriptions, and a senior management that encourages them to do so, while maintaining sufficient control to guide innovation in a coherent direction and ensure that appropriate levels of performance are maintained.
Of all of these, the final point seems to be the most difficult. This delicate balance between control and freedom described by Durban's Neil McLoed and Portland's Mike Armstrong is a significant shift away from traditional bureaucratic management practices. Rather than ensuring performance gauged against established criteria by narrowly confining staff actions, it permits staff to innovate both in terms of the programs and the objectives pursued by an agency and a municipality. Embedding this direction, not only in the individual leadership of specific bureau heads, but also in key municipal policies (like Durban's IDP, and Portland's CAP and Comp Plan) and structures (such as the creation of Durban's Energy Office and Portland's BPS) has been a key vehicle for encouraging this kind of leadership within a municipality.
As touched on above, these practices all bear the marks of management trends that reshaped corporate culture at the end of the 20th century. Flexibility, open structures and collaboration have all been the hallmarks of a new management culture that has idealized the successes of Silicone Valley and other centres of innovation (see Senge 1990). As Thrift (2000) points out, this new business culture is premised on the argument that a “permanent state of emergency” where a rapidly changing market drives a need for constant novelty and flexible production, while undermining traditional structures of hierarchical control. In the business world, these practices are the engine of unsustainable patterns of growth that have driven both the global economy and ecology to their present states of collapse. There is therefore an interesting irony in seeing municipalities pick up these techniques to help prepare themselves for the greater instability which is on the horizon. At the same time, the respondents in these case studies showed no signs of simply being in pursuit of by now well-worn private sector trends. Their approach to driving 193 climate policy arose rather out of their concerted efforts (and at times significant failures) at driving change within the context of existing path dependent institutions.
Besides these commonalities in both cities' approaches?? there were also some crucial differences between their experience. Among the most important ones are the following:
• The success of processes of translation were highly unequal. This in part seems to be do differences in the underlying historical context for environmental policies in both cities. EMD staff in Durban had to fight an uphill battle against the anti-development legacy left by the LA21 program, whereas OSD's work in Portland was facilitated by the institutional legacy of integrated transportation planning and energy efficiency policies.
• The complexity of institutional mobilization of climate science within processes of translation and mainstreaming was also significantly different between both cities. Portland had no equivalent to the GIS-based Integrated Assessment Framework that the EMD was putting in place in Durban. (Durban's efforts to downscale climate modelling to the local level are in fact among the most advanced in the world.) As Roberts argued, the low level of political capital attached to climate policy during the period under study meant that more exacting science was needed to justify action.59
• The level of internal institutional capacity and the role of outside agencies, in particular consultancies, was also a central difference between these two cities. During the period under study critical staff shortages were a common challenge for many municipal departments, including eThekwini Electricity and the EMD. While OSD had also begun with only a handful of dedicated staff, over roughly the same period of time it expanded to reach nearly ten times the size of EMD. To compensate for this shortfall of internal resources and capacity, the EMD relied heavily on outside consultants. But while hiring
59 It is worth noting that there has subsequently been a convergence here. An increasing number of northern cities are now looking for more precise projects of the likely impacts of climate change as part of nascent climate adaptation programs. Simultaneously, climate policy in Durban had acquired new found legitimacy due partially to the international profile the city will acquire as the host of the next round of United Nations climate negotiations (COP 17, discussed further in chapter 7). 194
consultants was necessary, it also meant that little internal municipal capacity was built over the course of the initiatives the carried out.
Nonetheless, at the end of this fieldwork climate initiatives in both cities had achieved new found status and institutional stability. The persistent efforts of relatively small teams within each municipality had culminated in significant institutional reforms, leading to the creation of two new climate change agencies in Durban and the creation of the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability in Portland. These were marked shifts from the time when, close to 15 years earlier, both Susan Anderson and Debra Roberts had been hired to fill minor, poorly defined positions within their respective municipalities.
If we knew precisely what climate change had in store, we would know the kind of transition to strive for to best adapt the practises of existing organizations to new conditions. But rather than a shift from one relatively steady state to another, climate change holds the promise of a prolonged period of instability and change. To face that, we need to foster organizations that are able to maintain sustained periods of learning and creative action. That type of adaptive and resilient response goes beyond any single “shift.” It means moving away from organizations that enshrine trained incapacity to ones that empower creative action and collaboration to meet shared goals. And more than just formal modifications to the institutional structures and built infrastructure of our cities, we need to put in place new organizational cultures that make rapid transitions and sustained adaptive responses possible.
In the next section, I will leave the confines of municipal bureaucracies to examine the relationships that exist between municipalities and their constituents. I will focus on the links between formal state-led participatory processes and community led examples of independent engagement with climate change. This will allow me to explore other relationships of power and agency that have a critical influence on local climate governance. Despite initial differences, in the analysis of these next case studies familiar themes will come to the fore. The critical importance of broad networks of diverse actors, the potentially positive contributions of conflict, and the tricky balance that exists between the freedom necessary to allow for creativity, and the stability and coordination that comes from structure. 195 Chapter 6: Climate Change and Participatory Planning
6.1 Introduction
In the previous section I looked at how the internal dynamics of municipal organizations influence the design and implementation of climate change policies and programs. As I've discussed, responding to climate change challenges the practices and interrelationships of city departments. But it also calls for a redefinition of the relationships between the municipality and its citizens. Civil-society mobilization and citizen engagement can help break the path dependency of municipal agencies and expand the scope and scale of municipal environmental policies. Whether through formal inclusion in participatory planning processes, or by direct action at the neighbourhood scale, community groups and local NGOs can strengthen environmental regulation, speed shifts in urban infrastructure, and contribute to a larger cultural shift towards more sustainable cities.
Without those contributions, both the pace and the scope of urban transitions would be limited. This is due to the fact that only a small portion of the emissions generated within a city are under the direct control of the local state. In addition, even in areas that are within reach of municipal policies and practices, action can be held back by institutional inertia, a lack of resources and personnel, or the active opposition of important actors in the local economy. Ambitious urban responses to climate change are a collaborative affair. Because of this, understanding them requires a shift away from an analysis that focuses solely on the internal dynamics of the municipality. It means shifting from a discussions of government to one of governance. In this section I will look at one facet of this shift: the potential of participatory processes (both state managed and community driven) to contribute to the design and implementation of urban climate policy.
I will begin this discussion with an overview of the theory and practice of participatory processes 196 since their introduction into the development programs of international agencies and American urban renewal programs during the 1960s and 1970s. I will then move on to discuss the vision of participation that has emerged from the most recent assessment reports of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC reports are perhaps the best entry point into the ever expanding body of research on climate change. Published every six years, the reports provide a synthesis of the most up-to-date research on climate science, mitigation, and adaptation60. In so doing, it is the most important force in defining the current understandings of both climate change and possible policy responses to it. Its reports play a crucial role in providing a basis for the international climate negotiations that surround the Kyoto protocol, and influence both national and local policies. At a more general level, reflected in the more mainstream media, the IPCC's work contributes significantly to the larger public understanding of climate change as the defining challenge of the early 21st century.
Participatory practices have come into the IPCC reports by way of a larger literature that links climate change policy and sustainable development. The literature on sustainable development attaches an inspiring list of aspirations to extending citizen participation: broader participation may be a way of creating better policy, of increasing the capacity of communities to adapt to climate change and reduce emissions, and act as a space for a collective revision of the lifestyles that are at the root of the unequal over-consumption of natural resources that is driving climate change.
But as I will show, the picture that emerges from the IPCC is of a narrow and instrumental vision of participation. In this, the IPCC follows a model of institutionalized participation laid out in the 1990s by international development agencies, most particularly the World Bank. This form of participation, which owes much to a watered down version of Jurgen Habermas' consensus driven politics (discussed further below), seems ill equipped – at least on its own – to deliver the types of results imagined by advocates of participatory responses to climate change.
Extending the definition of “participation,” I will look at theories and practices of direct action
60 Mitigation refers to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Adaptation refers to changes made to adapt to the impacts of a changing climate. 197 and protest that occur outside the box of state managed participatory institutions. These re- imagine, not only the shape that participation takes, but also the identity of its participants, the spaces used for participation, and the nature of what communities have to contribute. Drawing from works by Foucault and a later generation of scholars, I will look at arguments for the value of independent action, grass roots mobilization, and conflict.
The goal here is not to pick sides in a simplified debate between state-managed, consensus- driven forms of institutionalized participation on one side, and more confrontational, autonomous, and radical community-led practices on the other. In the conclusion to this chapter, I discuss a more nuanced relationship that can exist between these forms of participation, one that works with the synergies that exist between the strengths and weaknesses of each form of participation. This will provide a critique of both institutionalized and community-led approaches to participation, and a framework for analyzing the case studies that follow in Chapters 7 and 8.
The case studies in the following two chapters in this section look at both municipally managed, and community initiated participation in local environmental policies and programs. In Durban's case we will focus on municipally managed (and federally mandated) participatory planning processes, as well as more confrontational community achievements in the regulation of emissions from major petrochemical refineries within the city. In Portland we will also look at municipally managed participatory processes, before moving on to neighbourhood run renewable energy programs whose success has dwarfed all other clean energy projects underway in the city. Both cities provide interesting examples of the value and limits of state managed and consensus- driven participation. They also illustrate the ability of communities to participate actively in claiming and redefining the regulatory structures and built infrastructure of urban systems. 198 6.2 Mixed Visions of Public Participation, Democracy, and Sustainable Development
“Participation” is a slippery concept freighted with competing and contradictory definitions. Like “sustainability,” it has been adopted by projects otherwise widely different. Participatory local democracy has inspired hopes in both social and environmental policy circles that popular participation will produce just and environmentally sound development. Radical bioregionalists and urban community development activists endorse participation (Arnstein 1969, Dahl 1961, Piven 1965, Fagence 1977, Marris & Martin 1982, Thomas et al., 1988, Carr 2004). So do organs of global trade liberalization like the World Bank (1997, 2000a, 2000b) and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2001). In its 2007 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) also began discussing the merits of participation (Sathaye et al, 2007, Yohe et al, 2007). Agreement among such a broad and ideologically diverse set of actors calls for closer scrutiny of what exactly we mean when we talk about and practice “participation.”
6.2.1 Hopes and Fears about Participatory Democracy: a Survey of Recent Literature A survey of the recent literature on broadening public participation produces a list of benefits that apply both to the state and its citizens. From the perspective of government actors, participatory processes are valuable because they can produce better informed policy and increase the legitimacy of government programs (Melo & Baiocchi 2006, OECD 2001). This, in turn, reduces public opposition, facilitates implementation, and creates consensus over the direction of development (Taylor & Fransman 2004, Holmes & Scoones 2000, Pelletier et al. 1999).
From a citizen's point of view, increased involvement in policy making and implementation can increase government transparency and accountability, and provide citizens with an increased opportunity to exercise their rights (CPP 2005). Advocates of participatory democracy also argue that it creates a more level democratic playing field. In situations of pre-existing social 199 inequality, traditional representative systems magnify disparities by empowering those with the resources to participate (i.e. time, money, and education) while further excluding others (Abrahamsen 2000, McGee et al. 2003, CPP 2005). In contrast, participatory democratic processes encourage the traditionally excluded to make their needs known. Further, truly deliberative forums are celebrated for creating an environment where participants can gain the skills, understanding, and organizing capabilities to interact more effectively with the state and participate more meaningfully in decision making processes (Abers 2000, McGee et al. 2003).
But beneath this agreement over the potential benefits of participation lies deep debate about what constitutes participation in practice, and what is simply a repackaging and “brown- washing61” of pre-existing relationships of domination and inequality. By providing new avenues for the already powerful and politically savvy to exercise their influence, specific forms of participatory processes may precipitate the further marginalization of already disempowered groups (Mansbridge 1983, Saunders 1997, Fung & Wright 2001). Participation can also produce new forms of inequality by playing into the retreat of the welfare state, offloading service delivery to NGOs, community groups or local residents (Heller 2001, Mohan 2002a, Ackerman 2004). Finally, participatory processes can be used by state or development agencies to increase the efficiency of rolling out predetermined projects, without truly empowering local residents to question the projects’ objectives – or the market-based logics which often underpin them (Shah 1997, Mohan 1999, 2002a, 2002b).
6.2.2 The Practice of Public Participation The coexistence of these conflicting assessments of participatory processes can be clarified by being more specific about what “participation” has meant and how it has been practised since it first entered mainstream political discourse in the 1970s. As Cornwall (2002) outlines in a brief history of participation and development, international development agencies began adopting participatory methods in the 1970s as a way of increasing the effectiveness of their projects. There was at this time also an emphasis on community empowerment, capacity building and self-reliance that was simultaneously being discussed both in development circles and in
61 Similar to “green-washing”, “brown-washing” is a term used to denote the superficial inclusion of marginalized groups or issues of social justice and equality in a policy making or political process to win over public support. 200
American work on community-based urban revitalization (Arnstein 1969, Dahl 1961, Piven 1965, Fagence 1977, Marris & Martin 1982, Thomas et al. 1988). While the state or development agencies may have managed certain official participatory events, the scope of participation went well beyond town hall meetings or consultation processes. Community members were encouraged to become directly engaged in identifying local priorities and addressing them for themselves. Rather than setting priorities, the local, regional, or national state was asked to play a supportive role and provide the financial and institutional resources required to support these quasi-autonomous community driven projects. At its apogee, Arnstein describes this form of participation as “citizen control” where “the have-nots ... handle the entire job of planning, policymaking, and managing a program”(251).
By the mid 1980s, however, these broader goals had largely been replaced with a more instrumental approach to participation that focused on reducing costs and increasing compliance (Paul 1987, Cornwall 2002). In an internal review of 40 World Bank projects for example, Paul (1987) finds that cost sharing, project efficiency, and project effectiveness, were the dominant objectives pushing World Bank projects to include community participation. Only three projects aimed to empower or build capacity within communities.
This shift was coupled with an increased bureaucratization of participation as multiple local level institutions were created to act as the legitimate local interlocutors for the state and international donors (Esteva 1985). This approach to participation gained influence during the 1990s as it spread through the international donor community, most especially the World Bank which made community-based or community-driven development (CBD / CDD) a cornerstone of its Comprehensive Development Framework. This can most clearly be seen in the dramatic increase in lending by the World Bank targeted at CBD projects from $325 million in 1996 to an estimated $2 billion in 2003 (Mansuri and Rao 2003, Cornwall 2002, Platteau and Gaspart 2003). At the same time, the 1990s saw the rise of a market-inspired discourse that recast citizens as “consumers” whose primary role in the participatory process was to consume services and to express preferences through individual choices. In a critical review of World Bank CBD/CDD, Mansuri and Rao (2003) summarize this more limited approach to participation as the “involvement of members of an administratively defined community in at least some aspects of 201 project design and implementation. While participation can occur at many levels, a key objective is the incorporation of ‘local knowledge’ into the project’s decision making processes”(8). The World Bank's objective is to extract “local knowledge”, which is to say a better understanding of the local context within which World Bank projects function, from communities whose representatives are administratively selected. This process of selection can play into the process of bolstering the power of local elites and consequently may fail to empower local communities through any direct involvement in policy design and implementation.
This institutionalized and market-inspired vision of participation was attacked on a variety of fronts. As discussed above, it was seen as being complicit in reinforcing local inequalities and facilitating the off-loading of government responsibilities onto community groups and residents. Beyond that, it has been criticized for channelling community participation into narrowly defined state-managed processes and institutions, while simultaneously de-legitimizing other forms of more radical, critical, and autonomous forms of engagement represented in acts of protest and direct action (Stiefel and Wolfe 1994, Mayer 2003, Becher 2010, Silver, Scott, and Kazepov 2010, Ballard 2007, Barnett and Scott 2007, Becher 2010). The World Bank, for example, in a guide entitled “Consultation with Civil Society Organisations: General Guidelines for World Bank Staff” has warned that while inclusion and consensus are to be aimed for, engaging with civil society organizations can result in problems of "conflict and antagonisms...between government and CSOs or among CSOs [community service organisations]" (World Bank 2000a, 7). But as Mohan (2002a) argues, “surely, such differences of opinion are part and parcel of a vibrant democracy and should not be regarded as problems”(129).
Advocates of more deeply democratic forms of participation commonly make the distinction between “invited” and “invented” forms of participation. Invited participation includes state- managed consultation processes or the institutions of CBD promoted by the World Bank. Invented or “demanded” forms of participation take the shape of direct action, autonomously managed community projects, and protest. The term 'invented' is used to call attention to the ability of communities to design and implement their own forms of participation. In the literature, this form of community-based participation is seen to be crucial if communities are to 202 resist the domesticating influence of official processes, and develop or maintain their ability to participate in policy making and implementation processes in a way that meets local needs and without glossing over pre-existing inequalities (Ballard 2007, Barnett & Scott 2007, Becher 2010, de Souza 2006).
6.3 Habermas and Foucault: the Influence of Process and Power on Participation
Another way of approaching the distinction between invited and invented participation can be seen in the debate between Foucault and Habermas on the role of struggle and consensus within the modern state62. The important place of consensus building in the literature surrounding institutional participation discussed above has its roots in the works of Habermas and the larger tradition of integrative political philosophy62 of which his work is a part (Follett 1918, Habermas 1983,1986,1987,1996, March 1988, March & Olsen 1989). Habermas's work builds on Kant's quest to identify a universal rational foundation for democratic institutions. He argues for the ability of rational argument and proper institutional structures, rather than force, to create a social order based on consensus.
A good entry point into Habermas's thinking on democracy is his concept of “communicative rationality” whereby consensus arises from properly structured political processes and debate. In his Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987), Habermas describes the workings of communicative rationality as:
62 This debate has been assembled from published works by contemporary scholars, and is not one that actually took place between the two men. Although both were aware of each other's work, and had made attempts to create a forum where a real debate could take place, these plans were never carried out. See Flyvbjerg's (1998) for an excellent discussion of the interrelations between the works of these two important philosophers of the modern state. 62 Here I am using a term from March and Olsen's (1989) juxtaposition of standard aggregative liberal democratic practices to “intregrative” political systems: "Integrative traditions differ from aggregative traditions... in the role of reasoned deliberation in search of the common good by which the system is to be guided. Integrative processes treat conflict of interest as the basis for deliberation and authoritative decisions rather than bargaining. They are directed by a logic of unity, rather than a logic of exchange. They presume a process from which emerges mutual understanding, a collective will, trust, and sympathy” (126). 203
[the] noncoercively unifying, consensus-building force of a discourse in which the participants overcome their at first subjectively based views in favour of a rationally motivated agreement (Habermas 1987: 294)
In this he is reaching back to discussion of logos in classical philosophy, recalling, for example, Aristotle's discussion of “reasoned discourse” (Rahe 1994). He argues that this process of establishing mutual understanding is inherent in human social experiences. For Habermas, argumentative speech is a “unifying, consensus-bringing force… a 'central experience' in the life of a human being”(Habermas 1983, 10). Coordinated social action makes these kinds of inter- subjective exchanges unavoidable, and therefore a universal component of human life. It is this universalism that makes communicative rationality a suitable foundation upon which to build democratic institutions.
While universal, the experience of communicative rationality is not uncontested. He envisions an ideal speech situation where “nothing coerces anyone except the force of the better argument” (1990, 198). But he is open about the ways in which this can be derailed by differences in power between individuals and groups, strategic bargaining, and other limitations imposed when participants refuse to separate themselves from their subjective interests. To address this Habermas provides a series of four rules of “discourse ethics” (Habermas 1990, 122) which are to guide processes of debate and decision making: 1) all affected parties must be included in the decision making process; 2) all participants must be able to freely criticize and propose alternatives to the norms under discussion; 3) participants must be willing and able to empathize with the positions of other participants; 4) participants must be open about their goals and not to engage in strategic bargaining (Habermas 1993, 31, 1990, 65-6 , summarized in Flyvberg 1998).
This is not, as in the case of strategic bargaining within rational-actor economic models, a process through which a compromise is reached among competing interests. Rather, Habermas is advocating for an institutionalized system which creates consensus through a collective effort among all participants to make decisions that are in the common good. Habermas sees this institutionalization as the necessary work of the democratic process. As he argues in an introduction to the concepts of discourse ethics discussed above, “I wish to conceive of the democratic procedure as the legal institutionalization of those forms of communication necessary 204 for rational political will formation. ... A democratic procedure thus has to ensure simultaneously that several conditions for different forms of communication are met” (Habermas 1989, 151, see also Habermas 1986). In particular, Habermas focuses on the ability of abstract principles embodied in systems of law and constitutions (both of nations, and of organizations) to create the conditions necessary for a self-governing polity united by rational argument and exchange (Flyvberg 1998).
The rules of discourse ethics do not dictate the outcomes of the reasoned empathetic debate envisioned in the concept of communicative rationality. Rather, they create the conditions necessary for that type of debate to take place. While Habermas recognized that socio-political inequalities often exclude and disempower specific actors, he felt that properly designed institutions could ensure that true participation took place, and that decisions were based on consensus not coercion. In his conception, the ethical foundation provided by the universal social experience of communicative rationality provides the moral imperative for constructing legally binding systems imposed by the state. But these systems create the possibility for decisions and outcomes to emerge from an inclusive bottom-up process. In this Habermas is morally universalist, institutionally optimistic, procedurally authoritarian, and substantively deeply democratic. The advocates of state or agency-led participatory processes covered above do not adopt the same guidelines or broader moral and political framework as Habermas. But they share with him the faith that state-imposed systems of participation can ensure productive exchanges and just decision making even in situations of profound inequality.
6.3.1 Foucault: Power and Struggle A significant critique of this approach, already touched on above, argues that a focus on perfecting the techniques and institutions of participation encourages instrumentalism, and distances practitioners and participants from the truly transformative potential of participatory processes (Flyvbjerg 1998, Cleaver 1999, Owens 2000, Mohan 2002a, 2002b). This is not to say that institutional design is unimportant. Rather, the argument is that once participation becomes institutionalized, the government and aid agency officials who manage these institutions come to focus solely on fulfilling the official criteria, and not the underlying intent that they represent (see the discussion of “trained incapacity” in Chapter 3). 205
Cleaver laments participation's transformation into a “managerial exercise based on `toolboxes' of procedures and techniques...'domesticated' away from its radical roots” (1999, 608). He then calls on researchers to be more attentive to issues of power within communities. Power can determine not only who is included in participatory processes, but the way in which they participate and the conclusions that are reached (Cleaver 1999, Pellizzoni 2001, Hajer 2002, Mohan 2002b). Returning to an argument similar to that made by Arnstein (1969), Mohan (2002b, 4) emphasizes that participatory development “is fundamentally about power .... Even many supposedly pro-participation Development Agencies are incredibly powerful and show a marked reluctance to release control. Participation is a conflictual and, sometimes, violent process whereby the less powerful must struggle for increased control over their lives.”
In contrast to Habermas, these scholars are less optimistic that legal structures or institutional procedures can resolve these power struggles. In many cases, far from resolving them, they make them worse by playing into the hands of local elites, or simply acting as tools to justify the will of the local state (Mansbridge 1983, Saunders 1997, Fung & Wright 2001). Habermas assumes a situation where, with the proper institutional support, it is possible to enter into exchanges outside of relationships of power and domination. In opposition, these critical scholars of participatory processes argue that power is always present, and this reality is only papered over by a narrow procedural focus on institution building.
These more critical discussions of participatory processes share much with the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault's corpus has been foundational to discussions of resistance to established structures of power, value, and control. For Foucault, all exchanges are always permeated by power. State institutions are not solutions to issues of inequality and control, but are an integral part of the systems which hold inequality in place. Like Habermas, Foucault is interested in the construction of political rationality. Habermas' work represents a philosophically based attempt to outline a universal type of political rationality that would form the basis for systems of just democratic self-government. Foucault, in contrast, provides a historically based analysis of the way in which political rationality has been defined and applied in practice in different ways and to different effects. Rather than searching for universals, Foucault is attentive to historical 206 specificity. Instead of proposing ideal state-secured systems that will resolve situations of inequality, he proposes an analytical practice that enables participants to resist specific abuses of power.
An important component in the differences between Habermas and Foucault is their conception of the state. Habermas saw the democratic state as an agent able, through systems of law and democratic procedures, to embody and protect (even if only imperfectly) the practice of collective communicative rationality. For Foucault, far from being a disinterested facilitator of collective consensus building, modern states are in the constant pursuit of their own self-interest: namely increasing state power against both internal and external threats (revolution and competition from other states). He was particularly concerned with how the modern state, as it evolved, came to implement a specific type of political rationality to reinforce its own power (Foucault 1979). This logic of the state depended on a conception of power that was not violent or directly repressive, but rather productive. The power of the modern state was productive in that it sought to create within its population behaviours that were both in their interest and in the larger interests of the state itself. In his own words, “the aim of the modern art of government, or state rationality [is] to develop those elements constitutive of individuals’ lives in such a way that their development also fosters that of the strength of the state” (Foucault 1979, 251-2). This is the reasoning that he would later embody in his concept of “governmentality.”
Unlike the rigid structures of sovereign power which act upon that which is ruled (often through force), governmentality acts from within and is enforced by the subjects themselves. This form of self-policing is put in place by creating congruence between the interests of the state and the interests of the family, group, or individual. By facilitating the identification of the interests of the state with those of the individual, the state's aims come to be internalized by those who are subject to them (Foucault, 1991). With this new approach to governing, as Dean (1999, 485) explains, “power becomes dispersed, omnipresent, and facilitative, rather than centralized, occasional, and repressive.” Essential to the deployment of this type of facilitative power is the creation of new forms of knowledge about the state and its population. 207
For the modern state, this knowledge comes from the science of the state known as statistics. Because it is now able to measure the populations which it governs, and to quantify the different variables that affect it (eg births, deaths, epidemics, wealth, poverty, employment), government can act on the population either directly through large-scale campaigns or indirectly “through techniques that will make possible, without the full awareness of the people, the stimulation of birth rates, the directing of the flow of population into certain regions or activities” (Foucault 1991, 96, 100).
These more subtle techniques are left vague in Foucault's work. But as Miller and Rose (1990) clarify, the act of measurement itself – by defining, categorizing, and focusing attention – embodies a particular way of seeing the world and valuing it 64. Crucially, when these forms of knowledge are adopted by others, they carry with them their particular methods of interpreting reality. When individuals come to view themselves and their goals according to the same metrics as the state, and base their actions on these metrics, they become part of the network of self- regulating actors that is at the heart of the practice of governmentality.
Foucault's description of the functioning of power, rationality, and knowledge in the modern state does not represent an ideal. Rather, Foucault hoped that by clarifying the mechanisms of modern state power his work could enable acts of resistance and transgression. As he argued, writing with Chomsky in 1974, his goal was to criticize seemingly neutral and independent institutions “in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight them” (Chomsky and Foucault 1974, 171).
Unlike Habermas, therefore, Foucault does not set out a concrete program that could be used to guide struggles against injustice and inequality. He is intentionally open-ended about the form these struggles could take, depending on the specific historical contexts within which they were being fought. These struggles are what Foucault refers to collectively as “the undefined work of freedom” (Foucault 1984, 46). It is possible, however, to make some generalizations about the
64 This point is particularly relevant to an area like climate policy, which is so dependant on forms of measurement (of energy use, ghg emissions etc) see Rutland & Aylett (2008). 208 implications of Foucault's thought on the theory and practice of public participation.
Foucault draws attention to the unavoidably power-laden nature of participation, and more specifically the way in which the power and interests of the state are woven into official processes, as well as the systems of law and processes of measurement that support them. To limit “legitimate” participation to formal participatory processes would therefore mean to limit citizen engagement only to spheres which are designed a priori to reify the power of the state and the courses of action which it sees as beneficial. To empower communities and to create a venue for state actions to be truly contested something more radical is needed. It is through a focus on resisting particular concrete injustices through various forms of invented participation that citizens can more effectively unseat relationships of domination and represent their own needs and desires. In contrast to accounts that emphasize state-led processes, Foucault's work acts as a clear argument for the legitimacy of protest, confrontation, and direct action as constructive and necessary forms of participation. In this vision, and for those who have applied Foucault’s work more specifically to participatory processes (Flyvbjerg 1998b, Heller 2001, de Souza 2006, Pithouse 2006), struggle and conflict between civil society and the state is crucial to maintaining the fight for more profound change.
To link this discussion of Habermas and Foucault back to the larger literature on public participation covered above, Habermas can be said to represent the most thorough articulation of the value of “invited” forms of participation. As I've mentioned, it is rare (if ever) that states or agencies hold themselves to Habermas' exacting standards. But in their faith in the power of formal structures to facilitate meaningful engagement, they exhibit various examples of how “communicative rationality” can be manifest in practice. Foucault, in contrast, positions himself as a philosopher for mobilized community protests, struggle, and other forms of “invented” community-led participation.
When it comes to climate change policy, discussions of the role of public participation have so far focused almost exclusively on invited or state-managed forms of participation. The contributions that invented forms of participation can make to climate change response planning have been overlooked. The next section will provide an overview of those discussions as 209 reflected in the synthesis of climate change research provided by the most recent assessment report published by the International Panel of Climate Change (IPCC). I will use the broader theoretical work covered so far as a point of reference to highlight the limitations of the IPCC's approach to engaging non-state actors in the processes of designing and implementing climate change policies. Following this discussion, the final section of this chapter will look at an alternative conceptualization of participatory practice, providing a more complete picture of the dynamic relationship between state- and community-initiated forms of planning and action.
6.4 Participation and Climate Change: a Survey of the IPCC Assessment Reports (2001 and 2007)
Participatory practices have entered the issues considered in the IPCC's Assessment Reports by way of a larger engagement with the links between effective climate policy and sustainable development (discussed in Chapter 1). Both the IPCC reports and the larger literature on climate change research that they draw from have so far approached participation via a broader attempt to identify factors which influence a region or a community's ability to adapt to changes in climate or mitigate their emissions65. Work by Yohe (2001), Swart et al. (2003), Pielke (2005) and Working Groups II and III (WGII & WGIII) of the IPCC's Third and Fourth Assessment Reports (2001, 2007) (among others) have demonstrated the close relationship between factors affecting adaptive and mitigating capacity and the principles of sustainable development. Issues of poverty, malnutrition, poor education, lack of adequate sanitation, access to energy, weak local economies, and strained resource base have all been shown to limit adaptive and mitigating capacity. Likewise, well designed development planning can reduce vulnerabilities, and help switch communities to more sustainable forms of energy and energy use, thus reducing emissions. Following the lead of development organizations already active in many of these areas, participatory approaches to development has been looked to by the IPCC as one avenue
65 As covered in the report of the second working group (WGII) of the IPCC’s 3rd assessment report (TAR), adaptive capacity “refers to the processes, practices, and structures to moderate potential damages or to beneficial from opportunities associated with climate change.” Mitigating capacity, first defined by Yohe (2001) follows similar lines to look at the different ways in which specific regions, countries and socioeconomic groups can reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. 210 for increasing adaptive and mitigating capacity, as well as building social capital which may help communities deal with the stresses caused by a rapidly changing climate.
