Linking social actors by linking social theories: toward improved GHG mitigation strategies

Abstract

Understanding how to alter people’s behavior to mitigate GHG emissions in cities is a challenge for both researchers and practitioners. The problem encompasses comprehending variation in behavior among thousands to millions of people living in cities, as well as their contributions to the cities’ GHG footprint. To help simplify this challenge, this article seeks to define and justify the partitioning of people into three categories of actors for understanding and mitigating GHGs at the city-scale. The three actor categories are policy actors, designers and operators of infrastructure and individual infrastructure users. By linking theories from across the social sciences, this article provides specific illustrations of the three actor categories and intertwines them with the goal of developing better GHG mitigation strategies. This paper concludes with a discussion of the need for meta-theoretical approaches toward describing and explaining the interactions among the social actor categories and GHG mitigation in cities.

Acknowledgements

This paper was presented at the US–China Workshop on Pathways Toward Low Carbon Cities held in Hong Kong (December 2010), which was sponsored by the US National Science Foundation grant CMMI-1045411.

Financial & competing interests disclosure

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties. No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.