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Abstract
Increasingly at the scale of cities, strategies and plans to respond to the challenges of climate change and constrained resources are being developed. A range of climate change plans, low-carbon strategies, peak oil preparations and so on have been developed, often with ambitious aspirations. At the same time, new and reconstituted “intermediary” organizational forms are working between the priorities of these plans and the contexts of their “application”. This is the movement between the “what” of the plans, strategies and preparations and the priorities they embody and the “how” of attempts at their accomplishment. Drawing on research in Greater Manchester, in this paper we examine the organizational contexts constituted for such a purpose and ask fundamental questions about whose priorities are being advocated, where and how this is organized and what the implications of this are for forms of urban transition.
Notes
The chapters in a recent book (Bulkeley et al., Citation2010) explicitly exploring the role of cities in low carbon transitions detailed some of the many different ways of thinking about the roles of cities in this respect—the city as a transition actor, as a contributor to national level transitions (Geels, Citation2010), through the lens of decision-making calculus (While, Citation2010), as constituted through multi-level governance coalitions of interest, the organisational cultures of urban transition (Hodson & Marvin, Citation2010a), but also through ‘alternative’ spaces within the city through which often marginalised voices seek to participate in low carbon transitions (Pickerill, Citation2010).
The LCTP claims that by 2020: more than 1.2 million people will be in green jobs; 7 million homes will have benefited from whole house makeovers, and more than 1.5 million households will be supported to produce their own clean energy; around 40% of electricity will be from low-carbon sources, from renewables, nuclear and clean coal; and the UK will be importing half the amount of gas that it otherwise would (DECC, 2009a).
We use the terms Greater Manchester and Manchester city-region interchangeably.