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This article examines the effect of the development of bicycle policy in Mexico City on existing landscapes of urban citizenship. In Mexico City, NGOs, activists and progressive city officials used Ecobici, the city's bike share system, to promote the bicycle as an innovative, sustainable and socially inclusive mode of transportation in central areas of the city. At the same time, bicycle infrastructure has not yet reached peripheral, low‐income and underfunded districts, where residents rely on bicycles for transportation. I draw on the Cities and Low Carbon Transitions framework to examine bicycle policy as a project aimed at transforming Mexico City's socio‐technical systems for transportation, and I draw on notions of urban citizenship to examine how green urban infrastructures materialize and transform regimes of inequality. The article shows how the bicycle experiment was limited by a consensus that maintained existing power inequalities, favored expert‐driven design targeting middle‐class users, and opted for rapid project implementation over long‐term institutional re‐design and capacity‐building. These dynamics excluded citizens from the planning of bicycle policy and the urban poor from enjoying the benefits of the investments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy modelling can assist national decision makers in determining strategies that achieve net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, three key challenges for the modelling community are emerging under this radical climate target that needs to be recognized and addressed. A first challenge is the need to represent new mitigation options not currently represented in many energy models. We emphasize here the under representation of end-use sector demand-side options due to the traditional supply side focus of many energy models, along with issues surrounding robustness in deploying carbon dioxide removal (CDR) options. A second challenge concerns the types of models used. We highlight doubts about whether current models provide sufficient relevant insights on system feasibility, actor behaviour, and policy effectiveness. A third challenge concerns how models are applied for policy analyses. Priorities include the need for expanding scenario thinking to incorporate a wider range of uncertainty factors, providing insights on target setting, alignment with broader policy objectives, and improving engagement and transparency of approaches. There is a significant risk that without reconsidering energy modelling approaches, the role that the modelling community can play in providing effective decision support may be reduced. Such support is critical, as countries seek to develop new Nationally Determined Contributions and longer-term strategies over the next few years. Key policy insights Energy systems that reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions will be radically different to those of today, necessitating a modelling analysis re-think. On modelled options for mitigation, a range of demand-side measures are often absent resulting in a risk of over-reliance on carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and leading to concerns over robustness of corresponding pathways. Regarding models for policy, there is significant scope for improvements, including the use of scenarios that help imagine the radical change that will be required, techniques for improving the robustness of emerging strategies, and better alignment with broader policy goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Lever-Tracy's call for stronger sociological engagement with climate change in 2008, the number of climate-related contributions to leading sociological journals has increased. Yet, they still represent a small percentage of contributions overall. Reviewing the 37 articles published in eight top-ranked sociology journals until 2018, the authors of the present article identify five main subfields of research: (a) reflections on the role of the social sciences, (b) politics, (c) economy and consumption, (d) media and public perceptions, and (e) global flows. They conclude that the rise in contributions since 2008 indicates that climate change creates some resonance in the disciplinary core of mainstream sociology but that most sociological climate change research is undertaken and published in inter- and transdisciplinary spaces beyond the boundaries of the discipline. Emphasizing that climate change research can provide important epistemic resources for the discipline, the authors argue that sociology would benefit from being more responsive to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to outline a methodological approach that can be used in order to help understand such movements, and more fundamentally, the role of community in Social Innovation (SI). The article offers an overview of Participative Action Research (PAR), and outlines its strengths and weaknesses in studying community-based social innovation, in this case the Transition movement. PAR is not an ‘off the shelf’ kit, or a ‘conforming of methodological standards’, but rather a series of approaches that ought to inform the research. The paper argues that these approaches, rather than techniques, are essential to get right if the intangible, granular, and incidental-but-fundamental aspects of community are to be grasped by researchers. Given the small-scale nature of community low carbon transitions a granular analysis is preferred to a more surface, superficial overview of such processes. Qualitative research is preferred to quantitative aggregation of initiatives, due to the need to understand the everyday, more phenomenological aspects of community, and the specific tacit relations and subjectivities enacted through their capacity to cut carbon.

• Historical evolution of the European electricity regime. • Interaction between European grand visions with pragmatic integration processes. • Tensions between the current market-based regime and low carbon transition. • Importance of empirical study of regime evolution in transitions studies. In this paper we develop a socio-technical analysis of the European electricity system. We show that the relationship between high-level grand visions of an integrated European system and more pragmatic bottom-up processes of electricity system development have been a feature of the European regime for coordinating cross-border electricity flows since the 1920s. Following a period when radically different visions of a European system were proposed, the nation-state emerged as the key site of system building and constituted the core of the technological and institutional configuration. However, European grand visions persisted and this led to the creation of various forms of transnational collaboration and coordination. We discuss whether this inherited technological and institutional configuration is compatible with the contemporary desire for a European low-carbon transition