Exploring nascent climate policies in Indian cities: a role for policy mobilities?

Abstract

Cities are key actors in addressing climate change. Through local policies and regulation, participation in national programmes, and membership in transnational networks, cities have been shown to play an important role in the new configurations of climate change governance beyond the nation-state. There has so far been little attention, however, on how cities in the global South fit into this agenda and how climate policies become integrated and transformed in local municipalities with varying levels of development and differing urban priorities. This paper addresses this gap by bringing together literatures on cities and climate change with urban policy mobilities to explore how mobile urban climate policies are understood and embedded within municipal governments of second-tier cities in India. Based on the empirical work in five municipalities, this paper shows how a municipal network seeks to make climate policies mobile and how local municipal governments engage with such mobile policies. I suggest that the Indian example indicates different mechanisms of policy mobility than those identified in the literature elsewhere including a different use of policy spaces locally and nationally, strategic use of shifting policy narratives across scales to access global circulations of climate policies, and an important role for the precursors of mobility such as linkages, funding and awareness.

Keywords:

• cities
• climate change
• policy mobilities
• India
• networks

1. Introduction

The role of cities and urban policies in tackling climate change has been increasingly recognised in academic literature with significant research and scholarship over the past two decades (Betsill & Bulkeley 2007; Moser & Satterthwaite 2008; da Silva et al. 2012) as well as in the programmes of international organisations (Kamal-Chaoui et al. 2009; Bulkeley & Tuts 2013). Urban areas are the site of a large proportion of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission production as well as the location of a host of policies and regulations affecting GHG emissions and urban vulnerability such as provision of municipal services, land-use policies, building codes and regulations and water-supply systems. Additionally, urban areas are also sites that need to adapt to changing-climate conditions, and working with municipal governments offers one way to adapt infrastructure and prepare urban populations for climate variability. Urban managers are increasingly engaging with climate change through a variety of mechanisms such as national programmes, transnational networks and international donors, yet how these urban climate policies and policy models are circulating between cities, or how they are reinterpreted in each context is not well understood. This movement of urban policy models, formal policies and underlying policy knowledge linked to addressing climate change form part of what has been described as urban policy mobilities. This is a theoretical perspective that emphasises the flow of policies between urban centres through a range of actors including consultants, think tanks and international donors, and focuses both on the relations between cities (relationality) as well as how these policy frameworks become embedded in specific locations (territoriality). This paper draws together the literature on climate change and cities (Bulkeley & Betsill 2003; Roberts 2009; Brown et al. 2012) with the recent body of work around urban policy mobilities (McCann 2008; Peck 2011), to explore the process and mechanisms of the nascent mobility of climate policies in Indian cities.

This paper responds to two empirical gaps identified in the current literature. First, how second-tier cities and ‘non-leading cities’ are engaging with climate change in the global South and second, what role agents such as networks play in moving climate-policy fragments between urban centres. This paper will first review relevant literature on cities and climate change and policy mobilities and describe the methodology used. The empirical heart of the paper analyses the work of a transnational municipal network in India using interviews with network staff, municipal officers and engineers and observations of meetings and network spaces. The paper uses this research to address these identified gaps through the following research questions:

• How do networks seek to move climate policies into new urban environments such as second-tier cities in India?

• How are these policies received and embedded within the local municipalities?

I then go on to consider the implications of these case studies for theories of policy mobilities and work on climate change and cities. This paper is a critical examination of how municipal actors in second-tier cities are able to embed and act on new climate change policy agendas coming through external actors, and the types of mobility processes that support this. This is an important area to understand as such mobility agents become more common, and the role of sub-national governments in accessing climate finance may become more important. It is increasingly crucial that all types of sub-national governments are able to meaningfully engage with and influence the global urban policy models that are circulating on addressing climate change.

2. Cities and climate change: governance and urban policy mobilities

2.1. Cities and governance

There has been considerable debate around the role that cities and towns might play in climate change mitigation and adaptation. Initially this debate focused on cities in the global North but work on adaptation and cities in the global South has increased rapidly in the last five years. Scholarly debate has considered the role of transnational networks in instigating a climate change urban agenda (Bulkeley & Betsill 2003; Brown et al. 2012; da Silva et al. 2012), the role of cities in generating GHG emissions (Moser & Satterthwaite 2008; Dodman 2009) and case studies of specific city-climate policies (Roberts 2009; Aylett 2013; Castán Broto et al. 2013).

There has been a body of work on the transnational network Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI), mainly on cities in the US, the UK and Australia, that has focused on how certain cities come to be pioneers in this area and the role of multi-level governance in instigating local-climate agendas (see Bulkeley & Betsill 2003). In a review of the field over the past 10 years, Betsill and Bulkeley suggest that three key themes have emerged in work on cities and climate change: multi-level governance and policy fragmentation; the knowledge–policy interface; and the divide between rhetoric and reality at the local level (Betsill & Bulkeley 2007). This body of work suggests that ‘attention remains fixed on energy demand reduction rather than tackling harder issues including transport and adaptation to the impacts of climate change’ (Betsill & Bulkeley 2007, p. 450).

Since this review, work in the global South has burgeoned reflecting particularly on the lack of capacity and resources to address so many pressing issues at the municipal level, of which climate change is just one. A body of work is being built up on new initiatives such as the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN) and the UN-Habitat’s Cities and Climate Initiative (CCCI) that also seek to contribute to the movement of policies and guidelines around urban climate governance. The CCCI was launched in 2008 to support small- and medium-sized cities to become more resilient to climate change and to develop low-carbon pathways. The CCCI has created guidelines and methodologies for city managers and focuses on supporting policy dialogue. The initiative was piloted in four cities and now works in more than 20 countries. A special edition of Local Environment in 2013 on the experiences of CCCI shows that to move beyond the ‘usual suspects’ dominating municipal networks, additional entry points for climate change need to be found for smaller cities to promote sustainable urban development (Bulkeley & Tuts 2013). It also suggests networks such as the CCCI can also play an important role in trying to link national and local policy areas. The areas for future work by the CCCI show that the initiative is moving to focus on process elements of policy mobility, particularly around using adaptation as an entry point to promote broader innovations in urban planning with an emphasis on the urban poor. However, despite this more facilitative approach, Bulkeley and Tuts (2013) reflect that it is important to not just focus on policy change, but recognise that achieving adaptation and resilience can come in many forms.