At a broader level, as discussed in Chapter 1, with the release of the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) IPCC authors established that issues of regional and international equity, technological change, and the impacts of local and national development choices have a far greater effect on the climate than any form of environmental policy (Nakicenovic and Swart eds. 2000). Rather than searching for technological solutions, these results have inspired calls for a more fundamental discussion of alternative courses for our collective futures (Banuri et al. 2001, Munasinghe and Swart 2005, Swart et al 2003). Responding to climate change in this context means asking fundamental questions about how we wish to live our lives, what our goals are, and by which means we as a society will pursue them. Given the deeply moral and political nature of these questions, IPCC authors and others have argued that they can only be democratically resolved through collective processes of deliberation and participation (see Cohen et al. 1998, Robinson 2004, Swart et al. 2003).
As we will see next, the discussion of participation in the IPCC's most recent Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) is entirely focused on invited forms of state-led participation. In fact, although AR4 discusses participation in some detail, the vision that emerges is largely restricted to different forms of information gathering and consultation. Even when judged on its own terms, it seems unlikely that this narrow definition of participation will be able to contribute much to increasing adaptive or mitigating capacity, facilitating the design or implementation of climate policies, or providing a platform for a significant rethink of the current development priorities. As I will argue, it is only by engaging with the works of Foucault and the broader critical literature on participatory democracy that the IPCC can hope to realize some of the transformative potential implied by its engagement with sustainable development.
6.4.1 The IPCC and Participation The treatment of participatory processes in the most recent Assessment Report (AR4 2007) exists at the expanding edge of topics covered by the IPCC. Since the first Assessment Report in 1990, the IPCC's focus has steadily evolved from a narrowly scientific investigation of the 211 science of climate change to include increasing attention to the socio-political and economic context of the causes, impacts, and responses to climate change66 (Banuri et al. 2001; see Chapter 1). Following the inclusion of discussions of sustainability and development in the Third Assessment Report (2001), discussions of participation made their way into the most recent Fourth Assessment (AR4, 2007) in the reports of Working Groups 2 and 3 (WG2 and WG3, on adaptation and mitigation67). Both working groups discuss the importance of broad participation by non-state actors in planning and implementing climate change policy.
In the case of the report by WG2 on “Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability”, participation receives the most coverage in section 20.8.2, “Participatory Processes in Research and Practice.” Here the WG2 authors outline their general interest in participatory processes by describing how public involvement can “help to create dialogues that link and mutually instruct researchers, practitioners, communities, and governments” (Yohe et al. 2007, 832). The discussion of participatory practices in this section focuses on participatory assessment and mapping as an entry point into a broad and at times unfocused literature review on participatory governance more generally. The shifting focus and cursory coverage of parts of this section make it necessary to go back to the original sources used by the authors to clarify how they are approaching participation. The literature on participation reviewed by the authors of WG2 draws on a total of 42 research articles and reports from NGOs, government agencies, and private consultants. Reading these in parallel to the text of section 20.8.2 reveals three distinct visions of participatory practices: 1) Participation as a form of information gathering (particularly as a component in Participatory Integrated Assessments) (see Hisschemöller et al. 2001, Huntington et al. 2006, Lemos 2005). 2) Participation as a way to link scientific and policy making communities, and facilitating the creation of “usable knowledge” (see Hass 2004, Lemos 2005).
66 This expansion, particularly visible in the work of Working Groups 2 and 3, has brought on board questions of equity, sustainability, development, governance and participation. Attention to adaptive and mitigating capacity, and sustainable development were new topics introduced for the first time in the Third Assessment Report (2001). Public participation was discussed for the first time in AR4 (2007). See Banuri et al. 2001 for a more detailed discussion of this shift. 67 The IPCC Assessment Reports are made up of three sub-reports put together by separate working groups. Working Group 1 focuses on the “Physical Science Basis” of climate change, Working Group 2 on “Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability,” and Working Group 3 on the “Mitigation of Climate Change.” 212
3) Participation as a component of decentralized natural resource regulation, largely in rural settings and tied to development and poverty alleviation (Garande & Dagg 2005, Adger et al. 2005, Parkins et al. 2005, Schneider, 1999). Overall the discussion revolves around a focused concern with designing better informed policy and improving natural resource management. There is a strong emphasis on institutionalized 'invited' forms of participatory processes initiated either by government, NGOs, or researchers, but little or no mention of how adapting to climate change and building adaptive capacity may be linked to more decentralized, informal participatory channels that may already exist in a given community.
More detailed discussions of participatory processes appear in Chapter 12 of the mitigation report by WG3, “Sustainable Development and Mitigation” (Sathaye et al. 2007). In the area of mitigation, the broad based participation of government, the private sector, non-governmental organizations, and civil society in a loosely defined version of “deliberative democracy” are presented as a way of pushing forward the mainstreaming of climate change planning within decision-making processes:
Making decisions about sustainable development and climate change mitigation is no longer the sole purview of governments. There is increasing recognition in the literature of a shift to a more inclusive concept of governance, which includes the contributions of various levels of government, private sector, non-governmental actors, and civil society. The more climate change issues are mainstreamed as part of the planning perspective at the appropriate level of implementation, and the more all relevant parties are involved in the decision making process in a meaningful way, the more likely they are to achieve the desired goals. ( Sathaye et al 2007, 693)
This goal is linked to a perceived need to build partnerships between government, NGOs and businesses (with a specific emphasis on Public Private Partnerships, PPPs). PPPs get particular attention because of their ability to mobilize the capacities of both the public and private sector (see for example Sabel et al. 1999). While hopeful, the authors of WG3 are generally ambivalent about these partnerships, citing both the risks of PPPs for government (particularly in the developing world) and the marginalizing and disempowering results that have emerged from experiments with cooperative models of environmental governance. 213
This section also makes more explicit the equation that the IPCC is making between participation and a largely unproblematized view of ‘governance’ or the formation of self- regulating networks between government, the private sector, and civil society groups to achieve common goals (see Sathaye et al. 2007, and Stocker 1998). WG3 signals the advantages of a shift away from a conception of governing focused on the power of government regulations and sanctions to enforce specific forms of behaviour. Rather than coming from one source, regulation emanates from the consensus of multiple key actors working around a given issue. In this the IPCC follows a similar Habermassian logic to advocates of environmental governance more generally, like Sabel et al. (1999), who marvel that “in this problem-solving process, disciplined consideration of alternative policies leads protagonists to discover unanticipated solutions provisionally acceptable to all” (online, p. not given).
6.4.2 Beyond Institutional Participation: Pushing the Boundaries of the IPCC The IPCC's portrayal of public participation's role in the response to climate change is limited to considerations of formal, or “invited” forms of engagement. Both WG2 and WG3 draw on a portion of the literature on participation that adopts a pragmatic focus on economic efficiency, a managerialist approach to poverty alleviation, and an emphasis on consensus building as a form of social engineering. We see here the reflection of the institutional approach to participation, covered above, that has since the 1970s become a mainstay of international development agencies (Melo & Baiocchi 2006, OECD 2001, World Bank 2000a). While IPCC authors are open about the limitations of the literatures that they are drawing from, the reports have not yet begun to engage with the important literature that is critical of the role institutional participation can play in de-leglitimizing other forms of engagement, further marginalizing already disempowered groups, and the offloading of state services onto a professionalized civil society sector (Stiefel and Wolfe 1994, Mayer 2006, 2000, Becher 2010). Participatory approaches to climate change are entering into a terrain that is, as discussed earlier in this chapter, already shaped by four decades of debates over the theory and practice of public participation. If only for the sake of completeness, engaging with this critical literature would strengthen the IPCC's treatment of participatory governance. 214
But the IPCC's narrow vision of participation also leaves out more basic elements of how participatory engagements with climate change are likely to unfold. By adopting an institutional view centred around invited forms of participation, collaborative governance, and information gathering, it has completely overlooked the contributions of community-led invented participation, autonomous action, and the reality of conflict. Climate change will have increasingly negative impacts on human well-being and poses a serious challenge to both the viability and the legitimacy of our current socio-economic order. Engaging effectively with the fundamental questions now ahead of us will require both consensus-driven formal processes, and grass-roots, sometimes conflictual, forms of community mobilization.
We will need to make dramatic cuts in GHG emissions to hold increases in average global temperature at or below four degrees Celsius by 2100 (Anderson and Bows 2008). This at a time when countries in both the Global North and Global South have entered into a period of increased economic stress and reduced resources. In that reality, it is hard to imagine a sincere response to climate change without some measure of conflict. At the same time, seen from that vantage point, community-led projects represent an important supplement to resource-intensive forms of state-managed participation. Like conflict, they also represent part of the reality of how both mitigation and adaptation are happening on the ground. For a complete picture of how climate-relevant policies are created and implemented, we need to balance the current bias towards institutional “invited” processes with a closer look at the contributions of “invented” community-led action.
The promise of more radical and pluralist democratic practices (see Silver, Scott, and Kazepov 2010) lies in their ability to mobilize community resources and involve them directly in project design and implementation, while also calling governments to account and counterbalancing current trends towards the neo-liberalization of environmental regulation. This is a delicate balance, with many internal tensions and potential contradictions. (At what point, for example, does community based implementation stop being about empowerment and start representing the offloading of service provision by the State?) It may seem at times like we are trying to have our cake and eat it too. But strict dichotomies between invited and invented spaces of participation, 215 or between conflict and collaboration, are something that I want to question here. In what follows, I hope to show that there are in fact productive synergies between both approaches – that each is necessary for the other to function to its fullest.
6.5 Synergies Between Invited and Invented Participation
So far in this chapter, I have presented a compartmentalized discussion of the relationship between state-managed invited participation and more autonomous and sometimes confrontational invented practices. From what has been discussed so far, it would be reasonable to conclude that Habermassian institution building and Foucauldian power struggles represent fundamentally distinct and incompatible approaches to public participation. This reflects a dynamic that exists within the domain of participatory theory more generally where, as seen in the literature covered above, an oppositional and critical school favouring struggle and community empowerment has played off against a more instrumental and institutionally driven definition of public participation. This polarization can be seen in works on participation both new and old (compare Arnstein 1969, Sabel et al. 1999, Heller 2001, Pithouse 2006). It is also reflected in the view of public participation that appears in the work of the IPCC, which I have focused on as a key actor in defining the discourse that surrounds climate change and climate policy. But there are convincing reasons to see invited and invented forms of participation tied together in a mutually re-enforcing relationship.
A growing pool of research has established the need to look beyond simple binaries between conflict and consensus (see for example McAdam et al., 2001, Hickey and Mohan 2004, Mische 2008). In the introduction to a recent special issue of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research focused on the relationship between conflict and consensus in participatory democracy, Silver et al. (2010) synthesize recent empirical work on various forms of participation to argue that rather than being mutually exclusive categories, invited and invented participation are rather “different ‘moments’ in the democratic process (454).” In the South 216
African context, Barnett and Scott (2007) argue that protest plays an important function in maintaining connections between civil society organizations and their constituents, while also expanding the parameters of what is considered within official forums and deliberative procedures. Similar arguments have emerged from empirical research into participatory processes in the United States. There too studies have shown a synergy between confrontation and consensus (Berry et al. 1993, Becher 2010). Becher, for example, argues from her research into the American Street Empowerement Zone in Philadelphia that marginalizing the existence of confrontation ignores what is rather “a constant movement between times of conflict and cooperation” and the positive outcomes that this movement brings (2010, 498). In his study of public participation in Portland, Putnam (Putnam et al. 2003) describes a “civic-dialectic” whereby community activists and the municipality are locked in a virtuous circle of productively pushing the other on to greater accomplishments (I will discuss this in greater detail in Chapter 8).
Conflict is often the most visible form of independent community-based action. In reality, it is only one facet of the many shapes that invented participation can take. Community groups, local NGOs, and civil society organization often engage in multiple forms of both invited and invented participation. These can include the creation of alternative community planning exercises (Peterman 1999), “citizen science” or the community-based production of scientific knowledge (Corburn 2003), and street protests (Ballard 2007). They can also involve various forms of project based direct action such as neighbourhood revitalization, the creation of community gardens and green spaces, establishing community supported local agricultural production, or the installation household level renewable energy technologie (Semenza et al. 2006). The case studies that follow in the next two chapters contain examples of most of these forms of engagement.
It therefore becomes more sensible to shift our energies from discussions supporting one form of participation or another, to ones that are able to account for the relationships that exist between multiple coexisting participatory practices (Flyvbjerg 1998a, Owens 2000, Holmes & Scoones 2001). One approach has been to take into account the role of social movements in catalyzing meaningful social change and state action. A variety of studies have covered the contributions of 217 civil society both inside and outside of formal participatory channels (de Souza 2006, Barnett & Scott 2007, Ballard 2007, Aylett 2010). Although each study discusses widely different levels of direct engagement and conflict, their findings support Hajer's (2002) more general conclusion that civil society interventions can break the dominance of any one powerful group or discourse by creating a space where multiple alternative logics and values can enter into the process. In Durban for example, as I will discuss in Chapter 7, grass-roots activism and civil society protest have dramatically changed state approaches to industrial regulation by refocusing state attention on the human costs of industrial development and fighting against the influences of entrepreneurial neoliberalism on municipal planning decisions. But what gave these protest politics strength was their ability to feed into established channels for input into policy making and regulation (in particular environmental impact assessments) and to create concrete shifts in regulation.
In the context of issues covered in the previous section (Chapters 3, 4, and 5) a combination of state-led public engagement and community-based direct action can help overcome the inertia that locks municipal agencies into established patterns of thought and action. De Souza (2006) argues that by participating in collaborative processes while simultaneously maintaining their independence and engaging in other forms of grass-roots mobilization, social movements help maintain both their own credibility and the credibility of formal participatory processes (see also Ballard 2007). By refusing to sublimate all forms of conflict into consensus, mass mobilization and protest are an important challenge to institutional path dependency. They also help counterbalance the pressures that business places on government. In the language of Foucault, grass-roots activism keeps civil-society groups in contact with more radical critiques that allow them to challenge the logic of the state. But rather than simply discrediting state-led processes, this form of dual invited/invented engagement helps to expand the options considered by officially sanctioned debates. Through direct action, they also show the feasibility of alternative practices; they lead by example outside of processes that depend on the transformation of the local state as a precondition for changes in projects and practices. This is something that will be particularly relevant in my next case study of Portland (Chapter 8) where a community-led solar power initiative has managed fundamentally to transform the local solar market. 218
The contributions of official participatory process are equally important. Just as a mobilized civil society can supplement official participatory forums, stable state-managed structures help balance out the often cyclical and uneven nature of community-based mobilization (Cohen 1996, Melo & Baiocchi 2006). They can also promote capacity building within civil society groups (Fagotto & Fung 2006) in the form of increased political experience, technical expertise, and social and financial capital. Also, given the local state’s ability to mobilize resources and regulate certain aspects of local development, participatory forums provide community-based organizations with an opportunity to institutionalize and scale up their concerns to the level of the city as a whole. These are examples of what Heller (2001) describes as the “functional synergies between institution building and mobilization” (134). On their own, both invited and invented forms of participation have something to contribute to municipal responses to climate change. But it is in their ability to mutually support each other that the true potential of public participation is most fully realized. That dynamic balance between institutionalization and mobilization will be a central theme in the case studies that follow.
6.6 Conclusions
Over the past 40 years, a narrow vision of public participation has gained an important influence over the practices of influential international organizations like the World Bank and the OECD. It has recently made its way into the IPCC's synthesis of current research on climate change and potential adaptive and mitigative policies. This vision of “invited participation” focuses on gathering information, increasing the efficiency of regulation and program implementation, and creating consensus-based systems of decentralized governance. In opposition to this, a body of critical literature has grown up highlighting the way such state-managed processes can sideline already marginalized groups, delegitimize other community-driven forms of engagement, and ignore the existence of conflict around issues of climate policy and resource regulation. These researchers and activists argue for the importance of “invented participation”: community-driven and occasionally confrontational forms of participation that function outside of and sometimes in 219 opposition to official state processes.
The purpose of this chapter has been to show that other visions of participation are possible, and have much to contribute to our understanding of how broad-based and participative urban climate governance is likely to take shape. After exploring the literatures on invited and invented forms of participation, and their roots in the works of Habermas and Foucault, I have argued for a more dynamic and balanced vision of how invited and invented forms of participation interact. Empirical work on the role of civil society groups in a variety of local contexts has shown that there are synergies between invited and invented forms of participation, and that formal and informal modes of participation – far from being mutually exclusive or opposed – often coexist as distinct or overlapping moments in policy formation and implementation processes. It is this synergistic model of participation that I will carry forward as a guide into the two cases studies that follow.
But as already seen in the fractious history of Durban's LA21 program, invited and invented forms of participation can also generate conflict that does not contribute to a larger positive outcome. This combination is not a panacea for the many possible challenges that systems of urban climate governance will face. My argument is more modest, but still significant. I am proposing that the synergies that can occur when these two forms of participation co-exist can mobilize greater resources and expand the scope and scale of urban responses to climate change beyond what either would accomplish in isolation. It is also important to highlight the fact that civil-society groups are themselves not immune to cooptation and that their claims to represent specific communities can also be problematic and controversial. Finally, this emphasis on public participation assumes that both municipalities and communities have the social, economic, and institutional capital and capacity necessary to participate meaningfully (if not always amicably) in the process of making decisions about highly complex issues. This was the case in Durban and Portland, but it may not be the case in all cities.
Durban and Portland are both richly participative cities. Participative community engagement is built into the structures of government of both municipalities, and each also offers a wealth of grass-roots examples of engagement. Interestingly, despite radical differences in the composition 220 of communities and the stresses faced by each city, a common picture emerges of the limited success of strictly formal participatory processes, and of the ability of community-based groups to significantly supplement municipal efforts to regulate GHG emissions and transform their local energy systems. 221 Chapter 7: Durban – Conflict, Collaboration, and Climate Change
7.1 Introduction: Consensus, Conflict, and the Synergies of Local Climate Governance
Durban is an excellent place to begin my analysis of the different forms that participatory climate planning and action can take68. With a history of high-level municipally managed consultation processes and confrontational community-led environmental justice campaigns, the city contains clear examples of both “invited” and “invented” forms of public engagement (cf. Habermas 1987, Chomsky and Foucault 1974). At the same time, the tensions and overlaps between these two forms of participation provide a compelling view of the difficult but productive synergies that can exist between them.
In this chapter, and the one on Portland which follows, I will present material from my case studies to delve deeper in the argument made in Chapter 6 that we need to move beyond simplistic dualisms between Habermasian and Foucauldian approaches to participation. Recent literature on public participation has made a strong case that there can be a productive relationship between consensus-based, state-led processes, and independent, at times confrontational, community mobilization (McAdam et al., 2001, Hickey and Mohan 2004, Mische 2008, Silver et al. 2010).
Looking at these larger theoretical claims in the context of my case studies, I am not going to make a normative argument about what constitutes the “ideal” form of participation. Rather I
68 Versions of this chapter has been published in two separate publications: Aylett, A. (2010) “Participatory Planning, Justice and Climate Change in Durban, South Africa.” Environment and Planning A. 42(1) 99 – 115
Aylett, A. (2010) “Conflict, Collaboration, and Climate Change: Participatory Democracy and Urban Environmental Struggles in Durban, South Africa.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34(3) 478–9 222 will show that attention needs to be paid to the interactions between multiple forms of engagement. These interactions constitute the actual socio-political context that local climate policy is likely to encounter on the ground. Attention to the synergies between invited and invented participation, I will argue, is essential to understand and to productively engage with the reality of participatory climate governance.
7.1.1 Background to Participation and Protest In Durban Participatory governance at the municipal level can take on a variety of shapes, from the now- famous participatory budgeting done since 1989 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, to the recent large-scale public visioning processes carried out by North American cities like Calgary, Chicago, and Portland69. As a South African city, Durban is set apart from these other examples because of the role that participatory processes played in the resistance to apartheid, and to the process of post- apartheid rebuilding (Cronin, 2005). Its approach to participation and sustainable development has also been influenced by its early experiences with Local Agenda 21 (Roberts and Diedrichs, 2002). Among South African cities, Durban stands out for the resources it has dedicated to implementing new forms of public consultation and new bureaucratic structures which are supportive of more inclusive municipal planning.
The case study of Portland in the next chapter will focus on participation in processes specifically geared towards addressing climate change. In this chapter, I will be looking at the way climate change and participation come together in processes that pre-date the introduction of climate change onto the municipal scene. The first case study in this chapter will focus on the state-led invited participatory processes which are part of the city's Integrated Development Plan (IDP) process. Unlike Portland, Durban has yet to produce a municipal Climate Action Plan (see Chapter 4). I focus on the IDP process instead, because it is there that large scale formal public participation around issues of climate change and sustainability takes place. The extensive public participation that surrounds the IDP should, in theory, give citizen's the ability to influence the municipality's approach to Climate Change. As I will argue, despite a superficial engagement with the issue, these Habermas-inspired processes lack critical elements which make public
69 I am referring here to the imagineCalgary, imagineChicago, and Portland's visionPDX programs,which engaged residents in producing a long-term vision of what they wanted their city to become. 223 engagement in the making of climate relevant decisions possible.
Participation in urban environmental policy in Durban also has another face: that of protest, direct action, and community-based citizen science. This is particularly so in the South Durban Basin (SDB) where residential homes jostle with petrochemical refineries and other industries. Civil-society activism in the SDB will be the focus of this chapter's second case study. The SDB is a highly politicized area within the city. Vocal protests critical of industries and the municipality is the public face of many forms of participation and community engagement in the basin. The influence of environmental justice activists from the basin on the earlier LA21 program has already been briefly discussed. But beyond these conflicts, key actors conveened by the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA) have also honed a strategic engagement with official participatory processes. Their contributions to the regulation of local air quality show one face of the synergies between invited and invented forms of participation. In addition to this, I chose to focus on SDCEA because it provided the opportunity of following a sophisticated and effective environmental justice organization as it integrated climate change into its core concerns. Although removed from their immediate concerns over air quality and health, over the course of my case studies community activists came to see climate change as a unifying theme in their conflicts with large industry and the national “minerals and energy complex” which dominates South Africa's economy.
In both cases, climate change entered as a new issue into participatory processes already established within the city. In some cases climate change, despite superficial concern, has remained relatively marginal. In others its importance significantly increased over the course of these case studies. Both trajectories contain valuable lessons about how climate change enters into a participatory landscape already defined by other issues and objectives. Entering at this moment of transition also exposes the problems and potential of attempting to forge links between participation, social justice, and climate change. This process is directly relevant to larger discussions of what is involved when cities attempt to shift from a narrower scientific framing of climate policy to a broader integrated approach.
In what follows I will trace these issues through both invited state-led consultation processes, as 224 well as more confrontational invented forms of direct action by environmental justice groups within the city. But in both case studies, I will draw attention to the inadequacies of a binary conception of state-led or community-driven processes. Both the IDP process and the environmental justice struggles in the SDB contain examples of the synergies which link invited and invented forms of participation. Various forms of participation, I will argue, need to be considered relationally. The most productive collective engagements with climate policy and action will arise in cities able to establish and maintain reinforcing relationships between invited and invented participatory strategies.
7.1.2 Civil-Society Mobilization and the Fight against Apartheid: 1955-1994 Participatory democracy in South Africa has deep roots, and formed the foundation for much of the rebuilding that followed the end of apartheid. Early resistance to the apartheid regime, established in 1948, culminated in the 1955 Congress of the People. Held in Kliptown (near Johannesburg) on June 26, 1955, the Congress was an important summit that brought together 3000 representative from many of the organizations that opposed the regime70. The “Freedom Charter” that it produced enshrined participatory processes in its vision of South Africa’s future (ANC, 1955). The decade of popular mobilization that preceded the Congress emphasized the importance of public participation within the anti-apartheid movement (Cronin 2005, 1). In late 1940s and early 1950s more radical African National Congress (ANC) leaders like Nelson Mandela led boycotts, strikes, civil disobedience and non-cooperation movements that brought together thousands of protesters from across the country. The “Freedom Charter” itself was based on input gathered during sixteen months of mobilization around the country where Black, Indian, and Coloured South African were asked the simple question, “If you could make the laws...what would you do?” (SAHO, “Congress of the People).
Through the decades of violent state oppression of non-whites that followed the Congress, the ideals of collective self-empowerment and localized participatory democracy were not lost. They surfaced again in the tumultuous struggles of the 1980s that prefigured the collapse of Apartheid. This spirit took shape in concrete local institutions ranging from people’s courts to self-
70 The 1955 Congress was attended by representatives from the African National Congress, the South Africa Communist Party, the South African Congress of Democrats, the South African Indian Congress. 225 governing street committees put in place and run by local residents to replace institutions withdrawn by the embattled regime. Summarizing the spirit of these times, Jeremy Cronin, noted South African poet, political commentator, and politician, describes the boiling up of the principles of the “Freedom Charter” during the 1980s:
In the 1980s, in the midst of the rolling waves of semi-insurrectionary struggle, the “People Shall Govern!” vision was once more invoked. It was also enriched with deeper meaning in a thousand sites of struggle, in civics, in rural women’s organisations, in shop steward councils, in school classrooms, in the mushrooming of local newsletters, in liberation theology, in poetry, song and graphic design. In struggle, popular forces pitched against the apartheid regime increasingly fought not just against oppression, but also for something - for an alternative, if still rudimentary, popular power, “democratic organs of self- government. (Cronin 2005, 1)
These multiple examples of local community action were not a transitory phase of the struggle against apartheid. Rather they represented a key element of what the struggle was about: a fight not simply for a shift from state oppression to representative democracy, but from distant hierarchies that imposed control to a more localized, decentralized, and participatory form of democracy that would give significant power and freedom to local communities to shape their own futures. In fact, a highly mobilized civil society was one of the few positive legacies that post-apartheid South Africa inherited from nearly a half century of systematic racial segregation (eThekwini 2004, 78).
7.1.3 Public Participation in the Post-Apartheid Political Order With the end of apartheid in 1994, the principles of the “Freedom Charter” took shape in the South African Constitution (1996) and other key pieces of legislation (see table 7.1). These enshrined public participation within what is otherwise a representative democracy with a code of constitutionally protected human rights. While participation is limited at higher levels (restricted to occasional consultation by national and provincial legislatures) more importance is given to public participation at the municipal level. National and provincial bodies must “facilitate public involvement” in certain governmental processes (see sections 59(1) and 118 of the 1996 Constitution). Similar constitutional requirements apply to municipalities (expressed in general terms in the 1998 “White Paper on Local Government”). But cities are also subject to far more specific requirements mandated by the Municipal Systems Act 2000, section 16, which: 226
obliges municipalities to ‘develop a culture of municipal governance that complements formal representative government with a system of participatory governance, and must for this purpose (a) encourage, and create conditions for, the local community to participate in the affairs of the municipality, including in: (i) Integrated Development Plan, (ii) the performance management system, (iii) performance, (iv) the budget, (v) and strategic decisions relating to services. (MSA 2000, quoted in Buccus et al. 2007, p.10).
In this respect, South Africa is truly exceptional: most countries seeking greater levels of participation start within an existing representative system and have the precarious challenge of reforming it without undermining its fundamental institutions (see McGee et al., 2003). Here, the political system has – since its recent beginnings been designed to foster participation.
While this context may seem like reason for optimism about the vitality of participatory democracy in South African cities, recent studies have called into question the commitment of local and national government (Buccus et al. 2007, Cronin 2005, Heller 2001). In the most recent report on municipal practices, Buccus et al. (2007) found that – more than seven years since the enabling legislation was passed – there is still no final national or provincial policy to steer the legislative promises into concrete processes. Further, they argue that a close reading of the legislation shows that “participation” largely consists of various forms of consultation, rather than any meaningful involvement of communities or civil society in decision-making or implementation (see also Section 4(1)(b) of the Municipal Systems Act (32 of 2000) ).
In their interviews with both officials and community members in the municipalities of Ilembe, Mgungundlovu, Sisonke, and eThekwini (Durban), Buccus et al. (2007) identified a common dissatisfaction with the participatory mechanisms implemented so far and their limited effect on local governance. More specifically, both community members and officials echoed common complaints covered above: to function, participatory practices needs to be fully integrated into the municipal government. For this they require key resources which are currently lacking: money, training and staff. They also found that in the municipalities they investigated there was 227 general support for the idea of public participation, but that what was needed was the political will to make it happen.
Heller (2001) makes similar critiques, tracing these weaknesses to a shift in the ANC at both national and municipal levels away from the party's initial redistributive and transformative policies, to a more neo-liberal approach that emphasized growth-led development creating “business-friendly” economic conditions, and the role of the market (rather than state programs) to lead socio-economic development and repair inequalities (see Chapter 2, South Africa 1996). Rather than mobilizing participation or building sustained consultative or deliberative processes, the emphasis was now on streamlining the bureaucracy, reducing costs, and increasing administrative performance.
Durban has not been exempted from this tension between deeply embedded participatory structures within the context of a rapidly neo-liberalizing state. As we will see Durban dedicates significant resources to municipally managed public participation processes, specifically those that surround its Integrated Development Planning (IDP) process. At the same time, as these processes have become increasingly institutionalized, political and technical limitations have reduced their impact on municipal planning both in general and specifically in the area of climate change and sustainability.
7.2 Case Study 1 – Institutionalized Participation and Climate Planning within the IDP
During the early work of establishing the new municipal structures required by the 1998 “White Paper on Local Government.” and the Municipal Systems Act released in 2000, the city established two different types of participatory forums: Large-scale meetings with key stakeholders, dubbed “Big Mama Workshops”, that convened civil-society groups, labour, and senior municipal management to obtain high-level feedback on key municipal policies; and 228 community workshops run at the ward level that provided more locally specific input.
Both of these types of participatory forums continued to run as part of the formal IDP process during the period of my fieldwork. The impact that they have had on the municipality's climate related policies has been uneven. As we will see, some significant changes have resulted from the “Big Mama's.” In contrast, important limitations in ward-level consultations have limited community engagement with climate change or related issues within the IDP process.
To understand these mixed results, we first need to take a step back from environmental issues to look in detail at how these processes have been run, and what their overall impacts have been. The next three sections will provide a short overview of the Big Mama workshops and the initial round of ward-level consultations. This will provide the context for the more detailed discussion of formal public participation and climate change that follows.
7.2.1 Early Participatory Planning: the First Integrated Development Plan Beginning with the first Big Mama in 2001, the municipality reports that these large workshops have been central to collaboratively setting its development priorities, transforming expert policy documents into popular plans with broad community support, and convening large diverse groups of stakeholders that had previously been divided by apartheid. Ranging between 400 and 500 people these workshops brought together an exhaustive list of participants: elected councillor, community representatives, senior national and provincial officials, members of the press and representatives from parastatals, unions, academia, traditional leadership (Chiefs/Amokshi), NGOs, community based organizations, and environmental, women’s and youth groups (Moodley, personal correspondence). Each of these processes involved deliberation on complex local policy issues, but for the purposes of this chapter I will provide only a brief summary of their impacts.
