Strategic Bundling of Development Policies with Adaptation: An Examination of Delhi's Climate Change Action Plan

A growing number of cities in the global South are taking proactive action on climate change. Their plans provide insights into the potential for strategically bundling long‐term development policymaking with the climate agenda. In this article I study the case of Delhi, the first city in India to adopt a climate change action plan. Drawing on the literature on urban ecological security, I examine: (1) the adaptation challenges that Delhi faces; (2) the multiple motivations that underlie early action; (3) the key actors, strategies, and associated action domains outlined in the plan; and (4) the extent to which the plan seeks to bring about systemic change. Proactive action at the city level serves multiple strategic goals. Delhi's case is significant in illustrating how it has leveraged emergent opportunities to advance its short‐term development agenda, given the tight fiscal constraints and governance challenges it faces. The plan has been strategically formulated to enhance competiveness, facilitate image‐building, garner support for pet projects and access alternative sources of funding. But the short‐term orientation of the plan and its limited mechanisms for citizen engagement have severely restrained its capacity to address underlying social vulnerabilities or bring about transformative change.     

Urban Responses to Climate Change: Theories and Governance Practice in Cities of the Global South

Cities around the world have recently started to become ‘proactive’ initiators of climate strategies containing both mitigation and adaptation elements. The experience of these first movers has been studied and documented both empirically and, to a lesser extent, theoretically, primarily for cities in the global North. This symposium addresses related knowledge gaps by exploring case studies of urban regions in the global South confronting their projected climate change challenges, showcasing the experiences of Delhi, Santiago de Chile and Bogotá. Its specific aim is to explore the urban social response to nature change, the adaptation challenges faced by cities across the world and current practices of urban adaptation. Further, the symposium seeks to understand to what extent and in what respect current conceptual frameworks — which highlight urban ecological security and vulnerability — provide a useful context/framing to assist cities in confronting their challenges and to explain their actions. This introductory article examines current knowledge of the theory and practice of urban climate response. It introduces the concepts of ecological security and vulnerability and discusses the adaptive capacity of cities and how they are starting to respond to the emerging challenges of climate change. It concludes with a synthesis of the case articles and highlights some of the findings.     

适应型城市:将适应气候变化与气候风险管理纳入城市规划

气候变化对城市规划提出新的要求,即:通过人口、土地等资源的时空配置,最大限度地减小城市面临的潜在气候风险。本文从"城市发展如何考虑气候变化与风险管理需求"这一核心问题出发,探讨了气候风险、气候风险管理及适应型城市的概念和内容,指出在中国城市化提升阶段,城市发展迫切需要加强气候风险管理的意识和能力。基于国外城市应对气候变化风险的实践与经验,提出将适应与气候风险管理纳入城市规划,提出构建适应型城市的几个要点。     

Recasting Urban Governance through Leeds City Lab: Developing Alternatives to Neoliberal Urban Austerity in Co‐production Laboratories

This article reports on a research project, Leeds City Lab, that brought together partner organizations to explore the meanings and practices of co‐production in the context of urban change. Our intention is to offer a response to the crisis in urban governance by combining the growing academic and practitioner debates on co‐production and urban laboratories in order to explore radically different institutional personae that can respond to deficits in contemporary urban governance, especially relating to participation and disenfranchisement, and ultimately unlock improved ways of designing, managing and living in cities. Our analysis has identified four key ways in which co‐production labs can recast urban governance to more progressive ends: by moving beyond traditional organizational identities and working practices, embracing grey spaces of new civic interfaces, foregrounding emotions and power and committing to durable solutions. Ultimately, what we point towards is that urban governance can be more effectively enacted in co‐production labs that bring together universities and the public, private and civil society sectors on a basis of equality, trust and openness. These spaces have the potential to unlock a city's knowledge, resources and assets, to unpack complex challenges and to build capacity to deliver improved city‐wide solutions.     

Cultural Cooperation,Institution Building and Metropolitan Governance in Decentralizing Indonesia

The institutional turn in metropolitan governance has been influenced to a considerable degree by a rational choice approach, which views metropolitan governance as essentially created by local actors to reduce the transaction costs of inter‐jurisdictional public‐service provision. Another influential theoretical route follows a historical approach, which emphasizes the role of the state structure in producing formal institutions to enable governance at the regional level. Both approaches tend to be formalistic, simplistic and deterministic in nature, thus neglecting the dynamic interactions between the actors and their more informal, intangible, yet more basic, legitimate institutions, such as culture. This article examines the dynamic role of culture in metropolitan governance building in the context of decentralizing Indonesia. The analysis focuses on ‘best‐practice’ experiences of metropolitan cooperation in greater Yogyakarta, where three neighbouring local governments known as Kartamantul have collaboratively performed cross‐border infrastructure development to deal with the consequences of extended urbanization. We draw on sociological institutionalism to argue that building this metropolitan cooperation has its roots in the capacity of the actors to use and mobilize culture as a resource for collaborative action.     