ACCCRN was founded by the Rockefeller Foundation in 2008 and supports a network of secondary cities in south and southeast Asia to engage in urban resilience. ACCCRN has three aims: to support capacity building, to develop a network of knowledge and learning, and to expand and scale-up resilience actions. The approach of ACCCRN is to use iterative stakeholder analysis, with a planning and engagement process to develop locally owned strategies with relevant urban climate resilience strategies for a given location (Brown et al. 2012). Brown et al. (2012) identify a number of emerging challenges with the approach. One is that technical evidence on climate risks does not necessarily carry enough weight in urban planning to make sufficient changes. Second, is the issue of how the interests of the urban poor are incorporated and given priority in the resilience planning. Examples show that in some incidences risk can be transferred to the urban poor when being moved from other areas. The last challenges are the underlying governance, capacity and coordination in urban centres and aligning the incentives to address longer term challenges such as resilience. Da Silva et al. (2012) also draw on the ACCCRN experience to suggest a systems approach to thinking about climate resilience, as spatial analysis is not sufficient. They use a simplified model of the key urban systems of provision to understand how susceptible key systems are to external shocks and stresses that might arise from climate change.

As work on cities and climate change has burgeoned in the last decade, much of it has retained an analytical focus on governing, frequently through the lens of multi-level governance or transnational governance (see Lindseth 2004; Betsill & Bulkeley 2007). Governance is defined here as the steering towards public goals (Stoker 1998). Detailed case studies have explored how actors are steered towards certain goals and in what ways urban climate responses are brought about across different scales. However, despite this increase in case studies, I suggest there are two gaps in the current literature. First, work on second-tier cities in the global South and those that are not pioneering the agenda is still scarce. Work coming out of ACCCRN and CCCI is starting to address this (although these cities could be seen as the adaptation pioneers), but there is still a significant gap in understanding of climate change policies in these municipal centres particularly in countries such as India. The work of ICLEI outside the USA and Europe is also largely not covered in the literature. Second, there has been little empirical work on the role of those networks and agents that seek to move these climate policies between cities, with the network itself included as part of the object of study. Work on ICLEI has been largely focused in the USA and Europe, whilst emerging work in the global South has focused on the theoretical models and processes for engagement or single case studies rather than the how and why of policy mobility. Work on the policy process and mobilities places an emphasis on a particular part of this urban-governance cycle, ‘the policies’, and it is this aspect of urban governance I am interested in, in this paper. In the context of Indian cities where climate change is just emerging as an urban issue, there may be little action on the ground, and there is often little evidence of steering for public goals. However, cities may have stated policy aims to address climate change issues or may be interested in policy models from elsewhere coming in through networks or consultants and this will be a key area for contestation and policy formulation.

2.2. Policy mobilities

Policy often moves through informal processes, such as through policy transfer in transnational networks, transnational NGOs or the work of international donors (Keck & Sikkink 1999; Stone 2004). Recent work under the umbrella term of policy mobilities has an emphasis on the movement of written policies, policy ideas and policy knowledge between sites through a range of actors including consultants, NGOs and think tanks. This moves beyond just national policy-making processes to other policy transfers and movement. This is a relational–territorial perspective that focuses on the process of moving policies between cities as well as how these ideas and models become embedded in different contexts and is attentive to the how and the why of policy transfer (McCann & Ward 2011). In the context of an issue like climate change, this is highly relevant. Many actors beyond national governments are seeking to develop policy on a new and emerging issue and so the scope for policy mobility from ‘elsewhere’ is high. This could be from examples in neighbouring or foreign cities, municipal networks, international fora or theoretical urban models. This is contrary to a traditional policy model where national or State governments provide the policy framework and programmes for municipal governments to implement.

McCann (2011) argues that understanding policy mobility as a social process:

enacted through the apparently banal practices of bureaucrats, consultants, and activists…[is] a particular type of persuasive storytelling, involving strategic namings and framings, inserted into a specific context where actors are predisposed to a certain range of policy options, to convince actors [in one city] that their place is commensurate with another. (p. 115)

McCann (2011) defines three aspects within the broad field of mobile policies: urban policies themselves (formally drafted and adopted guidelines and procedures setting out long term goals addressing specific issues); policy models (more general statements combining elements of policies), and policy knowledge (expertise and experience on best practice and implementation). McCann also draws attention to the supply and demand side of policy transfer, the importance of site visits and conference attendance, ‘face-to-face interactions in these globalising micro-spaces’ (2011, p. 123), in shaping policy learning and the practice of ‘policy boosterism’ where consultants or planners travel to promote their policy within urban planning circles. This perspective draws attention to the individuals involved in the circulation, the role of outside influences particularly those that might appear ‘neutral’ such as technocrats and consultants, and the social processes of policy learning and boosterism. These are all key areas of interest for urban climate policies emerging in new and previously less engaged spaces.

Work on policy mobilities has so far focused on individuals moving between urban sites, such as engineers and consultants (Prince 2012). I continue this approach, but I also take as my focus actors working within a transnational municipal network that is an agent of policy mobility, addressing the gap identified in the literature above. A municipal network such as this one is another policy mobility actor like a think tank or a loose global policy network, but has the explicit purpose to mobilise policies into new urban sites around a particular issue. The network I focus on in this paper is ICLEI South Asia; however, as the review above shows this type of mobility is becoming increasingly important with other initiatives such as the CCCI and ACCCRN also gaining momentum.

The two main gaps identified in the literature are how climate change policies are moving and becoming embedded into second-tier and ‘non leading cities’ in the global South, and what role the networks themselves play in this policy mobility. The paper addresses the following two research questions to provide evidence on these issues:

• How do networks seek to move climate policies into new urban environments such as second-tier cities in India?

• How are these policies received and embedded within the local municipalities?

I now go on to outline the methodology to address these gaps and identified questions.

