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.     

“碎化”与整合:大都市区管治理论演进探讨

政治"碎化"是大都市区发展面临的棘手问题.根据看待大都市区政治"碎化"的态度及其解决方案,文章将大都市区管治理论演进轨迹划分为三次"潮流":主张建立大都市政府的传统区域主义、主张多中心管治结构的"公共选择"学派和主张网络化地方合作的新区域主义,进而分别阐述不同理论"潮流"的核心思想及其应用.     

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     

治理现代化、审批改革与营商环境:改革成效与政策启示

治理体系和治理能力现代化对"放管服"改革提出了新的要求,优化营商环境和激发市场主体活力对于经济结构换挡升级具有十分显著的作用。本文基于数据分析发现,审批制度改革有效地减少了注册公司的时间、成本和步骤,极大地提升了企业获得执照和许可的便利程度。研究发现,审批制度改革主要是通过提高法治化水平来优化营商环境。实现治理现代化,深入推进"放管服"改革,需要全面实施负面清单制度和提高市场监管的法治化水平,持续优化政务服务。     

Day Zero and The Infrastructures of Climate Change: Water Governance,Inequality, and Infrastructural Politics in Cape Town's Water Crisis

From 2015 to 2018, Cape Town, South Africa, was marked by fears of a water crisis in which the city's taps threatened to run dry. We argue in this article that Cape Town's crisis of water scarcity was a product of the convergence of ongoing contradictions in South African water governance as they came into contact with shifting infrastructural priorities associated with climate change. In its response to the possibility of a financial crisis brought on by reduced water consumption, the city withdrew the universal provision of free basic water (FBW) and reconfigured existing tariff structures. Both changes meant that the city moved further into commercialization and valuation practices in the context of restricted monetary flows. Based on an understanding of contemporary governance in South Africa as reflective of an often contradictory need to balance municipal budgets while also correcting for apartheid inequities, we argue that ongoing experiences of climate change are stretching existing municipal budgets in ways that threaten to deepen existing inequalities. Ultimately, we suggest that Cape Town's crisis is critical for understanding how climate change is reconfiguring existing governance dynamics at a planetary scale, thus offering insights into what form urban climate change adaptation may take in the future.     

基于可持续发展的中国城市治理体系:理论阐释与行动分析

良好的城市治理是实现城市可持续发展的关键.基于可持续发展的中国城市治理.其目标体系、组织体系、过程体系、制度体系、绩效体系都有别于现行的城市管理.建设符合城市可持续发展要求的中国城市治理体系,必须对现有的城市管理模式进行大幅度的变革.这种变革需要从表层的组织结构、体制、政策和深层的文化、理念等多方面着手.在理念上确立和体制上保证政府自身首先以可持续发展为行动导向,以有效的"强政府"代替全能的"小政府",推动非政府组织发展,激发和扩大公众参与,创新政策以激励城市的可持续发展等,都是建设可持续发展的城市治理体系的重要路径.     

Delivering Flagship Projects in an Era of Regulatory Capitalism: State‐led Privatization and the London Olympics 2012

Much of the urban studies literature on the London Olympics has focused on its social legacies and the top‐down nature of policy agendas. This article explores one element that has been less well covered — the contractual dynamics and delivery networks that have shaped infrastructure provision. Drawing on interviews and freedom of information requests, this article explores the mechanisms involved in the project's delivery and their implications for broader understandings of urban politics and policymaking. It assesses contemporary writings on regulatory capitalism, public–private networks and new contractual spaces to frame the empirical discussion. This article argues that the London Olympic model has been characterized by the prioritization of delivery over representative democracy. Democratic imperatives, such as those around sustainability and employment rights, have been institutionally re‐placed and converted into contractual requirements on firms. This form of state‐led privatization of the development process represents a new, and for some, potentially more effective mode of governance than those offered by traditional systems of regulation and management.     

Contradictions of the Climate-Friendly City: New Perspectives on Eco-Gentrification and Housing Justice

As local governments and corporations promote ‘climate friendliness’, and a low-carbon lifestyle becomes increasingly desirable, more middle- and upper-income urban residents are choosing to live near public transit, on bike- and pedestrian-friendly streets, and in higher-density mixed-use areas. This rejection of classical forms of suburbanization has, in part, increased property values in neighborhoods offering these amenities, displacing lower-income, often non-white, residents. Increased prevalence of creative and technology workers appears to accelerate this trend. We argue that a significant and understudied socio-environmental contradiction also occurs where the actual environmental outcomes of neighborhood transformation may not be what we expect. New research on greenhouse gas emissions shows that more affluent residents have much larger carbon footprints because of their consumption, even when reductions in transportation or building energy emissions are included. We describe an area in Seattle, Washington, the location of Amazon's headquarters, experiencing this contradiction and show a distinct convergence of city investments in low-carbon infrastructure, significant rises in housing prices and decreases in lower-income and non-white residents. We conclude with a discussion of a range of issues that require more attention by scholars interested in housing justice and/or urban sustainability.     

风险社会理论与城市公共安全——基于人口流迁与社会融合视角的分析

在我国社会转型和快速城市化的背景下,城市人口发展所面临的风险呈现出多元化特征,人口流迁与社会融合逐步成为影响城市公共安全的现实因素。流动人口缺乏在城市的原始积累,生存状态不体面,对城市社会缺乏认同感和归属感,而户籍制度仍然是制约流动人口城市融合的主要障碍。在风险治理和安全保障方面,政府需要通过合理的制度安排解决农民工在城市体系中的制度化生存问题,通过扩展流动人口的社会支持网络,增强其归属感。同时,还必须加强流动人口的常态性、制度性管理和政府公共服务能力建设,提高流动人口素质和对城市社会的自适应能力。     

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.     

