A Focus on Cities Takes Us Beyond Existing Governance Frameworks

Incorporating the urban scale into global-level environmental governance framings can take us beyond the limitations and distortions of a carbon trading regime. This in turn takes us beyond the kinds of nationalisms that carbon trading brings into negotiations. Among the key properties that distinguish cities as a site for environmental policymaking, and thereby as a source of policy innovations, are their multiple scales and diverse sociophysical ecologies. I want to argue that these two features should be conceived of as urban capabilities for addressing the environmental challenge. A key obstacle to this potential is that cities tend to be excluded from current practice and environmental governance discourse: Cities are flattened into one scale—the “local,” the bottom of the institutional hierarchy that runs through the national state. Mobilizing these scalar and ecological urban capabilities would enable more complex applications of mixes of policy and scientific knowledge. Further, recognizing the city as a multiscalar and multiecological system is critical for developing more sophisticated types of policies and anchors for policy implementation. The biosphere shows us that what might be negative at one scale, can become positive at another scale: When we flatten