3. Methodology: urban managers and engineers in five second-tier cities

The research on which this paper is based was conducted in five second-tier urban centres in the States of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa and Gujarat in India. All of the cities were involved in the programmes of a transnational municipal network, ICLEI. ICLEI is an association of local governments that have made a commitment to sustainable development. It was established in 1990 and the mandate was broadened with a name that encapsulated its original focus on local environmental initiatives in 2003 to reflect wider concerns of sustainability. The world secretariat is run from Bonn in Germany, and there are regional secretariats in Africa, Europe, Latin America and Caribbean, Oceania, South Asia, and Southeast Asia as well as a series of country offices and liaison offices; it has 1200 local governments as members worldwide (ICLEI 2010). Although ICLEI South Asia (hereafter ICLEI SA) was found to not be a very strong network in India, it was chosen for research as the network that had been working in India for the longest period on climate change (CCCI and ACCCRN were just starting up in 2009) and so had the most potential to see how climate change was becoming embedded. ICLEI is also a significant actor in municipal climate change policies, with 1200 members.

The cities in this research were selected for three reasons. First, this type of city (second tier) is under-represented in the literature, despite making up the majority of urban experience in developing countries, and it is therefore crucial to understand these processes in more detail. Second, they were all involved in current climate change programmes with the regional secretariat of the transnational municipal network at the time of research, ICLEI SA, which allowed for access to the officers and engineers currently involved. Third, they offered a breadth of experiences of climate policies, ranging from those involved since the inception of ICLEI SA to those who were very new to the programme. Forty-one semi-structured interviews were conducted between October 2008 and December 2010, as well as observation of network events in the municipalities, nationally and internationally, and documentary analysis of networks and city documents and policies. Interviews were with those involved in the projects, the municipal officers (commissioners, additional-commissioners, engineers) and political representatives, as well as network staff. Interviews focused on the projects, their involvement with the municipal network and their ideas about climate change in their municipality. To conduct the analysis interviews were transcribed and then analysed using Atlas-ti. Text was analysed in two groups: the network staff or documents, and the local engineers and officers. Codes were developed on the construction of climate change as an issue, the emphasis on solutions, the role of the international debate, the process of policy mobility and international comparisons.

As noted by geographers working in this field (Cochrane & Ward 2012; Peck & Theodore 2012) this type of work presents many methodological challenges, and neither detailed ethnography nor policy documents nor elite policy interviews can offer all the answers. This research used aspects of these three methodologies in combination which brought together diverse data sources and allowed claims to be triangulated or deconstructed through different policy spaces. This was a useful approach for a network that was fragmented and poorly embedded in urban spaces. The research is on cities that are not pioneers in the area, have few individuals involved in the policies that are being mobilised, and are traditionally not open to research and questioning on their activities (for a discussion of these issues see Fisher 2011). However, despite these challenges these cities are a crucial arena for future climate policies. This paper should be read as an exploratory piece of work that seeks to unpick those cities often not included in such research because of the very challenges associated with the data collection, laying the groundwork for future work in this area.

4. The research context: cities and climate change in India

4.1. Urban policy in India

Urban policy has undergone significant changes over the past two decades as part of sweeping economic reforms in India and a policy of economic liberalisation (Rao & Bird 2010). The main mode of urban governance within the municipal bodies across much of India stems from the Bombay Municipal Corporation Act of 1888 which gave extensive powers to a municipal commissioner, an administrative post. Power is shared between the commissioner and the deliberative body (the Corporation and Standing Committee). Budget decisions are approved through the standing committee but the commissioner leads on policy decisions and awarding contracts. The governance functions and funding of an urban area are spread between multiple actors including the municipal bodies, State departments and arms-length bodies, and national programmes and funding streams. In each city, the exact configuration of power and authority is different depending on: the State and municipal politics of the area, the legacy of urban governance systems, the size and importance of the city, and the influence of other actors such as private sector and civil society.

In 1992, the 74th amendment of the Constitution was passed which gave urban local bodies (ULBs) their first constitutional recognition as the third tier of government and increased the role and function of the ULBs in planning and regulation of land use. The amendment gave powers to ULBs to tackle sanitation, solid waste management, infrastructure, land tenure and city development (Baud & Dhanalakshmi 2007). One of the most significant developments in urban policy in India after the 74th amendment has been the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), a funding programme of $6.4 billion for 63 cities conditional upon a reform agenda. The JNNURM was launched in December 2005 and aims to support the ULBs to take on the functions of the 74th amendment. It has three missions: integrated infrastructure development, providing services to the urban poor and a reform agenda at State and local levels.¹ All cities have to produce a city development plan which outlines the plans for the municipal body to fulfil all three criteria of the JNNURM. Four of the municipalities I discuss in this article receive the JNNURM funding.

There are a number of schemes seeking to address climate change issues in urban areas in India, some directly through a climate change framing, and others through an energy or disaster-management lens. The government has launched a scheme to develop 60 solar cities, encouraging municipalities to reduce energy usage by 10% through solar sources and efficiency measures. There are a number of transnational municipal networks that work with Indian cities including C40, ICLEI and more recently the urban resilience network, ACCCRN. Besides these measures, bilateral and multilateral funding agencies are working on urban programmes which may have a climate element. It is clear then that urban climate policy models are being mobilised in new locations by a wide range of actors.

4.2. ICLEI SA and mobile policies

The secretariat of ICLEI SA was set up in India in 2005 after several bilateral funded pilot projects in the region including Cities for Climate Protection (CCP) which ran in 16 cities with funding from the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The focus of this research has been on the experience of CCP in India as well as three projects which were running at the time of research: these are City Level Carbon Reductions, Local Renewables Model Communities Network, and the Roadmap for a post-2012 agreement. They were chosen as they all directly address climate change as an explicit aim, and the two practical projects rely on a milestone approach based on GHG emission inventories very similar to CCP. The Roadmap project incorporates the political aspects of the CCP programme, seeking to provide a voice and advocacy platform for Indian municipalities in United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations. Figure 1 shows the locations of the member cities at the time of research.

I will now briefly outline the features of each programme in Table 1 before going on to discuss their implementation in five municipalities.

Figure 1. The map of the Indian members of ICLEI SA.

Note: The municipalities in bold are those included in this research.

Table 1. Programmes run by ICLEI SA on climate change.