and we emphasise the need for more detailed analysis of socio-technical regimes and their dynamics to inform policy and enrich transitions theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until relatively recently international political economy (IPE) scholarship on energy has tended to focus on oil, rather than energy understood in its full, current diversity through IPE's tripartite liberal, realist or critical lenses. Over the past decade or so there have, however, been far-reaching transformations in the global economy, not least in response to the increased recognition, and visibility, of damaging manifestations of fossil fuel usage and human-induced climate change. In the light of such changes this article, and the special section as a whole, represents a distinctive departure from earlier IPE of energy traditions by collectively deepening our understanding of how the IPE of energy is changing: in scalar, material, distributional and political terms. An appeal is made for greater engagement by IPE scholars with energy, given its wide-ranging relevance to debates about climate change, development, technology and equity and justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article excavates the role, function and practices of community within Transition, a grassroots environmentalist movement. It does so to pursue a quest for understanding if, how, and in what ways, community-based environmental movements are 'political'. When community-based low carbon initiatives are discussed academically, they can be critiqued; this critique is in turn often based on the perception that the crucial community aspect tends to be a settled, static and reified condition of (human) togetherness. However community--both in theory and practice--is not destined to be so. This article collects and evaluates data from two large research projects on the Transition movement. It takes this ethnographic evidence together with lessons from post-political theory, to outline the capacious, diverse and progressive forms of community that exists within the movement. Doing so, it argues against a blanket postpolitical diagnosis of community transitions, and opens up, yet again, the consequences of the perceptions and prejudices one has about community are more than mere theoretical posturing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research of transition processes in the context of climate change and sustainability has experienced a rapid growth in recent years. A popular framework to understand the dynamics of such socio-technical transitions is the multi-level perspective (MLP) developed by Geels and others. Two topics have been rising in the expanding discussion on Sustainability Transitions: develop a processual understanding of the proposed levels and integrating the "experimental turn" in transition research into the framework. Against this background, we ask whether and how the MLP approach can be used to better understand real-world laboratory settings regarding their form and dynamic. Doing so, we change from multi-level perspective (MLP) to multi-relational perspective (MRP). Our framework is based on Harrison White's concepts of identity and network domains. As proof of concept we rely on the case study on the empirical project "KlimaNetze" (ClimateNets) that investigates the role of social networks in urban climate change governance in a midsized German City. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the urban is identified as a productive site for addressing climate change, the ‘post-political’ critique dismisses climate policy as a vacuous discourse that obscures power relations and exclusion, defends the established neoliberal order, and silences challenges. This paper argues that rather than consensus, there is a conflict between urban climate policy and the need to reignite economic growth in the context of austerity urbanism, but also that we should not assume that challenges to neoliberal understandings of the ‘sensible’ will always be disregarded. Rather, urban climate policy can be progressed through partnership processes utilising ‘co-production’ techniques which entail significant agonistic, if not antagonistic, contestation. The argument is illustrated with a case study of climate policy making in the context of austerity urbanism in Liverpool, UK. While ‘low carbon’ is conceptualised by elite actors in Liverpool in neoliberal terms as a source of new low carbon jobs and businesses, with an emphasis on energy security and fuel poverty, this view is not unchallenged. The paper recounts how an ad hoc group of actors in the city came together to form a partnership advocating for more strategic decarbonisation, which should be progressed through a bid for the city to be European Green Capital. The disputes that emerged around this agenda suggest that in the context of austerity urbanism the need for cities to act to mitigate against dangerous climate change is not as uncontested as conceptions of the post-political suggest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses how national governments seek to enrol different subjects and objects in energy-carbon restructuring. It takes analysis beyond consideration of particular subjectivities and governmentalities to consider an expanded range of objects and subjects of governing at a distance. Developing an analytical model of ‘modes of enrolment’ focusing on power modalities, forms of policy integration and policy targets, the article explores five broad modes of enrolment employed in England. The article shows how policy across all modes of enrolment in England has increasingly tended towards disordered, syndromic experimentation and government by-project rather than any systematic programme of government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In policy and research, there is increasing recognition that the scale of transitions necessary for a low carbon society will require significant reductions in energy demand. Concurrently, advancing knowledge about energy practices has been highlighted as important in developing a basis for the delivery of less energy intensive configurations. In this article, we examine interview (participant n = 53) and visual (photographic) data collected across two UK communities to develop understanding of energy consumption as part of everyday life. We conduct our analysis through a practice theoretical lens, in particular drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts, to develop social theoretically informed interpretations of energy demand and its constitution through daily practice. We conclude reflecting on the implications of our analysis for conceptualising societal change and the role of policy in reducing energy demand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper unpacks the complex relations between community low carbon transitions, the prosaic state, neoliberal modes of governing, and the role of numbers therein. It aims to outline the ways in which the prosaic state