Between 2001 and 2002 the municipality conducted two of these large scale consultations as part of the period of concentrated activity that surrounded the creation of its first, LTDF (2001) (a twenty year strategic framework for municipal development), and its first budget (2002). In February of 2003 a third Big Mama was held to review the draft of Durban's first five year IDP. 229
The city reports that this session resulted in three major shifts: 1. an increased commitment to financial transparency resulting in the publication of actual budget allocations to each the IDP focus areas, 2. a more pronounced emphasis on local economic development and stimulating business growth in the historically under-invested areas, and the establishment of “sustainable development” as the central theme of the entire IDP (discussed further below) (eThekwini 2004a).
In the lead-up to the first IDP, released in 2003, the city also ran an intensive and ambitious program of ward-level consultations throughout the city, thus demonstrating a Habermassian dedication to proper process and the value of public debate. The underlying goal was to provide an opportunity for real discussion and debate, that in turn would help the municipality to steer its approach to development during the next five years. As we will see, despite real commitment among municipal staff, these two seemingly complementary imperatives would in fact prove difficult to reconcile.
The city is divided into 100 wards: administrative areas with populations ranging from 10 892 to 88 384, and spanning everything from gated luxury communities to informal settlements (eThekwini 2007). Over a six month period during 2001-02, IDP facilitators visited each ward three times to host public workshops (eThekwini Municipality 2004). Genevieve Hartley, who oversaw the entire first round of consultation as part of the city's Development Planning Unit, remembers this as a Herculean task, with day-long workshops held almost entirely on weekends and facilitated by a dedicated and enthusiastic team (interview Hartley, 2008/04/09).
Despite such an ambitious effort, the end results were modest. During consultations, held in community centres and public halls, facilitators first introduced participants to the city's planning processes and then led group discussions to identify the community's needs. At the close of the day they asked participants to condense their input into a ranked list for each ward (a 'needs assessment') which in turn would influence (to some degree) how the budget was spent in their area. This translation of complex debates into numerical rankings was designed to increase the 230 efficiency of municipal operations effectively marginalized any of the complexities of insights that had arisen from the day's discussions. The resulting simplification of participants' input produced a list of key priorities that were not terribly surprising. Aggregated across the city the top concerns were ranked as follows (eThekwini 2004a, 23):
1. housing and household services; 2. safety and security; 3. jobs/economic development; 4. community infrastructure; 5. health services; 6. governance issues; 7. transport; 8. education; and 9. social issues.
As Ballard et al (2008) point out, a team of competent planners and elected officials could have produced a similar list with far less effort. In fact, it seems they did. Both ward-level politicians, and municipal officials were relatively open about the fact that staff simply cherry picked from “inexpert” community inputs to rubber stamp predetermined budgetary decisions. (Interviews, Councilor Aubrey Snyman 2008/03/1, Soogen Moodley 2008/03/25, see also interview Jacquie Subban, Corporate Policy Unit quoted in Ballard et al 2008). Both Hartley and the officials interviewed by Ballard et al (2008) conclude that the major achievement of this first round of consultation was that participants felt that they were part of the city and had a say in what was happening.
Despite the lengths the city went to hold them, the impact of these consultations on the management of the city has been relatively slight. When I asked Hartley about this she explained that: “What people were saying … didn't drastically change the shape of the IDP. The IDP is a strategic document, and the average person out there doesn't think strategy. So, you often found, when you were in the wards, that all they could think of was their immediate surroundings” (Interview, Hartley 2008/04/09). As I will discuss below though, the process itself and the 231 information provided to guide deliberation may have been partly to blame. Similar short sightedness emerged in later rounds of IDP consultation when it came to local engagement with environmental issues. But – rather than being a shortcoming of the participants themselves – this could be directly traced back to the ways in which participants were encouraged to think about their neighbourhoods.
7.2.2 Strategic Thinking: Bridging the Gap A focus only on these limitations however overlooks the fact that the process itself went to considerable lengths to bridge the strategic deficit identified by Hartley. Municipal 'strategic thinking' is, in fact, based on complex systems of data collection and analysis. It is no surprise that work needs to be done before productive conversations can be held which integrate this technocratic perspective with the daily experience of residents.
Municipal facilitators began this work during the consultation processes by introducing participants to outcomes-based planning (OBP), the underlying logic of the city's approach to service delivery. By first explaining OBP methods to participants, they aimed to shift participant’s thinking away from large capital projects (“We want a clinic!”) to lateral ways of meeting the same needs (“How can we increase access to health services?”). Rooted in attempts to meet multiple demands with scarce resources, OBP is linked to the city's GIS-based access modeling. OBP and access modeling take a holistic view of the city by mapping citizens' access to services, rather than simply counting facilities on a ward-by-ward basis. They work from the premise that citizens can (and do) cross administrative boundaries to use services, and that increasing access does not necessarily mean building new facilities (presentation, Mark Byerley, eThekwini Housing Unit, imagineDurban Accessibility Workshop, 19 March, 2008).
By teaching community members to situate themselves within the metro as a whole, and to frame their concerns in terms of OBP, consultations for the first IDP began the process of developing the ability of community members to read the planning logic of the city and to make their needs legible to city planners. This is a modest example of the way in which, as discussed by Abers (2000) and others in Chapter 6, participatory processes can help citizens to build the skills, understanding, and organizing capabilities necessary to interact more effectively with the 232 state and participate more meaningfully in decision making processes. From the perspective of climate planning it is relevant because it illustrates the ability of well designed participatory processes to build the capacity of community members to think holistically and strategically about their city's future.
Despite the view, common in a certain portion of the literature on public participation (Arnstein 1969, Ballard et al 2008), that the state and civil-society are fundamentally in opposition to one another, there remain important functions for government bodies in fostering participation. As I will discuss below, there are clear examples where working within the structures of the state maintains situations that are deeply unequal and damaging both socially and environmentally. But being literate in the language and logics of the state can be a powerful tool, whether community members simply want to have input into municipal decisions, or critique the underlying logics that guide them.
7.2.3 Participation and the Environment (i) : Big Mama's Shifts in High-level Policies The impact of Durban's municipally-led participatory processes on climate-change-related planning mirrors the more general outcomes discussed above. Feedback obtained during Big Mama workshops helped to increase the profile of environmental sustainability and climate change within the first (2003) and second (2008) IDPs. Ward-level consultations, on the other hand, did little to help refine these high-level commitments or guide their implementation.
Input from local NGOs and members of the municipal bureaucracy during the 2002 “Big Mama Workshop” had a substantial impact on the place of sustainability in the city's first IDP. The city reports that feedback from one participant in particular helped catalyse a shift in the municipality's approach to sustainability: one astute observer, struck at the heart of the city’s strategy when he questioned how the city was articulating its views on sustainability: “ ... but surely the issue of sustainability is everybody’s responsibility, and does not just lie with a single cluster/department within the council and only in a single chapter of the IDP..?” (eThekwini 2004a, 33)
This comment inspired the city to reframe the entire IDP around a definition of sustainability that unified the city's multiple developmental goals. Initially, the primary focus of the section was on 233 economic and social aspects of sustainability, but it also contained a significantly expanded section on environmental sustainability. During subsequent annual reviews between 2003 and the release of the second IDP in 2006, this evolution of the city's engagement with sustainability continued, and the place given to environmental issues grew thanks to a combination of public, bureaucratic, and political pressures.
The 2006 IDP upgraded the priority of the sustainability of the natural and built environment to its top position. Echoing the now iconic language of early writing on sustainable development (see WCED 1987), the city committed to balancing “social, environmental and economic goals” (eThekwini 2006, 22), and committed to address the potential impacts of climate change on the municipality (28). But the municipality's response to another piece of public input shows the limitations of these high-profile commitments.
As well as an interest in sustainability, financial transparency was another key theme during early IDP reviews (eThekwini 2004a). This led the municipality to publish budget expenditure prominently in the IDP document itself. This exposes the fact that despite the high priority of environmental goals on paper, the budget for environmental programs in the 2006 IDP is a small fraction of what has been set aside for other areas: a total of R6 million (US $0.8 million) over three years. That is less than half the amount of the next-lowest of R12.689 million (US $ 1.6 million) allocated to “Celebrating Cultural Diversity”, and well below the largest budget of R6302.399 milllion (US $834 million) for “Quality Living Environments” (Housing) (eThekwini 2006). While many environmental goals can be achieved through proper planning in other sectors, and do not require a dedicated capital budget, such a low level of spending calls into question the city's commitment to sustainability.
This mirrors what has happened at the national level where the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism has adopted the language of sustainable development, but it has had little effect on the government's industrial policies (Wiley et al. 2002). Despite the appearance of sustainability on paper, environmental priorities in South Africa are trumped by “a neoliberal paradigm, which dominates society and the economy” (Scott and Oelofse 2005, 446) that promotes weak regulation and enforcement as a way of attracting foreign investment and 234 ensuring economic growth.
7.2.4 Participation and the Environment (ii) : the Limitations of Ward-level Consultations During ward-level consultations, concerns over environmental issues were voiced almost exclusively by participants in areas that faced immediate environmental problems. In the industrial areas of the municipality, particularly the SDB, residents face high levels of air pollution with serious health impacts, including high rates of asthma, leukemia, and cancer (groundWork 2003). During the consultations for the first IDP, Hartley reported that apart from these issues, little else in the way of environmental concern emerged during ward-level meetings (Interview, Hartley 2008/04/09). Attending the consultations carried out in 2008 as part of the annual review of the second IDP, I observed a similar situation.
Hartley ascribed this to the presence of two different cultures surrounding environmental issues within the municipality: Because we are partly a third world country and partly a first world country you can split an issue like environmentalism in two ways. The more affluent see environmental change and realize that we are messing up the environment and that we need to change. But when you go in there and talk to someone who is wondering where they are going to get their next slice of bread from ...[t]hen environmental change means absolutely nothing to them. You can’t even begin to try and explain to people the concept of environmental change. .... I think we are being totally unrealistic to even try. (ibid.)
Given the nature of participation in the municipality's Big Mama Workshops, this could provide a partial explanation for the different way in which each process addressed climate change and related issues. Feedback from elite representatives of local NGOs, environmental groups, and municipal officials draws from their own reflection on and interpretations of a larger global discourse surrounding environmentalism and climate change. Less affluent and educated community members on the other hand are less exposed to this discourse and – understandably – more concerned with matters that directly affect their livelihood. But there are two problems with this seemingly intuitive explanation. 235
First, as mentioned above, during ward-level consultations it was precisely poorer communities that voiced concern over local environmental problems (particularly around air quality and pollution). As we will see in the following section, outside of the IDP processes, members of these communities have also been highly engaged in campaigns that link these local issues to broader global environmental movements and climate change. In interviews, no municipal representative involved with the IDP process reported environmental concerns being voiced by residents in wealthier wards.
Second, Hartley's argument assumes that community capacity to engage with environmental issues is somehow independent of the participatory process itself. But as we have seen above in the discussion of strategic thinking and OBP, on some topics the municipality has effectively used ward-level consultations to build planning capacity within local communities. Teaching community members to engage effectively with the municipality's formal planning processes was itself a significant undertaking that at the outset could also have been considered “unrealistic.”
As revealed in more detail during my attendance at the 2008 ward-level consultations, this type of capacity building is something that the municipality had yet to initiate around environmental issues. Even judged solely within the Habermassian emphasis that the municipality has adopted to designing formal participatory processes (an emphasis that I will call into question below) the IDP process has failed to provide an effective framework for the participatory governance of climate change or environmental sustainability.
The best entry point for understanding this failure is to take a closer look at the process through which participants created ranked-needs assessments, a core component of ward-level consultations that I attended in 200871. These rankings are produced in each ward over the course of one afternoon meeting held in a community centre or municipal building. This process is guided by two key sources of information: the eight overarching goals of the IDP (of which “the
71 During my 2008 field season in Durban I attended 4 full day ward-level IDP consultation meetings [2008/02/15, 17 2008/03/ 2, 3]. Each of these meetings brought together groups of representatives of up to 10 wards. Following the general orientation I observed two or three groups at each meeting to follow their deliberations and the process through which they created their ranked needs assessments. 236 sustainability of the natural and built environment” comes first), and a ward profile containing demographic information about the ward as well as about access to key services and infrastructure (from running water and roads to housing, health care, and education). These ward profiles are compiled by the municipality's Corporate Policy Unit both for the IDP process, and to provide accurate socio-economic data to act as a basis for research and decision making around development issues by public service, civil-society, and business organizations (CPU 2007). Table 7.2 and 7.3, for example, show the ward profile for Ward 18 “Pintown Centre” the first ward whose IDP consultations I attended.
The ward committees read over and reviewed the accuracy of their profile and used its contents to guide their discussions of local needs. Nowhere in the profile was there any information that related to or enabled discussions of environmental sustainability. Issues such as average per capita electricity and water use, waste production, or access to public transportation, for example, were absent. There was also no opportunity in these relatively short meetings for committees to access or obtain other information. Facilitators at these consultations provided quick refreshers on the principles of OBP (covered in more detail during earlier consultations), and the overarching goals of the IDP were quickly reviewed. But there was no substantive discussion of environmental sustainability, Durban's greenhouse gas emissions, or other relevant local environmental issues such as air quality or biodiversity protection. Committee members were then placed in the disingenuous position of having to relate their goals back to the issue of environmental sustainability (enshrined in the IDP), without having the most basic data or guidance to help them to engage in a substantive discussion of the issue. Much of this information is already gathered by the city, but it is either not publicly available, or is split across disparate departmental reports.
With electricity, for example, the ward profiles used during consultations only contained statistics for the percentage of households connected to the grid. There was no information on average rates of household consumption, or on the carbon footprint of the city's electricity supply. This successfully steered participants' attention towards the city's developmental goal of increasing access to key services. These goals are admittedly very important in many historically 237 marginalized wards. But this narrow focus completely masked the fact that from an environmental point of view there are two other electricity problems: the disproportionately high and wasteful electricity consumption in areas of high connectivity (particularly historically wealthy white wards), and the emissions produced by the national grid that relies almost entirely on coal-fired power. Any meaningful deliberation on communities' roles in reducing Durban's emissions needs to engage with issues of over-consumption and the lack of renewable energy. But without reliable information it is difficult if not impossible for community members to engage with or even truly perceive their place in these issues.
The IDP's focus on access leaves unquestioned patterns of elite over-consumption and the externalization of atmospheric pollution that were established as desirable long before the end of apartheid. The socially transformative drive to increase access in this case also, through its limited focus, conveys implicit support for a relationship to natural resources that is both reactionary and environmentally unsustainable. This illustrates how, as Foucault (1981) argues, statistics can be used as a way to communicate state values and goals while also acting as a repository for specific logics which remain stable across political and structural change.
These shortcomings serve as an important reminder that formal participatory processes in and of themselves are not enough to increase a community's ability to address climate change effectively. They must also provide participants with relevant information, and build local capacity to interpret that information and situate local development goals and patterns of consumption within the city's larger environmental objectives. At the same time, this increased environmental literacy would enable participants to effectively critique these objectives and the municipality's approach to reaching them (something which I will discuss in more detail in the first case study of Portland in Chapter 8). The development of community literacy in OBP shows that the local state is capable of this kind of capacity building. But the municipality had yet to do so, or to include any environmental indicators into ward profiles. Both absences are another tell- tale sign that despite ambitious commitments, the municipality itself had yet to integrate climate change into its participatory IDP review processes. 238
7.3 Case Study 2 – The Confrontational Contribution of Civil Society
This chapter has so far dealt only with the large-scale “invited” participatory planning process run by the municipality as part of the IDP. This is one approach to urban participation and one that sits well with the conception of consensus-based processes promoted by international development agencies and discussed by the IPCC. It is a technocratic and process-driven system. While it benefits from being well supported by municipal staff and resources, it is also vulnerable to being carried out in a perfunctory, symbolic manner to increase the perceived legitimacy of the local state or simply to meet the requirements set out by national legislation. But state-led participation is not happening in a vacuum. To see what lies beyond this specific interpretation of what counts as “participation” we now turn to the more “inventive” contributions of civil society groups to environmental debates and policies in Durban. I will start by examining the history and recent successes of environmental justice struggles around local air quality in the SDB. I will then look at how the tactics and techniques used in these struggles are being adapted to the new and different challenge of mobilizing civic engagement with climate change.
7.3.1 Industrial Development vs. Environmental Justice: a Short History of Community Struggles in the South Durban Basin Grassroots mobilization around environmental issues is strong in Durban, particularly so in the South Durban Basin (SDB). The SDB is the product of early industrial development and apartheid-era planning beginning in the 1950s. Today, roughly 200,000 residents live in the area. It is also the home of (among other industries) two petrochemical refineries (the SAPREF refinery owned jointly by BP and Shell, and the Malaysian-owned ENGEN refinery) which together produce 60% of the petrol refined in South Africa. The current mix of industrial and residential spaces – often literally across the street from one another (as can be seen in fig. 7.1) – is a direct result of the city’s administration during apartheid, which pioneered the practice of locating inexpensive black, Indian, and coloured workers close to the industries that depended on 239 them. There are multiple chemical emissions from the various industries, and communities in the SDB have abnormally high rates of respiratory problems, asthma, leukaemia and cancer (groundWork 2003, 31).
In terms of CO2 emissions, industry in the basin accounts for close to 50% of the city’s overall emissions of 17.8m tons per year72 (Environmental Management Department 2007). The SDB is considered a national “pollution hot-spot” that threatens residents’ constitutionally protected right to a clean and healthy environment (DEAT 2007, 6), But it is also a strategic site for South Africa’s economic growth, particularly the “value added manufacturing sectors such as chemicals, plastics, metalworking, and the motor industry” (Barnett and Scott 2007, 2614). These two classifications highlight the tense relationship between economic priorities, and local and global environmental issues that are contained within the basin. These difficult realities are what await cities as they attempt to engage in a more far-reaching and holistic way with urban climate policy. They are also an evocative example of the impacts of what urban political ecologists refer to as the urban metabolism of natural resources (in this case the refining of oil) for the global market (see Chapter 1).
In part due to these tensions, the SDB has been a key site in the transformation of local environmental politics from a (largely white) green conservation movement, to a more democratic and popular brown movement that links environmental and social concerns (Freund 2001). It is also an area where much municipal energy was placed during the city's Local Agenda 21 program (Wiley et al 2002, see Chapter 2). Even prior to the transition from apartheid, the conflicts built into the planning of the SDB led to an active culture of civic participation, and the emergence of a number of vocal organizations advocating for the rights of residents, and pushing for a stricter regulation of its industries. Beginning in the early 1960s, organizations like the Merebank Residents Association (MRA) were among the first groups in South Africa to mobilize around urban environmental issues (DEAT 2007, 9). Currently, advocacy groups in the SDB range from religious organizations to civic and ratepayers’ associations (like the MRA), prominent national environmental NGOs like groundWork and Earthlife Africa, and the Danish 72 This level of emissions is comparable to those of similar sized cities in North America. Vancouver, for example emits approximately 17m tons per year. Exact comparison is not possible because of the fact that North American inventories tend to include a group of greenhouse gasses, whereas Durban has only inventoried CO2. 240 environmental conservation organization DN (Danmarks Naturfredingsforening).
These groups do not act in isolation. The core of their efforts lies with the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA), an umbrella organization that unites many of these other groups. It has established a high profile over the past decade. Although the day-to- day work of the organization is done by a five-person team, the coalition as a whole is composed of 20 other local organizations (SDCEA 2004, interview with SDCEA chairperson, Des D’Sa, 2008/03/17). This broad-based membership provides the Alliance with crucial support in terms of expertise, funding, and community mobilization. It acts as the hub of an active ‘counter- public’ (Hernández-Medina 2010) that has formed in the basin to fight for stronger responses to environmental health issues and climate change.
The organization itself, and many of its key members, grew out of the struggles that preceded the fall of apartheid. Focusing now on environmental justice, they remain committed to ‘taking the fight into the streets.’ Theatrical and at times confrontational protests remain a core part of their approach (see also Cohen 1993, Carnie 2008). As you walk into their cramped offices what grabs your attention is a photograph of Nelson Mandela with a loudhailer addressing a crowd of demonstrators. The photograph was taken during a protest in 1995 (see fig. 7.2). Mandela arrived to assist in the opening ceremonies for a new expansion of the SAPREF refinery. He left having joined the protesters’ cause, setting the wheels in motion for a policy requiring industries to reduce their emissions.
Founded in 1996, SDCEA grew directly out of this protest. The photo serves as a reminder of the continued legitimacy and leverage gained from vocal protest and struggle. But the Alliance is not just protest, which becomes clearer when you see that around the photo, occupying most of their cramped offices are the filing cabinets needed to keep all the records of their participation in multiple Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs). SDCEA has also been an active partner (along with local businesses, the municipality, and the national government) in the creation of a more stringent air quality monitoring system in the Basin known as the Multi-Point Plan (MPP)
There is a seemingly incongruous balance between SDCEA’s protest against local industries, as 241 well as the national and local state, and its participation in state-run processes. But this dual form of engagement has allowed the Alliance to push the limits of what has been included in formal participatory structures. It also allows them to hold the municipality to its promises, and to resist the 'domesticating' influence that formal participatory avenues can have on community-based groups. More generally, SDCEA's activities are a concrete example of the synergies that exist between invited and invented forms of participation, discussed in Chapter 6 (see Barnett and Scott 2007, and Ballard 2007, Hernandez-Medina 2010, Skocpol 2003).
As we explore these different areas of engagement in more detail, I will argue that far from being contradictory, protest and participation in fact support and feed into one another. But SDCEA's successes in this area were established around issues of air quality, and the transition they have undertaken to tackle climate change as well has not been without problems. Even with its experience of mobilizing community members around the social and environmental impacts of petrochemical industries, finding a focus for productive local action initially eluded the Alliance.
The following two sections will focus on the general dynamics of SDCEA's confrontational relationship with the municipality, and the process leading to the creation of a more comprehensive air-quality monitoring system in SDB (known as the Multi-Point Plan or MPP). This will provide the background for my analysis of their more recent engagement with climate change. I will discuss the two initial stages of SDCEA's climate change campaign, its links to their earlier activism, and the opportunities and challenges that the issue represents for local environmental justice groups.
7.3.2 Confl ict’s Positive Contributions (i) : “Klupping” and Counter-balancing Local Neo-liberalism In interview, both SCDEA members and city officials showed a similar disdain for each other. Des D'Sa, SDCEA's leader and main spokesperson, had little knowledge of, or interest in, the IDP process. He had not been invited to participate in that year's consultations, and he clearly valued street protest and community-based scientific monitoring more than formal participatory processes (Interview, D'Sa 2008/04/17) (one of SDCEA's protests is pictured in fig. 7.3). Other SDCEA staff reported similar views (interviews Varsha Naidu, 2008/03/11, Stephen VanWyk, 2008/03/28). 242
With respect to air-quality, confrontation was a key part of the Alliance’s approach to its campaigns both at home and abroad73:
Being on the streets for us is a sign of how far we have come, and how far we still need to go. It is a sign to the government that the people are prepared to take to the streets if you do not do your job . . . It is keeping governments [and industry] on their toes . . . and not thinking that they can get away with things. We have seen it in other parts of the world, where people think that just because they have got a progressive government things will change. No way! The most progressive governments in the world will always need pressure from the people. (interview, D’Sa 2008/04/17)
This form of participation had earned SDCEA a reputation. For many officials, the Alliance was the first organization that came to mind when thinking about environment-related conflict between the city and civil society (interviews, eThekwini Municipal officials, 12 February to 1 April 2008). Barnett and Scott (2007) also report that key municipal figures, including the City Manager and the head of the Environmental Management Department, perceive NGOs and CBOs as a largely negative force within the city.
More than simple frustration, Barnett and Scott argue that this reaction on the part of the municipality is an expression of a very specific vision of how participatory processes should proceed based on norms of “participation, conciliation, and consensus. Any departure from these norms is looked on as obstructive, and even as an index of the lack of legitimacy of the SMOs [social movement organizations] who adopt such adversarial activism”(ibid., 2627). This consensus-based definition of legitimate participation is a local manifestation of the broader argument, discussed in Chapter 6, that institutionalized participatory processes channel community participation into narrow state-managed institutions, while de-legitimizing more radical, critical, and autonomous forms of engagement (see Stiefel and Wolfe 1994, Mayer 2006, 2000, Becher 2010, Silver et al. 2010, Ballard 2007, Barnett and Scott 2007, Becher 2010).
Legitimacy, however, is not only derived from government approval. Barnett and Scott (ibid.)
73Along with activists from other areas, SDCEA members attend Shell’s board meetings and other events to protest against their activities. 243 make a convincing argument that SDCEA’s often theatrical protests play an important function in maintaining the organization’s standing with their grassroots constituents while they participate in more formal channels, such as environmental impact assessment (EIA) processes, and the building of the Multi-Point Plan (MPP) which we will discuss below.
Despite a general uneasiness around SDCEA’s tactics, a number of municipal officials were quite open about the beneficial function performed by SDCEA and other organizations like it. One municipal respondent put succinctly what came up in interviews with other officials as well, and the story he told illustrates another important function of civil society mobilization and protest: ‘You need the environmental movement, you know. The government can pass environmental regulations, but right now those are so weak. The big companies need to get “klapped”74 and the community organizations keep them on their toes’ (conversation with Eric Appelgren, IDP Ward Consultations, 2008/02/17). That the government at times also needs to be ‘klapped’ is a symptom of the heavy weight that businesses considerations seem to have when it comes to important municipal decisions.
The city has a track record of low penalties for infringements of air-quality regulations, combined with recorded fears among city management that being perceived as too ‘green’ might make the city economically uncompetitive (see Chapter 2 and 4). Durban’s economic development plan focuses on major investments of public capital in monumental construction (conference centres, sports stadiums, and associated real-estate development) to attract private investment, as well as a continued and aggressive plan to expand its industrial and shipping sectors (Interview, Jacquie Subban, Head Geographical Information and Policy Unit, 2008/04/03). This is not to say that the local government is not attentive to social and environmental problems75. But these issues exist in a context of competing interests.
Durban is by no means unique in trying to balance social, environmental, and economic goals
74 South African slang for ‘smacked’ or ‘brought into line’. 75 The municipality of eThekwini is justly proud of its achievements, which include building 16,000 affordable housing units every year, seriously pursuing a large-scale consultative planning process as part of the Integrated Development Plan to make sure local communities have a voice in determining how budgets are spent in their communities, and implementing an air quality management plan to regulate industrial emissions (more on this last follows). 244 that are in tension with each other (see Robinson 2006)76. As sustainability has established itself as an important variable in urban planning, many cities are simultaneously moving down a road of increasingly conservative and neoliberal planning practices in the hopes this will make them more attractive to national and international capital. This has led in some cases to a ‘race to the bottom’ in terms of taxation and environmental protection. Harvey (1989) and deSouza (2006) both speak of a generalized movement towards ‘entrepreneurial’ urban governance or ‘urban neoliberalism’ which sees power increasingly given over to private capital to shape land-use planning and municipal policy (see also Brenner 2003 on Standortpolitik). Civil-society groups and NGOs, therefore, are in a position to play an important role in coalescing concern and resistance so as to counterbalance the influence of business on local government and to question the legitimacy of economistic approaches to urban development.
7.3.3 Confl ict’s Positive Contributions (ii): the Collaborative Science of Confrontation The use of confrontational strategies on the part of urban environmental organizations serves multiple purposes. Street protests, for example, are a means of articulating local concerns with national and international activist networks; they create spaces for conversation among multiple related areas of concern, and attract the crucial attention of the media, which can then be used to put pressure on local governments and corporations. This is the most commonly perceived face of local activism. Often less recognized are the ways in which local environmental organizations employ scientific methods as a form of contestation and opposition. In the SDB, the frequent mismatch between people’s experiences of odours and illness, and recorded by air quality monitoring systems, pushed SDCEA to engage more actively in the production of scientific knowledge.
The ongoing experience of local residents with the effects of pollution has led participants in the workshops I attended to the conclusion that there was more going on than captured by official numbers from either government, or corporate air quality monitoring systems. In the late 1990s, a local elementary school particularly hard hit by the effects of pollution, the Settlers School, 76 These same conflicts also play out at other scales — around the problematic adoption of the international Kyoto protocol, for example, and concerns over its effects on national economies. The more immediate macroeconomic context which exacerbates this situation at the municipal level is the national government’s GEAR policy (growth, employment and redistribution) covered in Barnett and Scott (2007: 2613–14). 245 emerged as a key point for community mobilization. Teachers reported widespread health problems, and a later study (groundWork 2003) found that 52 percent of students suffered from asthma. This far exceeds the European average of 14–16 percent. The rudimentary air quality monitoring system in place could not account for this, or the multiple other health conditions suffered by the community in general. Residents and activists were aware that many harmful compounds were not monitored by state or industry, and that the records that did exist were difficult to access and often of irregular quality. This led SDCEA to take confrontation into the laboratory and to produce their own data.
Since 2000, SDCEA has been the leading player in a community air quality monitoring program that uses independent monitoring to support claims against industry. Affectionately known as the ‘bucket brigade’, the system is based on air samples taken using special sampling bags placed within modified plastic buckets and filled using a hand-pump (pictured in fig. 7.4). This system allows SDCEA members to take ‘grab samples’ for analysis at any publicly accessible location where a problem has been reported by residents. When the first sample was taken in 2000 it detected seven noxious chemicals, including alarmingly high levels of benzene, a carcinogen that at that point was not measured by any of the local monitoring systems or covered by national regulations (groundWork 2003, 28).
As well as providing data, this first sample showed that local communities could speak the language of science and challenge industries and governments on their own turf. It then used this knowledge to both mobilize community protests against industrial emissions, and contribute directly to monitoring them more effectively. Since the late 1990s, SDCEA had been on the steering committee of a collaborative program that brings together industry and local and national governments to address the need for better emissions monitoring in the basin (the South Durban Sulphur Dioxide Management System (SDMS)). The system they had put in place initially only dealt with Sulphur emissions, ozone and NOx. But the results from the first bucket sample allowed SDCEA to push for even more inclusive monitoring. Four months after the sample, a new monitoring station was opened at the Settlers School. The station was the first monitoring point in the basin to continuously monitor CO, TRS and PM10, in addition to SO2, NO2, NOx, and NO (site visit, 11 March 2008). 246
The results of the bucket sample attracted national attention, including a site visit from the national minister of environment Valli Moosa (Interview, VanWyk, 2008/03/28). In late 2000, Minister Moosa announced a special Air Quality Multi-Point Plan (MPP) which would replace the earlier air quality monitoring system by 2003. The MPP established twelve monitoring stations similar to the one at Settler's School. This important expansion of both local monitoring facilities and the chemicals they monitored led to a significant reductions of emissions within the basin.