Beyond Circular Thinking: Geographies of Transit‐Oriented Development

Transit‐oriented development (TOD) plays a significant role within contemporary planning policies for ‘smart growth’ and sustainable development, particularly in Europe and North America. As a well‐rehearsed practice, this planning model is due for critical assessment and improvement in terms of its ability to incorporate dynamic and heterogeneous socio‐spatial processes as matters of concern. Analyses of the conditions for ‘making TOD work’ in the scholarly and professional literatures tend to focus on the ‘node’ and ‘place’ qualities. While elaborations on node analysis (primarily based on accessibility measurements) abound within empirical research, discussions of place‐specific assets are limited in scope and often spatially bounded by the circle defined by a 10‐minute walk. This essay examines the use of this generic ‘circle’ model, and how it normatively frames how place is understood in TOD studies. We argue that the circle enhances a Euclidean understanding of the site, which favours a static and homogeneous spatial analysis of accessibility and density rather than (other) place qualities relating to dynamic socio‐spatial processes. Finally, we argue that relational geography can facilitate an analysis of place qualities beyond the circle—one in which both the continuities and shifting settings of the wider context are meaningfully taken into consideration.     

Planning Histories and Practices of Circulating Urban Knowledge

This symposium creates and stimulates new dialogue and cross‐disciplinary exchange between planning theorists and geographers in researching the transfer of urban policy and planning models, ideas and techniques. The symposium challenges a restricted historical focus in much of the emerging geographical literature on urban policy mobilities by drawing on a rich tradition within planning history of exploring and documenting the trans‐urban travel of planning ideas and models over the last 150 years. It is argued that this longer‐term perspective is required to highlight important historical continuities and institutional legacies to contemporary urban policy circuits and pathways and to question what is particularly new, distinct and innovative about an intensification in the travel of urban ideas, plans and policies over the past decade — and the accompanying scholarly interest in them. The symposium also uses the emphasis on particular details and specific experiences within planning histories to foreground and develop approaches, particularly from recent geographical scholarship, that investigate the contingent and embodied practices and wider epistemic contexts that enable — or hinder — contemporary policy transfer.     

Facilitative Leadership and the Challenge of Renewing Local Democracy in Italy

Participatory arrangements have become a popular way of addressing modern challenges of urban governance but in practice face several constraints and can trigger deep tensions. Facilitative leadership can play a crucial role in enabling collaboration among local stakeholders despite plural and often conflictual interests. Surprisingly, this style of leadership has received limited attention within debates linking urban governance and participatory democracy. We summarize the main insights of the literature on facilitative leadership and empirically develop them in the context of participatory urban governance by comparing recent participatory processes in two Italian cities. Whereas in one city facilitative leadership gradually emerged and successfully transformed a deep conflict into consensual proposals, in the other city, participatory planning further exacerbated pre‐existing antagonism, and local democratic culture was only later slowly reinvigorated through bottom‐up initiative. These diverging pathways explain how facilitative leadership is: (1) important for making things happen; (2) best understood as situated practices; (3) an emergent property of the practices and interactions of a number of local actors and (4) a democratic capacity for dealing with continuous challenges. Key to this style of leadership is understanding participatory urban governance as an ongoing democratic process.     

Do policymakers need to cool the UK housing market?

The combination of government schemes and a recovery in the wider economy underpinned a robust pickup in housing transactions and house prices through 2013. But there is no evidence of a housing bubble across most of the country. Across the majority of regions prices are still below previous peaks in nominal terms and much lower still in real terms. Meanwhile measures of affordability and indebtedness are in a much better state than they were prior to the financial crisis. The exception is London, where supply shortages and strong demand have pushed both the price‐to‐income ratio and average income multiple back to previous highs. An improving macroeconomic backdrop and ongoing support from Help to Buy should ensure that demand continues to strengthen, supporting further growth in transactions. There has been a strong supply response over the past nine months and this should continue, which will help to keep a lid on price growth. Divergent macroeconomic prospects across the regions will lead to a wide variation in house price growth, with London expected to lead the way. We do not see a case for changing the terms of Help to Buy, particularly given that the most likely source of a bubble is London, where the impact of Help to Buy is likely to be small. In our view, the average income multiple is crucial and macro prudential tools should be used if it continues to rise above previous peaks in any regions. The most likely cause of a bubble at the national level would be an inadequate supply response. Alongside its policies to support demand, the government should implement a series of measures aimed at increasing supply, including planning reform, and it could also consider using its low borrowing costs to fund public sector house building.     