can, through everyday tasks, decisions, measurements and demonstration requirements, force a calculative logic onto and into community based movements and groups in ways that can be counterproductive. It centrally argues that the will to quantify, in particular the accompanying demonstration requirements (most often a number), enacts three fundamental shifts in the collective subjectivity integral to community groups and movements. First, the preferred form of knowledge becomes abstract, disembodied and fungible ( episteme ) over and against relational ways to understand and conceive togetherness ( mētis ), including ecological relationships. Second, the vision of community shifts from a search to belong, an intrinsic end in itself, towards an instrumental means to achieve specific targets. Finally, third, the splitting of means from ends. These can all be traced from the demonstration requirements, and numbers, accompanying neoliberal prosaic state engagement with community groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The involvement of private sector actors in low carbon urban transitions is a neglected element of geographical analysis. Drawing on Polanyian, cultural economic geographies and the non-capitalocentric ethics of JK Gibson-Graham’s diverse economies perspective, the paper engages with the wider literature on the engagement of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in environmental action, corporate social responsibility and low carbon transitions to develop a substantivist account of the contribution of SMEs to local low carbon transitions. The paper argues that, contra formalist economic analyses of economic rationality, SME owners should not be thought of as uncritical profit maximizers but as actors in favour of positive low carbon futures. Thus the paper argues that Polanyian economic geographies and diverse economies perspectives, which rarely speak to each other, can be drawn together, and concludes with suggestions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the varying interpretations, idealising and use of community, with specific reference to the way community is mobilised, deployed and put to work within the transition to low carbon futures. It surveys the broad heritage of community from nineteenth century sociology to more recent post-structural interpretations, including community as a governmental technique. This backdrop of wider understandings of community is now reflected in the emerging field of community low carbon transitions. The paper looks to the multiple, overlapping yet categorically different communities implied in this theoretically and empirically burgeoning field. First, and in common with community's social science heritage, this article argues that community is polysemic. That is, it carries within it wide and varied semantic associations; importantly - amongst small-scale, place or rurality - requiring commonality and a border. Digging deeper, community also has a concurrent social theory legacy beyond referred semantic association. Here community is polyvalent, capaciously involving many different and overlapping values: from exclusive belonging, exclusion of others and difference, a more governmental fostering of correct conduct and good behaviour, to a feeling of belonging or acceptance that goes beyond semantics. Lastly, and innovatively for this area of study, the paper addresses community as phatic communication. Here, community has no meaning, nor does it imply shared or encouraged values. Rather community is reduced to gesture, which transforms understanding the way community is used in meeting low carbon challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of contradictions in urban low carbon transitions as engines of change. Following Kojève's reading of contradiction in Hegel's oeuvre, I argue that contradiction is a constitutive feature of low carbon interventions. This is an alternative to conventional readings of contradiction as a provisional encounter of opposites in which one will eventually cancel out the other. I unpack the concept of contra diction in three ways: first, by displaying a Hegelian-inspired understanding of contradiction in relation to change, time, and desire; second, by explaining how inherent contradictions can also be read in relation to the excesses that characterize the deployment of methods of calculation in low carbon interventions; and third, by situating these contradictions within the overall dynamics of carbon governance and purposive attempts to bring about a low carbon transition. The paper explores the practical implications of this analysis in a case of low carbon interventions in social housing in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The case study shows that, if contradictions are at the heart of low carbon interventions, contradiction analysis may provide a direction towards broader reconfigurations of social and technological practices and generate a desire to change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The electricity sector worldwide is facing considerable pressure arising out of climate change issues, and security of supply. Electricity systems are also facing technical issues of bi-directional power flows, increasing distances of power flows, and a growing contribution from generation sources with limited dispatch capability. There is a concern that these systems are vulnerable. Transition pathways research using a multi-level perspective has identified a general picture of the drivers in future electricity systems architecture. In such futures, the vulnerability of electricity systems becomes multi-dimensional, and security becomes a more complex issue than that of supply of fossil fuels. The aim of this work is a critical analysis into the Government's 2050 pathway scenarios for the UK with respect to their impact locally on the electricity distribution network in a case study urban area in the North East of England. A simplified electricity network model is created to evaluate network performance under the seven pathway scenarios. The results of the study show clearly that under the 2050 assumptions for growth of electricity demand and renewables uptake, problems arise for the present day local electricity distribution system. The significance of these findings are discussed with respect to transitions and local governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely recognized that a major challenge in low carbon transitioning is the reduction of energy consumption. This implies a signifi cant level of transformation in our ways of living, meaning the challenge is one that runs deep into the fabric of our personal lives. In this article we combine biographical research approaches with concepts from Bourdieu's practice theory to develop understanding of processes of change that embed particular patterns of energy consumption. Through an analysis of 'case biographies' we show the value of biographical methods for understanding the dynamics of energy