The making of net-zero cities: Assembling discourses, performances and instruments in global urban climate governance

Abstract

Achieving climate neutrality by mid-century requires transforming climate governance to bolster climate action in cities. This research examines how the global governance process within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has facilitated and coordinated their responses after the adoption of the landmark Paris Agreement in 2015, and the resulting policy changes. Drawing on constructivism in international politics, urban policy theories and ethnographic methods, it conceptualizes global climate governance as a space where transnational norms on cities’ climate action are constructed and diffused. This theoretical approach yields a number of findings. Notably, it shows the key role of the Global Covenant of Mayors (GCoM), an international association of local authorities, in forging ‘net-zero emissions’ as a shared urban policy goal, through assembling scientific discourses, scripts for performances at COPs, and carbon accounting instruments circulating in the climate regime, and diffusing them to its members. Ahead of COP26 in Glasgow, the collective pledges of 1,000 cities worldwide served as crucial rhetoric tools to catalyze states’ ambition and maintain hope in the UNFCCC process, while reinforcing mayors’ claims for multilevel institutions. Furthermore, the research shows that the local uptake of net-zero targets drives a progressive climatization of urban governance, encouraging cities to expand their authority along spatial, institutional, temporal and functional dimensions. Finally, it also sheds light on the ongoing territorialization of climate governance as a contested process, by revealing competing coordination logics, important implementation hurdles, and attempts to reframe dominant narratives of green urban growth. Ultimately, this study argues that the UNFCCC offers significant symbolic resources for city-level action, and proposes avenues for future research on its contribution to urban transformations.