Data collection method and materials

The initiatives were collected as records in an Excel database. For each initiative, the following information was collected and filed: (1) year the initiative was launched; (2) sector; (3) type(s) of organization that led the initiative; (4) partnerships involved in the initiative; (5) functions performed by the initiative, and (6) new technologies or policy/planning practices introduced through the initiative.

Year of launch

Most of the selected initiatives have taken place in the 2000s, with the majority launched between year 2005 and 2015. In this sample, the largest amount of initiatives per year was introduced between the years 2010 and 2011. This peak may be associated with the launch of NDRSs low carbon pilot scheme in 2010. The earliest project selected in this study was launched in 1998 (a waste-to-energy plant in Hangzhou) and the latest in 2015. The year of launch of the initiatives is shown by Figure 10.

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Figure 10: Year of launch of urban climate initiatives selected for comparative analysis

Sector

The initiatives were categorized into the following sectors: industry, energy, construction, transport, land use/forestry, eco-city/eco-community projects, and waste. The division is based on the categorization of climate projects used by the World Bank (2010), with the additional category of climate change information dissemination projects, understood as projects specifically aiming to spread information about climate change issues and low carbon development. The initiatives were selected with the aim of identifying initiatives from different sectors in each city. Most of the initiatives were carried out in the industrial and energy sectors, with the least number of cases in the waste sector and related to low carbon information dissemination (Table 8).

Table 8: Share of initiatives per sector of selected initiatives Sector Number of initiatives (%)

Industry 32 (21%) Energy 27 (18%) Construction 20 (13%) Transport 19 (13%) Land use/Forestry 19 (13%) Eco-City 14 (9%) Dissemination 10 (7%) Waste 9 (6%) Leadership

Type of actor leading the initiative was organized according to the following categories: municipal authority, company, civil society (local academia/local NGO), national or provincial authority, and foreign/international organization, and PPP. When determining leadership of the initiatives, the first step was to determine actor in charge of initiation and management of an initiative. As is discussed further in the Chapter 7, the question of leadership involves multiple aspects. Many of the initiatives that are initiated and managed by companies or local authorities are often in some way directed by higher level government policy guidelines. The issue of leadership becomes more complicated by the fact that many initiatives are managed by more than one actor, where actors take on different roles (e.g. financing, contracting, managing, designing or planning). Type of cooperation involved in the management of the initiatives, as well as a detailed account of different roles of different actors, is discussed in Chapter 7. Apart from “leading” actors, any other actors involved in the initiative were also listed in the database. The most common actor in charge of initiatives in this sample is municipal authorities. As shown by Table 9, just over half of the initiatives (52%) in this sample are led primarily by a

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 1998 2000 2001 2002 2003 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

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municipal authority, with the second largest group being companies (36%) and the third largest civil society (10%).11

Table 9: Actor type leading selected climate initiatives

Actor type Number of initiatives (%)

City authority 77 (51%)

Company 53 (36%)

Local Academia/NGO 11 (7%)

International organization 5 (3%)

National or provincial authority 2 (1%)

PPP 2 (1%)

Municipal authorities include Planning Bureaus, Construction Committees, Development and Reform Commissions, Transport Bureaus, Environmental Protection Bureaus, Industry and Information Technology Commissions or Science and Technology Commissions. The municipal departments are in charge of projects within their respective areas of jurisdiction, such as planning bureaus being in charge of spatial plans and urban form, construction committees in charge of energy saving schemes in buildings and development and reform commissions in charge of broad emission reduction schemes.

Companies in the sample include state-owned enterprises (SOEs) (58%), private companies (36%) and a few companies registered as public-private hybrids (6%).12 _{SOEs include}

municipal firms formed out of previous departments, as well as large units that operate on a provincial level, in all of China and overseas. Private companies are primarily companies specialized in environmental technologies.

Initiatives led by local academic organizations or NGOs are heavily dominated by semi- governmental research institutes and think tanks. This includes local branches of China Academy of Sciences or China Academy of Science and Technology, as well as municipal research and design institutes. There is one university-led initiative, and only one initiative led by an organization listed as an NGO (China Sustainable Transport Centre). However, both of these organizations participate in these initiatives in role of researcher/technical advisor. In Chapter 7, this category of leadership is referred to as domestic academia, as all of the actors in this category have a research/technical profile. None of the initiatives is led by local communities. This confirms the weak role of independent civil society in China and the way in which “expert” organizations have a much stronger representation than community-led organizations or political movements in urban environmental projects.

In this sample, 4% of the initiatives are primarily led by foreign or international organizations, which include foreign firms and research institutes, international NGOs, multilateral institutions and bilateral cooperation partners. This indicates that in spite of China’s increasing participation in global forums and cooperation with international organizations, the influence of international organizations on a municipal level remains limited. The cities selected for this study were chosen because they were likely to have a higher degree of internationalization than the average in China. This means that if international organizations have a weak representation here, it is probably even smaller in other urban areas. However, as will be further discussed in Chapter 7, participation of foreign organizations through partnerships is relatively common. Only one per cent of the initiatives is directly managed by national or provincial authorities. This seems to indicate that higher level government authorities rarely are directly in charge of

11 _{This share is similar, but lower, than that which was found in a study of climate experiments carried out in one}

hundred global cities (66%)(Castan Broto & Bulkeley, 2013).