demand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We assess the ability of machine learning models to predict credit ratings. • For low-carbon firms, classification and regression trees have the best precision. • The random forest ensembles have the second-best accuracy of rating predictions. • In firms with financial distress, artificial neural network models are also suitable. Maintaining low carbon energy transitions is a phenomenon that is critical in curtailing greenhouse emissions. However, such shifts usually warrant incremental capital expenditures, which require an uninterrupted access to financing. Credit ratings are an essential consideration of the financing process. In this paper, we assess the ability of various machine learning models, in order to forecast the credit ratings of eco-friendly firms. For this purpose, we have employed a sample of 355 Eurozone firms that are ranked on the basis of the extent of their climate change score by SDP, between the years spanning from 2010 to 2019. The study uses various machine learning methods, and the findings suggest that classification and regression trees have the most precision for the credit rating predictions. Even when the forecasting was constrained to the investment grades, speculative grades, or default categories, the accuracy remained robust. The results also suggest that a random forest ensemble can be used alongside the regression trees in order to predict default or near default ratings. Given that such firms face dynamic risk exposure towards environmental, ecological, and social factors, these results have important implications that can be taken into consideration when assessing the credit risk of pro-ecological firms. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with recent discussions about new requirements for the consideration of the 'impact' of research by the UK research councils, and in the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework ( REF). The paper argues that the need to consider impact should be critically welcomed, and, given that research is always subjectively evaluated, for academics to take a broad, rather than self-limiting conceptionalisation of what constitutes impact in their research funding bids and submissions to the REF. The paper argues that the emerging Knowledge Exchange ( KE) agenda provides a welcome mechanism for funding critically engaged research with real world partners on a participatory basis, and explores experiences of one such KE partnership, Low Carbon Liverpool, to discuss potentialities and problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In the context of a growing interest on cities as agents of change for low carbon futures, there is a question about the integration of climate change concerns into municipal sectoral policies, in particular, to what extent low carbon innovations can be incorporated into social housing policies. The paper presents a case study in Ljubljana (Slovenia), where the Municipal Housing Fund has implemented initiatives to advance low carbon innovation and to address energy vulnerabilities in the city. The analysis interrogates to what extent these experiments contribute to achieve a low carbon transition in Ljubljana and to what effect, through the application of a framework to understand how low carbon innovations are made, maintained and lived. The analysis suggests that whilst these experimental project enable the development of alternative visions of a low carbon urban future, they should be understood within the existing contradictions of the urban landscape in Ljubljana. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article furthers political geographic thinking on democracy by generating and employing a conceptualisation of 'assemblage-democracy'. Bringing an assemblage perspective to democratic thinking brings to the fore three key dimensions: the co-constitution of material and non-material connections; connectivity and associations, in particular engagement with multiple heterogeneous 'minoritarian' publics; and the (re)construction of spatial configurations such as scale. We employ these three dimensions of materiality, publics, and scale, in combination with the concept of (de)territorialisation to produce a geographic conceptualisation of democracy as emergent, precarious, and plural. We operationalise and refine the concept of assemblage-democracy through an empirical analysis of democratic experiments with energy resources. Specifically, we analyse negotiations involved in emergent democratic energy experiments through in-depth qualitative empirical study of community-owned energy projects in the UK, asking what kind of democracy emerges with new technologies and how? In answering this question, we demonstrate the fragile, contingent, and contested nature of democratic practices and connections produced in the (re)enactment of energy infrastructures. In doing so, this article also shows how an assemblage lens can offer a renewed understanding of how democratic politics is configured through material resource governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has become increasingly clear that cities will have to simultaneously undertake both adaptation and mitigation in response to accelerating climate change and the growing demands for meaningful climate action. Here we examine the connections between climate mitigation and climate adaptation, specifically, between low‐carbon energy systems and extreme events. The article specifically addresses the question, how do responses to extreme climate risks enhance or limit capacity to promote city‐level greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation? As a step toward answering this question, we present a framework for considering windows of opportunity that may arise as a result of extreme events and how these windows can be exploited to foster development and implementation of low‐carbon energy strategies. Four brief case studies are used to provide empirical background and determine the impact of potential windows of opportunity. Some general conclusions are defined. In particular, the existing energy system structure is an important determinant of impact and potential for energy transitions. Well‐developed and articulated governance strategies and ready access of effective and economically efficient alternative energy technology were key to transitions. However, prospects for inequity in development and implementation of low‐carbon solutions need to be considered. Finally, exploiting windows of opportunity afforded by extreme events for developing low‐carbon economy and infrastructure also can provide resilience against those very events. These types of responses will be needed as extreme events increase in frequency and magnitude in the future, with cities as primary sites of impact and action. This article is categorized under:Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Learning from Cases and Analogies [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]