Policy model	Funders	Aim	Objectives
Cities for Climate Protection (Started in 2002 in India)	USAID (in India)	To engage local governments in climate mitigation.	A five-milestone process that involves measuring emissions, creating a climate action plan, committing to emissions reductions, implementing the plan and monitoring progress.
Part of ICLEI International – mobilised globally.
City Level Emissions Reduction Project (2008–2010).	British High Commission	To promote energy efficiency and renewable energy to help address climate change and energy security.	Develop policy frameworks and incentives to facilitate public and private investment in low carbon technologies.
ICLEI SA project mobilised in three Indian municipalities.	Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the UK		Series of steps to create database of energy consumption and carbon emissions, city level climate protection plan, detailed action plan and implementation strategy.
Local Renewables Model Communities Network Project (2006–2010).	German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ)	To support and strengthen local governments which promote the generation and supply of renewable energy and energy efficiency in the urban environment.	The work programme involves: developing three ‘model’ communities in India committed to creating local policies to encourage energy efficiency and increased use of renewable energy; establishing and operating capacity centres; and setting examples to encourage additional municipalities to emulate their progressive energy policies.
ICLEI project mobilised in India, Europe and Brazil using same policy model.	GTZ (German Technical Agency)	Aims to link communities to share knowledge and expertise.
Roadmap of South Asian Cities and Local Governments for the Post-2012 Global Climate Agreement and Actions	Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the UK – Global Opportunities Fund.	To develop a regional consensus on local action plans to address carbon emissions and provide local government platform in UNFCCC negotiations.	The project, collected data from 54 South Asian cities to produce a database of carbon emissions, compiled generic action plans, surveyed the cities for responses, held national and international workshops, developed a South Asian response to climate change and brought together a delegation for COP 14 and 15.
ICLEI SA project. Local action plans mobilised for 54 municipalities.

This work is in the preliminary stages of attempting to mobilise climate policies. ICLEI SA faces many challenges related to urban governance in general, and the particularities of trying to address a local climate agenda in India. In this paper, I address the role of ICLEI SA in seeking to move urban climate policies to new locations and explore both the relationality of such urban locations (how they are connected to other cities and positioned with the global policy flows) as well as the territoriality (how they become embedded in each specific location). The five municipalities discussed in this article are Bhubaneswar (State capital of Orissa), Vijayawada and Visakhapatnam (medium-sized towns in Andhra Pradesh), Thane (medium-sized town in Maharashtra) and Vadodara (medium-sized town in Gujarat). In Table 2, I provide a summary of their involvement with ICLEI SA, including what projects were running at the time of research, the key actors involved, what policies were moved into the municipalities by ICLEI SA (made mobile), the views of the engineers and municipal officers and other initiatives in the city on similar issues.

5. The network as an agent of policy mobility

ICLEI SA seeks to move climate and energy policies² between municipalities, including projects that are part of the transnational network (such as the CCP), and projects that have been designed by the secretariat staff, funded by donors and need willing ‘sites for mobility’. The elements that are being moved between cities by ICLEI staff through workshops, training and advocacy are written policies themselves (e.g. Bhubaneswar municipal energy efficiency policy, local action plans), policy models (e.g. the five-step process of the CCP) and policy knowledge (e.g. software and information). I now go on to outline three elements of how policies are moved through urban locations by the staff of the network. This is through developing the underlying prerequisites for policy mobilities, creating policy spaces for municipal officers, and rendering the written policies and policy models transferable through a focus on data and technical knowledge. The empirical focus of this section is on the ICLEI network staff and their activities within the network in India.

5.1. Building linkages and precursors to mobility

One of the primary ways the network staff seek to make policies mobile between Indian municipalities is to develop underlying capacity for such mobility through technical support, providing ideas and policy inspiration, and a community of policy actors through which mobility might occur. The secretariat staff members help link local-government officials to funding agencies, provide support on accessing national-government programmes such as the Solar Cities, and advise on international funding opportunities such as the Clean Development Mechanism. This is all part of building policy knowledge and expertise. It is also the role of the ICLEI office staff to introduce climate change as an issue within ULBs, and they describe this as a ‘struggle in the beginning to sort of make them understand’ and local governments as ‘not bothered about these things’ (ICLEI staff interviews, 28 April 2009; 4 August 2009). The role of the office is not just to provide access to policy ideas or opportunities for ‘policy boosterism’ for concerns that already exist, but to instigate and develop awareness and concern among the municipal leaders for environmental issues and the motivation for policy transfer and mobility. Whilst most relationships are routed through the central office, some government members of the network describe city-to-city learning; this is often within smaller projects that prioritise city-to-city exchange on a certain issue. One Municipal Commissioner described an exchange of ideas through international visits and with a Local Renewables partner city in India, whilst another asked for more exposure to what other cities were doing (Fieldnotes, 21 January 2009). As the Commissioner explained:

it never happens that I know everything, so the exchange of ideas is very helpful. We are learning a lot from Nagpur … they have done very well and people are coming from outside… We are trying to go for solar systems in our street lights, we didn’t know about this before but this is what we have learned from other cities. (Municipal commissioner interview, 9 March 2009)

National site visits have played a role in policy mobilities in this context, and several government officials spoke of ideas gained by visits within India. Several officers had gone on international site visits, but did not draw on any specific urban policy ideas from these trips which could be applied to the Indian municipalities. However, these were all part of building wider policy knowledge and models and motivation for new areas of policy development. Through such personal linkages, capacity building, motivation and awareness this mobility agent is laying the precursors to future policy mobilities.