Remaking Equality: Community Governance and the Politics of Exclusion in Bogota's Public Spaces

Bogota's public space policy is often credited with promoting inclusionary principles. In this article, I explore critically the content of Bogota's articulation of equality in public space policy. In so doing, I present a critical view of the work Bogota's insistence on equality does to mediate class relations in the city, relying on deeply held conceptions of both social extremes. This results in the construction of a version of social harmony in public space that at once depoliticizes the claims to public space of subjects such as street vendors and the homeless and claims a new role for the middle class in the city. The analysis focuses on two examples of community governance schemes, documenting the logics and methods used by communities to implement official visions of equality and justify the exclusion of street vendors and homeless people from the area. By looking at the articulation of these exclusions in local class politics through seemingly inclusionary rhetoric, the article accounts for ‘post‐revanchist’ turns in contemporary urban policy, while anchoring its production in local processes of community governance.     

Ponds,Power and Institutions: The Everyday Governance of Accessing Urban Water Bodies in a Small Bengali City

While researchers in the growing field of urban political ecology have given significant attention to the fragmented hydroscape that characterizes access to drinking water in the global South, so far the (re)production of other urban waters and its related power relations have been underexplored. This article seeks to contribute to filling this gap by exploring the everyday negotiations over access to urban water bodies, in particular ponds. These are understood as a composite resource that is simultaneously water, land and public space. This analysis draws on a case study from a small city in West Bengal, India, and is based primarily on data from open interviews with different actors with a stake in urban ponds. The article demonstrates that in a context of ambiguity of the statutory governance regime and fragmented control, the (re)production of the pondscape is embedded within complex relationships of power whereby social marginalization can be offset at least momentarily by local institutions such as neighbourhood clubs and political parties.     

When Mayors Go Global: International Strategies,Urban Governance and Leadership

An enigma lies at the heart of this article. In December 2006, the mayor of Saint‐Étienne, Michel Thiollière, was elected as the fifth best mayor in the world by the internet site City Mayors. Yet no publicity was made locally around this award. Taking this anecdote as a starting point, this article deals with the motivations that can lead a city mayor to become involved in urban international relationships' policy (city twinning, participation in cities networks, study trips, etc.). On the one hand these activities provide resources for building up political legitimacy and for electoral control, and on the other they provide resources for policy solutions to urban problems in the public realm. Nevertheless, in a context of transformation of the process of legitimization of urban elected officials, the second kind of resources seems to be the most sought after in mayoral involvement in international activities.     

Governing Enclosure: The Role of Governance in Producing Gated Communities and Guarded Neighborhoods in Malaysia

Enclosed residential areas are proliferating in Malaysian cities, in common with many other parts of the world. The production of gated communities and guarded neighborhoods in Malaysia reveals the active role of the state in creating conditions that support enclosure and securitization of space. This article examines the role of governance in producing residential enclaves that reinforce segregation and fragment urban landscapes. Based on a study of gated communities in Malaysia, we argue that governments, corporations and citizen groups collaborate within a complex governance system that (re)produces enclosure. Neoliberal market principles fuse with ethnic politics, cultural predilections and economic imperatives to generate a socially and spatially fragmented urban landscape where security concerns dominate and where citizens culturally, physically and symbolically segregate themselves from others.     

BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE: Heterogeneous Governance,Claims Making and Forced Eviction in a Megacity

Residents of informal settlements worldwide face challenges defending their land tenure. In contexts with overlapping systems of governance these challenges are even more complex and claims to land tenure more precarious. How do heterogeneous systems of governance, a characteristic of some global South megacities, affect evictions? This article presents an in-depth case study of the informal Otodo Gbame waterfront settlement's struggle to defend its customary land tenure through multiple authorities in Lagos, Nigeria. The analysis reveals how a heterogeneous system of governance disempowers citizens by obscuring the locus of power and creating confusion when communities make claims on the state. Communities find themselves claiming rights to the city that receive varying degrees of recognition from the many authorities within the heterogeneous system. In Lagos, the state weaponizes this heterogeneous system in pursuit of modern development and urban growth.     

Justifying Redevelopment ‘Failures' Within Urban ‘Success Stories': Dispute,Compromise, and a New Test of Urbanity

Large‐scale waterfront redevelopment projects, an urban development phenomenon that originated in the 1970s, are attractive to a growing suite of cities worldwide. But why? These mega‐projects are full of pitfalls, broken promises, cost overruns, disappointments and are often accused of promoting inequality. In this article, we consider the specific case of Melbourne's Docklands, which local popular opinion has roundly judged a failure despite the countervailing judgment of success in the revival of ‘liveability' of the adjacent Melbourne central business district. We use the Docklands case to illustrate the utility of a ‘critical pragmatic' framework of analysis to get behind dominant explanations of the demands of the urban growth machine and postmodern neoliberal capitalism. Without denying the existence of these dynamics, nor their hegemony, we nevertheless explicate how a critical pragmatic analysis can reveal the social dynamics driving the judgments and justifications offered by actors in urban redevelopment. A pragmatic analysis of these dynamics of argument and action at critical moments in the long process of an urban redevelopment can reveal new kinds of compromises and tests by which these projects are judged. In other words, what counts as failure and as success in the work of city building will shift, depending on what actors do and how they talk about it, and on how well these actions and justifications hold up to public challenges about the true character of a successful city. By gauging how these challenges are constituted and settled, we can better understand the evolution of the urban value proposition, and the new notion of justice grounded in urbanity that is emerging at the urban redevelopment frontier.