Climate pioneership and leadership in structurally disadvantaged maritime port cities

ABSTRACT

Innovative climate governance in small-to-medium-sized structurally disadvantaged cities (SDCs) are assessed. Considering their deeply ingrained severe economic and social problems it would be reasonable to assume that SDCs act primarily as climate laggards or at best as followers. However, novel empirical findings show that SDCs are capable of acting as climate pioneers. Different types and styles of climate leadership and pioneership and how they operate within multi-level and polycentric governance structures are identified and assessed. SDCs seem relatively readily willing to adopt transformational climate pioneership styles to create ‘green’ jobs, for example, in the offshore wind energy sector and with the aim of improving their poor external image. However, in order to sustain transformational climate pioneership they often have to rely on support from ‘higher’ levels of governance. For SDCs, there is a tension between learning from each other’s best practice and fierce economic competition in climate innovation.

KEYWORDS:

• Structurally disadvantaged cities
• climate
• pioneers
• leaders
• offshore wind energy jobs
• societal participation

Acknowledgments

Rudi Wurzel and Andrew Jonas are grateful to the British Academy (grant no. SG 131240) and the University of Hull for funding. The authors thank their interviewees. More than 70 interviews with local politicians, officials, businesses and NGOs took place in Bremerhaven and Hull while three were carried out in Berlin and Dessau in 2014–2017. We are grateful to the referees as well as to the journal editors, Anthony Zito and Chris Rootes, for their very helpful comments. We delivered an earlier version of this manuscript at the Innovations in Climate Governance (INOGOV) funded workshop on ‘Pioneers and Leaders in Polycentric Climate Governance (PiLePoC) in Hull on 15–16 September 2016. The usual disclaimer applies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Hull is formally called Kingston-upon-Hull although it is widely referred to as Hull (see: http://www.hullhistorycentre.org.uk/discover/hull_history_centre/about_us/historyofhull.aspx [Accessed 5.5.2017].

2. It is not yet clear whether the unemployment figures for 2016 constitute an outlier. One reason for the improved employment figure for 2016 is due to the fact that Hull was the UK’s City of Culture which resulted in about 800 additional jobs (University of Hull 2018). Other recently created jobs in Hull are relatively insecure jobs in the gig economy. Table 1 states the unemployment figures for 2015 because they are more typical for the last few decade.