5.2. Policy spaces for mobility

One key tool used within the Indian part of the network and also internationally to move policies and best practice is creating a space where network members meet for a common purpose and have the opportunity to make connections with others. Within India, capacity-building workshops (on energy efficiency, renewable energy and the construction industry) were held in the period 2008–2009, as were a number of regional and national meetings working to produce a South Asian local government position on a post-2012 climate agreement. Internationally, ICLEI holds the World Congress every 2 years and in 2009 promoted a space within the UNFCCC negotiations – ‘the ICLEI lounge’ – as a key space for ‘dialogue and interaction with their national government, with other local governments, NGOs and international press’ (ICLEI 2009). These spaces are not just opportunities for networking, but in the Indian context the international opportunities are incentives in themselves for membership, as an ICLEI staff member describes:

maybe it is a goodie for him, actually an incentive for him. He has gone to a cold place in Edmonton last month [location of World Congress 2009] but he had one or two things picked up from that city or conference, and come back and implement them here in India … That helps them in saying that they are one of the so many people working towards a cause. (ICLEI staff interview, 4 August 2009)

As well as acknowledging the incentive factor of overseas visits, the staff member also describes how these trips can help government officials to see themselves as part of a bigger organisation, something that is difficult for individuals to feel within India in an embryonic and geographically fragmented network, and so promotes the idea of the international community and momentum around the urban policy problem and emerging policy models. It is important to note however that simply organising a space for meeting does not necessarily facilitate informal policy mobility within the network. In India, many events are highly formalised and structured, with the day full of long speeches and presentations. Municipal officers are highly mindful of protocol, and come with other members from their own municipalities and do not mix with others. Without a clearly understood aim of networking amongst the participants, there seems to be little need to integrate with other municipalities who are geographically dispersed and facing very different urban challenges. In the ‘ICLEI lounge’ at COP 15 in Copenhagen events held by African members of ICLEI and the South Asian delegation were generally attended only by members of those regions (Fieldnotes, 10 December 2009). Therefore, even within the international convergence space there was little converging of regions or cross-fertilising of ideas within the formalised structures.³ This suggests that the conference attendance identified by McCann (2011) as one of the two crucial elements for policy mobility may be playing a different role for these municipal officers than described in the wider literature. Such international events provide motivation to be involved in this area of policy, as well as an understanding of the wider scope of this policy field and actors involved, but do not necessarily result in the informal spaces for mobility and exchange of policies and policy models envisaged by McCann.

5.3. Rendering policies transferable

ICLEI SA uses local energy policies, best practice models, GHG reporting systems and pilot projects to mobilise climate policies in the municipalities and render them transferable. In the following quote, a government engineer discusses the process of this mobilisation:

they are collecting all the data and regarding this energy audit also taking place … They have proposed some of the remedies … They have given a report and its action plan is under preparation. (Municipal interview, 24 March 2009)

This intense focus on collecting and reporting data is one way of quantifying the problem and measuring success. This use of GHG-emission data and certain methodologies to define city emissions allows climate change as a problem to be defined and measured, as technical and quantifiable. A municipal engineer described how ‘they provided the methodology. This is the data to be collected; this is the software. They have calculated how much GHG emissions [we are producing]’ (Municipal interview, 21 January 2009). This process makes GHG emissions visible and the target for policy interventions that can be mobilised through the network.

ICLEI SA uses a range of policy models to involve Indian municipalities in the uptake of urban climate policies, and these are deemed to be transferable among a wide range of urban contexts. In a strategic review of ICLEI International’s operations in 2006 a goal was set to ‘harmonise and standardise policies, procedures and tools’ (ICLEI 2006, p. 7); the harmonisation of policies across the international network is seen as a strength within the ICLEI network and relies on a climate policy travelling intact between different locations. The two policy models ICLEI SA sought to embed in the municipalities discussed in this paper followed a step-wise process of identifying needs, collecting data on emissions, producing a policy for the municipal corporation and monitoring the implementation. The process by which policies were brought into the municipality, involves passing through a series of steps with support from the network. An engineer describes the process of passing a policy through internal procedures, ‘the Memorandum of Understanding has been signed in February/March and subsequently a core team has been formed in the corporation … subsequently we have collected data. This data has been processed and its results put up for the stakeholders’ (Additional commissioner interview, 24 March 2009). The passage of a mobile policy into a new municipality is a convoluted one, and the policies would not be mobile without the supportive work and strategic role of ICLEI SA, acting here as what I call the mobility agent. ICLEI network staff understand a key part of their work as securing some level of participation from the municipal officers, and to do this they use strategic messages that will resonate with the current urban discourses. As one network staff explains:

when we had started the project we had not talked about that we are going to decrease the emissions because no Corporation is interested … We told them that this is going to have impact on your cost bottom line and energy bills. This is how we have convinced so many Indian cities to work on the project. (ICLEI staff interview, 7 October 2008)

As well as this strategic framing staff members do not address any potentially contentious issues within the municipalities, such as the vulnerability of the urban poor to climate change or tensions between encouraging industrial development and decreasing emissions, to make policies more mobile.

I have argued so far that the network uses a range of techniques to support policy mobility. These include building the precursors to mobility, using policy spaces as motivators and building policy knowledge for municipal officers. They also seek to render the policy area more technical and so more transferable between different contexts. I now turn to how these policies and the network were received in the municipalities by the administrators and engineers involved, the territoriality of the mobility process.

6. In the municipality: ideas and inspiration, policy entrepreneurs and shifting narratives

Each municipality engages with the written policies, policy models and policy knowledge mobilised by ICLEI SA in different ways depending on the local power dynamics and the context of current municipal programmes. However, there are some common themes emerging through these five case studies which allow consideration of the second question I posed at the beginning of this paper: how do such policies travel and how are they received and embedded within municipalities? I show in the following section that municipal officers use ICLEI SA as a source of ideas and inspiration for policy models and knowledge but the mobile policy models can also be a source of local contestation: something that is not recognised in the network model of smooth mobility between locations and reliance on one or two key individuals. Second, individuals working within the municipality have played an important role in engaging with moving policy ideas but this has not been enough to move them into the municipal institutions. Finally, engaging in wider policy spaces has led to municipal officers adopting global narratives to ‘boost’ their cities which differ from their local priorities and incentives. The empirical focus of this section is the activities and actions of municipal officials and engineers in the five urban centres.