For D’Sa, the path to the Multi-Point Plan was paved with pressure and conflict. But there is more at play here than placards and picket lines. The MPP is a good example of what happens when conflict and collaboration connect. Despite its sometimes unpleasant face, disagreement and confrontation can be forces that mobilize and produce new knowledge, and push the continued evolution of institutional participatory processes by identifying weaknesses and proposing remedies (see Aylett 2010). In this case, SDCEA's reliance on community-based science and active participation in established municipal processes (the early air quality management process), allowed it to transform the community's anger into an effective force for change. What remained to be seen, as I began my fieldwork in 2008, was whether SDCEA could employ similar tactics in its budding climate change campaign.
7.3.4 Localizing Climate Change in the SDB (i): from Air Quality to the Global Climate Climate Change and GHG emissions are something that the MPP does not address. But by 2008 SDCEA protests and publications had begun to make clear that, as much as the direct health impacts of refinery emissions, climate changes was becoming an important part of their fight against industrial pollution. Climate change had acquired importance as an issue linking together multiple organizations that worked on different aspects of the socio-environmental problems faced by their home communities. In its newsletter, the Alliance articulates the hope that this common ground might turn into something more substantial: “As never before, opportunity is knocking for activists. The solutions to global warming and chemical contamination are both 247 peeking over the horizon and they look very much alike. The timing is perfect for building a global coalition” (Montague 2008).
SDCEA’s chairperson Des D’Sa also saw a changing climate change as an important threat that increased the vulnerability of the residents of the SDB. Recalling recent flooding that left several families homeless, and inundated both local refineries causing 16 hours of continuous flaring (Christianson 2008), he emphasizes the volatile effects that climate change could have on his community:
In January we had a storm last year, a huge storm along the coast. We had another one this year. In both of those instances we were very lucky, the refineries flooded, we had a small fire at ENGEN, but can you imagine what would happen if you had a huge explosion at ENGEN or SAPREF, . . . shooop! Bhopal would look like a picnic. (interview, D’Sa 2008/03/17)
From the point of view of SDCEA’s campaigns, the effects of carbon emissions are another front in their fight against the global petrochemical industry. Displaying some of the fiery rhetoric that has earned the Alliance its reputation within the city, D’Sa explains:
Certainly it does [fit within our mandate] because Shell and BP and these guys are preaching how they invest in renewable [energy], and we are saying “This whole issue of fossil fuels, how long is it going to carry on?” Stop digging! Stop exploiting the earth and digging up the ground! (ibid.)
But moving beyond these declarations of guilt and aspirations to global coalition building would require work. Coupled with D'Sa's fiery rhetoric, SDCEA was at that point in the early stages of developing a full program around climate change that would grow to encompass the combination of awareness raising, community building, street protest, and political pressure that it had refined in its earlier campaigns in the SDB. Begun only shortly before I arrived in Durban, the initial phase of this program was managed by Varsa Naidu, a project officer who had been with SDCEA since 2006. She described climate change as another facet to the work that SDCEA's had been doing since its inception, but a powerful one that could help to further extend the Alliance's network and political impact: 248
[Climate Change] will become integral to SDCEA in the next few months. The issue of carbon emissions from the refineries for example is a way for us to approach the same issue – local emissions – from another angle. It also gives us better access to national media, and to collaboration with a whole other set of well established [international and South African] NGOs. First though, as an organization, we need to decide what our stand on these issues is. [Interview, Naidu 2008/11/03]
Naidu began SDCEA's climate program on familiar ground: using funds from OXFAM, she worked with school groups in the Basin to design a locally-relevant curriculum around climate change. She worked with graduating year local high-school students to create an educational program that explained the scientific basis and global impacts of climate change. Their work would also draw connections to the emissions generated by neighbouring industries, and the vulnerability of their home communities.
For Naidu, developing the curriculum went beyond educating students. It was an avenue for engaging local households and communities as children went home to their families and discussed what they had learned. Working with parents and children had been a mainstay for SDCEA since their campaign over high rates of asthma at the Settler's School (discussed above). In their new climate change work, they could mobilize relationships of trust and respect developed during that earlier process. This first stage of the climate change work was also a manifestation of SDCEA's skill at collaboratively transforming complex scientific phenomena into language that was understandable, relevant, and empowering to the local community.
When I asked Naidu about the type of engagement she envisioned coming out of SDCEA's climate work, she focused on creating the capacity for critical thinking that enabled people to “see the politics behind the issue” and to use protest to put pressure on politicians and corporations (ibid.). This goal was admirable, but lacked the tangibility of their earlier campaigns. SDCEA's success had come from their ability to channel this type of confrontational activism into concrete local procedures (EIAs and the creation of the MPP) that increased Durban's overall capacity to monitor and protect local air quality. In 2008 the one local procedure that could have enabled SDCEA to use its brand of collaborative confrontation to address climate change was the IDP process. Either inside or outside of formal consultation 249 processes, SDCEA could have engaged with the IDP to highlight the municipality's limited dedication to its own climate change and sustainable development commitments.
When asked about the IDP though, both D'Sa and Naidu expressed strong scepticism about involving themselves with state-led processes that they viewed as window dressing for decisions that had already been made by municipal officials (Interviews, D’Sa 2008/03/17, Naidu 2008/03/11). Other targets for protest, whether South Africa's national climate policy, or inaction at the international UN FCCC climate negotiations, were too distant to act as a focus for local mobilization. At the end of my first field season, it was unclear how SDCEA planned to address this issue and what the focus of their climate campaign would be.
On my return in 2009, SDCEA's climate campaign had moved successfully through the stages laid out by Naidu during our first interview. Naidu was no longer with SDCEA, but the workshops that she had run with local students had provided material for a educational booklet entitled “Climate Change for the People of South Durban” that was launched on February 18th 2009, at a community centre in the SDB. The event was well attended, attracting numerous local school groups and teachers. The report's primary author was Lisa Ramsay, then an intern with SDCEA and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography at Cambridge University.
The booklet outlined the basics of climate-change, its possible links to recent coastal storms, and the ways in which a more volatile climate could increase health problems and disrupt the livelihoods of local communities, farmers, and fishermen (groups which had all also been involved in the booklet’s creation). But when it came to the issue engagement, it was clear that SDCEA remained at a loss as to how to translate understanding into action. The book's concluding “What Can You Do?” section recycled cliched appeals to individual action: “walk or take transit - don't drive”, “buy local”, “plant indigeous trees”,“save energy”, “get engaged”. While this first stage of climate action had succeeded in making climate change intelligible and relevant, SDCEA had yet to meaningful articulate any type of local response. 250
7.3.5 Localizing Climate Change in the SDB (ii): from Understanding to Action Leaving Durban at the end of my second field season, the future course of SDCEA's climate program was uncertain. The organization had begun to build capacity within the community to engage with the issue, but lacked a concrete focus that would allow it to turn this engagement into something productive or transformative. But then two larger announcements gave SDCEA's programs new direction: First, as discussed in chapter 4, in November of 2009 ESKOM, the national electricity provider, applied to the country's national energy regulator (NERSA) for permission to raise electricity rates by 35% per year for three years to help fund the construction of additional coal-fired and nuclear power plants to address the country's energy crisis. Then in November of 2010 it was announced that Durban would be the host city for the 2011 round of UN FCCC Climate Change negotiations (COP17) that would decide the fate of the Kyoto protocol.
Taking advantage of both of these situations, SDCEA positioned itself as a leader of local consumer's opposition to the rate hikes, and as a central coordinator for the global civil-society presence that (at the time of writing) was being planned for the 2011 climate negotiations. On the one hand SDCEA could tie climate change to consumer's outrage at rate hikes while large industrial and mining clients continue to receive electricity at heavily discounted rates. On the other, with COP17 coming to Durban, SDCEA could use its extensive networking and community mobilization skills to full effect. Given that both of these announcements took place after the end of fieldwork for this dissertation, only general comments based on secondary sources are possible at this time. But there are signs of an interesting continued evolution in SDCEA's approach to climate change.
During late 2009 and early 2010, SDCEA organized a series of workshops to coordinate local protests against ESKOM rate hikes and planned construction of additional coal-fired power plants. These culminated in a picket of NERSA's local hearings which played heavily on the climate impacts of ESKOM's expansion. Opposition to the rate hikes was widespread all across South Africa, and in late February NERSA approved reduced rate hikes of approximately 25% per year for three years. Eskom's planned coal-fired power expansions continue unchanged (Creamer 2010). 251
More interesting are the preparations taking place for COP17. Working closely with groundWork (a national environmental NGO that has been active in the SDB) and the University of KwaZulu Natal's Centre for Civil-Society, SDCEA has become one of the primary local organizers for what is known as the Civil Society Committee for COP17 (C17). The C17 is made up of 17 local, national, and international NGOs that also include Earthlife Africa, Greenpeace, and the WWF. The C17's main goals are to increase mobilization and awareness prior to COP, and to provide parallel sites for engagement – outside the restricted venue of the COP itself – where NGOs can voice their views about the COP process. This will culminate in a “Global Day of Action” on December 3rd, organized by SDCEA, to attract media attention and present a prepared statement of their views to the COP negotiators.
The C17 was founded in late 2010 and it remains to be seen what impact they will have on the negotiations. Their work builds on growing civil-society presence at the COP negotiations that peaked in Copenhagen at the 2009 negotiations. Generally the role of NGOs at the climate negotiations has been to monitor and publicize the course of the negotiations, organize parallel events to highlight alternative interpretations of key issues, lobby delegates, and use peaceful public protest to draw attention to important developments and “name and shame” countries perceived to be negotiating in bad faith (Avaaz's “Fossil of the Day” award is one of the most well-known examples). SDCEA's involvement in this process shows the coming to fruition of its ambition to help build “a global coalition” to push for more radical and holistic responses to the climate challenge (Montague 2008).
On July 26 201177, in preparation for the COP, SDCEA published its second booklet on climate change “Feeling the Heat in Durban: People's Struggles and Climate Change” (SDCEA 2011). The twenty page booklet, again funded by Oxfam, was written by David Hallowes (a long time South African activist, member of groundWork, and technical adviser to SDCEA). The first portion of the booklet re-states and expands on the links between climate change and local community struggles and vulnerabilities discussed in their earlier climate change publication
77 As revisions to this chapter were being concluded. 252
(SDCEA 2009). This portion is based on testimonials gathered during community climate change workshops held in 2009 and 2011.
In the second half, in a section entitled “Where SDCEA stands”, Hallowes articulates a much more complex critique of South African climate policy and of the global climate regime. Adopting the central themes of the emerging international “Climate Justice” movement78, he argues that the failure of the global climate regime to reduce emissions can be traced to an underlying dedication to preserving capitalist economic growth. Following the Environmental Justice rallying cry “Change the System. Not the Climate”, he explains that:
“Changing the system is necessary because capitalism is not compatible with addressing climate change. ... [South Africa's] government cannot face up to what it sees coming because it remains wedded to the dominant interests of the minerals-energy complex. It remains locked in a view of the world in which economic growth constitutes the central organising principle of development. This is not because growth is needed to alleviate poverty but because it is needed to reproduce capital. This is the system that puts profit before people.” (SDCEA 2011, 18-19)
Speaking for SDCEA, he argues that little should be expected from a UN process that has become dominated by the economic interests of the largest polluters, used emissions trading schemes to offloaded Northern responsibility for emissions reduction onto Southern countries, and consistently failed to agree to targets (let alone enact policies) that are on the scale of the problem being faced. Rather, he advocates for the replacement of global capitalism with a system of radically democratic and localized development that focuses on equity, not growth, and puts engaged communities at the heart of a profound transition in economic, agricultural and energy systems.
The booklet ends with six core proposals that represent SDCEA's first articulation of a larger plan of action and vision of an alternative future:
78 The Climate Justice movement was founded at the 2007 UN FCCC climate negotiations in Bali through the collaboration of 18 local, national, and transnational environmental organizations. Many themselves coalitions of other environmental organizations. Its founding statement articulated a vision of climate change policy and action that engaged deeply with issues of social, ecological, and gender equity. It also called for the protection of indigenous rights, and massive financial transfers from wealthy Northern countries (historically responsible for the majority of recent antrhopogenic GHG emissions) to countries in the global South to fund their adaptation and mitigation programs. (CCS undated) 253
1) Development founded on economic, social, and environmental justice -- not narrowly defined economic growth 2) Localized development focused on supporting the capacity of communities to drive their own development 3) The transformation and democratization of the energy system leading to “people's energy sovereignty” and local democratic control of the energy system 4) The use of declining fossil fuel resources as inputs to provide the energy needed to build the new post-carbon energy system 5) The localization and democratization food production and consumption system 6) A renewed commitment to people “centred development” where “people are actively and consciously making the decisions that shape their collective future. ” (Summarized from SDCEA 2011, 20)
These are powerful ambitions that weave together elements of SDCEA's previous environmental justice campaigns with a new and deeper understanding of the way in which community action can form the basis for a low-carbon future based on economic localization, energy decentralization, and local food security. The proposals are a synthesis of elements also found in the Peak Oil and Transition Towns Movements, the Climate Justice Movement, Urban Political Ecology, and South Africa's own (now perhaps fading) post-Apartheid history of people centred government. SDCEA's past successes have stemmed from its ability to marry this kind of high- level critique and protest with tangible and transformative local action. What remains to be seen is how SDCEA will carry this still aspirational critique forward into concrete local actions.
7.4 Conclusions
SDCEA's role in the creation of the MPP in the South Durban basin is a strong example of the type of synergies that can occur between invited and invented forms of participation. The Alliances's fight to improve air quality and protect the health of residents in the basin was heated and confrontational. Through extensive outreach and citizen science, they mobilized community members to vocally and persistently protest industrial emissions and to take the municipality to task for its failure to act. What enabled it to transform life in the basin, however, was its ability to work within existing participatory forums (EIAs and the SDMS) and leverage the legitimacy it derived from protest to produce a profound shift in the regulation of local industries.
As this chapter has shown, SDCEA has not managed to apply a similar strategy in its climate 254 campaigns. In fact, both invited and invented forms of participation in the municipality have so far failed to effectively address climate change or the design of just and sustainable cities through popular participation in urban climate governance. Superficial green aspirations in the municipality's IDP are a prisoner to a public consultation process that lacks crucial elements needed to allow meaningful citizen participation. If communities are to help establishing more sustainable modes of urban development, they must be provided with a participatory context which builds community capacity to engage critically with local climate related policies. This requires effective facilitation (of the kind Durban provided to explain outcomes-based planning) to allow community members to better understand the trade-offs and impacts of different decisions about urban form and infrastructure.
At an even more basic level, invited climate governance forums also require sustainability metrics and indicators that are comparable to those used in areas like health and economic development. It is important to note that these types of metrics are also deeply relevant to addressing issues of social justice. Rates of resource consumption (and not simply access to resources) offer a fine-grained gauge of disparity within a city. As Satterthwaite (2008) argued (discussed in Chapter 1) cities reproduce internally the same dramatic inequalities in resources use that exist on the world stage. Research has shown these internal differences to be significant issues, as much in Northern cities like Toronto (where neighbourhood CO2e emissions vary by a factor of 10) as they are in a Southern city like Durban (Van de Weghe et al. 2007). Concrete measures of these inequalities will provide necessary information for communities as they plan past the initial stages of development towards a more equitable and sustainable future in the context of increasingly scarce resources.
In addition to these forms of capacity building, participatory processes must begin to influence decisions on municipal development policy directly, and be more closely linked to the way the budget is spent. As shown by the existing IDP process, one does not necessary follow from the other. But without a clear link to how decisions are taken and money is spent, the most extensive participatory processes can become little more than window dressing.
Beyond changes to the techniques and structure of participation, Durban's IDP process would 255 benefit from a shift away from its focus on “invited” consensus-driven consultation to a more active recognition of the contributions of civil-society mobilization within the city, even when (as discussed more generally in Chapter 6) this takes the form of conflict and confrontation (cf. Barnett and Scott 2007, Becher 2010, Berry et al. 1993). More active participation from NGOs and CBOs in the IDP would bring new energy to the process, and could also help further develop planning capacity in the community. While not a silver bullet, greater civil society involvement would help address both the uneven success of ward committees across the city and the clear gaps in information and action on environmental issues noted above.
This point is driven home by the successful campaign waged by SDCEA to improve air quality and the monitoring of industrial emissions in the South Durban Basin. Why then had it not managed, at the time of writing, to orchestrate a similarly productive engagement in the local governance of climate change? Clearly, there are profound differences between an immediate local hazard such as air pollution and the more generalized and distant threat represented by climate change. It could be argued that these more “wicked” characteristics are at the root of SDCEA's struggles to engage effectively with climate change (cf. Horst & Webber 1973, Levin et al. 2007, Lazarus 2009) . But this would not be entirely accurate. The mixture of petrochemical refineries and dense residential settlement in a flood prone coastal area has in fact transformed climate change into a clear and present danger for the population. Even a small increase in the frequency or severity of flooding could have disastrous impacts. Discussions of these risks have been a central element in SDCEA's work to mobilize the local community around climate issues.
The problem is also not that productive community-based responses to climate change are impossible. As we will see in chapter 8, communities can mobilize extensive resources to bolster municipal mitigation efforts. In SDCEA's case the clear vulnerability of the population could also lead them to engage directly in adaptation planning. But realizing the possibility for synergies between community-led and municipally-managed forms of climate governance has been blocked by two significant hurdles.
First, there was a lack of any truly empowered forum for participatory planning within the 256 municipality. Without a venue providing SDCEA (or any other civil-society group) with some kind of tangible purchase on climate planning in the city, they have no official channels to which they can contribute. The IDP could play that role, but will not until it truly allows citizens and NGOs to influence municipal decisions.
The second hurdle was the challenge that SDCEA had in shifting from their traditional focus on regulation to issues of urban design and management. Regulation is a necessary component of responses to climate change. SDCEA's protests and internationally networked activism, both inside and outside of the UN FCCC process, are part of an important effort to push for an effective regulatory response (something which now seems increasingly unlikely). To generate concrete changes within their city, however, SDCEA would also need to take a role in advocating (or directly implementing) adaptive or mitigative strategies. These could mean anything from pressuring for the creation of better disaster and flood water management in the Basin, to mobilizing support for a shift towards bringing green collar jobs into the industrial manufacturing sector of the Basin. If the organization moved in this direction, it could become a “critical” civil-society partner for the efforts of the EMD's fledgling Climate Branch, and the new Energy Office – at once a key and a demanding ally.
This chapter has shown that the process of creating a locally-relevant understanding of climate change that can effectively mobilize action is as challenging for civil-society groups as it is for municipalities. SDCEA understood from early on the links between climate change, GHG emissions, and their earlier campaigns against global petrochemical companies in the SDB. They also effectively used their established methods of community engagement to build an understanding within the community of climate change's local relevance. But identifying an entry point for concrete action that went beyond protest has been challenging. With their most recent publications and engagement with the COP17 process, they have begun to articulate an anti-capitalist alternative to the global climate regime. It is based on a multi-faceted localization of economic, energy and food systems. With this they have joined – and are now helping to build – a broader global coalition of similar initiatives, which we will touch on again in our case study of Portland in Chapter 8. But SDCEA had yet to take the crucial step of becoming a creator as well as a critic, and beginning to build concrete examples of the solutions for which it advocated. 257
The most successful responses to climate change will come from places that are able to recognize and make the most of the strengths that grow from conflict. This is not because conflict represents an ideal state of deliberative participation such as those developed by Habermas (1987), Sabel et al. (1999) and many others, but because it is an important element in the actual state of participation in most parts of the world. Recalling the potential middle ground between Foucault and Habermas, Heller (2001) argues that rather than focus strictly on either confrontational grassroots mobilization, or on more centralized and consensus-driven systems of participation (as if they were in opposition to each other), we instead need to explore and promote an intermixing of the two.
In that respect, the multiple possible futures contained in the IPCC’s climate scenarios (discussed in Chapter 1) present a social challenge that its work on governance and participation (discussed in Chapter 6) has yet to fully address. As the scenarios illustrate, shifting from our present course to one that is both more sustainable and more equitable will require significant social, economic and political innovation. What approach to participatory governance, in particular participatory urban governance, can help contribute to this? Acknowledging the dynamic relationship between conflict and collaboration is a beginning. But what other aspects of participatory urban governance need recognition if we are to analyse and facilitate attempts by urban populations to collectively, effectively and rapidly respond to the challenges of a changing climate?
These are important questions that I will continue to explore in the next chapter, which focuses on two comparable examples of public participation in Portland. There again we will see some of the limitations of invited state-led processes of consultation. Despite these limitations, experiences in Portland show that when civil-society groups engage as full partners in official climate planning processes they can help municipalities make the transition to from marginal to transformative local climate policies. But as with Durban, civil-society's most important contributions come when they go beyond official “invited” participatory forums and take matters into their own hands. Although non-confrontational in nature, the example of direct action that we will look at in Portland has also made an important contribution to the city's response to climate change. Interestingly, there as here, the group at the heart of this action was one largely excluded from the municipality's official participatory processes. 258
Chapter 8: Portland – Managed Participation and Autonomous Action
8.1 Introduction
Portland has achieved a near mythical status in discussions of public participation and civic engagement in municipal affairs. By various metrics, the city has bucked national trends that show an overall decline in civic engagement in the United States, and many of the city's most vaunted planning and environmental successes have been driven by grass-roots activism and community mobilization. In 2003, Robert Putnam, Harvard Professor of Public Policy, and a popular expert on American civic engagement, described the city as shaped by a “positive epidemic of civic engagement” (Putnam et al. 2003, 241). Beginning at or below national levels of public engagement in the 1970s, by the 1990s Portland was three to four times more engaged in civic life than comparably sized cities.79 Updating and critiquing Putnam's work, local political scientist and community activist Stephen Reed Johnson estimates that there are currently 3000 civic organizations in Portland, 350 of which focused on environmental issues 80 (Johnson 2008, 11, 163). These range from small “friends of” groups dedicated to local waterways or green spaces up to large organizations mobilizing hundreds of people and commanding considerable budgets. Forms of participation in Portland are spread across a similarly wide spectrum. They run from small-scale activities such as community-run “de-paving81” programs up to large municipally-managed campaigns aimed at steering the city's development over the next 30 years.
79 Putnam bases his calculation on survey data drawn from the Roper Social and Political Trends archive, 1973- 1994. Indicators include, for example rates attendance at public meetings or membership in good governance organizations over that time period. For both of these Portland begins at slightly below national averages for 1973. By the 1990s the figure for Portland had risen to 30-35% of adults reporting that they had attended at least on public meeting on town or school affairs, while it had been halved to 11% for the rest of the country. Membership in good-government organizations follows a similar trend, with membership rates nearly tripling in Portland, while they were halved nationally (Putnam et al. 2003, 242). 80 This is up from up from 30 in the early 1970s. 81 “Depaving” is a moniker coined by local organization Depave.org, which collaborates with community groups to remouved paved surfaces and replace them with green space and community gardens. 259
In his analysis of Portland's exceptionalism82, Puntam describes a call and response system of positive feedback or “civic dialectic” that exists between civil society groups and the municipality: “More grass-roots activism has (often through conflict) led to more responsive public institutions, and more responsive institutions have in turn evoked more activism” (Putnam et al. 2003, 262). The focus of Putnam's research however was on larger trends in civic engagement in American society. In this chapter I will argue for something much more specific: the potential for a “green civic dialectic” able to drive urban climate policies beyond what can be achieved by municipalities or communities acting in isolation.
Over the course of western philosophy “dialect” has been heavily loaded with multiple competing definitions. For clarity's sake, I should specify here that I am not employing the term in the Marxist sense. Putnam's vision is based on a very loose application of Hegel's progression from thesis and antithesis to synthesis. Following him, I am using “green civic dialectic” to describe a situation where environmental initiatives (led either by the municipality or community groups) create a tension in their relationship to each other. This tension between municipal and community actors then pushes each to go beyond the limits of their initial positions and expands the scope and scale of policies and projects. These policies and projects, in turn, becomes the starting point for another iteration of the cycle. As I will show in this chapter, the relationship between the municipality and communities ranges from highly confrontational to largely collaborative. But even in the most collaborative examples, their continues to be a tension between the positions of municipal and civic actors which drives a continuous dialectical process of transformation and innovation.
This is similar but not identical to what I have discussed in Chapter 6 in terms of the synergies that exist between invited and invented forms of participation (cf. Berry et al. 1993, Becher 2010, Heller 2001, de Souza 2006). The main difference is that synergies can be discrete and occasional, as in the case of how SDCEA's combined combination of invited and invented participation led to the creation of the MPP (see Chapter 7). In contrast, the existence of a green civic dialectic implies a larger pattern of multiple synergies that iteratively link the municipality 82 Something also discussed in Berry et al. 1993. 260 and civil-society in an ongoing process of producing environmental policies and programs.
The case studies that I will treat in this chapter provide a view of a situation where increasingly integrated, ambitious, and responsive municipal climate programs engender increasingly innovative, ambitious, and engaged community based inputs and programs. These in turn put pressure on the municipality to increase the scope and scale of the next iteration of its climate policies.
This rosy picture masks an important caveat to the recent history of participation in Portland. At roughly the same time that the data sets used Putnam ended (1993), the city's flagship participatory processes – the Neighbourhood Associations (NA) – entered into a period of decline due to over management and capture by local property owners (to the exclusion of more radical voices and the city's growing minority communities). Participation around key environmental and planning issues was a key contributor to the rise of Portland's civic infrastructure, and processes focused on these themes have not escaped this decline. But, interestingly, environmental issues are also the sector where fresh innovation to renew the city's participatory processes is most evident, both inside and outside of the NA system.
In this chapter I will begin with a short history of public participation in Portland and a description of the current context of civic organization and participatory processes within the city. While this history pre-dates the municipality's climate change policies, discussing it allows me to trace how shifts in the interpretation of the nature of both “the city” and “environmentalism” have set the stage for community engagement with climate change. This will provide the context for two case studies of different forms of participation linked to the city's most recent Climate Change Action Plan (CAP): city-led “invited” forums and “invented” programs designed and implemented by communities.
The CAP, released in 2010, also marked Portland's transition from narrow “Local Scientific” policy responses to climate change to a much more inclusive and ambitious “Local Integrated” 261 approach. This extended the scale and scope of its commitments further than all but a small number of other cities worldwide. Prior to its release in 2010, this more holistic approach to climate policy was reinforced by input received during a formal public consultation process led by the city. In the first case study covered in this chapter, I will look specifically at how input coordinated by one group (Transition PDX, TPDX) allowed the city to deepen its engagement with the Scope 3 emissions related to Food & Agriculture, an area that the city had included in its climate plans for the very first time.
Although interesting, the first example shows how often participation is equated with consultation in many municipally-led “invited” participatory forums. To explore what is possible when we go beyond those limits, our second case study will focus on work done by a small groups of volunteers and NGO staff to establish Solarize Portland. Solarize has transformed the local market for residential solar energy systems and made significant contributions to the amount of renewable energy generated within the city. Created independently of the CAP, Solarize is all the same one of the crowning achievements of the city's attempts to transform their local energy supply. More generally, Solarize stands as an example of the capacity of local communities to go beyond consultation and play leading roles in the design and implementation of climate-relevant programs. Although far less confrontational in their methods than SDCEA, this program has also significantly expanded the municipality's capacity to set and achieve environmental and climate-change-related targets. In Portland, as in certain examples from Durban, the interaction between invented grassroots action and invited municipally-led participatory structures allows both groups to accomplish far more than they could alone. However, as I will also argue, experiences in Portland also call for a reassessment of the easy associations that the critical literature on public participation has established between invited and invented forums, and state and civil-society actors (respectively).
262 8.2 History of Participatory Processes in Portland
Portland made its transition from “a strikingly dull and derivative city, only a restaurant or two above a logging town” (Johnson 2004, 103) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A mixture of counter-culture energy, federal and state programs and legislation, and progressive municipal leadership unseated the small white male elite that dominated Portland's politics (Abbott 1983). Mobilized communities and civil-society groups successfully resisted a top-down approach to urban planning that persisted in the city until the early 1970s. Rallying around urban renewal issues and freeway expansions, community groups (joined by a new generation of local politicians) led the early campaigns that established Portland as a leading American city in terms of both urban planning and community engagement with the municipal decision making processes.
The first milestone in this process came in 1968 when a board of elected citizens was formed in the city's poor northern Albina neighbourhood to directly manage federal funds that were coming into the community as part of the Federal Government's Model Cities Program aimed at fighting urban decay (Johnson 2004). The next landmark happened one year later, in 1969, when residents of South East Portland banded together to oppose the six-mile long, eight-lane Mount Hood freeway that was slated to bisect the area. The project, which was to be the lynchpin for a grid of freeways intended to interlink the Portland Metro Area (illustrated in green on Map 1, existing highways in red, from Young 2005), would have displaced 1,750 homes in an area where 68 percent of the families had annual incomes of less than $10,000. Coalescing under the banner of Southeast Uplift, a neighbourhood organization founded the preceding year, community opposition eventually stopped construction of the freeway when a U.S. District court ruled in favour of the citizens. Blocking the freeway was significant in and of itself, but neighbourhood activist also secured the right to use the $USD 500 million in federal funding originally slated for the freeway to fund significant expansions of the public transit system within the Metro area (Young 2005). This has earned the episode legendary status in local planning lore, and it came up repeatedly in interviews with local officials and NGO representatives. This double victory over both a specific freeway, and over a transportation 263 planning logic that prioritized the private automobile is a concrete example of Foucault's argument that resistance needs to target not only concrete injustices but also the logic that underpins them (see Chapter 6).
The battle over the Mount Hood freeway also had an important impact on Portland politics. Neil Goldschmidt, then a young legal aid lawyer running for city council, was heavily involved with the fight. He used it as the focal point for a political campaign that pitted a Jane-Jacobs-inspired vision of walkable communities and a vibrant downtown against a Robert-Moses-like promotion of freeways and suburbs. Voters responded to his call. Elected to city council in 1970, Goldschmidt became mayor in 197283.
8.2.1 Institution Building and Decline: the Arc of the Neighbourhood Association System The Model City Program in Albina and anti-freeway activism in the city's South East were the two most prominent examples of a rise of civic engagement that characterized Portland in the late 1960s. Incorporating this civic energy into his plans to revitalize Portland's downtown and surrounding neighbourhoods, Goldschmidt created the city's Office of Neighbourhood Associations (ONA, today the Office of Neighbourhood Involvement or ONI). Created in 1974, the ONA is billed as a shining example of the synergy between community activism and municipal institution building highlighted by scholars of public participation like Abbott (2008), Berry et al. (1993), Cohen (1996), Fagotto & Fung (2006), Heller (2001), Melo & Baiocchi (2006), Putnam (2003), Johnson (2004), and de Souza (2006) (see Chapter 6).
