Cities

The practical imperatives of debating trade-offs and priorities in pursuing green city development can contribute to the maturing of governance relationships.

In contexts with strong local government it is possible to envisage a range of planning, regulatory and financing instruments to advance green infrastructure investments, green economic development and a multitrack approach to greater urban sustainability. In countries where local government is weak or marked by mistrust and disinterest due to its inefficiency and/ or corruption, it is important to underscore that unless broad-based cultural movements are fostered that can shift the aspirational horizons of ordinary people, it will prove very difficult to promote and institutionalise the numerous green city reforms proposed in this chapter.

In poorer cities, the building up of such capacities is important, as is their access to financial resources for investing in the various sectors of green cities. Here it may be prudent to adopt a more pragmatic and minimalist approach, which primarily commits municipal sectors such as water, waste, energy and transport to a limited number of strategic goals. These are the major areas where the support from national governments and international organisations is needed.

Coalitions that work to advance green city principles and practices need to identify practical ways in which they can design and execute mass-based campaigns

to make alternative approaches to

routine consumption a desirable option for ordinary people, especially the middle and working classes but also the large segments of the population that one can term the working poor. In these contexts, it is important to drive home the connections between poverty reduction through effective slum policies, which of course can be dovetailed with aspects of green infrastructure such as decentralised systems and community maintained systems.

However, external (to the local) actors, be they funding agencies or national departments who operate through local offices, are also working on city-wide infrastructure investments and these protagonists should be targeted as well to ensure that they see the potential value of technological

leap-frogging and more

by diverse stakeholders. Such a coalition can promote the idea of a long-term strategic plan for the city complementing the more conventional spatial and environmental planning instruments. For example, the internationally-based Cities Alliance (2007) promotes so- called City Development Strategies (CDS), as appropriate tools to address the nexus between sustainable economic growth and ecological preservation and restoration. They are based on the premise that local governments have little power and funding to promote or impose change, and that partnerships are the only practical way forward.12

This should be backed up by effective resource allocation and decision-making

systems that demonstrate to

everyone in the city that systematic progress is being achieved towards the long-term goal of becoming a green city. To date, however, city level green economy initiatives have been largely decoupled from national policy frameworks. Glaeser and Kahn (2010), in a study of US metro areas, find that the cities with the lowest per capita CO2

emissions also tend to have the tightest

planning restrictions. They suggest that “by restricting new development, the cleanest areas of the country would seem to be pushing new development towards places with higher emissions” (Glaeser and Kahn 2010).

To avoid a patchwork of uncoordinated targets, goals, and programmes, and to allow the most cost-effective emission reduction opportunities to be exploited, national and city initiatives need to be synchronised as part of a coordinated design and implementation of policy instruments. In the example of the USA above, the city-level coordination failure could be dealt with at national level through a personal carbon tax that internalises the environmental costs of household behaviour, including location decisions. Governance restructuring witnessed in many parts of the world often simultaneously involves devolution as well as powers shifting to supranational bodies. These processes increase

the role of municipalities as independent community-

based decentralised delivery systems. But such an ideal immediately sounds naïve because these technological approaches effectively undermine the political control of national elites over local territories. In this sense, advancing effective and deep democratic institutions become a truly foundational enabling condition for green cities.

Effective governance will also come into its own through a substantive agenda or vision that is shared

policy actors. In addition, they play an important role in implementing national policies at the local level and in shaping the immediate living environment via long standing municipal policy instruments. However, these also need to be improved as decentralisation efforts in most developing countries, and especially in least developed countries remain deeply flawed, uneven and partial (Manor 2004).

Within this framework, it is possible to generalise from everyday practice, and suggest a potential distribution

12. “Local governments alone cannot turn a city around. They control a minuscule portion of the capital available for city building and often have an even smaller proportion of the available talent in urban innovation. Although important as catalysts and as representatives of the public interest (in theory, at least), local governments should work in partnership with private interests and civil society to change a city’s developmental direction – CDS processes are based on private, public, and civil society partnerships” (Cities Alliance 2006).

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