Possibility and the climate politics of the Cities for Climate Protection campaign.

摘要

My research assesses municipal commitments to greenhouse gas emissions reduction as part of the Cities for Climate Protection (CCP) campaign. I conceptualize these actions in terms of the capacity of the local to affect larger scale processes. Cities are sites of production of greenhouse gas emissions. They are able to affect these emissions through control and/or influence of land and energy use, waste management and transportation strategies. Cities are also capable of political leadership and democratic interaction with the populace. The thesis makes a contribution to theoretical debates within Geography on scale, the production of space and the construction of nature and society. I use a theoretical framework that enables a normative critique of the CCP campaign. This framework also enables a view of potential in contradiction and possibility in sites and actions understood as compromised.; I employed a qualitative case study research design involving 135 in depth interviews in the three case study sites, Minneapolis, MN, Tucson, AZ and Seattle, WA as well as phone interviews with key informants in 12 cities. I analyzed quantitative data from the emissions inventories and examined the local action plans from 10 cities.; The CCP campaign challenges notions of the appropriate scale of response to global climate change. The campaign produces space. Cities act to ‘protect the climate’ via material changes to urban form and changes to the processes that shape cities. The CCP campaign's climate politics could forge political networks, foster participation and encourage dialogue in public spheres at multiple scales. However cities have not taken advantage of their potential to involve the public in these municipal responses to climate change. City climate action complements, challenges and is appropriated within discourses about spheres of action, ranges of possibility and relations among ourselves and with the environment. It localizes this issue by focusing on the relationship of climate change to aspects of urban livability such as clean air. Climate change disappears into urban sustainability and air pollution. Society is made in terms of the local relationship to the global and it is made in the options left open and closed off in determining what to do in cities about climate change.