The Office provides funding to local District Coalitions (DCs) that serve different areas of the city. The DCs are independent non-profits bound by a contract with the municipality to support the work of the multiple Neighbourhood Associations (NAs) active within their geographical area (there are currently a total of 95 NAs and seven DCs; 84 see Map 2). While the municipality
83 The postivie legacy that Goldschmidt left landuse, transportation, and civic engagement in Portland was heavily tarnished in 2004 when it was revealed that he had repeatedly abused a high school aged babysitter over three years during his term as mayor. 84 This is a slight simplification. Two of the seven DCs are in fact now municipally run District Offices, following political problems and infighting that left the former DCs unable to function. (See Johnson 2004) 264 provides funding to the DCs, the DCs oversee how the money is spent. This independence allows NAs to identify and invest in community projects ranging from printing newsletters to organizing neighbourhood fairs and public safety and crime prevention efforts. NAs also participate in transportation planning processes, and have the power to review land-use plans and liquor licenses (Portland 2009). Providing support to the neighbourhoods across the entire city, the structure was also an attempt to level the playing field between poor and wealthy communities when it came to their ability to defend their interests during municipal planning processes.
Created shortly after Arnstein's 1969 work on public participation, the NA system exemplifies many of the traits of community empowerment, capacity building, self-reliance, and budgetary control that were being discussed both in development circles and in American work on community-based urban revitalization during this period (see Chapter 6; Arnstein 1969, Dahl 1961, Piven 1965, Fagence 1977, Marris & Martin 1982). The system rapidly expanded, and by the late 1970s there were 75 neighbourhood associations, and what Johnson calls “a small army of activists” armed with new found legitimacy and authority (2004, 110). Through the NA system, as well as citizens committees convened to advise the city on specific policies, the municipality established an open and responsive relationship with community groups.
Exemplifying this rapprochement between community activists and the municipality, a number of community organizers went on to become prominent politicians, including mayors Bud Clark (1985-1992) and Vera Katz (1993-2005), and a variety of commissioners and advocate bureaucrats. It is a running joke in the city that during her activist days, the Portland Police placed Katz on their watch list of known “subversives”(Johnson 2004).
8.2.2 Early Successes, Decline, and Marginalization : 1970s - 1990s Between the 1970s and the 1980s, community activists and NAs led a variety of major initiatives that helped rejuvenate both the city's neighbourhoods and their surrounding ecosystems. Important initiatives included the replacement in 1973 of another six-lane expressway along the shores of the Willamette River with a linear park; the 1970s plan to revitalize the city's 265 downtown; the creation of the city's recycling programs; the resettlement of inner-city neighbourhoods; and the city's sustainable agriculture movement. All of these were led or supported by civil-society groups (Abbott 1983, Mayer and Provo 2004 , Johnson 2004, Johnson 2008, interview Johnson 2008/10/21).
By the early 1990s, however, the NA system had entered a period of decline. As with Durban's IDP consultation process, as the system matured it became increasingly bureaucratized and rule- bound. The contractual relationships between NAs and the ONA that governed spending and project delivery became more and more restrictive. Rather than empowering community based action, the directors of ONA increasingly pushed to standardize and routinise decision making processes, and enrol the NAs in supporting the service provision functions of the municipal government. By the early 1990s, a series of contract disputes and lawsuits broke out between NAs and the municipality (Witt 2004). At the same time membership in NAs declined and became dominated by homeowners to the exclusion of both renters, old-guard activists, as well as Portland's rapidly expanding immigrant populations. The mandate of the ONA (re-baptized the Office of Neighbourhood Involvement, ONI) had also shifted, and it opened itself up to local business associations. This did little to restore trust with community groups or rejuvenate the NA system.
All of this reflects many of the critiques made in the critical literature on public participation (see Chapter 6; Mansbridge 1983, Saunders 1997, Fung & Wright 2001). As these scholars argued, an overly narrow focus on institutional design and bureaucratic efficiency can lead to shallow participatory processes aimed and forwarding the interests of the local state, and not empowering communities. State structures, as Foucault (1979) argued, always in some way reflect the state's drive to increase its power and competitiveness. While in the early 1970s there was clear political power (as well as seeming sincere commitment) in partnering and nurturing community activism, by the 1990s another agenda focused on service delivery and entrepreneurial urban development had gained ascendency. State structures shifted accordingly, efficiency replaced empowerment, and business groups were invited welcomed alongside community groups. 266
This reflects the same turn towards vaguely conceived systems of governance discussed by the IPCC which loosely combine collaboration between state, civil society, and business actors, without any clear conceptualization of the very different roles played by each. In particular, it undercut any legitimacy that ONA and the NA system had as a check on the influence of business on local government (one of the key roles of civil-society actors identified in the literature, see De Souza (2006) and Ballard (2007)). In addition, these exercises in institution- building did nothing to prevent the capture of the NA system by local elites, or to help address power imbalances between long time homeowners and more recent arrivals in the city. This ability of managerial approaches to participation to exacerbate and entrench existing inequalities is another of the main criticisms voiced by scholars like Mansbridge (1983), Saunders (1997), Fung & Wright (2001).
Faced with this situation, city bureaus began distancing themselves from the NA system. When they did engage with NAs, there was a perception that it was simply rubberstamping decisions (Witt 2004). More and more bureaus instead opted to pay professional facilitators to manage in- house consultation processes as an alternative to engaging with NAs. During interviews with municipal officials, answers to questions about community participation only mentioned involvement with NAs after a long list of other civil-society organizations and bureau-led processes.
8.2.3 Civic Environmentalism: Expanding Engagement Beyond Beyond NAs The NA system is currently undergoing a period of reorganization and “soul searching,” as one scholar put it (Witt 2004, 95). As we will see in the case study below, NAs have experienced a new-found success as implementers of the Solarize Portland program that has spread rapidly throughout the city. I will explain this program further below. This revival of the NA system seems to be a belated manifestation of a more general explosion of a broader civil-society engagement with urban sustainability and environmental issues that began outside of the NA system just as it entered into period of decline. 267
The period from the 1980s to the early 2000s saw the number of urban environmental groups in Portland go from roughly 30 to 350. This continues to be visible in Portland today: during my field seasons in 2008 and 2010, the city brimmed with community-led “green” events and organizations all of which seem to welcome new participants with open arms. In an analysis of this rapid growth, Johnson (2004) isolates two important conceptual shifts within local environmental thinking and organization.
First, beginning in the mid-1980s, the traditional environmental movement began to shift their attention from the preservation of external “wilderness” to look at environmental issues within the city instead. Organizing around urban watersheds, small activist coalitions sprang up motivated by the then new idea that nature and the environment were urban issues, and not relevant only to some distant or pristine wilderness. This idea that there is “Nature in the City” was promoted by Mike Houck, a key local activist who heads up the Portland chapter of the Audubon society (Interview, Houck 2010/06/29). This idea proved to be a powerful organizing tool: in 2003 nearly one quarter (87 of 350) of Portland environmental groups focussed on urban rivers, streams, wetlands, and the fauna that lived in them (Johnson 2004, 55). Unseating a socio- natural binary that has been the subject of much scholarly critique (Cronon 1996, Braun & Castree 1998, Luke T.W. 1997, Gandy 2005), residents have begun to see the city as a natural space and an integral part of its surrounding ecosystems.
The second conceptual shift turned around the concept of “sustainability.” The history of civic environmentalism in the Portland area showed a few examples of groups that as early as the late 60s and 70s sought to engage with social and environmental issues in a holistic manner. Groups like Portland SUN and RAIN could anachronistically be said to have focused on a broad vision of “sustainability.” They were the exception, though. As Johnson summarizes:
Saving wilderness 'out there' and not in the city was the main course. The relationship between energy production, green infrastructure in urban areas, organic farming, and healthy bodies was only acted upon by a small set of activists. (Interview, Johnson 2008/10/21)
268
Like the concept of watersheds, the language around sustainability and sustainable development that emerged during the 1990s proved to be a powerful tool for re-organizing and re-energizing civic environmental groups in the city. By bringing together what had previously been seen as discretely bounded issues, “sustainability” catalysed the creation of a new generation of organizations. These may be relatively small community-based groups like the Tryon Life Community Farm, a residential, agricultural, and green building collective operating within the city, run by a small group of families who live communally (Interview' Brenna Bell Tryon Life co-founder 2008/11/05). But they also include power players like EcoTrust, which has a large staff, millions of dollars in project funding, and runs multiple projects ranging from book publishing to co-founding two environmentally minded financial institutions.
Johnson's analysis also shows that partnership building is a distinguishing characteristic of these types of multiple-issue sustainability groups. Looking at 24 of Portland's leading sustainability groups, he found that they were working in partnership with a total of 885 other organizations internationally, and were partnered with 30% of the environmental and sustainability groups in the Portland area. As with OSD's role within the municipal bureaucracy, and SDCEA's role as a convenor of multiple community groups in Durban, networking and bridge-building has emerged as a key tactic among Portland's civic environmental groups. With this background and context established, I am now going to turn to my first case study, the invited participatory processes linked to the 2010 Climate Action Plan (2010).
8.3 Case Study 1 – The 2009 Climate Action Plan
During the period of my fieldwork, the public consultations that informed the creation of the 2009 Climate Action Plan (CAP) were one of a plethora of municipally led consultative and participatory process linked in some way to climate change relevant policies.85 During my first
85 The largest among these were a city-wide community visioning process known as VisionPDX; and extensive citizen engagement around “The Portland Plan”, an initiative that will provide a 25 year vision for the city's development and steer the expert driven process of revising the municipality's comprehensive land-use plan. Beyond these processes, individual departments, policies, and projects also have their own participatory components. The (then) Office of Sustainable Development, for example, ran two rounds of professionally facilitated public consultation as part of a failed attempt to draft a new green building policy. A look at staffing 269
(2008) field season, the creation of the city's third CAP86 was in the final stages of the initial draft process. The final document was released just shortly before my return in 2010. This allowed me to interview municipal officials and civil-society actors at points when the process was either ongoing, or still fresh in their memories. But there are other reasons, beyond good timing, that make the 2009 CAP an interesting research focus.
The CAP both raised the bar and increased the scope of Portland's planned responses to climate change. This in part took the shape of an expected, but ambitious, continuation of the city's long established focus on energy and energy efficiency (see Chapter 2). In the 2009 plan the city committed itself to:
• reducing emissions by 40% by 2030 and 80% by 2050,
• reducing emissions from existing buildings by 25% and achieving net zero buildings in all new construction by 2030, and
• generating 10% of the total energy used within Multnomah County from local renewable energy by 2030, starting with the installation of 10MW of local renewable energy by 2012.
For comparison, the preceding 2001 “Local Action Plan on Global Warming” had an overall target of reducing emissions by 10% below 1990 levels by 2010, much more limited goals around building efficiency, and targets for the purchase of renewable energy but not its generation within the city (Portland 2001).In a similar fashion, the 2009 CAP scaled up the targets proposed by earlier CAPs in sectors like transportation and recycling.
and budget figures is a useful metric of the scope of participatory process within Portland's municipal departments: In 1960, municipal records indicate only one employee engaged with citizen participation. In 2002 the ONI had a total budget of $8 million dollars, of which $1.2 million went directly to facilitating citizen engagement in public policy issues. In addition, due to the shift (discussed above) of municipal departments away from NAs and towards in-house or consultant-managed participatory processes, a 2003 internal report identified 122 bureau staff in “public involvement positions” accounting for $8million in municipal spending (Johnson 2008, 209). 86 Here I am counting the city's 1993 “Carbon Reduction Strategy”, the 2001 “Local Action Plan on global Warming”, and the 2010 “Climate Change Action Plan”. 270
But what sets the new plan apart from previous initiatives is its attention to issues outside these commonplace staples of urban environmental policy. Covering eight core themes87, the CAP established pioneering emissions reduction goals related to the consumption of food and consumer goods. This marked the first time the city that had engaged with the Scope 3 emissions associated with the production and distribution of goods within the city ( what the CAP refers to as life cycle emissions88).
The most visible impact of this engagement with Scope 3 emissions on the CAP is the inclusion of the section on Food and Agriculture. Food and agriculture can embody both scope 1, scope 2 and scope 3 emissions, depending on where they are produced. Food that comes from outside the city is a significant source of urban scope 3 emissions. To address this, the plan aimed to achieve 10% of the city's overall reduction target through encouraging local agriculture and shifting resident's food choices (see fig. 8.1). Although the municipality is only now generating the data necessary to estimate the total carbon footprint of its food supply, general statistics show the importance of action in this sector. The provision of food in 2006, for example, accounted for 13% of U.S. emissions (EPA 2006, from Portland 2009, 22).89
Even before the publication of the 2009 CAP, Portland's innovative programs and success at keeping emissions below 1990 levels (see Chapter 2) had already won it recognition as one of the greenest cities in the world. Despite this, the new plan opens with the sobering point: “perhaps the most important lesson learned from local climate protection work to date is the frank recognition that our good work to date is not nearly enough.” The ambitious targets and increased scope of its policies seek to align the municipality's efforts with the true scale of the
87 The 8 sectors covered by the 2010 plan in full are: Buildings and Energy; Urban Form and Mobility; Consumption and Solid Waste, Urban Forestry and Natural Systems, Food and Agriculture, Community Engagement, Climate Change Preparation, and Local Government Operations. 88 Complimenting the measurement of emissions produced directly within the municipality, the CAP explains that “the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) is developing a complementary method, the “systems method,” to consolidate carbon emissions from the full life cycle of a product, including manufacturing, distribution and disposal. Whereas the sector method allocates emissions based on the production of goods — the supply side of the economy — the systems method seeks to attribute emissions to the consumption of goods — the demand side of the economy. ” (CAP 2010, 21) 89 Note explaining the different types of emissions associated with food, production, transportation, and waste. 271 challenge. With its attention to Food and Agriculture, Portland became one of a very small number of cities to engage with some portion of their Scope 3 emissions. In addition, while the two preceding CAPs had adopted a narrow “Local Scientific” framing of Climate Change, each of the 2030 objectives is explicitly linked to other goals in the area’s health, economic development, equity, affordability, quality of life and resilience to future changes. As a whole, the plan is a solid example of the type of thinking that emerges from a “Local Integrated” approach to urban climate policy. By focusing on the city as a site where both food and energy can be created, not just consumed, the city is also engaging in a limited way with discussions of economic localization that are woven into the critiques voiced by urban political ecologists.
8.3.1 Public Input to the CAP from the Municipality's Perspective The Office of Sustainable Development set up a series of different participatory avenues for community members to give input on the CAP. Between April and early July of 2009, citizens could participate in a variety of ways. Over 400 people attended eight “Town Hall” style meetings that were held in schools and community centres across the city; 118 people responded to an on-line survey; 133 filled out printed comment cards; and BPS received 58 e-mails or letters. Some citizens participated in multiple ways and, in the end the city reported a total of 604 respondents (BPS 2009).
As might be expected, the rate of participation was low (604 respondents out of a total population of 582,130) but feedback overwhelmingly supported the municipality's plans to increase the scope and scale of their climate plans. Eighty percent of survey respondents felt that the city's CAP was either appropriate or not ambitious enough to “address climate change sufficiently” (Portland 2009, 25). While this first level of feedback did little other than confer a statistical aura of popular support to the CAP, more detailed feedback resulted in some substantial changes to the text of the CAP. I will cover one such example below.
In interview, Mike Armstrong (who headed up climate change planning and the CAP process at 272
OSD and BPS for the past 11 years) gave a very positive overview of engagement by citizens and civil-society groups. He described a situation where in the general course of business citizens and NGOs played an important – if slightly chaotic and disorganized – role in making climate change policy a priority for the municipality, identifying opportunities, and championing specific solutions even outside of specific consultation periods such as the one discussed above (Interview, Armstrong 2008/11/06). The relationship between BPS and these organizations paralleled the state of “creative chaos” to which Armstrong referred (see Chapter 5) when discussing the state of sustainability and climate-related programs across municipal departments. There as here, the challenge was balancing creative freedom with the coordination necessary to make effective communication and action possible.
As we have seen, while the NAs were intended to play a coordinating role in representing communities' needs and views to municipal agencies, bureaus increasingly began to create other avenues of participation outside the NA system. The CAP's public consultation process mirrored this more general turn away from the NA system. Although mentioned as part of the groups who had helped facilitate public input into the CAP, Armstrong admits that in fact with a few exceptions, the NAs played a small role:
“Neighborhood associations – a few have been interested in and directly involved, asking us to come present the plan in their neighborhood. Most of them have not. .... So we haven't had as much engagement there as we probably could” (Interview, Armstrong 2010/06/11).
He explained that while neighbourhood associations have historically played an important role in mobilizing communities around redevelopment and transportation issues, the issues they currently focus on tend to be more local and specific than what is at stake in the CAP.
Ultimately, the coordination of a large number of important local environmental organizations and other community groups fell to Transitions PDX (TPDX). TPDX embodies the two major shifts that took place in Portland's civic landscape since the 1980s: it is one of the new urban environmental groups that mushroomed in the last two decades (from 30 to 350); and it exemplifies the transformation of the environmental sector from one dominated by single issue 273 or conservation-driven groups to a holistic and interconnected approach to socio-environmental well-being made under the banner of “sustainability.”
In what follows I am first going to examine TPDX's participation in the CAP review processes. Specifically, I will focus on how their input is reflected in the plan's approach to food policy. This case study speaks to the ability of community groups to support the municipality as it extends into uncharted territory. It also looks at how participatory planning processes can move municipalities away from linear top-down approaches to policy making towards arrangements where policy (and the knowledge necessary to support it) is co-produced as the emergent result of interactions between municipal and civil-society actors.
The story of TPDX and the 2010 CAP provides a concrete example of the more general argument made in Chapter 6 that civil-society groups can expand the scope of official processes, while themselves also benefiting from the stability and structure that these processes provide (see Berry et al. 1993, Becher 2010, de Souza 2006, McAdam et al., 2001, Hickey and Mohan 2004, Mische 2008). This story provides a glimpse of one episode in Portland's green civic dialect, within which community mobilization has challenged the city to create more integrated, ambitious, and responsive climate programs which in turn have supported further civic engagement. But there are also clear limits to the impact that this type of invited consultative participation can have. Following our discussion of TPDX, we will move on to the potential represented by community-designed and implemented projects to directly contribute to meeting the city's climate objectives.
8.3.2 TPDX & Portland’s Climate Action Plan: a Companion in Uncharted Waters TPDX is one local branch of a now international Transition movement focused on a holistic approach to sustainable human settlements. The movement is based on a combination of grassroots local engagements, and a broader vision of how coordinated local actions can address the larger linked global crisis of climate change, peak oil, and the economic destabilization (the so called “triple crisis”). In its methods and concerns, the Transitions movement is a close parallel to the urban political ecological approach to urban sustainability. It shares both the 274 latter's devotion to deep participatory processes and its larger concern with the need to re- localize away from the growth based global economy and its environmental impacts.
Its methods of engagement are based on the underlying argument that the best way to resist the logics of global capitalism, rather than direct protest or confrontation, is to provide an attractive alternative ideology mobilised within multiple participatory venues. This combination of vision and action allows participants to directly reshape social and economic relations at the local scale. This focus on resisting the underlying logics of the existing system provides an interesting application of Foucault's work (1979, 1984, 1991, Chomsky and Foucault 1974) -- itself is more focused on conflict -- in a setting focused on creativity rather than protest as a form of resistance.
TPDX was founded in 2008 by three core members of a group called Portland Peak Oil, and other participants of a Peak Oil Taskforce in the municipality run from 2006 to 2007. They were joined by David Johnson, an Englishman and friend of Transition founder Rob Hopkins, who had relocated to Portland to help set up the larger Transition USA initiative. At its origins the Transition movement and methodology sought to catalyse change in towns and small urban settings where there had been little or no coordinated engagement with sustainability issues. To adapt this approach to Portland's context TPDX focused on becoming a hub for networking and partnership building within the city. TPDX could act in part as a facilitator for exchanges and collaborations between established groups, while also providing local community activists with a more positive avenue for their efforts than traditional oppositional and conservation based environmentalism.
During the summer of 2010, I attended one of TPDX's community meetings, as well as a larger grassroots sustainability conference known as the Village Building Convergence with which TPDX was affiliated. These events were emblematic of their positive and network based approach. Sitting in a church hall on an odd assortment of donated furniture from various homes, eras and styles, attendees introduced themselves. Together with a number of people who identified simply as interested citizens, there were representatives from two different faith-based organizations, one school, a community social services and mental health worker, and a variety 275 of other local environmental NGOs. Among the latter included the former head of the Portland chapter of Greenpeace who, he explained, had resigned from his position and was interested in TPDX because he was “tired of always being against things.” Rather than oppose development, pollution, or other single- issue problems, the group largely saw community groups and citizens as having the role of partnering among themselves and with the municipality, to ensure the development and implementation of ever more ambitious sustainability policies and programs within the city.
8.3.3 Transition PDX and the 2009 CAP One of their first opportunities to practice this approach on a large scale came when the city released the CAP for public comment. Jeremy O'Leary, a well-connected community organizer who had helped establish TPDX, remembers that the initial draft of the CAP represented “everything that was politically possible” within the municipality at the time. TPDX's goal was to help raise the bar and show the municipality where and how it could go further (Interview, O'Leary 2010/06/17). A small group, led by two other founding TPDX members, Liz Bryant and Jim Newcomer, set out to create a community forum for representatives from local groups.
All of the people associated with TPDX maintained multiple affiliations to a variety of sustainability themed groups active in the city, including The Portland Permaculture Guild, Friends of Trees, Neighbourhood Emergency Response Teams, and the NAs. O'Leary also kept a community website, www.thedirt.org that acted as a clearing house for locally relevant sustainability news, events, tools, and information. Leveraging this broad network, the group organized two community input sessions hosted one week apart at Portland's St. Francis Church in Portland's southeast.
The events attracted 72 people. They broke off into smaller focus groups to provide feedback on each of the seven action areas within the plan; an eighth group focused on government operations. TPDX recruited volunteer facilitators and note takers in advance for each session. Over the two meetings, each group drafted detailed comments on their specific section. These were then edited into one larger coherent document which was hand-delivered to the mayor. 276
8.3.4 TPDX and Sustainable Local Food Systems Transition PDX's report totalled 108 double-spaced pages, and contained multiple specific and general suggestions for each of the CAP’s action areas. A comprehensive review of this feedback and its impacts on the CAP is beyond the scope of this chapter. But to provide a more detailed sense of both the nature of TPDX's input and the way it affected the CAP, I will review the action area devoted to food and agriculture. TPDX's role in the CAP process provides another manifestation of the way in which community groups can expand the scope of what was being discussed within official participatory processes (cf. de Souza 2006, Barnett & Scott 2007, Ballard 2007, Hajer 2002, Heller 2001). In scope, scale, and impact, TPDX's work cannot be compared to SDCEA's struggles in the SDB. But their accomplishments are also not without importance. Taken together TPDX and SDCEA provide two separate points along a spectrum of what civil-society groups can contribute to official “invited” processes of participation.
TPDX members interviewed for this study felt a general sense that their feedback had been well received, and commented frequently that their wording was integrated into the CAP at various points. The “Food and Agriculture” section of the report was identified as one specific area where the feedback produced more substantial changes90. As a recent addition to the CAP that expanded the scope of the city's climate plans, this section represented a foray into uncharted territory for a municipality historically focused on land use, transportation, and energy.
Both before and after consultation on the CAP, section five on Food and Agriculture contained two objectives to be reached by 2030, each with a corresponding set of “quick start” actions to be completed by 2012 (this pairing of 2030 goals and 2012 actions is the structure followed throughout the CAP). The first of these goals was to “Reduce consumption of carbon-intensive foods.” This section showed no significant changes before and after the consultation process. And while it was interesting to see the city engaging in this new area, there was little in terms of
90 This action area was also a theme that attracted a lot of interest. The city reported that of people who had responded to an on-line survey on the CAP, Food and Agricultural policy was identified as the second most popular theme within the CAP (second only to Landuse and Transportation). This was mirrored in TPDX's forums, where Food and Agriculture emerged as the most popular theme, attracting 20 people 26% of total participants). 277 concrete policy to be discussed. Using an approach that recalls innumerable other public awareness campaigns used worldwide for issues like recycling and energy efficiency, the city proposed to use a combination of public education and awareness raising to encourage citizens to make dietary shifts that would reduce their carbon footprints. The CAP closed its discussion of this goal by observing that, “[i]f the average household were to shift the calories of one day’s meat and dairy consumption per week to grains and vegetables, the resulting carbon emissions reductions would be equivalent to driving approximately 10 percent less per year” (Portland 2009, 52).
There is more of interest contained in the section's second goal to “significantly increase the consumption of local food.” The 2012 actions associated with this goal were substantially reworked after public consultation, and, at times closely mirroring input from TPDX, more concrete policy actions were included in the final version. I will discuss a few of these changes in more detail below.
The first and strongest critique that TPDX voiced for both 2030 goals in the Food and Agriculture section was the lack of any quantifiable targets that could be used to measure performance and to hold the city accountable. In fact, this is one of only three of the CAP's eight sections that do not have measurable objectives included in at least one of its 2030 goals.91 Areas where the municipality already had experience (like energy, land use and transportation, waste, and urban forestry) all contain clear and quantifiable targets. In contrast, the wording of the goals around food and agriculture shows hesitation on the part of the municipality to commit too strongly to precise performance metrics in these new and unfamiliar spheres.
Responding to TPDX's concern, the final version of the CAP contained two new 2012 action highlighting the need for quantitative measures. The first, (action i) calls for the integration of “quantitative goals and metrics” “where practical” into city and country planning processes. The second, (action vi) commits the city to establishing “quantitative metrics for the consumption of
91 The other two are section 6 on Community Engagement, and section 7 on Climate Change Preparation. 278 regionally sourced food” ( Portland 2009, 53).
TPDX also advocated for two other key revisions to the 2012 action plans that are reflected in the final version of the text. First, across a number of comments in their report, TPDX members called on the city to remove policy barriers to local agriculture. This can be seen, for example, in their request that ordinances and regulations be reviewed to “remove all unnecessary restrictions” to raising poultry and other animals in the City / County. Second, at the same time they also advocated an expansion of what was being considered under the rubric of “local agriculture” in the 2012 goals. This can be seen in their support for animal husbandry as well as planting of fruit and nut trees (action iii).
Neither of these issues was covered in the original CAP, but both have a lineage in other processes within the city or the county.92 Therefore rather than contributing to the inclusion of completely novel issues, this part of TPDX's input to the CAP encouraged the city to address established local issues that the document had overlooked. In the final version of the CAP, TPDX's demands to engage with policy barriers and increase the scope of what was included in the definition of “local agriculture” were all reflected in a completely revised Action iii. The new Action iii was an ambitious omnibus goal that proposed to create supportive policy for a wide variety of agricultural practices (including fruit and nut trees and animal husbandry) on both public and private land and as part of publicly funded projects. Removing regulatory barriers was addressed again in Action ii of the final CAP.
8.3.5 TPDX's Impact on the CAP Process and the Final Plan Overall TPDX's main high-level critiques of the “Food and Agriculture” section of the CAP seem to have had a substantial impact on the wording of the final text. A number of key changes
92 The impact of zoning codes on local agriculture had been raised by Portland-Mulnomah food policy council, a citizen advisory panel formed in June of 2002 to advise the city on how to support a functional regional food system. Likewise, keeping a small number of hens on residential properties (to a maximum of three) was officially allowed in Portland since the passing of a municipal ordinance in 2008 (Ordinance 13.05.015 Section E). The practice, which had been happening in a legal grey zone for some time prior to the ordinance, has been the focus of popular support and activism in surrounding cities and towns like Beaverton, Salem, and South Portland where it is also now permitted (Portland's mayor Sam Adams has two hens (AP 2009). 279
– expansion in the number of agricultural practices covered, attention to policy barriers, and a commitment to producing quantitative performance measures – all directly respond to TPDX's input. More generally, their feedback provided support for the city's decision to make the transition to a “local integrated” approach to climate change that would begin to deal with some portion of the city's Scope 3 emissions.
Another contribution that TPDX brought to the process was a significant increase in the level of public participation. Overall, public participation in the CAP public consultations was low (at 604 respondents out of a population of 582,130). The 72 people who contributed to TPDX's submission to the city are equal to 12% of the total number participants in the consultation, and are almost equal to the number of people who filled out the city's online survey.93
A CAP progress report published by the municipality in December of 2010 shows some progress in the areas focused on by TPDX. The report highlights the fact that both the city and the county had formed partnerships with other groups to identify economic and code barriers to the production and distribution of local food. In early 2011, this work continued at the municipal level under the banner of a municipally led Urban Food Zoning Code Update Project.
Despite these advances, the one area of the Food and Agriculture theme where the city is experiencing serious challenges is in putting in place quantitative metrics for the performance of the local food system, another of TPDX's key concerns. Interestingly, as the 2010 CAP update summarizes, the challenges have primarily been institutional and not technical:
Developing quantitative metrics remains an elusive goal for food system efforts. Until very recently, traditional planning efforts have not included the food system as a
93 This ability of civil-society groups to mobilize community participation is something that the city has capitalized on in the past. In its earlier visionPDX process, the city effectively subcontracted out public participation to community groups by awarding grants through a competitive process to community organizations who came up with creative ways of bringing people together throughout the city. The level of participation in that process (at approximately 17,000 people) demonstrates the effectiveness of that approach (Interview Stephanie Interview Stephens vPDX Project Manager, 2008/10/09). Although, given that mass mobilization was a core objective of visionPDX, it is not a fair comparison to contrast participation in that process with participation in the public review of the CAP. 280
recognized infrastructure or service function, or as an economic cluster opportunity (Portland 2009, 15).
Rather than being stymied by many possible technical challenges (for example, the availability and consistency of production and sales data from multiple small producers), the main barrier has been that, unlike zoning code revisions, the existing institutional structure has no “home” or established processes for addressing the issue. Yet to be resolved, this difficulty highlights one area where TPDX's input pushed the city well beyond the work on urban and regional food systems begun prior to the CAP. Problems such as this also link back to the problems of institutional path-dependency and siloization discussed in Section 1 (Chapters 3, 4, and 5).
8.3.6 The Green Civic Dialectic (i): Synergies Between Municipal Structures and Civil-Society Mobilization The interaction between TPDX and the municipality during the public consultation for the 2010 CAP is a detailed snapshot of the types of reciprocal reinforcements that power Portland's green civic dialectic. To fully appreciate this, we need to look at the ways in which TPDX benefited from the support that the CAP processes provided as it established itself within the municipality. The CAP provided a framework within which it could build its own institutional and social capacity, and practice engaging municipal planning processes.
In particular, coordinating feedback for the CAP gave TPDX an opportunity to position themselves as a convenor of other local environmental and civil-society groups. This echoes a theme that was important in SDCEA's air quality campaigns in Durban as well. In both cities civil-society groups worked within existing municipal structures, however imperfect, to build community capacity and engage with the city around planning issues. As de Souza (2006) and others have argued, securely established municipal processes that are open to community participation provide a venue for civil-society organizations to build their own social capital and expertise (Fagotto & Fung 2006). This “safe environment” also helps to counter-balance the cyclical nature of public engagement and membership in civil-society groups (Cohen 1996, Melo & Baiocchi 2006 )94.
