City-Level Decoupling-Full Report

mediate national transitions – that is 'accelerate', 'reshape' or even 'disrupt' the implementation of national transitions in their local context? • If cities can mediate national transitions, to what extent can they then develop further capacity and capability to envision and enact their own locally developed transitions that are relatively distinct from national transitions? • Depending on the answers to these questions, can cities develop transition initiatives that are 'taken up' by the national context and re-incorporated into new national transitions that are then cascaded back downwards onto cities? 116 Central to this potential is the relative positioning of cities in terms of their location in governance hierarchies, implying that cities have differentiated capacities to either be shaping or shaped by national transitions. In order to understand the role of cities in a multi-level perspective, multi-level governance 117 and different scales of action must also be considered. Agency at the level of the city cannot be reduced to understanding the variety and coalitions of actors (e.g. local authorities, mayors, universities, local and economic actors) expected to work at this scale. It also involves the influence of actors at national and supranational scales of action who influence, both intentionally and through unintended consequences, action at a city scale. 118 Considering the way decisions at the national and regional scales cascade downwards leads to seeing cities as both the recipients and generators of urban transitions. 6.1.3. Understanding purposive urban infrastructure transitions: a framework The relative neglect of cities in discussions of transition to sustainable development can be corrected by developing a framework for understanding the distinctiveness of purposive urban infrastructure transitions. This raises questions as to who is driving the transition

multiplicity of energy, water, waste, mobility and food 'regimes' co-exist in ways that can be both functional and dysfunctional at the same time. City governments are notional 'managers' of the spaces within which these 'regimes' operate, so they are implicated in the way these regimes change over time, either directly due to their control of the service delivery agencies or indirectly as key policy actors with some degree of policy influence and/or regulatory authority. However, some cities, mainly in developing country have networked infrastructures that service only a minority of citizens and their governments have very limited capacity to either extend or operate these infrastructures. In these contexts bottom-up initiatives by households, streets, neighbourhoods and associations, such as taxi drivers who invest in road maintenance, fill the gaps in ways that could over time build new kinds of governance capacities for infrastructure transitions. Nevertheless, the discussion that follows aims to reinforce 'purposive transitions', with significant capacity to manage transition (which in most cases must still be built up) and a willingness to draw on knowledge and learning from outside agencies, whether or not they are controlled by city governments. Despite an impressive breadth of focus on substantive areas as varied as transport, energy, water, waste and food systems, and governance, 115 the MLP has thus far neglected the spatial dynamics of cities. This raises the issue of where cities 'fit' within the MLP and how do cities manage the landscape-regime- niche hierarchy? This calls for exploring how innovative activities within cities interrelate with wider national and societal transitions by seeking answers to questions like: • To what extent are cities conceived of as 'receiving' national transitions that are then 'implemented' in their own local context? 6.1.2. The absence of cities in multi-Level transition approaches

• To what extent can different configurations of social interests at the urban scale

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