12 _{These are companies based on private and public ownership. Initiatives led by such companies are listed as}

company-led. The initiatives that are listed in the study as PPPs are initiatives that are led by a company and a municipality.

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municipal climate projects in China, and that municipal authorities play a strong role in local action. Yet, consideration of the way in which local initiatives are shaped by higher level guidelines points to the strong influence of central and provincial government over local action.

Function

Defining the function performed through the climate initiatives follows on research of sustainability partnerships discussed in Chapter 2. A range of functions have been listed in previous research, out of which many studies conclude that “soft” functions (e.g. raising awareness, sharing information and knowledge) are most common. Glasbergen et al (2007) identify common functions as raising awareness, dissemination of information, providing technology assistance, and developing sustainable products. Pattberg et al (2012) identify a longer list: agenda setting, rule making and standard development, advocacy and lobbying, norm setting and information dissemination, knowledge production, implementation, planning, capacity-building and training, technology transfer, and service provision. Backstrand (2008) identifies advocacy, standard-setting and rule-making, implementation and service provision. Andonova et al (2009) identify information sharing, capacity building and implementation, and rule setting. This thesis categorizes initiatives into the categories of rule setting, provision of services/infrastructure, provision of incentives, information/ demonstration, technology development/capacity building, and clean production.

Bulkeley and Kern (2006) define rule setting as introduction of some sort of binding rule, including local policy, regulations and spatial plans. Rules are contrasted with what in the governance literature is referred to as “soft tools”, that is, non-binding policy that influences actors in other ways than binding regulation. In the comparative analysis, the category of rule setting includes both hard and soft tools: construction requirement, emission control zones, emission reduction plans, such as comprehensive industrial emission reduction action plans, or low carbon transport plans. Provision of public service and infrastructure includes public transport, waste and energy infrastructure. Infrastructure in the form of single or multiple buildings through low carbon construction projects is not included in this category. Information dissemination includes exhibitions, campaigns or similar awareness-raising activities. Demonstration projects include low carbon buildings and districts. Eco-city projects involve spatial planning, provision of infrastructure, technology development, information dissemination and demonstration. In this study, these projects are categorized as demonstration projects, as a key function of eco-cities often is to try out and show-case new planning and technology solutions.

The principle of “technology transfer” builds on the logic that developing countries need to access technology in developed countries in order to speed up sustainable development trajectories and achieve leap-frog development. The UN and the World Bank (2015) sees technology transfers as an important aspect of sustainability partnerships. It is also an aspect that has been raised in the academic literature (e.g. Pattberg et al, 2012). Capacity building is defined as initiatives that explicitly aim to improve knowledge or tools, for example through staff training or development of new policy toolkits.

Introduction of new policy and technology

To investigate if and how partnerships contribute to new technology or policy, any “new” energy saving and emission reduction technology or policy practice was listed in the database. Deciding whether a technology or policy is new is inherently difficult, as it requires comparisons of both time and place. The literature on policy innovation generally accepts that adoption of “new” policy is a result of diffusion of policy elements from other administrative jurisdictions or other policy domains, and rarely something entirely new. This study relies on this understanding and uses Bauer and Steurer’s (2014) definition of new climate policy. This was developed in the context of finding how climate partnerships contribute to policy innovation. This definition is “new instruments that have not been applied before in a sector, region, or local authority and changes in existing instruments that take climate-change adaptation into account” (p. 821, Ibid). Technology is similarly accepted as new if it is adopted

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for the first time introduced in a city. Initiatives that may be expected to eventually produce new technologies or practices (e.g. research centres) are not counted below, as the outcome of such efforts is unknown.

In this study, a technology or policy is accepted as new if it is self-reported in a city as introduced for the first time, according to available information and the best knowledge of the researcher. This is a generous approach to innovation, in part adopted out of necessity. Determining if and where the technology or policy really has been used in a city before is a task that is outside the scope of time and resources of this thesis. It is possible, therefore, that technologies or policies are promoted as new in the name of promotion. There is a risk that the results over-estimate the number of new technologies or policy elements, which is taken into account in the discussion of the results.

4.3.4 Data analysis

The data analysis was carried out in the following steps:

 Determine how many of the initiatives were carried out by each type of actor.

 Determine how many initiatives in each sector were carried out per type of actor, by creating a cross tabulation table. Correlation between actor type and sector was tested using Pearson’s Chi-square test.

 Determine function of the initiatives. Determine correlation between leadership and initiative function, by cross-tabulation of initiative function per type of leading actor. Correlation between actor type and function was tested using Pearson’s Chi-square test.  Determine how many initiatives involved partnerships, as well as form of partnership

(actor constellation and roles of different actors), and function of these initiatives.  Determine which initiatives involved policy or technology innovation, as well as how

many of these involved partnerships. This was followed by testing correlation between partnership form and introduction of new technology and policy or planning practices using Pearson’s Chi-square test.