94 The benefits that civil-society groups can draw from existing municipal structures are even more apparent if one 281
But the capacity building benefits that civil-society groups can derive from state-led participatory practices are not in and of themselves proof of the kind of dialectic that I am describing (although they may be one facet of it). The green civic dialectic is more visible when one looks at the content of the draft CAP, the nature of TPDX's input, and its impact. In the draft the municipality had already established a tentative engagement with urban food systems. In turn, this provided an opportunity for the various civil-society groups convened by TPDX to put pressure on the city to deepen it engagement. In reaction BPS staff solidified the municipality's commitments in the CAP, and established a new round of collaborative inquiry (the Urban Food Zoning Code Update Project) that will seek to smooth the implementation of the municipality's green objectives.
Translated onto the page, the spiralling nature of this relationship makes for monotonous reading. But the relationship that it records is anything but dull. It is an indication of a dynamic, engaging, and creative process co-created by the municipality and community groups that has helped drive the city's approach to climate and sustainability policy well beyond most other cities.
On its own, this example could very well be seen as an exception. But this dynamic is also evident in many other projects and processes within the municipality. Specifically, examples are found in the areas of green building, the protection of urban ecosystem services, and transportation planning.95 That said, this process was held back by its equation of participation
looks at the trajectory that TPDX has followed during the CAP processes. Still struggling to adapt the Transition methodology to an urban setting (rather than towns or villages), TPDX has created links with District Coalitions, NAs, and volunteer emergency response teams across the city. The existence of these older civil-society structures (all of which the municipality had a role in creating) have given TPDX a way of recruiting new members and building a decentralized organizational structure better suited to working in a large urban centre (Interviews, Reece 2011/07/06, Newcommer 2011/07/11). 95 ReCode Portland, to give a simplified glimpse of just one of these, was a community-based effort to assess local and state building and zoning codes to identify obstacles to residential green building techniques. ReCode was managed by members of Tryon Life Community Farm (TLC, mentioned above), which had already successfully petitioned the city to receive exceptions (both official and tacit) from certain codes and bylaws that would have prevented many of the green building and urban agriculture practices which were employed on their land (Interview, Bell 2008/11/05). Following public support for residential green building expressed in the visionPDX process, the municipality awarded TLC a small grant to create ReCode and investigate the barriers that existed to mainstreaming residential green building across the city. ReCode have since successfully lobbied the State to overturn a ban on the collection and use of rainwater, and helped establish a formal review process at the municipal level that speeds up assessment for new and innovative green building techniques and technologies. Here again the virtuous circle between community mobilization and increasingly ambitious municipal policies is apparent. 282 with consultation and information gathering. I briefly discuss these limitations in section four, before exploring what is possible when civil-society groups engage directly in the implementation of climate relevant projects in section five.
8.4 Limitations of Consultation and Individual Action
Although I have focused on the opportunities presented by the consultation process that created the CAP, there are of course clear limitations to these kinds of initiatives. The public comment process is an example of the most basic form of consultation in which a municipality can engage. While it was undertaken in good faith by the municipality, and the consultation had some influence over the final text of the policy, the process itself was designed to solicit feedback, not to empower community level action or to devolve any measure of control. Even the reinforcing dialectic I have described above, so far, has led to nothing other than revision to the CAP and the promise of future investigation. In this respect, the CAP process's equation of participation with consultation mirrors some of the more superficial forms of consultation criticized in the literature of public participation and development reviewed in Chapter 6 (see Arnstein 1969, Dahl 1961, Piven 1965, Fagence 1977, Marris and Rein 1982, Thomas et al. 1988). TPDX's contributions were significant within that narrow context. But if their achievements seem in some ways more procedural that transformative it is worth looking at the limitations that the municipality's definition of “participation” imposed on what communities could contribute as part of the CAP process.
The municipality's circumscribed vision of public participation is clearly explained in the text of CAP itself. The sixth of the eight overarching action areas that make up CAP is devoted to “Community Engagement.” The section is based around one single 2030 goal that aims to “Motivate all Multnomah County residents and businesses to change their behavior in ways that reduce carbon emissions” (Portland 2009, 54). The six 2012 Actions for this goal touch on three means: raising awareness to encourage behaviour change among residents and businesses; 283 uniting business leaders and the research community to expand the local green economy; and sourcing funding to support the community based implementation of carbon reduction projects.
The thread running through three of the six actions is the raising of awareness to spark behaviour change among individuals and businesses. This is emphasized in bold type in a colourful full- page table (see table 8.1) that occupies the second of the two pages given over to the “Community Engagement” in CAP. Encouraging individuals can “Take Action Today!” the table begins by informing readers that “[b]etween heating, cooling and powering our homes, and driving, Portland residents are responsible for about 50 percent of all local carbon emission.” The authors recommend, among other things, that individuals and families consider calculating their carbon footprint, conduct a home energy audit, or purchase a more energy efficient vehicle (Portland 2009, 55).
This emphasis on individual action and consumer choice has been a staple of Portland's approach to climate change, and figured prominently in the city's 2001 Local Action Plan (it was also employed by eThekwini Electricity in its attempt to reduce household electricity consumption during the South African electricity crisis). It is the same approach that the city used in the “Food and Agriculture” section of the 2009 CAP to motivate residents to reduce their consumption of red meat and other carbon intensive foods.
More generally, Slocum (2004a, 2004b) has shown this to be a common characteristic of ICLEI's Cities for Climate Protection (CCP) program. It is premised on an understanding of individual behaviour that posits that a lack of information is at the root of the gap between environmental values (as demonstrated by numerous national and international polls) and environmental actions. Filling this information deficit, it is argued, should bridge the value-action gap and lead to changed behaviour among the population. This approach continues to guide government and NGO programs worldwide, despite being discredited by a large body of research dating back decades (Blake 1999, Burgess et al, 1998, Finger 1994, Hobson 2001, Hinchcliffe 1996, Myers & Macnaghten 1998).
At the root of this vision of public participation and behaviour change are a set of positivist and linear assumptions about the relationships between information and action. In this perspective, 284 people are perceived as rational actors who, given the right input (more accurate information about environmental issues), will produce the right output (changes in behaviour that reduce human environmental impacts). This parallels the “linear transmission” models of the relationship between science and policy making that was assumed in the early Global Scientific phase of the climate regime (see Chapter 1). Critics of the “information deficit” argument seek to replace this linear conception with a more nuanced explanation. They argue that individual behaviour, rather than being narrowly rational, is the result of a network of interconnected and co-constitutive habitual practices, epistemological frameworks, values, and worldviews.
Beyond these critiques, there is an important level of non-government participation that the city leaves out in the CAP itself, and the participatory processes around it. In between the actions of individuals and public consultations that aggregate public feedback into higher level municipal policy documents, there is an intermediate scale of action: collective community-based initiatives. Ironically, the section on “Community Engagement” says very little about engaging communities. Its vision of action is limited entirely to the individual behaviour of citizens, and envisions a strictly one way top-down relationship between the municipality and urban residents. It completely ignores collective action and the role that citizens play in mobilizing popular efforts to create change.
8.4.1 “Community Engagement” beyond Consultation to Implementation The emphasis on individual actions in the initial draft highlighted the fact that from the perspective of the municipality community groups did not play an important part in implementing climate-change relevant projects. Community engagement received only scant coverage in the sixth goal of this section in the final document, which aims to: “Seek funding to support neighborhood and community groups in the implementation of carbon-reduction projects and programs” (Portland 2009, 54). This relatively minor and vague gesture towards community- run programs is at odds with the fact that many of CAP’s goals, whether they are around food systems, energy use, walkable “20-minute” neighbourhoods, or increasing density within existing residential areas, are in fact community-scale issues or issues of collective action which neither individual citizens nor the municipality control. 285
These collective action problems are one of the central dilemmas of far-reaching holistic urban climate policy. To achieve the scope and scale necessary to have any considerable impacts, municipalities need to go beyond areas where they have direct or indirect control, and begin to involve non-governmental actors not as advisers, but as partners in implementation – sometimes even as leading partners. This is crucial if municipalities are to create networks of climate governance that truly increase the likelihood of meaningful responses to the challenges which we face.
This was one of the high-level critiques that emerged unexpectedly and independently from the majority of the eight working groups TPDX convened to provide feedback on the CAP. As Jim Newcommer, another of TPDX's founders and a co-editor of the TPDX report, summarized:
If you look at what is in the CAP... No government could do it all, all by themselves. There had to be a shift in the citizen’s sense of who they are from consumers of government to co-creators of government. And there needs to be a willingness on the part of the city to let that happen. (Interview, Newcommer 2011/07/11)
The introduction of the TPDX's report goes on to argue that decentralized community-based design and implementation can be a valuable source of increased capacity for the municipality. Capacity which, they argue, the municipality will need as it struggles to respond to the pressures of an unstable future, with constrained resources and heavily siloized departments:
[t]his combination of [the need for] increased planning capacity and flexibility collides head-on with a condition that came up in our conversations over and over: lack of coordination among government agencies. ...
We don’t have an answer to that paradox, but we do offer some recommendations for beginning the search in a different place: the citizens in the neighborhoods and nonprofit organizations that already exist. Over and over the different groups independently arrived at similar points: much of the design work and implementation could be done by non- government groups coordinated by a central city or county agent charged with supporting local community development. There was a common thread to our talks, and that was the potential for ending our current stance toward government, that of consumer, and changing it to co-creators of the city in partnership with government (TDPX 2009, 4).
This pragmatic line of reasoning is interesting because it distinguishes itself from two of the main camps of participatory theory covered earlier (see Chapter 6). It is at odds both with groups like the IPCC, the WB, and other large organizations who see “participation” as a synonym for 286 invited forms of “consultation” and envision little in the way of devolved powers, resources, or control. But it is also set apart from more dogmatic advocates of community empowerment, like Arnstein (1969), who argued strongly in favour of giving the maximum control over local affairs to autonomous communities. Rather, embodying the synergy between civil-society mobilization and government structures identified by de Souza (2006) and other scholars (Cohen 1996, Fagotto & Fung 2006, Heller 2001, Melo & Baiocchi 2006), the various groups that came together advocate for an arrangement where communities and the municipality take on complementary roles in the work ahead. TPDX, in effect, was advocating for a deepening of the mutually reinforcing green dialectic from the realm of policy development to the realm of action.
When asked how the city responded to their advocacy for shared responsibility and a larger role for community-led implementation, Newcommer voiced clear frustration: “That suggestion just disappeared. There is no place in that complex set of systems (the municipal bureaucracy) for that type of proposal to take root and flourish” (Interview, Newcommer 2011/07/11). The minor mention of supporting community initiatives in the CAP seems to bear that out.
But, in fact, conditions on the ground in Portland evolved rapidly to exceed what was captured by published municipal documents. (This reinforces the value of research that, like this project, maintains a prolonged engagement with individual case study sites.) Upon returning to Portland, just over one year following my initial round of interviews, a community-led but municipally supported solar energy project dubbed “Solarize Portland” (Solarize) had begun to have a significant impact on levels of locally generated renewable energy in the city. By December 2010, when the city released its CAP progress report, Solarize had emerged as one of the most striking successes during the year since the Plan's adoption. In a way reminiscent of the municipality in Durban (which celebrated the air quality monitoring network set up in the South Durban Basin as one of the main achievements of the IDP process), Portland's BPS praised the success of a project that existed entirely due to community activists and a coalition of local non- governmental groups. And interestingly here too – as with SDCEA – the central community organizations involved, in this case Portland's NAs, had been largely marginalized in the process of drafting the CAP. But, as we will see, beyond these similarities Solarize exemplifies a much more collaborative and mutually respectful process than was the case in Durban. 287
8.5 Case Study 2 – Solarize Portland and the Challenge of Local Renewable Energy
As discussed (see Chapter 2), to broaden its reach beyond traditional strengths in land-use and transportation planning, the municipality has attempted to tackle the 41 percent of Portland's emissions that come from its electricity supply. Initial attempts to facilitate a transition to renewable energy in the region were a resounding failure. A 2001 commitment to purchasing 100 percent of municipal electricity from renewable sources within nine years had by 2010 been hamstrung by a shortage of supply and high prices. Despite guaranteed demand from the municipality, the regional energy market did not provide the needed supply. The actual level for 2010 was only 9 percent, and the 2009 Climate Change Action Plan deferred the 100 percent goal to 2012. Deciding to take a more direct role, in the 2009 CAP the city shifted its attention to building supply directly, pledging that by 2030 ten per cent of the total energy used within Multnomah County would be produced “from on-site renewable sources and clean district energy systems” (Portland 2009, 35). It also set a 2012 target for installing ten megawatts of on- site renewable within the city.
In interviews conducted during the period when the 2009 CAP was being drafted, municipal officials in senior- and project-level posts (Interviews, Steve Dotterrer, Principal Planner Bureau of Planning, 2008/10/23; Gil Kelley, Head Bureau of Planning, 2008/11/07; Stephanie Stephens, Project Manager VPDX, 2008/10/09) discussed the potential of local renewable energy. But they also sounded a pessimistic note highlighting the many technical, economic, jurisdictional, and governance issues they felt stood in the way. Gil Kelley, then head of Portland's Bureau of Planning, was particularly articulate about the opportunities and challenges :
Simply buying energy off the grid in so called traditional ways is pretty wasteful. You don't have much leverage on the source. As a consumer you can pay a bit more and buy green energy but [the impacts are limited].
But if you actually own the system and produce at the community level it is far more effective. More dollars stay locally, and it is also a community building tool. Because 288
there is a local set of actors who are both producers and consumers who control the fate of that system. .... It helps build the sense in Portland that people do have a large amount of control over their daily lives. That they aren't simply consumers. ....
I think that it is a two part challenge (assuming that the technology can be delivered, which I am certain that it can): I think that the other two pieces of that equation that are difficult are finding a scale at which they [local renewable energy systems] are economically feasible, and finding the right governance structure: ....Who builds this thing? Who owns it? Who operates it? What is the fee structure going to look like? (Interview, Kelley 2008/11/07)
Leaving Portland at the end of my first field season, this general uncertainty seemed to overshadow the municipality's interest in renewables. “We frankly need to do a bit more feasibility work on our side to really know what we are talking about,” Kelley confided at the end of our discussion of solar and district energy systems (ibid.). At the same time, none of the community-based groups that I had contact with showed any intention of engaging with the issues of renewable energy.
So, it was a surprise to see when I returned that, in little over a year, a community-led project had taken the lead on the issue. Already well advanced at the start of my second field season in Portland, by the time the 2010 update on the CAP was released Solarize Portland had installed more than 250 residential solar systems. This dwarfed the number of residential solar installations done independently, and also generated two megawatts of renewable energy, or 20 percent of the municipality's total 2012 goal for renewable energy. As I will argue, this example shows the potential of invented community-led programs to significantly increase the scope and scale of urban responses to climate change. Underlying this success is the fact that community- based activists have a profoundly different understanding of the mechanisms of community-scale technological change. Linking this case study to those in Section 1 (chapters 3, 4, and 5) local activists' situated understanding (vis. Hartsock 1987, Harraway 1991, Schoenberger 1997) of residential solar power brought into play factors and approaches that lay outside the established practices of the municipality. Specifically, they replaced a rationalistic and individualized “information deficit” understanding of mobilizing change with an approach based on social ties, relationships of trust, and collective accomplishment. The city's response, in turn, provides another view of Portland's green civic dialectic in action, while also questioning the established 289 association of invented forms of participation with civil-society actors.
8.5.1 Solarize: Early Days Solarize Portland began in April of 2009 as the brainchild of Stephanie Stewart, a resident of Portland's Southeast Mount Tabor neighbourhood; and Tim O'Neil, the paid sustainability coordinator for SE Uplift (the same community organization that had coordinated resistance to the Mt. Tabour Freeway and that had since then become a Neighbourhood Coalition facilitating the work of NAs in Southeast Portland).
Also a volunteer with her local NA, Stewart heard O'Neil mention that he had come across a San Francisco non-profit solar contractor (One Block Off the Grid, or 1BOG) that used neighbourhood scale bulk-purchasing to reduce the cost of residential solar electricity. Stewart had for a long time wanted to put solar energy on her home, but was dissuaded by the costs and complexity of the process. Together they tried to contact 1BOG, but were unsuccessful in getting a reply from the contractor. In conversation, they realized that they didn't need 1BOG; their combined commitment and the resources provided by the NA system gave them what they needed to set up their own program in Portland.
Looking for additional support, O'Neil then contacted the Energy Trust of Oregon (ETO), a state- wide non-profit established in 2002 to help Oregonians take advantage of energy efficiency and renewable energy options at a household scale. Funded by a special levy on household energy bills, ETO had been running public seminars on solar energy, and providing a $2.25/watt rebate on the cost of home solar installations (average installation costs in Portland during the second quarter of 2009 were approximately $8.95/watt). But despite high demand from the public for information on solar, numbers of installation remained very low (only 38 in 2008).
Until 2009 Energy Trust had targeted individual homeowners. When Stewart and O'Neil went in to discuss their community-based model at a meeting they found Lizzie Rubado, ETO's Senior Renewable Energy Project Manager, waiting for them with many of the same ideas. Beyond price, studies commissioned by ETO (Rosoff 2007, Rosoff & Sinclair 2009, cited in Rubado 2010) identified the overall complexity of installing a residential solar electric system as a second important barrier. Rubado saw collaboration with Stewart and SE Uplift as a way to test a 290 new solar marketing strategy that would address these issues (Interview, Stewart 2010/06/29). To address both cost and complexity, Stewart, O'Neil, and Rubado designed Solarize Portland to be a sort of “one-stop shop” for residential solar. By signing-up to the process households would receive full support from the initial assessment of the suitability of their property right through to installation, the final inspection of the work, and the application for available subsidies.
Energy Trust took charge of the technical aspects of drafting the Request for Proposals (RFP), circulating news of the program among ETO's network of local solar installers, and coordinating the bidding process, inspections, and applications for available discounts. SE Uplift, in turn, coordinated an extensive grassroots promotional campaign to supply the demand necessary for the benefits of the bulk purchasing discounts. Volunteers used a mixture of word of mouth, posters put up at local businesses, articles written for community papers and newsletters, announcements at community meetings, the distribution of flyers to homes and events, and a volunteer-maintained website (www.Solarizeportland.org).
SE Uplift and Energy Trust also ran a series of introductory workshops explaining home solar as well as the Solarize project. They then held weekly Q&A sessions for people wanting more in- depth information. Energy Trust reported high rates of attendance, with all sessions having between 50 and 100 participants. The team also decided to use a “limited time offer” approach to stimulate demand and began outreach on July 30th of 2009, ending enrolment on September 15th. The result of this short, concentrated, and multifaceted campaign was a much higher participation in the program than organizers had initially expected:
Tim and I thought, we are going to consider ourselves successful if we get ten people. Twenty is going to blow our minds. I went home that night, picked a name, designed a logo, and within a couple of days I launched a website. ... We started sending out e-mails to our contact lists, our contacts sent out e-mails to their contacts and within weeks 100 people had signed up. By the end of it I think 300 people had signed up. (Interview, Stewart 2010/06/29)
Contractors had been required to submit bids prior to knowing the full number of people who would enrol in the program and to include tiered pricing that reduced installation costs as the number of installations grew. It quickly became obvious that the program would reach the 150kW of installed capacity necessary to qualify for the lowest price bracket offered by the 291 winning contractor, Portland-based Imagine Energy.
In total, 350 homes signed up for the program, and 120 of those followed through and installed solar electric systems by the following February. This was more than triple the 38 residential solar electric systems installed the year before. The program also managed to reduce costs significantly, with bulk-purchasing taking 24 percent off the average cost of installations, and combined incentives and tax credits from Energy Trust and the State and Federal governments reducing costs by a further 65 percent. In total this meant that the average cost (post-incentives and tax credits) for an average sized 2,800 watt installation went from $8,120 to $2,918 (Rubado 2010, 7).
Beyond the individual benefit of reduced costs, Tim O’Neal, sustainability coordinator for SE Uplift, reports that the overall impact on the community was much greater:
“This project has truly brought our community together, all moving toward one goal. From attending workshops to watching as neighbors went solar street by street — it’s been great to see what we’ve been able to accomplish as a group.” (O'Neal, quoted in Rubado 2010, 11)
Echoing the argument made by Gil Kelley (quoted above), the community-driven approach used in Solarize (what in the business sector would be called “social marketing”) achieved two main accomplishments: It was able to use social ties to build demand for technological change, and simultaneously to use technological change to reinforce those ties and create a shared sense of accomplishment that community members could point to with pride. Although it is hard to convey as an outsider, the density of the clustering of Solarize installation (Map 3), gives some sense of how in a short period house after house went solar. For residents who had long been interested in finding a more meaningful scale of action than recycling or changing light bulbs, Solarize showed what was possible when people acted collectively at community scale.
8.5.2 Solarize Phase Two (i): Background to Municipal Involvement Interest in residential solar energy was not confined to Portland's Southeast. It was a popular theme among the 13,000 people who participated in visionPDX three years earlier. In the final weeks of the first phase of Solarize, increased attention from larger media outlets resulted in a 292 wave of enquiries from households across the city. Neighbourhood Coalitions in Northeast and Southwest Portland began considering running similar programs of their own. This flood of interest overwhelmed the small group that had founded the program. Lizzie Rubado (at Energy Trust) recognized that none of them had the capacity (or the mandate) to support an initiative that looked likely to go city-wide. Seeing this, she approached BPS and lobbied for the bureau to provide support to other Neighbourhoods wanting to start their own programs.
BPS, in partnership with Energy Trust and another non-profit, Solar Oregon, had earlier attempted to spark a change in the residential solar market. In 2006 they created a program called “Solar Now!” that would go on to win a $200,000 federal grant in 2007. Solar Now! was designed to reduce confusion among the public about the types of assistance available for home solar installations. A variety of municipal, federal and non-profit solar incentive programs had been competing for home owner’s attention. Solar Now! unified these efforts under one banner. (Interview, Cleek 2008/10/15). This was primarily done by creating a single website where Oregonians could turn for information on local solar contracts; offered consistent messages to the media; and organized a series of educational workshops citizens could attend. But it did not lead to any significant change in the underlying approach embodied in these programs, and Solar Now! did not result in a significant increase in the number of solar installations within the municipality.
At its root, Solar Now! was another manifestation of the “information deficit” approach to behaviour change. The municipality's (and the large institutional actors it had partnered with) based their understanding of the resistance to residential solar on a model of rational individual actors who were held in check by a lack of coherent information. This institutionally situated understanding (Harraway 1991) of processes of decision-making and community engagement prevented it from seeing or effectively engaging with the broader social context which surrounds communit-level technological change. As a result, OSD's efforts lacked the social component of Solarize's neighbourhood approach. Where Solar Now! proposed more and better information, Solarize had gone beyond appeals to logic and tapped into broader community bonds of trust, shared enterprise, and neighbourhood identity. What the Solarize lacked, however, was the institutional capacity to help support the spread of Solarize within the city. 293
8.5.3 Solarize Phase Two (ii): Community-Led, Municipally Supported After discussions with Rubado, BPS staff approached O'Neil and Stewart to identify what types of support the city could provide to a program that was primarily being run by Neighbourhood Coalitions and the Associations. Informed by their feedback, BPS took on a more important role for Solarize in the Northeast and Southwest parts of the city. Two staff members, Jaimez Valdez and Lee Rahr, provided a portion of their time to shoulder many of the technical support functions for which Energy Trust had been initially responsible. In interview, Valdez described the city's role as very much background technical and administrative support (Interview, Valdez 2010/06/18). In a summary of the program written for the Mayor's Office, Rahr and Valdez (2010) describe their own role as providing “leadership and technical oversight professionalizing a community-led initiative” (8). Concretely, this meant that Rahr and Valdez helped Neighbourhood Coalitions in the Northeast (NE Coalition of Neighbourhood) and Southwest (SW Neighborhoods Inc.) with drafting Requests for Proposals (RFPs), editing and clarifying legal documents, attending workshops and volunteer meetings, and helping with website content, information management, and customer service. In NE, the city also collaborated on the drafting of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the selected contractor that emphasized hiring from within historically marginalized local communities.
Importantly, while benefiting from municipal support, the project remained primarily driven by community members and local NAs. Neither Rahr nor Valdez attempted to claim control over or credit for Solarize's successes. It is also worth pointing out that in their work, Rahr and Valdez were not acting through the formal processes that governed the NA system. Both are based in the BPS not the Office of Neighbourhood Involvement. Although NAs played a key role in the Solarize project, both employees were clear that their involvement was a partnership with specific community activists and organizers, not an extension of the municipality's support of the neighbourhood association system (Interview, Valdez 2010/06/18; Rahr and Valdez 2010). They were in effect, upsetting established visions of “invited” and “invented” participation, also inventing a new avenue for interaction between the municipality and communities. (I will come back to this further below.)
As in SE, these projects were primarily led by Neighbourhood Coalitions and Associations. 294
Following a similar approach to the one used in SE, the NAs recruited teams of volunteers to publicize the program and to help run and promote a series of workshops and Q&As that were aimed at enrolling community members into the program. Small seed grants provided by BPS to Neighborhood Coalition Offices covered the costs of additional staff time, venue rentals, printing, information management, outreach, and advertizing.
This support gave Solarize NE and SW the capacity to handle a significantly larger volume of interested community members. One thousand households in NE and 700 households in SW signed up to the first stage of the process with respectively 185 and 168 going on to installation. During 2010, programs also began in North and Northwest Portland. This rapid expansion was not without some difficulties. While valuable, the municipality's increased involvement also raised some challenges.
8.5.4 The Challenges of Scale, Politics, and Bureaucracy Stewart, who provided guidance to Rahr (BPS) while she took on the role of support to Solarize, reported a number of small but frustrating problems that arose when the small volunteer-run pilot project morphed into a city-wide initiative with support from a sometimes ponderous bureaucracy. From her perspective, setting up BPS's takeover of the website and the system for tracking enrolment took “months and months,” as Rahr had to relay information between other staff in the municipality to accomplish what Stewart (a painter who had acquired some basic web-design skills to promote her business) had initially done herself on her home computer.
The greater agility of community-run programs operating outside of complex bureaucratic structures, chains of command, and decision-making frameworks was one reason that Solarize got off the ground in such a short time. As Gil Kelley's quote illustrates above, the city felt the need to do continued study before rolling out any large-scale projects. As a pubic authority responsible to multiple diverse constituencies, municipal projects were open to criticism from many sides. The difficulty of identifying and pre-empting the many possible political and financial risks involved with new programs could make municipalities hesitant to innovate and to experiment. Stewart and O'Neil felt no such hesitation. They were happy to try, and by starting small they risked little more than the time and energy they had put into the project. As 295
Stewart put it:
We started so small, we were just going by the seat of our pants. Which was great! Because we were able to just get it done, and get it started that way. .... It was nice for us to be small, and it was also nice for us not to have the city involved” (Interview, Stewart 2010/06/29)
As the municipal involvement increased during Solarize's second phase, the municipality came under fire from a small number of local contractors for unduly interfering with the local solar market and showing preference for some companies over other. Their accusations were a clear misreading of the Solarize process, but still meant that the municipality had to do damage control to counter the negative spin put on the program. As a small coalition of private citizens, Stewart, O'Neil and their volunteers had been able to design the process free from this kind of resistance. With the municipality's larger institutional capacity also came greater public scrutiny and the more complex politics of the local government's role as caretaker of Portland's economy.
8.5.5 Culture, Structure, and Positionality The different dynamics so far described that surround attempts to transform the residential solar market in Portland are a consequence of differences in the positionality of civil-society groups and municipal actors (Hartsock 1987, Harraway 1991, Schoenberger 1997). Each group is surrounded by a very different set of social ties and institutional structures; possess very different tolerances for risk; have different forms of capacity (social capital vs. institutional and financial capital); and rely on disparate modes of organizing and communicating information and understanding the subjects they were interacting with (neighbours vs. citizens). These divergent worldviews and modes of communication were a point that Stewart stressed throughout her interview. Contrasting the confusing thicket of information presented by the municipality and other agencies to Solarize's approach, Stewart summarized:
That is one of the things that Tim and I brought to the table. Identifying the questions that homeowners have [about solar] and the order that they have them, and putting them all in one place. .... We were able to say “these are the first questions that people have,” those answers have to be out of the gate before they even ask them. Or they don't even ask questions enough to really consider solar panels.
The answers were out there, but they were out there in these ways that were really hard to find. That could be a lesson that the city could learn from this. Clearly they did a lot of 296
work on finding out what people needed to know to put solar panels on. And they spent money putting it on-line... But it wasn't organized in a way that people could digest it. In a way that this community, this culture of citizens, not bureaucrats, could really use. (Interview, Stewart 2010/06/29)
A small but telling symbol of these differences appeared as Stewart handed the task of maintaining the Solarize Portland website to BPS (one of the various support roles played by BPS staff as other neighbourhood groups began to run their own Solarize programs). What initially was available to the public under the simple url “www.Solarizeportland.org” was given the new address of “ http://www.portlandonline.com/bps/ index.cfm ? c=51902 .” To access this new page, residents had to follow a lengthy path through the following layers of nested categories within the municipality's website: PortlandOnline --> Government Bureaus & Offices --> Planning & Sustainability --> What We Do --> Sustainability --> Clean Energy --> Solarize Portland. This progression is a perfectly logical and accurate representation of Solarize's position within the municipal bureaucracy. It is also a lengthy, circuitous and “bureaucratic” route sure to lose most residents before they find the information they are seeking. There is, of course, google, but the municipality's inability to provide a more direct entry point is symptomatic of larger structural path dependencies that hamper municipal attempts to innovate (see Chapter 3).
In this case, the value of invented forms of participation was precisely that it could approach the issue of solar power without the fetters that restricted municipal action and create new approaches to a problem which institutional actors had proved unable to solve. In the place of accurately categorized, but cold, distant, and seemingly inhuman information, Solarize provided residents with direct, in-person access to information, presented in a language that they understood, and by local people and organizations that they trusted. Here, as in many of the case studies covered in this dissertation, the ability to communicate effectively across differences was a crucial component of the program's success. In a reversal of the way participation in Durban's IDP process, for example, taught community members to represent their needs in the language and epistemological structures used by municipal planners (see Chapter 7), here the activism of a small group of community volunteers translated the complex technical, financial, and governmental aspects of solar energy into a language, logic, and process that was both intelligible and – just as crucially – interesting and inspiring to neighbourhood residents. 297
8.5.6 The Green Civic Dialectic (ii): Solarize and the Relay-Race of Urban Climate Governance Solarize continued to grow in 2010, with a second round in Southeast adding another 110 installations (350 kW) and programs beginning in North and Northwest Portland. (Projects using the Solarize model have also begun in Pendleton, Salem, and Seattle.) By the end of 2010, Solarize projects had installed 2 megawatts of solar energy capacity on 585 homes across the city of Portland. There are different ways to put these numbers in context. In terms of pre-defined policy objectives, two megawatts represents 20 percent of the city's goal of installing 10mw by the end of 2012. Solarize's unexpectedly rapid growth has helped the city to achieve this goal two years ahead of schedule (Portland 2010, 7). In terms of emission’s mitigation, based on calculations done by SE Uplift, Solarize's 2MW have reduced GHG emissions by an amount equal to taking 3714 cars off the road. In terms of the local economy, the program has generated 40 jobs in the local solar manufacturing and installation sectors. And, finally, Solarize has transformed the local solar energy market in the city, by lowering costs and expanding the local workforce. It has also shifted home solar energy from a marginal practice of a “super green” few to a sensible consideration for local homeowners.