促进区域基本公共服务均等化的财政政策研究--以广东省为例

基本公共服务均等化是打造服务型政府的重要内容,是缓解社会矛盾的现实需求,更是推进国家治理体系和治理能力现代化的必然要求。基于此,论文运用泰尔指数测算广东省基本公共服务支出均等化水平,并从经济发展不平衡、人口增长、财权与事权匹配以及公共资源配置方面分析原因,为促进广东省区域基本公共服务均等化提出了相应的政策建议。     

A relational view of climate adaptation in the private sector: How do value chain interactions shape business perceptions of climate risk and adaptive behaviours?

Studies exploring climate change adaptation in the private sector have seldom investigated the effect of business network interactions on climate vulnerability and adaptation outcomes. This paper proposes a novel theoretical framework to explore how business–network dynamics affect risk perceptions and adaptive behaviours in business firms. The framework is empirically grounded in a comparative analysis of business–network dynamics from three agricultural value chains in Jamaica that are vulnerable to climate change impacts. The results illustrate how the exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity of value chain actors are influenced by business interdependencies and interfirm relationships. We find that the level of formality of business exchanges (contractual or noncontractual), the level of resource interdependency, and the ability to diversify access channels to critical resources can influence the propagation of climate‐related risks and influence actors' exposure and sensitivity to those risks. The study also offers evidence of the role played by bonding and bridging relational ties on adaptive capacity. The framework and findings provide a foundation for a new research agenda exploring a relational view of firm adaptation strategy in response to climate risks.     

Necrotecture: Lifeless Dwellings and London's Super‐Rich

This article problematizes the relationship between the global super‐rich and processes of property development that have generated large volumes of underused residential space. Evidence is presented to show that much of London's new skyline is underused or lies entirely empty, so that one interpretation of this new landscape of super‐prime residential development is that it is a kind of dead residential space or necrotecture. These relatively lifeless spaces can be interpreted as the particularly wasteful result of continuing rounds of international capital investment in the built environment and the overconsumption of housing and other resources by the super‐rich. Necrotectural forms, seen in new towers and spectacular homes, appear to index a massive misdirection of development capacity, even as the city experiences a massive social crisis that continues to be played out in the wider housing market.     

China's Emergent City‐Region Governance: A New Form of State Spatial Selectivity through State‐orchestrated Rescaling

This article examines the emergence of city‐region governance as a specific state spatial selectivity in post‐reform China. The process has been driven by the state in response to the crisis of economic decentralization, and to vicious inter‐city competition and uncoordinated development. As part of the recentralization of state power, the development of urban clusters (chengshiqun) as interconnected city‐regions is now a salient feature of ‘new urbanization' policy. I argue in this article that the Chinese city‐region corresponds to specific logics of scale production. Economic globalization has led to the development of local economies and further created the need to foster ‘regional competitiveness'. To cope with regulatory deficit at the regional level, three mechanisms have been orchestrated by the state: administrative annexation, spatial plan preparation and regional institution building, which reflect recent upscaling in post‐reform governance.     

Can businesses move beyond efficiency? The shift toward effectiveness and equity in the corporate sustainability debate

The aim of this paper is to articulate to a wider practitioner and academic audience the value and importance of moving the sustainable business agenda beyond the notion of eco‐ and socio‐efficiency. This in itself is not a new development in the sustainable business literature. What are emerging are integrated models of corporate sustainability that link together the six criteria that a sustainable business will need to satisfy, namely eco‐efficiency, socio‐efficiency, eco‐effectiveness, socio‐effectiveness, sufficiency and ecological equity. At this stage these new models of corporate sustainability need further theoretical development, taking corporate sustainability beyond the business case (eco‐efficiency) towards an integrated approach that links in the social and natural cases. A new model for sustainable entrepreneurship is presented and discussed in the context of a social entrepreneur case study. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

The Governance of Corporate Responses to Climate Change: An International Comparison