6.1. Embedding ideas and policies locally

ICLEI SA faces many of the same challenges as elsewhere in mobilising climate policies in different localities and it should not therefore be assumed that difficulties in instigating a local climate agenda are specific to India and the global South. These include a lack of capacity to take on such issues within local governments, a lack of working across departments and a focus in particular policy areas which are deemed to be the ‘low-hanging fruit’. However, equally, although problems with instigating local climate policies have been found in research on ICLEI in other countries, they are exacerbated in India by a specific context of climate politics and weak municipal structures. In the context of Durban, Roberts describes how the CCP programme and:

the highly technical nature of the greenhouse gas inventory and the buildings energy efficiency project meant that the work was undertaken primarily by consultants… Work was being overseen by municipal staff with very little understanding of why this action was required in the first place. (2009, p. 257)

Whilst ICLEI SA staff held workshops and meetings on energy efficiency, and provided technical expertise and consultancy on creating GHG inventories and drawing up action plans (outlined in the earlier section as the precursors to policy mobility), there seemed to be very little evidence of the policies or policy models becoming embedded within the municipalities themselves.

The municipal officers identified a number of reasons why they joined ICLEI SA and what they sought to gain from the network (shown in Table 2). Cities that had joined recently talked about wanting support for existing projects and ideas, as well as looking for new ideas and inspiration. The engineer from Thane also highlighted the value of a framework and methodology for looking at the problem. Others valued the role of ICLEI SA as a network that could circulate best practice and document projects in cities as well as seeking the support of other levels of government. However, the mobile climate policies and their transplantation from place to place have not gone uncontested. The initial support of the individual from another organisation supporting ICLEI SA in Bhubaneswar was withdrawn after he complained that ICLEI SA was more concerned with presenting the city internationally than actually doing any work in the city. This individual then started his own projects. He was motivated by the need to have some ownership of the local agenda; something that was often not possible in ICLEI SA projects given their externally driven nature (Municipal interview, 14 March 2009). Beyond these local politics in the city, energy efficiency and renewable energy promotion also sits within the domain of several State agencies and regional government offices also based in Bhubaneswar. The two local offices and nodal agencies of the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) have mandates which extend to the type of activities ICLEI is undertaking, but describe the work of ICLEI as rhetoric rather than reality. Both offices suggested they were keen to support renewable energy and energy efficiency in the municipal corporation but had had little enthusiasm from the municipal corporation. This example shows that mobile policy models can become embroiled in local politics, and how the ownership of an urban agenda and the existing institutions can be challenged by mobile policy fragments and models. Working with these actors to build ownership of new ideas is an important aspect of embedding mobile policies in wider urban structures. There is little acknowledgement by the network staff that this could be a contested, political agenda at the local level as shown in this example and also little consideration of how the process of the mobility itself may contribute to building ownership amongst wider stakeholders. Whilst some policies are integrated in municipal structures, the lack of deliberation and wider engagement with the agenda has hindered the movement of the policy into implementation or further policy models.

Table 2. The five municipalities: relationships with ICLEI SA and mobile policies.

Urban centre	Relationships with ICLEI SA and key actors	Projects running at time of research	What has been mobile?	View of municipal officers/engineers	Other initiatives in the city
Bhubaneswar (Orissa)	Relationship started in 2003 with CCP, political involvement very strong through the Mayor and Commissioner also been for site visits. Particularly strong role of one individual from a supporting organisation. ICLEI project officer also present.	Local Renewables Model Communities NetworkRoadmap Project	City Climate Protection PolicyCCP ProgrammeLocal Renewables Resource centre and small peer-to-peer networkPilot projects: solar water heater in hospital, energy monitoring of municipal buildingsCommissioner attended UNFCCC meetings donator of best practice on energy efficiency policy	Contested agenda at the local level: ‘We wanted more transport declaration. They said no. [We wanted] more discussion, more practical things, fitting of more practical measures. That is more possible than any declaration. [This] was not acceptable to some international institutions, they remain fixed on their targets’ (City organisation working with ICLEI)	Separate climate declaration initiative started by another organisation.JNNURM.Training held with housewives and school children on energy efficiency
Visakhapatnam (Andhra Pradesh)	Joined ICLEI in 2008 for carbon emission reduction project. Chief Engineer previously at Vijayawada and brought interest in energy issues was key actor.	Carbon Emission Reduction Through City Local Level Action PlansRoadmap	City Climate Protection PolicyLocal Level Action Plan	Finds ideas and inspiration from ICLEI, but also does projects alone (Chief Engineer).	Projects on street lighting and energy efficiency.JNNURM
Vijayawada (Andhra Pradesh)	Joined ICLEI in 2008 for carbon emission reduction project. Emphasis on local connection with director of ICLEI SA and strong relationship with municipal engineer.	Carbon Emission Reduction Through City Local Level Action PlansRoadmap	City Climate Protection PolicyLocal Level Action Plan	Looking for support for current projects: ‘We were also looking at the time at a lot of energy conservation activities and we are encouraged that we get their support for implementing our activities. Not for any special project from their side. At least we will get some support for project we have taken up’ (Additional Commissioner)	ESCO project on street lighting.JNNURMApplying to become Solar CityEnlisted CDM consultantVisit to Nasik
Thane (Maharashtra)	Joined ICLEI in 2008 for carbon emission reduction project. Chief engineer playing an important role for but also political support from the Mayor.	Carbon Emission Reduction Through City Local Level Action PlansRoadmap	City Climate Protection PolicyLocal Level Action PlanMayor attended UNFCC meetingsDonator of best practice on solar water heaters and energy	ICLEI has provided framework and methodology but not been the impetus for energy projects: ‘We thought this is a systematic way of working so we added them. So before that we had undertaken certain efficiency measures, but we saw this and thought ok this is a systematic way, methodology is ok, and see what happens?’ (Chief Engineer)	Municipal work on energy efficiency and solar water heaters.State awards for energy conservation and management.
Vadodara (Gujarat)	Joined ICLEI in 2002 with CCP. ICLEI chairwoman in the town. Membership channelled through one individual in the municipality, an engineer.	Roadmap	CCP Programme	Need ICLEI to continue to document projects and best practice as well as create an actionable programme for which support of the national government is also needed (Electrical Engineer).	Energy Conservation Award for street lighting in 2008.
					JNNURM

The experiences of these five municipalities suggest that the policies are received and integrated in different ways into municipal structures depending on the personalities involved, the interest in the municipality and the approach of the network. None of the municipalities described an interest in the written policies themselves as an incentive to join the network, but the surrounding policy knowledge and policy models seemed more important giving ideas and inspiration. This is somewhat at odds with the emphasis of the network staff on the written policies themselves.

