Experimentation and Transition Toward Low-carbon Cities: Shanghai as a Case Study

Abstract

Cities are central to climate mitigation. Cities' transition towards low-carbon pathway has been practiced by some front-runners worldwide. There is a substantial body of literature studying the cities' multi-dimensional transformation process, indicating a variety of transition pathways and degrees of success in practice. Albeit with this growing trend in urban sustainability transition study, the aggregated efforts of existing knowledge and urban mitigation practices remains under-explored. Moreover, Urban sustainability experiments, which embody an innovative social-technical configuration central to a novel solution for sustainability, can be a useful leverage adopted by the local government for enabling the transition. Investigating how to enable and upscale urban sustainability experiment may unravel the internal mechanisms of transition, which needs further understanding in the literature.

This thesis aims to address some research gaps in the broad research field of urban sustainability experiment and transition, by investigating two main research questions, i.e., how to enable the incubation of the sustainability experiments in cities and how to facilitate the upscaling of innovations for transition. This research adopts a case study approach. I take Shanghai as the case study city because Shanghai has been undergoing rapid economic growth and transition, initiated many innovative practices towards low-carbon transition, and is a designated Pilot Low-Carbon City in China. Four main chapters in this thesis collectively answer the above two questions but with different focuses. Chapter II examines the governance structure that may enable the incubation of sustainability experiments for policy learning in cities. Chapter III unravels the innovative processes in contextualization to understand the enablers or barriers for innovation adoption. Chapter IV inspects direct and indirect effects of a city-level direct-funding scheme on urban low-carbon transition, with weighted focus on its catalytic effects on institutions and local capacity building. Chapter V investigates the policy schemes that enable the business sector's engagement and reveals their role in the transition. The findings and main arguments are summarized below.

In Shanghai's case, the city's low-carbon initiatives are embedded and integrated into its existing policy frameworks. A strong vertical linkage between the central and the local governments, and more importantly, a nested structure for innovative policy practices were identified, where a top-down design is met with bottom-up innovation and proactive adoption of enabling mechanism. The structure includes two layers of experiments that facilitate learning through policy experiments across scales. I examined the adoption of Energy Performance Contracting case in Shanghai to examine the contextualization process of an introduced experiment. We argue that post experiment adoption and contextualization requires mobilization and realignments of actors, resources, and institutional arrangements within the process of learning, which involves much more than simple duplication and often with distinctive outcomes, thus in many ways is an innovation in itself. The investigation into the direct funding mechanism show that , over the 11 years of its implementation, the fund has become a catalyst for a series of institutional changes in the city by enabling and enhancing cooperation across numerous governmental units in Shanghai. The case study also indicates that multiple policy schemes implemented in Shanghai, either directly supporting a specific low-carbon industry or enabling their growth by providing incentives to create the market demand, may play a role in triggering local low-carbon industries' development. Show more