In response to pressures from governments, investors, non‐governmental organizations and other stakeholders, many large corporations have adopted a variety of carbon and energy management practices, taken action to reduce their emissions and set targets to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Using the case of international retailers, this article examines whether, and under what conditions, non‐state actors might be capable of assuming the governance roles that have historically been played by national governments. This article concludes that external governance pressures can, if they are aligned, robust and of sufficient duration, have a significant influence on internal governance processes and on corporate strategies and actions. However, the specific actions that are taken by companies – in particular those that require significant capital investments – are constrained by the ‘business case’. That is, companies will generally only invest capital in situations when there is a clear financial case (i.e. where the benefits outweigh the costs, when the rate of return meets or exceeds company targets) for action. That is, the extent to which external governance pressures can force companies to take action, in particular challenging or transformative actions that go beyond the boundaries of the business case, is not at all clear. This is particularly the case if the business case weakens, or if the opportunities for incremental change are exhausted. In that context, the power of non‐state actors to force them to consider radical changes in their business processes and their use of energy therefore seems to be very limited. Copyright © 2016 The Authors. Business Strategy and the Environment published by ERP Environment and John Wiley & Sons Ltd     

Determinants of board size in an emerging market

Drawing largely upon the selective adaptation paradigm, the resource dependence literature, and the capture argument, we examine determinants of board size using panel data set of Korean‐listed companies that have experienced dramatic changes in their governance system following the 1997 Asian crisis and regulatory reforms. Observing that the firm's compliance with statutory requirements reflects a strategic choice, our results also investigate the idea that the determinants of board size differ between firms actively and passively adapting to regulatory reforms. For actively adaptive firms, board size increases along with firm complexity but it varies inversely with the power of controlling shareholders (CSHs). In contrast, the roles of complexity and CSHs are not significant but seniority‐based promotion is an important factor to increase the size for the passive firms. Our results suggest that determinants of board size differ depending on corporate strategies to comply with statutory requirements in an emerging market where family business is dominant and corporate governance system has substantially changed.     

基于云计算的电子商务模型的构建

近年来,各大IT企业相继推出了云战略,将帮助企业解决应用电子商务过程中遇到的问题,避免了因构建IT基础设施、培养专业人才而投入巨大的成本。它进一步降低了企业应用电子商务的门槛,跨越传统的营销模式,为企业的发展提供了广阔的空间。因此,本文阐述了我国电子商务应用的发展现状、存在的问题及云计算的基础理论,并分析构建了基于云计算的电子商务模型。     

Thermal Eco‐cities: Green Building and Urban Thermal Metabolism

Eco‐city projects are becoming increasingly prevalent throughout the globe and are often marketed as ‘new’ urban environments focused on achieving sustainable urban living while promoting environmental–economic transitions towards a low‐carbon technological and industrial base. The article argues for the need to consider the thermal aspects of urban metabolism, while at the same time focusing on the link between individual buildings and eco‐city master plans and wider economic development strategies at a state level. In so doing, the article encourages critical analysis of eco‐city design and planning, while keeping a focus on the role of specific building structures within eco‐cities as examples of the intermeshing of what can be termed a ‘political ecology of scale’ which stretches from specific buildings' climatic characteristics, to the metabolic master plan for eco‐cities, to provincial, regional and state‐level plans for the integration of eco‐cities within wider economic and political development trajectories. The article focuses on Masdar, in Abu Dhabi, an eco‐city under construction at the time of writing.     

Urban Climatology Applied to Urban Planning: A Postwar Knowledge Circulation Failure

The article discusses an instance of knowledge that failed to circulate — the application of urban climatology in town planning. This field of applied science was systematized in German‐speaking universities and cities and remains most firmly established in North‐Central Europe. In the decades after the second world war successive commissions and study groups of the World Meteorological Organization, the International Federation of Housing and Planning, the Confédération Internationale du Bâtiment and the International Society for Biometeorology sought to spread awareness of climatological factors among planners and architects worldwide. The article examines the organizations and individuals involved in this campaign, describes their meetings, publications and outreach, and assesses the disappointing impact. The legacy of this failure is considered in the context of present‐day interest in planning for carbon mitigation and climate‐change adaptation.     

面向客户的项目管理:一种新型模式

外部环境的不断变化使得传统项目管理的局限性彰显,面向客户的项目管理是从传统项目管理发展而来的,能使企业更好地应对环境变化和市场不确定性的一种新型模式。同传统的项目管理相比,面向客户的项目管理具有更广泛的适用范围和更完善的流程设计,其倡导以客户为中心,以客户满意为最高目标,强调客户在整个项目管理运作中的作用,主要通过质量的持续改善和高客户关系管理来达到客户的更高满意度,最终形成长期合作共赢关系。