6.2. The role of policy entrepreneurs

The role of individuals in establishing the initial relationship with ICLEI SA and moving urban climate policies between locations has been key in India and in the CCP programme elsewhere (Bulkeley & Betsill 2003, p. 175; Roberts 2009). In Bhubaneswar, for example, the interest of an individual in environmental issues led to the initial CCP programme in Bhubaneswar, and in Thane the support of the municipal commissioner for the programme has given it visibility in the Corporation and elsewhere. In Vijayawada and Visakhapatnam, it was an engineer with a specific interest in energy efficiency who brought the ideas to the municipality, and personal connections in Vadodara which led to the link. However, bringing an initial relationship with ICLEI to a municipality does not necessarily translate into action in the key sectors of municipal policy. What is important is how these policies become embedded and translated in the local context, and in these five case studies there is little evidence of this happening. In several municipalities individual champions could be identified but there is no evidence of the policies being further embedded through policies being implemented, supported by a wider range of organisations or stakeholders or moving forward on the agenda outside of a specific project framework. City development plans drawn up recently for the JNNURM fund make no mention of climate change or energy efficiency and no funds or staff have been allocated to these programmes. The lack of institutionalisation is partly due to the difficulties of institutionalising anything in the fractured governance picture of municipalities, and creating change without significant extra resources, but it could also relate to how mobile policies and models become attached to an individual who may not have the power to institutionalise it. The reliance on one or two key individuals has also had an impact on local ownership of the agenda and excluded some other stakeholders who have institutional mandates at the municipal level.

6.3. Policy boosterism and shifting narratives

The importance of conferences and site visits is highlighted by McCann (2011) and the role of policy spaces in this context has already been noted in the previous section. However, moving between the policy spaces and the municipalities themselves there is a shifting narrative in how policies are discussed and how the urban problem is constructed. Whilst network staff stress that they engage municipalities through an energy-saving, cost-saving agenda, several events used the narrative of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions to present policies and urban initiatives. The policies themselves are also described using a climate-change script, with municipalities passing ‘climate protection policies’. In Vijayawada, the municipality understandably uses the expertise of ICLEI SA locally to seek to save money on power bills rather than for any explicit climate change aim. As the additional commissioner explained: ‘basically the savings in power is the immediate concern. The power bills are climbing up so …[there is no alternative] … but to reduce the consumption’ (Municipal interview, 24 March 2009). However, at a presentation at an ICLEI SA workshop in September 2009, the Commissioner describes the primary benefit an energy efficiency project as through emission reductions, and in a presentation in January 2009 put ‘mitigate climate change effects’ at the top of a list of benefits from proposed projects. This demonstrates how municipal officers understand what is expected of them in climate change policy spaces, and strategically move between local pragmatics and international rhetoric to maximise the impact of their message. This is ‘policy boosterism’ to some extent. They are promoting a particular way of doing municipal energy, but they are also framing the benefits of the policies in terms of the national or international policy space rather than through local concerns. In Bhubaneswar, an energy-efficiency policy was passed in 2007 which made Bhubaneswar the first Indian city to have an energy-efficiency policy. This was promoted externally by various municipal and political officials. Other urban stakeholders complained in interviews that the municipality was more focused on promoting this policy than implementing it, and at the time of research there was no evidence of progress towards the target of energy reduction set for 2012. This example shows how officials use certain policies to boost their international profile but this does not necessarily translate to local gains in energy efficiency, or build ownership at the local level.

McCann (2008, 2011) discusses the role of urban professionals in promoting particular models of urban planning by ensuring that their story is told correctly and can influence wider discussions on urbanism. The presence of cities at conferences, the locations of the conferences and the stories told, all serve to build up a picture of which cities are worthy of attention. This raises an interesting question about how cities such as those discussed in this paper can engage with these global spatialities of urban climate knowledge when the stories being told, the problems raised, and the solutions proposed are often so far from their own urban contexts and needs. As shown above, these municipalities have been supported to engage in these flows by the policy-mobility agents, and have adapted their ‘urban stories’ to chime with the national or international concerns expressed. Whilst this is in many ways a thin veneer of climate change, as McCann suggests attention to mundane practices such as these are an important part of ‘the social, inter-scalar process of policy mobilities’ (2011, p. 117) and highlight the tensions for such urban actors in seeking to promote their cities and access these global climate policy trends. This need to access the global policy trends and movement may become more urgent if direct access to climate finance opens up to sub-national governments and following the decision in Warsaw COP 19 to facilitate the spread of best practice between sub-national governments within the UNFCCC. Given the gap identified in the wider literature between rhetoric and implementation in urban climate policies, a process of mobility that encourages climate-change rhetoric without local depth to allow municipal actors to engage in global dialogues is problematic for the sustainability of the agenda.

7. Discussion and conclusions

So far, I have argued that ICLEI SA acts as an agent for policy mobility seeking to move climate policies into new locations through new actors and networks. These policies are both regional and transnational. The techniques used by the network are to build connections and motivation for climate policy mobility through a range of events, programmes and incentives. They provide policy spaces for interactions and idea transfer and render policies mobile through a focus on generating data, creating inventories and transferring technical information. Whilst the current mobility of such policies may be relatively low, such work of laying the groundwork for future mobilities (whether through the network or more informal means) may be a crucial part of ensuring these municipalities can begin to participate in the fast policy transfer in the future. Within the municipalities themselves I have noted the challenges of integrating mobile climate policies into complicated and political urban structures, and the use of the mobile policy models for ideas and inspiration as well as sparking some contestation of the agenda. I then argued that the role of individuals has been important in initial mobility but this has not been sufficient to lead onto institutionalisation within municipal structures. Lastly, I argued that municipal officers use strategically shifting narratives to promote themselves and their cities in new policy spaces around urban climate change.