For the purposes of this dissertation, though, the real significance of Solarize lies in its strength as proof that “community participation” can extend well beyond the simple expression of needs, wants, and questions. It shows that, similarly to the case of SDCEA in Durban, community organizations can mobilize resources, design, and implement projects in ways that extend the overall capacity of the city to act on specific issues (see Corburn 2003, Semenza et al. 2006, Silver, Scott, and Kazepov 2010). At the same time, its success has also been due to the municipality's willingness to appreciate these accomplishments and step in to play a minor but crucial role in providing necessary logistical support.
As such Solarize is a version of the reinforcing dialectic Putnam described between grass-roots activism and responsive public institutions (Putnam et al. 2003). This example also exceeds the bounds of the literature on the synergies between invited and invented participation discussed in Chapter 6 (Aylett 2010, Barnett & Scott 2007, Ballard 2007, de Souza 2006, Flyvbjerg 1998a, 298
Holmes & Scoones 2001, Owens 2000). This literature approaches issues of participation from the perspective of community activism. The synergies they describe between invited and invented forms of participation focus on the ability of civil-society groups to participate simultaneously in both forms of engagement (to the benefit of both communities and the state). But the same potential is not attributed to the state.
In critical accounts of participatory practice, state action appears only in the guise of official processes, or various attempts to instrumentalise them for to the state's benefit. What Solarize demonstrates is that governments also have to capability of “inventing” new forms of participation. The support that Rahr and Valdez provided to Solarize existed quite apart from the contractual relationships that link the municipality and NAs. In their work, Rahr and Valdez invented a new form of engagement with civil society. This is not to say that they did so disinterestedly. Portland's goals of securing a place as a competitive “green” municipality depend on concrete successes like Solarize. But when municipalities and communities truly engage with the synergies that exist between their different but complimentary capacities it is possible for a shared purpose to emerge to enable both to achieve more than they would on their own. This may seem like a Habermassian outcome, but it arose out of a fundamentally Foucauldian exercise of civil-society challenging the logics of the state and claiming the right to manage their own affairs. There are clearly tensions in this account, but this only further serves to reinforce the need to think beyond the binaries of “state control vs. community empowerment,” and to look at how these two approaches to participation interact in practice.
That this type of relationship arose in Portland, but not in Durban owes much to Portland's specific history. Specifically, it reflects the role that both environmental issues and the synergies between state and civil-society actors have played in the processes of place-making that have transformed this once dull and derivative logging town. In his history of environmental civil- society groups in Portland, Johnson (2008, 10) highlights the role that collective action has played in bringing about many of the city's green successes:
While civic and business leaders played critical roles in the greening of Portland, it was the grassroots that played the role of early implementer. Citizens, acting alone, but more often through collective action, occupied civic space like pioneering plants in a clear-cut. 299
When the baton was passed effectively, community leaders who understood their role as facilitators of the wisdom of citizens, were able to implement policies that moved Portland toward its liveable and sustainable future.
This image of environmental governance as a sort of relay race between government and community groups is a memorable simplification of the many exchanges between the two that since the 1960s have profoundly shaped Portland's approach to land-use, transportation planning, urban renewal, and now renewable energy. These successes have become icons of the city's new identity as a leading “green” city, helping it to top various quality-of-life and environmental rankings. These in turn have helped to fuel a steady in-migration of people, particularly young people between the ages of 18 to 30, who are interested in contributing to that collective project (Templeton 2011). The relay-race between the municipality and communities around environmental issues has therefore helped to constitute Portland as a very specific kind of place.
It is important not to idealize this process. There is messiness to these hand-offs, and the metaphor itself is somewhat imperfect (assuming at least that our figurative athletes understand the rules of a relay race).
Sometimes the city and communities run along-side each other holding different ends of the baton, either to share the load or because neither quite trusts the other to reach the finish line alone (or to head to the finish line that they have in mind). At other times, one contestant finds no one there to meet them at the end of their sprint.
It should not escape notice that Neighbourhood Coalitions and Associations have been central to the success of Solarize. The municipality, on the one hand, deserves some credit for creating a system that provided the funding that allowed for someone like Tim O'Neil to be there as a resource and partner for Stephanie Stewart. On the other, there is a certain irony that one of the biggest successes in the first year of the CAP should come from the very community organizations that the city had conspicuously avoided during its creation. This speaks to the messy and unpredictable nature of the partnerships that make ambitious urban sustainability policy possible. When the city stepped in to partner with NAs on Solarize, it represented the most significant project-based partnership between communities and the municipality since mayor Goldschmidt's urban renewal projects of the 1970s. 300
8.6 Conclusions
Since the early successes of the local Model Cities Program and community activism in opposition to the Mount Hood Freeway, mobilized civil-society groups have been a defining force in Portland's urban planning. These early victories were nurtured by a supportive local government, composed in some cases of people who had themselves come up through the ranks of community organizations. The result was an open relationship between government and community groups that was the foundation of many other achievements during the 1970s and 80s. It also lead to the re-creation of Portland's identity as a green and participatory city.
Far from being some kind of calm communalist utopia, some measure of confrontation was often an essential part of this first era of public participation in Portland. Community groups would never have stopped the freeway if they hadn't been willing to take their fight first to the streets, and eventually to the courts. But even in highly confrontational situations, community mobilization in Portland has been based as much on a desire to create as on the need to oppose. In their victory against the freeway, for example, SE Uplift also secured $USD 500 million to fund a substantial expansion of the local public transit system. In this way, this early stage of activism in Portland is reminiscent of SDCEA's mobilization of protest to secure resources for air quality monitoring in the the South Durban Basin.
Examples like this where civic innovation has enabled important shifts in the built form of the city and the policies that govern it continue to this day. They pass through the removal of other freeways within the city, to the rehabilitation of local wetlands and streams, the development of regional and urban agriculture, and, most recently, Solarize Portland's transformation of the residential solar energy market. Overall my discussion of the relationship between invited and invented forms of participation in this chapter has had three facets:
First I have discussed how, as seen in TPDX's contributions to the drafting of the 2009 CAP, participatory planning processes question established uni-linear and state-dominated approaches 301 to policy making. In its place, they create the possibility that policy making (and the knowledge necessary to support it) can instead be co-produced through the interactions between municipal and civil-society actors.
Second I have argued, in my critique of the CAP's definition of public participation, that municipalities need to move beyond depictions of engagement focused on the atomized individual. The traditional focus on the micro-scale of individual actions and choices completely ignores collective action and the role that citizens play in mobilizing collective efforts to create change. Based an outdated information-deficit understanding of human motivations, it ignores the important role played by social ties and collective behaviour in shaping human actions, and it assumes a uni-linear top-down relationship between the municipality and urban residents.
Third, in my discussion of Solarize Portland, I have shown that far from simply providing input into policy decisions, civil-society groups (and the broader communities which they can mobilize) have the capacity to design and implement significant urban sustainability projects. This is perhaps the central finding of this chapter.
Urban responses to climate change are all too often equated with municipal climate policies. But the vast majority of urban GHGs (even when narrowly defined to include only Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions) fall outside the direct control of the municipality. Attempts to expand beyond this limited jurisdiction while preserving the perception that state actors are the dominant forces behind urban climate responses have led governments to adopt a disingenuous and unproductive relationship with their constituents. They implore, inform, and “incentivize” their citizens to change their individual or household behaviour. These tactics are based on outdated understandings of individual and collective actions that assume that behaviour can be changed simply by providing better information or reducing financial barriers. It also assumes a uni-linear top-down movement of knowledge, innovation, and resources that over estimates municipal powers and marginalizes communities. The limited impact of this approach can be seen all around us, and in Portland's case in the failure of the municipal Solar Now! program to build demand for residential solar power within the city. 302
The success of Solarize, in contrast, is proof that urban responses to climate change are not – and cannot be – solely municipal endeavours. To go to a scale where they will have any true impact on the problems we face, the transformation of our cities must be a collective process. As we have seen in Section 1 (Chapters 3, 4, and 5), even the coordinated renewal of municipal processes and infrastructure represent a colossal challenge. To expect local governments and bureaucracies also to lead broader socio-technical shifts throughout the city overestimates their resources and overlooks the limitations of their position within the broader urban community. They have an important role to play in enabling and facilitating this broader shift. But to play that part, state actors must be ready to treat communities and civil-society groups as peers and partners, not idealized rational actors to be manipulated through education programs or market incentives.
The story of Solarize Portland is based on this kind of productive partnership between civil- society and municipality. Rooted in their communities, local activists had the networks and relationships of trust necessary to find key partners, mobilize volunteers, and to initiate programmes. Their position outside of government allowed them to take risks and experiment without having to worry about the larger political fall-out of their plans. But perhaps most importantly, because they were from the community they could build a program that was truly of the community. They framed a complex process of technological change within the language and logic of the communities within which they worked.
Without the support of the municipality, Solarize's successes would have been limited. Putting solar panels on 120 homes in Southeast Portland is an accomplishment. But only once it reaches the scale of the city as a whole does the endeavour begin to have any true impact on the local energy grid or solar market. The municipality's behind-the-scenes technical support made that expansion possible. The city became a crucial supporting partner. But just as crucially, it remained in that role without attempting to commandeer the process or claim it for itself. Solarize continued to be a community-led process embedded within the neighbourhoods that it served. Interestingly, municipal officials supported Solarize outside of the existing structures defined by the NA system. They “invented” a new form of interaction with community groups that upsets a depiction of the state as rule bound, self-serving, and uncreative. 303
Beyond driving home the substantial contributions that communities can make, and the role of municipal support in scaling up those contributions, the case studies in this chapter have also made an argument for the importance of more general processes that institutionalize public participation within the municipality. As we have seen, this institutionalization has benefits both for the municipality and civil-society organizations. From its very beginnings, Solarize drew heavily on the structures of the NA system. While the NAs may have been in decline – suffering from parochialism and elite capture – their networks and resources allowed the program to take hold and spread. Coming out of a period where conflict between NAs and the municipality were the norm, Solarize represents a new start. The debt Solarize Portland owes to NAs also emphasizes the importance of municipally supported civic institutions even when they are a venue for sometimes acrimonious conflicts. This is an important conclusion to keep in mind during an era when “consensus-building” is often the primary motivation for official participatory forums.
This is not to say that municipally-led participatory processes do not also have an important place in creating effective systems of climate governance. Public support expressed during CAP consultations, for example, gave the city political legitimacy to go forward with an ambitious climate change plan. Repeated public emphasis on issues of equity, health, and the protection of local natural systems also helped the city to shed the vestiges of its former “local scientific” approach to the issue.
This chapter’s analysis of the feedback provided by TPDX showed how community groups can mobilize significant levels of participation to create detailed inputs that support municipal policy makers. TPDX's input was particularly relevant to those areas where the municipality was entering unfamiliar territory as it expanded the scope of its climate policies. And as with Solarize, TPDX derived its own benefits from CAP and other institutionalized participatory structures, which helped the organization to build its own capacity and profile as it established itself in Portland. 304
Climate Change is like no other challenge faced by today's cities. It isn't a discrete bounded issue that can be planned for, consulted upon, budgeted for, addressed, and forgotten. Rather, creating effective responses to climate change will be an ongoing process that will touch all aspects of urban life. As such, designing and implementing climate policies and programs also requires an approach to climate governance that goes beyond established norms that equate public participation with consultation. Simplistic dualisms that celebrate consensus over conflict, or autonomous action over structured collaboration, are also not useful guides on this journey.
In this chapter, as in the preceding one, I have presented a more complex reality where conflict and consensus, independent action and formal structures play important roles. Civic engagement has had its greatest impact when municipalities and communities have capitalized on the positive aspects of conflict, taken seriously their roles and shared responsibilities in steering the city towards a path that is less polluting and more resilient, and challenged and supported each other in ways that enable each to achieve more than they could alone.
In some ways this echoes Putnam's description of the virtuous cycle or “civic dialectic” (Putnam et al. 2003, 262) that exists between increased grass-roots activism, and increasingly responsive public institutions. Each, he argues, leads to more of the other. But Putnam's interests lay in the study of civic engagement in and of itself. What I have argued is for something more specific, the existence, or the possibility, of a “green civic dialectic.” A situation where increasingly integrated, ambitious, and responsive municipal climate programs engender increasingly innovative, ambitious, and engaged community based inputs and programs, which in turn support the municipality as it seeks to increase the scope and scale of the next iteration of its climate policies. Or where, as in the case of Solarize, creative ambitious and ressourceful community-led project start the process rolling, and municipal officials help move it forward, in turn enabling more community-led engagment.
Cities are in the early years of attempting to respond to a challenge of unprecedented proportions. They are doing so at a time of increasingly limited resources, and within established socio-political and economic structures highly resistant to change. I can see no way for cities to meet this challenge without both civil-society actors and municipalities expecting more and 305 receiving more from each other. This entails profound reconsideration of the hierarchies and relationships of power and responsibility that ground current approaches to climate governance. There is nothing to say that this is the way that all approaches to green urban governance will function, just as there is nothing to say that cities will successfully rise to the challenges and threats posed by a changing climate. What I have tried to do here is describe the at times admittedly difficult dynamics brought about by this approach to urban climate policy. I hope to have made visible the conditions that make it both possible and productive. 306 Ch.9 Conclusion: a Stronger Foundation for Hope
9.1 Introduction
This dissertation began with the argument that established urban responses to climate change are inadequate. Juxtaposing the small-scale and project-based climate programs carried out by most cities to the reality of rapidly rising global emissions, energy use, and temperatures makes clear that something more fundamental is necessary if cities are going to play a significant role in avoiding potentially catastrophic climate change. We need to move from small-scale programs to truly transformative shifts that impact all the various processes and actors who steer the ways in which cities are imagined, built, maintained, and extended.
This transformation involves municipal governments, but it also goes well beyond them. No single actor, institution, or sector has the power to oversee the type of broad socio-technical transition that is needed. Rather than a challenge of climate government, this is a question of climate governance. Rather than resting on the power to mandate change from above, any significant urban responses to climate change will depend on the interaction of broad networks of multiple actors. In this dissertation, I have contributed to an emerging body of work studying the dynamics of these networks of governance. The analysis provided in the preceding chapters explored the challenges inherent in this decentralized approach to climate policy, and identified strategies which may help increase both the speed and effectiveness of urban responses to climate change.
This was a complex undertaking. The rise of interest in urban responses to climate change has been part of a more general shift towards a more holistic analysis of climate change that extends beyond a narrowly scientific approach to the issue. In place of an initial focus on atmospheric sciences, scholarly and political attention to climate change has come to integrate increased 307 attention to the broader socio-economic factors that drive our ghg emissions. Rather than a reduction in scope or complexity, “down scaling” climate change to the urban level is therefore part of a series of expansions and overlaps that make the study of urban climate policy inseparable from broader discussions of sustainability and sustainable development.
The internationally focused discussions of the IPCC and the negotiations happening under the banner of the UN FCCC and the Kyoto Protocol have also adopted this more holistic approach. But in key areas, urban and local discussions have gone further than their international counterparts. They have added depth and detail to discussions of “synergies” or “co-benefits,” opened the door to discussions of the different constellations of power that arise out of shifts from climate government to climate governance, and challenged a scalar perception of where opportunities for meaningful and effective action exist. The urban scale has also been proposed as a fitting level for going beyond narrow adaptation and mitigation measures to begin collective re-examinations of the priorities and values which guide our approach to development.
My goal in this dissertation was to fill two important gaps in the emerging literature on systemic and transformative urban approaches to climate governance. Integration and openness are the bywords for the increasing localization of climate change policy: the integration of climate policy with other municipal policy agendas, and the openness of local systems of climate governance to various forms of non-governmental participation. But as covered in the Introduction, even the most expansive approaches to studying urban climate policy, what I have called the “local integrated” approach and urban political ecology, said little about either of these themes. Specifically, they overlook both the internal workings of municipal bureaucratic systems, and the various forms that public participation and the democratization of urban processes can assume. This study is the first in the literature on urban responses to climate change to look at either of these issues in any detail.
To understand what integrating climate policies with other local priorities entails first requires at least some understanding of how existing municipal structures run at cross purposes to that 308 integrative impulse. But both approaches to urban climate policy treat municipal systems as a black box. While in some cases greater attention has been given to community and civil society movements, the internal functioning of the municipality has been overlooked. This despite the fact that municipal bureaucracies are the ones most directly responsible for guiding the growth and day to day functions of many cities. It is as if you were watching a film where, unaccountably, one character's voice had not been recorded. You see them move, but have little understanding of what motivates or constrains them. Missing is an account of how municipal institutions and systems actively work to isolate and atomise policy priorities and create organisational cultures. These processes constrain adaptation and innovation, not simply in the area of climate change, but across all sectors of a municipality.
Likewise, it is striking that the literatures that I reviewed at the outset of this dissertation lacked any systematic overview of the multiple forms that public participation take. Calls for “participation” and “democratisation” ring hollow unless they are rooted in a more detailed discussion of what those very broad terms mean in practice, and how those specific manifestations live up to the broader hopes wrapped up in calls to pursue climate policy at the urban level. Despite emphasizing the need for public engagement in urban planning and urban environmental struggles, UPE and integrative studies of climate policy rarely move beyond hopeful evocations of the role of public participation.
In addition to adding both theoretical and empirical work to the areas of municipal institutions and urban participatory processes, I provided detailed overviews of the history of municipal environmental policy and public participation. This history provides essential context for understanding current approaches to climate policy in my case study cities of Portland and Durban.
Overall, this dissertation has made significant contributions to current understandings of urban responses to climate change on two fronts. Using a novel theoretical framework, it is the first 309 study to provide an in-depth view of the determining influence that institutional path dependency has on municipal efforts to respond to climate change. No other study in the current literature on cities and climate change provides the type of comparative, long-term insights into the workings of municipal institutions and policy leaders discussed in this dissertation. The theoretical framework used in that analysis is also a unique construction built specifically to facilitate the detailed institutional analysis of the barriers and drivers of urban climate policies and programs. I have shown specifically the ways in which organizational culture, and the path dependency that arises from it, hampers municipal efforts to engage with climate change in an innovative, effective, and integrated fashion. I have then outlined the ways in which, through networking, translation, and the decentralization of empowered creativity, certain municipal actors have managed to catalyse significant shifts in municipal practices.
The treatment of public participation in this dissertation also addresses a number of gaps in the existing literature. My research shows the limitations of the functionalist and bureaucratic approach to participation that dominates the projects of major development agencies and now influences the discourse of the IPCC. Looking beyond a large and polarized literature supportive of either state or community-led forms of participation, my research has pushed forward the engagement of discussions of urban climate responses with a more nuanced literature focusing on the relationships and synergies between multiple types of participation. Most significantly, I have highlighted the capacity of communities to go beyond “consultation” and to collectively lead ambitious and transformative urban climate projects.
Overall, the analysis contained in this dissertation makes clear some of the institutional and socio-political dynamics involved with moving from marginal to transformative urban responses to climate change. By bringing a new level of detail to discussions of cities and climate change, it also helps to free the discourse which surrounds the issue from the “local trap” of assuming that the urban scale is somehow intrinsically a more effective venue for climate action (Brown and Purcell 2005). As I have shown, while the potential of urban climate policy is clear, creating the systems of climate governance necessary to realize it is a complex task. In the following two sections I will summarize these contributions in more detail. 310
9.2 Section 1: Summary of Key Findings
In section one (chapters 3, 4, and 5) my goal was to chart the course of municipal climate policies as they moved through the bureaucratic structures of the local state. Far from being irreducible unitary actors, my analysis shows that municipal bureaucracies are complex social institutions whose internal dynamics have a crucial impact on the course of urban responses to climate change. In my research I have approached municipal bureaucracies as internally differentiated networks of distinct actors, structured by a combination of formal protocols and ingrained institutional cultures. This has allowed me to bring increased detail and specificity to generalized observations about the path dependency or inertia of large institutions. Rather than ossified, intransigent, and reactionary agencies, the picture that emerges from this approach is of organizations that are in a constant process of change as existing epistemologies and tactics are applied and modified in the face of new circumstances. To talk about path-dependency, therefore, is not to talk about why organizations don't change. Rather it is to talk about how organizations change, and why certain types of change and courses of action gain acceptance while other are marginalized or overlooked entirely. This form of socio-institutional analysis is particularly relevant to ambitious urban climate policies which, of necessity, present sometimes fundamental challenges to current approaches to urbanization.
In Durban and Portland, the impact of organizational culture on climate-related policies and projects was significant. Key projects faltered, or failed altogether, because they could not effectively negotiate the established practices, worldviews, and identities of key municipal departments. That was the story of the early challenges faced by Portland's “Green Streets” project, and the city's failed attempt to update its green building policy. In both cases, those driving the policies did not anticipate or effectively address the ways in which the policies were interpreted by other key actors. The initiatives struggled not because of technical challenges or poor design of the policy as such, but because they failed to gain legitimacy within the wider institutional context of the municipality. 311
The struggle to secure broad support for climate policy and pursue renewable energy in Durban tells a similar story. From their beginnings, climate policy there had to contend with the fact that both the competing entrepreneurial and developmental discourses which guided municipal planning perceived environmental policy as a threat. Climate policy somehow needed to surmount this institutionally ingrained 'anti-development' interpretation of environmental policy that was a legacy of earlier work on sustainable development. To address this, Debra Roberts and her department laid out a concerted campaign to translate climate policy so that it could appeal both to entrepreneurial and to developmental actors.
The challenges they faced show the power that organizational cultures, and the senior management who shape them, exert over the course of municipal climate programs. The inability of senior management within the electricity utility to see themselves as facilitators of a shift towards locally renewable energy, or to think of their clients as potential energy suppliers, is another case in point. They were not held back by a lack of information or opportunity, but because key actors within the utility were unable to reconcile the available information with their established worldview in a way that provided them with an appropriate strategy. In the language used by March and Olsen (1989, 2004), the casualties of both cities' climate programs fell because they simply were not seen as “appropriate” within the established practices, epistemologies, and social structures, that made up the worldviews of key municipal actors.
But, the real value of this socio-institutional approach to the analysis of municipal climate policies is not that it enables a detailed account of why projects fail. Understanding failure is important, but so is understanding success. The constructive aspect of this research is that it also provides a clearer perspective on what makes successful policies possible. The success of municipal climate policies depend in large part on strategies of translation (Latour 1987) that are able to align established institutional interests with specific climate policies. Coupling the concept of translation with a cultural analysis of institutional path dependency clarifies how policy leaders create a space for climate policies within the dynamic application of existing organizational cultures. It recognizes that the socially constructed meaning that surrounds specific policies is malleable, plural, and contradictory. The fact that a single initiative can have 312 multiple meanings provides the opportunity for creating coalitions of interest between actors with otherwise very distinct – even sometimes diametrically opposed – objectives.
These processes of translation have been central to climate policies in Portland beginning with the unlikely alliance between local businesses, environmental groups, and citizens that brought about the city's first energy policy at the end of the 1970s. Susan Anderson's success at leading change despite OSD's position on the margins of the municipal bureaucracy stemmed from her ability to continue this process of translation. Her office's work began by catering to other department's established economic concerns through energy efficiency programs. They then moved on to more assiduous and tactical acts of translation that aligned the Climate Action Plan with processes of institutional transformation already at work within other municipal agencies. The result has been an ambitious plan with far-reaching support.
In Durban, Debra Roberts had employed a comparable strategy of translation to protect vast tracts of municipal land from development. The economic valuation of ecosystems services allowed her to recast issues of biodiversity protection in financial terms that conformed with the municipality's need to increase quality of life while working with limited resources. This has had the added benefit of reducing emissions from land-use change and preserved a major carbon sink within the municipality. The EMD has also successfully used strategies on translation in their work on the Integrated Assessment Framework (IAF) and their adaptation planning work with the Water, Health, and Disaster Management sectors. These have all won support for climate policies by merging them with existing concerns over infrastructure, health, and coastal vulnerability.
But how far can translation go? As shown by the EMD's troubled energy strategy and OSD's stalled green building policy, successful translations in some areas are no guarantee that climate policies in other areas will encounter less resistance. And even if they could provide such a guarantee, is a strategy based on project-by-project negotiations what we should be aiming for? Is it the route that will lead us to a fundamental transformation of municipal practices and culture that both increases the scope, scale and integration of municipal climate policies; and increases municipal adaptive capacity so that future shifts and adaptations are more easily introduced? 313
The answer is clearly no. But acts of translation can still help prepare the ground for that kind of larger transition. In Portland, nearly a decade of opportunistic and incremental acts of translation established a broad network of relationships between OSD and the rest of the municipal bureaucracy. Despite its marginal position in the city's organizational hierarchy (or perhaps in part because of it) OSD had positioned itself as a key node that enabled collaboration across departmental lines and helped build an understanding of and engagement with climate change across the municipality. Initial acts of translation, marginal energy efficiency projects, for example, were OSD's calling card in these early stages. They helped to get them through the door. But in and of themselves they would not have been enough. OSD then built on these links by both formally (through appointments and joint hires) and informally (through regular contact and encouragement), supporting staff elsewhere in the municipality who were engaged with climate-relevant work.
The result was a decentralized network of individuals and teams throughout the municipality working on climate issues from within their own institutional contexts. This reflects Schoenberger's (1997) call for a decentralization of empowered creativity. Portland's internal climate policy network was built on the collective strength of multiple situated knowledges, each contributing to the creation of a strategic and organizational culture. It is still too early to comment on the success of Portland's 2009CAP. It is clear that its creation depended on drawing support and input from the decentralized network that OSD had cultivated between other municipal bureaus. If its implementation follows a similar course, the city may become a model for how initially marginal translations of climate policy can be used to initiate a process of network building around the collaborative design and implementation of climate policy. If successful, this approach could enable municipalities to create spaces for innovation, and tackle the true scale of their carbon footprint.
In Durban, the benefits to replacing hierarchies of control with looser networks of decentralized creativity were seen within the department of Water and Sanitation. But similar relationships between departments had yet to materialize. This may change rapidly. At the end of these case studies, the processes of translation that the EMD was undertaking with the Integrated 314
Assessment Framework and sectoral adaptation plans held the potential of establishing collaborative approaches to climate policy, linking multiple municipal agencies. The processes of translation implied in this work are much more profound than simply catering to existing departmental priorities. They represent a concerted effort to displace existing goals by convincingly redefining them in terms of climate policy. These efforts could also be coupled with the Integrated Development Planning process. Here, too, we will have to watch and wait to see if this strategy is capable of building up from small, discrete acts of translation to more significant institutional shifts.
In both cities, these attempts to create internal coalitions of support for climate policy have also had unexpected impacts on the municipalities' bureaucratic structures. Even though the EMD's energy strategy could not enrol the local utility in championing renewable energy, it did win over other powerful actors. The strategy, and the research that lay behind it, succeeded it translating the value of renewable energy for another audience: the City Manager and the heads of the Treasury, Procurement, and Infrastructure Departments. Their support led to the creation of the new Energy Office which, following a slow start during the period of my research, now seems to have attracted more skilled management and staff. It is driving an effective campaign to roll-out solar-hot water technology (based in part of the model developed by Solarize Portland) (Personal Communication, Derek Morgan Energy Office Head, 2011/08/15). Likewise, support for the EMD's adaptation-focused work has led to the establishment of a Climate Branch within the department. In Portland's case, the impact was even more substantial. The merger of OSD and Portland's Bureau of Planning to create BPS represents a dramatic reordering of the municipal bureaucracy. Placing the new bureau under Susan Anderson's directorship was a clear indication that her persistent efforts to use climate policies as a connective tissue within the municipality have paid off.
These institutional reforms are significant in-and-of themselves. But by calling attention to them I don't want to re-inscribe discussions of municipal climate policy within a Weberian quest for the most efficient and effective institutional design. While dedicated agencies empowered to oversee the integration of climate policy are important, what made these reforms possible, and 315 what will continue to make their work effective, was a long process of translation and network building that is diametrically opposed to the siloization and specialization central to Weber's bureaucratic model.
From a theoretical point of view, this first section of the dissertation makes several contributions to the critical frameworks that I have used to frame my analysis. First and foremost, it makes clear the necessity for analysis of urban climate governance that treats the local state with the same nuance as civil society actors and community groups. The local state is itself characterized by internal divisions of power, agency, and influence that all have a crucial impact on the course of urban climate policies. These case studies have shown that a socio-cultural analysis of municipal institutions is an effective way of engaging with this internal variation within municipalities.
The hybrid analytical framework that I assembled from the sociological works of Veblen (1898, 1914, 1918) and Merton (1944), as well as more recent work in political science (March and Olsen 1989, 2004), geography (Schoenberger 1997), and science studies (Haraway 1991, Latour 1987) has proven to be a productive way of parsing out the various factors that shape how institutions respond to changing circumstances. Together their combined insights help to stabilize the influential, but sometimes elusive, social and political dynamics of institutions. This makes them accessible to detailed analysis and study in a way that clarifies the dynamic processes that underlie path dependency. It also helps identify ways in which motivated actors can attempt to steer these processes in new directions.
This is particularly relevant to the literature on local and urban climate policies. Discussions of the synergies that exist between climate responses and other development goals are a central pillar of this large and growing body of work (Gibbs et al. 2002, Pielke 2005, Robinson et al. 2006, Wilbanks 2003, Van Asselt et al. 2005). These synergies, it is argued, allow climate and development policies to be woven together, thus providing a more effective approach to policy design and implementation. My work has shown that even when synergies clearly exist, they do not necessarily provide a less contentious foundation for new courses of action. While they may prove effective in the long term, synergies first need to gain acceptance through tactical (and 316 sometimes lengthy) processes of translation. This finding provides nuance to accounts that sometimes focus too narrowly on demonstrating possibilities and celebrating successes. This does not call into question the value of pursuing a combined approach to climate policy and other local sustainable development priorities. Quite the opposite. My analysis has shown this approach to be essential. But it has also given a more detailed account of the work involved in such an approach.
