320 Politikwissenschaft
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Several scholars concerned with global policy-making have recently pointed to a reconfiguration of authority in the area of climate politics. They have shown that various new carbon governance arrangements have emerged, which operate simultaneously at different governmental levels. However, despite the numerous descriptions and mapping exercises of these governance arrangements, we have little systematic knowledge on their workings within national jurisdictions, let alone about their impact on public-administrative systems in developing countries. Therefore, this article opens the black box of the nation-state and explores how and to what extent two different arrangements, that is, Transnational City Networks and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, generate changes in the distribution of public authority in nation-states and their administrations. Building upon conceptual assumptions that the former is likely to lead to more decentralized, and the latter to more centralized policy-making, we provide insights from case studies in Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil, and India. In a nutshell, our analysis underscores that Transnational City Networks strengthen climate-related actions taken by cities without ultimately decentralizing climate policy-making. On the other hand, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation tends to reinforce the competencies of central governments, but apparently does not generate a recentralization of the forestry sector at large.
South Africa’s energy sector finds itself in a gridlock situation. The sector is controlled by the state-owned utility Eskom holding the monopoly on the generation and transmission of electricity, which is almost exclusively produced from domestically extracted coal. At the same time, the constitutional mandate enables municipalities to distribute and sell electricity generated by Eskom to local consumers, which constitutes a large part of the cities’ municipal income. This is a strong disincentive for city governments to promote reductions in energy consumption and substantially limits the scope for urban action on energy efficiency and renewable energies. In the present case study, we portray the current development in South Africa’s energy policy and trace how deadlocked legal, financial, and institutional barriers block the transition from a coal-based energy system toward a greener and more sustainable energy economy. We furthermore point to the efforts of major South African cities to introduce low-carbon strategies in their jurisdictions and highlight key challenges for the future development of the country’s energy sector. By engaging with this case study, readers will become familiar with a prime example of the wider phenomenon of national political–economic obstacles to the progress in sustainable urban development.
Focusing on forest policy and urban climate politics in Brazil and Indonesia, the primary objective of this chapter is to identify domestic pioneers and leaders who, compared to other sectors, governmental levels or jurisdictions within the same nation-state, move ‘ahead of the troops’ (Liefferink and Wurzel, 2017: 2-3). The chapter focuses especially on the role of multilevel governance in bringing about pioneership and leadership and on the different types of that have emerged. It also explores whether and, if so, to what extent domestic pioneers and leaders attract followers and whether there are signs of sustained domestic leadership. The chapter identifies the actors that constitute pioneers and leaders and assesses the processes which lead to their emergence. The chapter authors take up Wurzel et al.’s (2019) call to open up the black box of the nation-state. But instead of stressing the role of non-state actors, the chapter authors focus on vertical interactions among different governmental levels within nation states. The main argument put forward is that international and transnational processes, incentives, and ideas often trigger the development of domestic pioneership and leadership. Such processes, however, cannot be understood properly if domestic politics and dynamics across governmental levels within the nation-state are not taken into account.