City-Level Decoupling-Full Report

controlled and accountable. However, the dominant fossil-fuel based energy regime that is secured by a tight national regulatory framework may prohibit these kinds of local generation enterprises and a feed-in tariff system may not exist to support this kind of enterprise. If such regime restrictions exist, it is unlikely that local and city-level stakeholders have the capacity to change these restrictions. In such circumstances, it is necessary to develop cooperative rather than antagonistic relationships between niche-level agents and regime-level managers.

of additional niches. This requires that city planners and their partners are able to influence regulatory and political regimes at other levels so that the institutional context within which cities operate can be changed. The best examples here come from the energy sector. Bottom-up sustainable urban developments tend to favour micro-generation (solar, wind, biogas) because the material nature of these systems, and the low barriers for entry from a financial perspective, are such that they can be configured as local generation enterprises that are locally

84