Finally, in a similar fashion, this analysis has affirmed both the value and the challenge of calls for decentralized empowered creativity made by Schoenberger (1997), and also present in a less radical form in the literature on new organic approaches to management (Baker and Branch 2001, Burns and Stalkker 1961, Deming 1994, Kotter 1996, Morgan 1997, Wheatley 1992). As summarized, Durban and Portland have benefited from decentralized networks of creativity operating at different scales. But efforts to create those networks were not uniformly successful. Where they were successful, another important question emerged: how can the decentralized engagement of multiple situated knowledges with climate change balance the need to guide diverse efforts towards a larger common goal? Particularly in an institutional context where a detailed understanding of the nature, scope, and scale of the climate challenge is often concentrated in the hands of a small and marginal department within the municipality. This balance between the centralization and decentralization of power is complex, and may operate in different ways at different stages in a municipality's engagement with climate change. Portland's approach, for example, of encouraging ongoing independent innovation, while also using the temporally limited climate planning process to create a unified direction and understanding of the challenge suggests one possible approach.
There are limits to my theoretical framework. While Schoenberger provided an analysis of how complex institutions can be shifted onto new courses, her call for decentralized empowered creativity is vague and simplistic. Her advocacy of the replacement of institutional hierarchies by networks of multiple situated knowledges is reminiscent of some of the more radical and binary perceptions of public participation discussed in section two. The more challenging reality of attempting to put these principles into practice in Portland and Durban draws attention to the 317 need for a more complete theorization of the relationship between hierarchy and decentralization, between control and creativity. This is something that my future work will address.
9.3 Section 2: Summary of Key Findings
Moving out from the internal working of the municipality, section two of the dissertation (chapters 6, 7, and 8) examined the role of public participation in the creation of more ambitious and far reaching urban responses to climate change. In each case study I examined both “invited” municipally led public consultation linked to specific planning and policy design processes, and community-driven “invented” forms of participation ranging from confrontational street protests to the community-managed installation of neighbourhood-scale renewable residential energy systems.
I approached these case studies from the point of view of a relational model of public participation that called for invited and invented forms of participation to be analyzed in recognition of their interrelationships. My focus rested largely on the synergies that can exist when both communities and the municipality are open to both types of engagement. Unlike the Habermassian and Foucauldian approaches to participation that idealize either formal processes or popular resistance to them, this model is based not on arguments about how participation should be carried out, but on the basis of the context within which public engagement around climate change will most likely take place. Formal participatory processes have become standard practice among many municipalities, and they coexist with a variety of civil-society groups engaging in their own ways on a variety of urban issues. Climate policy, rather than playing out on a blank slate, needs to be understood in terms of how it functions in a participatory context already defined by both state-led and community-driven forms of engagement.
Climate-relevant policies in both Durban and Portland were influenced by a mixture of invited and invented forms of participation. In Durban, my analysis focused on the way in which pre- existing participatory processes of both kinds began to engage with climate change. The 318 federally mandated consultation processes managed by South African municipalities made Durban an insightful case study of the challenges of addressing urban climate policy within existing participatory planning processes. Formal participation in Durban was generally undercut by an instrumental and bureaucratic approach to participation illustrative of many of the criticisms found in the literature on centrally managed forms of public participation (Esteva 1985, Mansuri and Rao 2003, Paul 1987, Cornwall 2002 ).
Specifically, public engagement with climate policy was hampered by technical problems. While the IDP consultation process did go some way towards building community capacity to engage in planning decisions, it completely excluded even the most basic types of information necessary for communities to understand and address their environmental impacts. The high-level endorsement of sustainable development and climate-change policy was not reflected in any of the materials or processes that structured community participation in the IDP process. This shows that climate policy cannot simply be slotted into pre-existing participatory processes. True engagement with the issue also requires providing citizens with the metrics and indicators needed to ground meaningful deliberation, planning, and action.
Invented, or community-led, forms of participation yielded more powerful results – specifically in the case of SDCEA's work in the South Durban Basin. But rather than contrasting the strength of Foucauldian acts of protest to the shortcomings of a Habermassian focus on institutional consensus-building, my research has shown that community mobilization had the greatest impact on environmental policy within the city at the overlap of these two forms of engagement. This supports the conclusions of the emerging literature on the synergies that link invited and invented forms of participation (Aylett 2010, Barnett & Scott 2007, Ballard 2007, Cohen 1996, de Souza 2006, Fagotto & Fung 2006, Melo & Baiocchi 2006, Silver et al. 2010). My work lends further support to the argument that there is a third position, outside of the binary between centrally- managed and community-driven participation, from which both types of participatory processes can be seen to interact with and reinforce each other.
SDCEA's success at catalyzing a more effective regulation of industrial emissions, for example, came from its ability to combine community-based protest with collaborative involvement in 319 state-led environmental impact assessment and regulatory processes. This hybrid of invited and invented participation allowed SDCEA to maintain its own legitimacy as a community representative, while also effectively counterbalancing the influence of business interests on municipal policy. This approach also attracted national level political attention and helped SDCEA mobilize the resources of an extensive international network of activists and funders.
Applying this approach to climate change, however, has been more problematic. SDCEA's campaign over petrochemical emissions and the safety of local residents can, at a conceptual level, easily be linked to a broader campaign against climate change. Petrochemical emissions, albeit of a different sort, are at the root of anthropogenic climate change. And the population of the Basin is highly vulnerable to the increase in coastal flooding and extreme weather events that climate change promises to unleash.
During the period under study, SDCEA worked rapidly to integrate climate change into their campaigns. They saw it as a powerful coalition building issue, as well as a clear threat to the residents of the area. But they have so far been unable to combine confrontation and collaboration with the same success as in their earlier campaigns. While climate change has become an important mobilizing force for anti-industry protest (especially in the lead up to COP 17), SDCEA has yet to arrive at a way to use this energy to drive any concrete or constructive projects for transforming the city itself. The IDP process could provide a venue for that coupling, but has not done so yet.
In Portland, I was able to examine invited and invented forms of participation that had been tailor-made to address climate change. Here as, in Durban, there were clear examples of the synergies that exist between grass-roots mobilization and formal state-led processes. Both Transition PDX's input into the Climate Action Plan consultation process, and the municipality's support for Solarize Portland's transformation of the local solar electricity market showed in detail how municipal and community actors working off of each other could push policies and projects beyond where they would have gone if each worked in isolation. Beyond individual examples of these synergies, Portland's ongoing history of this kind of virtuous cycle between civic and municipal actors has created what I have referred to as a “green civic dialectic”. This 320 process has sometimes been collaborative, and at other times confrontational, but it has always been driven by the tension produced as municipal or civil-society actors stretch the bounds of what has been done before raising the bar in a sort of continuous one-up-manship.
This finding goes beyond the limits of the general theoretical framework that I set out in my review of the participatory approach to climate policy. The ongoing iterative process described by the green civic dialectic is something not covered by the research which has formed the context for this dissertation. This dialectic is related to the general synergies between invited and invented forms of engagement. But an analysis of the dynamic and self-perpetuating nature of this relationship requires more than an understanding of the mutual benefits derived from individual overlaps between various participatory processes. I will pursue a more complete theorization of the green civic dialectic in my future research to tease out more clearly the conditions that make this kind of dialectic possible, and what it can bring to urban pursuits of integrated approaches to climate change.
Perhaps the most noteworthy characteristic of the green civic dialectic is that it is not an engineered success. That is to say that it is not the result of properly designed processes or key actors following established protocols96. Rather the dialectic depends on both community and municipal actors going beyond the officially established parameters for their roles in a given situation, and responding openly and constructively to the challenges posed by the other. Transition PDX, for example, created their own parallel participatory process within the consultation period for the 2010 CAP. They convened a significant percentage of the total number of people who gave input into the CAP, and their detailed feedback pushed the municipality to deepen its commitments in areas of climate policy where it was engaging for the first time. TPDX benefited from the institution-building opportunity, while the municipality gained the support and encouragement it needed to push its food policies further. This, in turn, sparked another round of civil-society participation in the form of the Urban Food Zoning Code Update Project. Solarize Portland tells a similar story. Only in this case it was the Neighbourhood Associations that lead the process, and municipal employees who stepped in – 96 In fact municipally-led processes in Portland (like the CAP consultation process) have institutionalized a narrow vision of public engagement focused on harvesting feedback from citizens and inspiring limited individual action. 321 going beyond their official roles – to provide the support needed for Solarize to extend its reach across the city.
My analysis in this second section of the dissertation also draws attention to two more general, but still significant, attributes of civil-society participation in networks of climate governance. First, experiences in both cities demonstrate that conflict and tension – far from being negative forces – can contribute to the creation of ambitious urban environmental policies. Second, beyond simply providing input or information to planning processes – as envisioned for example in the IPCC's discussion of public participation – my case studies have shown that communities and civil-society groups can play direct and central roles in the implementation of urban climate policies and programs.
On the first count, the fight against petrochemical emissions in the South Durban Basin is illustrative of the deep challenges that many cities will face as they attempt to go beyond narrow and project-based responses to climate change. The history of community battles against freeway expansion in Portland contains a similar message. Other municipalities and communities will have to address their own versions of these tensions when established economic drivers and development paths are shown to be in contradiction with commitments to climate action.
In some cases, a holistic approach to climate policy may reveal synergies between social, economic, and environmental goals, but not always. As well as “win-win” outcomes, the transition to low-carbon cities will also mean confronting “win-loose” situations. These will undoubtedly generate conflict. It is therefore imperative that future research be attentive to the conditions that allow conflict to be a positive force within transitions to low-carbon urbanism. These case studies in this dissertation provide some preliminary indications97. But it is a question that would benefit from direct study.
On the issue of implementation, both SDCEA and Solarize Portland show that community
97 In Durban, the presence of established constitutionally guaranteed rights of participation in environmental regulatory procedures were crucial to SDCEA's success. In Portland, an open an collaborative relationship between community groups and local political contenders established a precedent of constructive approaches to community-driven challenges to the status-quo. 322 organizations have much more to contribute than expressions of their views and preferences. Through independent “bucket sample” air-quality monitoring, and extensive community education and outreach, SDCEA has increased the capacity of both the community and the municipality to engage effectively with local environmental regulation. Solarize, by directly overseeing the roll-out of a city-wide solar energy campaign, shows the transformative power of programs run by members of the communities in which they serve. The theorization and study of systems of local climate governance needs to look closely at the ways in which community groups can participate directly in, and even lead, the design and implementation of, significant climate relevant initiatives.
These two conclusions may at first seem quite distinct one from the other. But both are directly related to the ambitious changes needed to make truly low-carbon urbanism a reality. On the one hand, it is unlikely that integrated urban responses to climate change can be pursued without some measure of conflict and contestation. Understanding the positive contributions that conflict can bring – both inside and outside of official participatory processes – therefore becomes crucial to enabling productive change. On the other hand, urban responses to climate change cannot rest solely on the shoulders of municipal governments. The changes required go well beyond the limits of municipal control and influence, all the more so in the current context of atrophying budgets and reduced human resources. Acting alone or in partnerships with local state actors, civil-society groups can extend the reach of systems of urban climate governance beyond the limits of municipal agency. Understanding how they do so, and what role municipalities can play in supporting their work, is therefore another crucial component in the study of holistic approaches to urban climate policy.
9.4 Cross-Cutting Findings
Overall then, what do the experiences of Portland and Durban say about the characteristics of effective integrated urban climate change policies more generally? The multiple in-depth interviews which form the foundation of this analysis have provided a detailed view of the dynamics of urban climate policies in both cities. Repeat visits to both case study sites also provided a view of the evolution of municipal and civil-society engagement with the issue. 323
Abstracting slightly from the more specific findings already summarized above, let me suggest a few general conclusions.
The first is that history matters. Despite the fact that climate change may be a relatively new issue, the course of local climate programs is profoundly influenced by past engagements with environmental and urban planning issues. The actions of municipal and civil-society climate leaders in both cities were directly influenced by the legacies of previous campaigns ranging in their focus from nuclear power and energy efficiency to freeway revolts and environmental justice struggles. Debra Roberts and the EMD's work on climate policy were interpreted by other key players within the city in light of their earlier experiences with the LA21 program. Susan Anderson and OSD's work was similarly shaped by earlier institutional energy efficiency campaigns.
This does not mean that historical precedent always determines future outcomes. But history does exert a complex, uneven, and even contradictory influence on the various actors engaged with urban climate governance. What can be an enabling tool for some may be a constraint or a liability for others. The course of Solarize Portland, for example, depended heavily on the lineage of the NA system in the city. But while community leaders worked through the system and revived the value of a decaying institution, municipal support staff avoided official NA channels reflecting a general municipal avoidance of a system that was viewed as fractious and parochial. Every city will have a different story, and this unique history will enable and constrain local climate leaders in different ways. Attention to this context is essential to understanding the creation of local networks of climate governance.
A second conclusion is that successful collaborations are an essential component of far reaching urban responses to climate change. Johnson (2008) argued that in Portland partnership building was a distinguishing characteristic of sustainability-focused civil-society groups. This conclusion holds true in this dissertation for integrated approaches to climate change across both cities. For municipal and community-based actors, the success or failure of attempts to unite various actors around a common initiative was a determining factor in the policy or program's success. 324
This is true of the strength SDCEA and Transition PDX derived from bringing together a coalition of local and international civil-society groups. It can also be seen in the ability of Portland's OSD to win support for climate policy from a variety of municipal actors, or the internal partnerships created by Durban's EWS. Where partnership building failed, as with Durban's Energy Strategy, the projects themselves also struggled to survive. The acts of translation necessary to build these partnerships will themselves occur within contexts partly defined by the prior history of urban environmental campaigns, and relationships within and between the municipality and civil-society groups. As with this historical context, the dynamics of this partnership building will be different in each city. But my research indicates that even in cities separated by significant socio-economic, geographical, and institutional differences, partnership building is a common and determinant variable of the success of urban responses to climate change.
The final broad conclusion that links my research in both cities covers the relationship that links formal and informal pathways for action. By “formal” I am referring to actions that move through official institutional channels, or explicit attempts to change those channels through institutional reform. I am also referring to civil-society participation in formal state-managed participatory processes. In this dissertation, these formal pathways have played an important part in advancing local responses to climate change. The creation of OSD, or the more recent establishment of Durban's Energy Office and Climate Change Branch, all provided crucial institutional homes for climate-relevant policies. Portland's neighbourhood association system, despite its problems, provided the support needed for the spread of Solarize, and SDCEA's air quality campaign depended on its participation in formal regulatory procedures.
But informal courses of action – ones that existed in parallel to or independent of formal channels – were essential to every successful example of urban climate policy covered in this dissertation. Susan Anderson's early interdepartmental work in Portland happened in a context where no formal procedures existed to guide her. Later work on the city's 2010 CAP depended on extensive informal exchanges between OSD and members of other bureaus. Transition PDX exceeded the boundaries established by the CAP's formal consultation process. The administrative support that Valdez and Rahr provided Solarize operated outside of the formal 325
ONI framework for engaging with NAs. In Durban, SDCEA's protests and activism outside of official participatory channels was crucial to its work. Explicit but still informal expectations were also what drove EWS' culture of innovation. The EMD's entire climate action program, until the formation of the climate branch, was undertaken outside of the department's formal mandate. There are also several examples of formal commitments and processes, such as the IDP's consultation processes or Portland's departmental Sustainability Ambassadors, which despite appearing promising on paper accomplished little if anything when it came to climate change.
Formal processes by their nature leave more of a paper trail than informal ones. They are recorded in reports, the minutes of meetings, and newspaper coverage of municipal affairs. They are also embodied in the institutional designs, procedures, and policies which they help to create. From a researcher's point of view, this makes them easily accessible to investigation and analysis. A review of a municipality's formal approach to climate change can be conducted in relatively short order with little other than a computer and an internet connection. I would also assert the existence of a hybrid Haber-Weberian impulse common to some municipal officials to solve problems through the creation of better and more appropriate institutional designs and systems. The results of this dissertation show how crucial it is to look beyond the boundaries of the “official” to understand the many types of informal engagement that make local climate action possible.
Both Durban and Portland show the power of emergent, transgressive, spontaneous, and unexpected outcomes that arise from the complexities of urban systems and the multiple actors who engage with them. By recognizing this I am not calling into question the importance of formal processes and institutional reform. But I am arguing that these processes of reform need to take into account, and even be designed to encourage, the multiple informal types of action which will happen in relation to or independent of them. I am also arguing that researchers need to pay attention to these informal processes and give them their due in the analysis of urban responses to climate change. 326 9.5 Limitations and Lacunae
The strength of this research is also its primary weakness. This dissertation is based on the extended and in-depth engagement that I maintained with my two case study sites. I conducted over 60 interviews in each city, spread across a two year period and touching on a wide cross- section of key municipal and civil-society actors. Repeat visits to my case study sites allowed me to capture how specific policies and programs developed over time, and to chart the evolution of municipal and civil-society engagement with climate change. But this depth of analysis comes at the cost of generalizability. While similar results in both cities – despite their significant socio- economic and geographical differences – point to the fact that my results may be applicable to municipalities more broadly, my methodology does not allow me to state this conclusively.
In my ongoing research (discussed further below) I would like to use these in-depth results as a guide for a broader survey-based appraisal of approaches to urban climate governance. This could then create a broader sense of current trends, challenges, and tactics, and provide an indication of other cities where a second round of in-depth investigation would generate interesting results.
The second shortcoming of this work is that it leaves largely undiscussed the role that economic development planning and local businesses play in shaping urban approaches to climate policy. In both Durban and Portland I collected interviews on the topic of green economic development, green building, and renewable energy. These have informed the analysis provided in this dissertation, but I have not been able to give them a full treatment here while staying within a reasonable length for this dissertation. To be complete, any treatment of urban climate governance should include a discussion of the relationships between local businesses and industry and municipal and civil-society actors. There are important questions that need to be answered regarding the degree to which municipal responses to climate change are limited by established economic development priorities, and (on the other end of the spectrum) the role played by innovative local companies in driving a reorientation of the local economy. There is also a need to couple this type of analysis with a more general analysis of the effectiveness and interaction of the two major economic narrative currently competing for influence over local 327 economic development: ecological modernization, and radical economic re-localization.
Finally, this dissertation has focused almost exclusively on the dynamics which surround urban approaches to the mitigation of ghg emissions. Were I to change one thing about this project, it would be to include in my analysis equal attention to adaptation. My focus on mitigation is reflective of the general discourse that surrounded urban responses to climate change at the outset of this research. In 2005, mainstream discussions of both local and international climate policy were still largely focused on mitigation. Major international organizations and agreements like ICLEI, the US Mayor's Pact, or the European Covenant of Mayors dealt exclusively with cutting emissions. (Most still do, in 2010 ICLEI became the only major international urban environmental organization to provide support for adaptation planning.)
My research replicated this focus. As I discussed in the Introduction, however, our understanding of the pace and likely severity of climate change evolved rapidly over the course of my research. Given the hazardous course we are currently on, an optimistic focus on mitigation is no longer appropriate (if it ever was). Portland's approach to climate change has so far overlooked issues of adaptation. But Durban, on the other hand, may in fact be among the first cities in the world to seriously and systematically engage with adaptation planning. The EMD's work on adaptation, which began in 2004, predates by a number of years the work of other leading cities like London (begun in 2007) and New York (begun in 2008). As such, my focus on mitigation – while capturing many of the central issues in Portland – has given only cursory coverage to an area where Durban is emerging as a global leader.
9.6 Future Research For my future research research I plan a significant expansion of the work that I have begun in this dissertation. To begin, I will begin by analyzing a portion of the data collected during my fieldwork that did not find a place in this dissertation. As mentioned in chapter 1, to keep this dissertation to a reasonable length, I have chosen to treat interviews conducted on the influence of business actors and economic development planning on urban climate policies separately. 328
Working with this already collected data will produce a series of publications of both theoretical and practical relevance. Since both Durban and Portland are emerging as leaders in green economic development, this analysis will contribute to the expanding literatures on ecological modernization (Blowers 1997; Buttel 2000; Desfor & Keil 2004; Gonzalez 2005; Gibbs 2000; Hajer 1995; Mol & Sonnenfeld 2000) and neoliberal environmental governance (Bakker 2005; Castree 2008; Heynen et al., 2007; Liverman 2004; Luke 2008; Prudham 2009; Slocum 2004a, 2004b) where the urban scale has become increasingly important. With many cities attempting to chart a similar course, the results of this research would also be timely and relevant for practitioners outside of academia.
Beyond this, in the next phase of my research I will test the results of the research covered here among a much larger sample of cities. The conclusions discussed above are the result of in depth comparative research between two cities. To study their transferability I will run an international survey targeting cities in Canada, the United States, Europe, and Africa. Recognized climate leaders will be included, but so will a broad spectrum of cities at various levels of engagement with climate change. The survey will focus on both the institutional and community dynamics of urban responses to climate change. This will allow for a broader analysis of the factors that affect the transition from climate government to climate governance. It will also allow me to verify some of the more specific findings of this dissertation, and capture other key variables influencing urban adaptation and mitigation strategies.
Many national and international urban climate change and “sustainable cities” rankings exist (ICMA 2010; EIU 2009, 2010, 2011a, b). But these invariably focus only on what cities are doing, not on how they are doing it. Projects are itemized and evaluated with no insight into the processes that made them possible, or stood in their way. The aim of my future research will be to apply the socio-institutional focus and tripartite theoretical framework that I developed during the writing of this dissertation to a much larger set of cities. This will make possible the first international comparative analysis of the factors that enable and limit effective urban climate governance. 329
The goals of this project are three-fold. First, it will allow comparisons both within and across categories defined by national location, population size, degree of climate engagement, and primary local economic drivers, Second,; it will provide insight into the socio-institutional strategies that enable innovation and change in complex urban systems. And, finally, it will help to define the parameters of a rapidly emerging sub-field focused on urban climate governance and provide a useful basis for a future round of in-depth research.
This will be a targeted (nonprobability) purposive sample. The sample group will be drawn from a sampling frame defined by the membership of the International Council For Local Environmental Initiatives' Cities for Climate Protection Program (ICLEI – CCP). Many cities are now pursuing climate and sustainability initiatives, and other urban climate networks exist. But the CCP is the oldest, largest, and most internationally representative such organization. The sample group (n = 200) will be subdivided into three categories: high performance (Leaders), medium performance (Achievers), low performance (Laggards). Cities will be categorized according to the self- reported “milestone” process that is central to the CCP process, and the categorization verified during survey responses.
In each city, two respondents will be recruited: the municipal official most closely involved with coordinating the municipality's climate response program, and a representative from the civil- society or community group most engaged in urban climate and environmental issues. The survey will be run on-line, and participants recruited through an initial e-mail and a follow-up telephone conversation which will allow them to clarify any questions they have about the study. Survey questions will be guided by the results of discussed in this dissertation, and combine both quantitative (Likert scale), closed-ended, and open-ended questions. Municipal and civil-society respondents will answer a common set of general questions concerning climate initiatives in their municipality. Each will then answer a more specific set of questions tailored to their sector. The survey will explore five core issues: 1. The characteristics of the institutional context that surrounds climate change policy in a given municipality or civil-society group (organizational structure, mandates, jurisdiction, funding, human resources). 330
2. The type of climate initiatives being undertaken by the municipality (projects, regulations, incentives, changes to planning processes, etc). 3. The types of partnerships in place to design and implement climate responses that go beyond formal municipal jurisdiction (both in terms of partnerships among siloized municipal agencies, and between municipal actors and civil-society or business actors). 4. The role of civil society groups in designing and implementing urban climate policies independently of municipally run programs. 5. The perceived relationships (positive, negative, or indifferent) between climate change policy and other local priorities (economic development, health, equity, etc).
Analysis of the survey data will, first, enable the production of a detailed portrait of the characteristics of cities at various levels of climate performance. Second, it will produce generalizable results about the institutional arrangements that allow cities to pursue ambitious climate policies. Third, it will outline the nature and effectiveness of the different urban approaches to climate governance. And, finally, this analysis it will help make clearer the role of non-state actors in the push for more integrated and ambitious urban responses to climate change.
Currently, no similar analysis has been conducted. Previous large scale studies have focused either on the overall effectiveness of transnational networks like the ICLEI – CCP (Betsill & Bulkeley 2004, Bulkeley et al. 2003) or relatively superficial evaluations of the scope and content of official municipal policies (Wheeler 2008, EIU EIU 2009, 2010, 2011a, b). Studies of urban climate governance more specifically have focused largely on case studies of one or two cities (Brownill & Carpenter 2009; Bulkeley & Betsill 2005; Rosol 2010; While et al. 2004). This next phase of my work will provide a much needed international cross-section of current approaches to climate governance. This will clarify what the state of current efforts and what central concerns and challenges are in need of further research and theorization. 331
9.7 Conclusions
"We have lost ten years talking about climate change but not acting on it. Meanwhile, evidence from the IPCC indicates that the problem is bigger than we thought. A curious optimism — the belief that we can find a way to fully avoid all the serious threats [it represents] — pervades the political arenas of the G8 summit and UN climate meetings. This is false optimism, and it is obscuring reality. The sooner we recognize this delusion, confront the challenge and implement both stringent emissions cuts and major adaptation efforts, the less will be the damage that we and our children will have to live with." – Parry, Palutikof, Hanson, & Lowe (2008) Nature
“To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.”
– Raymond Williams (2002) New Internationalist Magazine
In some ways the work that I have done in this dissertation has been an attempt to reconcile the spirit of these two quotes. Each crossed my desktop as I worked on this research and stayed in my mind as I moved through the various stages of fieldwork, analysis, and writing.
The first quote was written by four senior scientists who led the IPCC's 2007 assessment of the likely impacts of climate change over the course of this century. Their criticism of the tenor of international negotiations resonated with my own analysis of cities' responses to climate change. At the urban level as well, there is a pervasive false optimism. It also narrowly focuses discussions on mitigation, but in addition it has disingenuously implied that cities' mitigation efforts are occurring at the scale necessary to alter significantly the course of global climate change. Almost twenty years spent discussing how much cities could be doing has not, where most cities are concerned, translated into two decades of significant accomplishments. For cities to lead responses to climate change, more radical action needs to replace the false optimism that dresses up marginal tinkering as world-changing action. 332
But the second short line from Raymond Williams, the Welsh academic, playwright, and critic, contains an important challenge for anyone seeking to move beyond false optimism to a more honest engagement with the reality that climate change is putting before us. In my work, his challenge of creating a radical expression of the possibility of hope became manifest in the necessity of acknowledging the generally limited scope of urban climate action, while also making a more rigorous case for the what cities could accomplish, and how they could accomplish it.
This dissertation is the end result of this search for a more exacting, radical, and critical basis for being hopeful about urban responses to climate change. Cities do indeed have an important part to play in steering the course of our collective climatic future. Their bombast aside, the mayors of the world's major cities are right to point to the high levels of urban emissions as an important opportunity for action. But significantly reducing urban emissions is not an easy task, and there is nothing to be gained by implying that it is. It entails facing a reality defined by deeply ingrained institutional path dependency, inter-agency conflict, competing objectives, protest, confrontation, frustrating failures, and years of hard work with few resources. But lest all that seem rather despairing, my analysis has also shown that far from being intractable barriers to change all of these conditions are things that dedicated individuals and groups can tackle and transform.
The history of climate action in Durban and Portland was a difficult one. None of the key municipal policy leaders or community groups engaging with the issue found their work already done for them. In all cases they had to derive as much support as possible from the structures that were around them, while strategically working to extend their reach and influence beyond the limitations imposed by established practices. And often, if not always, they succeeded. Even in the relatively short period of time covered in this dissertation, municipal and civil-society actors in both cities substantially deepened their engagement with climate change, ran several successful projects and inspired significant institutional reforms. 333
These successes however did not follow a cut and dry process of identifying the sources of emissions and then setting about to reduce them. Rather, as my analysis has shown, this work has first and foremost been about managing the complex links that bind various actors together and make action possible. Rather than a vision of top-down control and centrally coordinated change, truly ambitious urban responses to climate change require something different. That something is not easily distilled into a “five milestone process” (of the kind promoted by ICLEI), or punchy quotes dolled out at press conferences. There is messiness in the process of mainstreaming engagement with climate change across a city. But this messiness is also the reality of the type of changes that we need to see.
There is reason to be hopeful about the role that cities can play in shifting our current climatic course. But that hope does not rest on the fact that far-reaching urban responses to climate change will be easy. Putting them in place will be challenging and complex. But “complex” is not a synonym for “impossible.” For an issue where there can be no easy answers or quick fixes, intricate multi-actor negotiations are not an obstacle to transformative climate change responses. They are what makes them possible. The work of this dissertation has been to show that rather than shying away from that complexity we need to engage with it. It is only by directly facing the supposedly insurmountable that it can be made tractable. Though challenging, that transformation is eminently possible, and it is that possibility that provides a true foundation for hope. It is only by building and participating in broad networks of urban climate governance that that hope will become reality. 334
Figure 1.1 The Evolution of the IPCC Reports (adapted from Banuri et al. 2001) 335
Figure 1.2 An Integrated Approach to Climate Change (AR4, Synthesis Report 2007) 336
Table 1.1 A Typology of the Localization of Approaches to Climate Change 337
Table 1.1 (cnt'd.) A Typology of the Localization of Approaches to Climate Change 338
Figure 2.1 Estimated Annual Carbon Emissions for the eThekwini Municipality (in millions tons CO2 /yr) (eThekwini 2007a, 24) 339
Figure 2.2 eThekwini Annual CO2 Emissions by Energy Type (eThekwini 2006, iii) 340
Figure 2.3 Multnomah County GHG Emissions by Sector (Portland 2009, 21) 341
Figure 2.4 2008 Multnomah County GHG Emissions by Fuel Source (Portland 2009, 21) 342
Table 2.1 Multnomah County GHG Emissions by Sector (in CO2e) (Portland 2009, 20) 343
Figure 3.1 A Simplified Weberian Bureaucratic Structure 344
Figure 3.2 Department of Water and Sanitation, Organigram (courtesy of DWS) 345
Figure 4.1 A Networked and Integrated Bureaucratic Structure 346
Figure 7.1 Industrial/Residential Mix in the South Durban Basin 347
Figure 7.2 Nelson Mandela Addressing Protesters in Front of Expanded SAPREF Refinery, 1995. (Artifact from SDCEA Offices, reproduced with permission) 348
Figure 7.3 SDCEA Protest In Front of Shell Refinery, South Durban Basin (undated, courtesy of SDCEA). 349
Figure 7.4 SDCEA Bucket Sampling Materials (undated, courtesy of SDCEA). 350
Table 7.1 Timeline of Public Participation Relevant Legislation and Policy in South Africa (adapted from Buccus et al. 2007, 8) 351
Table 7.2 eThekwini Ward Profile for Ward 18 – Pinetown Centre 352
Table 7.3 eThekwini Ward Profile for Ward 18 – Pinetown Centre (cnt'd) 353
Figure 8.1 Portland 2009 Climate Action Plan, Emissions Reduction Targets by Sector (Portland 2009, 13) 354
Figure 8.2 Map of Solarize Portland Installations ( Imagine Energy 2010). 355
Table 8.1 Portland 2009 Climate Action Plan, Individual Actions ( Portland 2009, 55) 356 Bibliography
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