These findings offer useful ways ahead for networks and individuals working within these contexts as well as some insight into the increasing role of external consultants and policies that are circulating within sustainable urban development. It suggests, for example, that the process of policy mobility is as important, if not more so, than what is agreed or formalised in an actual policy. In fact, too much emphasis on a single policy itself often seems to be less productive. Embedding an urban climate policy with the necessary supporting policy models and knowledge is a process that needs a wide range of stakeholders and a local ‘hook’ that engages different actors. The harmonisation approach to urban climate policies taken by ICLEI SA does not seem to support this embedding in local circumstances, and the territoriality aspect of policy mobilities is shown to be weak in India often for this reason. It is interesting to note that the approach taken by the ACCCRN network has focused more on the process aspect of mobility with shared learning dialogues and deliberation (policy models) rather than so much emphasis on the policies themselves (Reed et al. 2013). However, even within this focus on deliberation the political economy of involving the urban poor as stakeholders and acting on technical information is noted to be challenging. The CCCI has also taken a more diverse approach to mobility seeking to engage with local governments through their own local entry points. These looser types of engagement focusing more on policy models and negotiated knowledge than the policies themselves are interesting responses to the challenges noted in this paper; however, it remains to be seen how and if they manage to embed climate change urban responses in different ways.

This paper has focused on an agent that seeks to make policies mobile and I argue that the lens of mobile policies and mobility agents is particularly insightful in a situation such as this one in second-tier cities where climate policy mobility is in its infancy and cities have little international (or in some cases national) presence to promote their policies for mobility. Through a focus on how and why the policies, models and knowledge move, it is possible to identify the beginnings of an urban climate agenda and the potential challenges ahead. Study of some of the ‘mundane practices of mobility’ highlights emerging challenges such as incorporating some urban experiences within the wider frames of global urban policy. The evidence presented in this paper suggests some differences in the mundane practices of mobility in these Indian cities compared to the movement of policy consultants and planners described elsewhere (see McCann 2011; Prince 2012). First, the policy spaces, both national and international, play a different role in such contexts. The events can be highly formal and structured not leaving time for the informal interactions that McCann considers an essential part of such mobile policy spaces. More is needed to facilitate the movement of policy in these cases: this includes developing the political will of the municipal officers concerned, the precursors for mobility such as capacity, links with other institutions locally, and also for the policy fragments to be deemed transferable. Second, some policy spaces also involve the municipal officers using a shifting narrative that emphasises the global discourse of climate change and emission reductions whilst downplaying the local incentives for such policies including saving money and gaining prestige. This shifting narrative suggests that to access these global flows of knowledge officials are reinterpreting their local experience to be of relevance to these actors. This is not travelling to ensure the story is correct (see McCann 2011) but attempting to access global policy forums and the benefits they bring, through hooking local stories onto the appropriate circulating policy model. The policy spaces do however play an important role in building the sense of community and momentum around the policy area; focusing on policy knowledge and models that might initiate local ideas and inspiration rather than the written policies. Third, I argue it is important to be attentive to the prerequisites for mobility in countries such as India where some cities need support, frameworks and wider networks to begin engaging in these fast policy flows.

In terms of ways ahead for networks, these findings suggest that the spaces for policy mobility need to be catered to the particular cultural context and focused on their desired outcomes. Just creating spaces is not sufficient for policy mobility or exchange and the primary purpose, whether it is capacity building, exchange of policy models and inspiration or actual training on policy knowledge, needs to be clear. Second, whilst municipal officers and engineers currently translate their local stories to access global policy models and circulations, as this type of policy mobility becomes more significant in second-tier cities such as those discussed here will need more robust entry points to join the global dialogue. This is to ensure that local interpretations of urban climate change responses relevant to their urban experiences are communicated at all levels and supported for any funding streams that may become available. This will probably need to come from bottom-up concerns that may correspond to aspects of sustainable urban agendas rather than from GHG emissions and global policy models scaled down to the urban level.

Finally, I turn to the question of how policies are rendered transferable and the possible implications of this for future urban climate governance. If new actors are increasingly engaged in climate change through policy mobility agents, and policy models and guidelines that are deemed most transferable are those that succeed in moving between locations, what implications would this have for the development of urban climate policies? Transferability in this case has been managed through a focus on data collection, reports and a set of action plans, and ensuring policies are within broader urban discourses (i.e. not challenging current priorities or accepted orthodoxies). This has in some instances side-lined questions of whose sustainability is being addressed, the consequences of climate change for the urban residents, and the trade-offs to be made. A focus on measurable, reportable data also generally favours local mitigation agendas rather than more complicated measurements of resilience or adaptive capacity (Brooks et al. 2013). Urban policy mobilities are increasingly visible in the global South and the role of policy mobility agents, such as the transnational municipal network I discuss here and others such as ACCCRN and the CCCI, are considerably more significant in these contexts where municipalities are competing for external opportunities and funding, and are less able to seek out mobile urban policies, policy models and knowledge themselves. These mobility agents may need to align their policy discourses with their constituent local governments to gain traction and interest which has implications for the types of urban climate change policies that become mobile and the approaches taken by local government. This is of particular concern in the case of climate change, where an overly technical agenda may side-line the most important climate change issues such municipalities face, leaving aside questions of urban environmental justice and adaptation to address technical programmes of water pumping systems, or street lighting in municipalities with very minimal carbon footprints. In the current context of partially stalled climate change negotiations and mobile climate policies travelling with a variety of non-state actors, consultants and networks, it is necessary to continue to examine critically the implications of these new policy flows and processes of mobility. These processes affect what flows and what doesn’t, who is involved and who isn’t and how these policy ideas and actions might become embedded across both urban mitigation and adaptation agendas in the long term.

Funding

This research was undertaken with the support of an Economics and Social Science Research Council (ESRC) studentship at the Geography Department, University of Cambridge.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all the interview respondents who shared their time and thoughts with me and particularly Dr Emma Mawdsley for her guidance during the research. Any errors and omissions remain my own. I acknowledge the support of the Geography Department, University of Cambridge and the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics, who supported the writing up of this paper.

Notes

1. Reforms are categorised as compulsory and optional, at both the State and municipal levels. The reforms are built around decentralisation, basic urban services for the poor, property tax reform, public participation and various by-law revisions.

2. Whilst the policies discussed in this paper are primarily around energy, they all include an explicit aim to address climate change more broadly.

3. Due to the methodological challenges of this work I cannot state if such networking occurred in informal spaces beyond my research access. There was no indication of this given in interviews or informal discussions with participants.