Sustainability in City-Regionalism as Emergent Practice: The Case of the BRICS

Philip Harrison
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Philip Harrison: School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg 2050, South Africa

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 9, 1-19

Abstract: Sustainability concerns transgress jurisdictional boundaries compelling multi-scalar and inter-jurisdictional responses. The city-region is one of the scales at which governance actors may mobilise for sustainability and this is now recognised in literatures on integrated food systems, for example. However, within the mainstream debates on city-regions, sustainability as a motivation for inter-jurisdictional governance is still given scant attention. This paper considers the extent to which sustainability is present as a driver towards city-region governance, using countries within the still underexplored BRICS cluster as cases studies. The paper shows that in practice the connection between environmental sustainability and city regionalism remains mainly limited and fractious. In all cases, however, there are emergent connections which offer the potential for stronger connections. Most importantly, public reaction to a mounting environmental crisis in the BRICS is obliging the actors of governance, concerned with sustaining their public legitimacy, to establish or strengthen inter-jurisdictional and collaborative relationships across city-regions. There are however significant limits to these endeavours, especially where levels of social trust are low, or where sustainability problems are rooted within unsustainable national growth paths.

Keywords: city-region; urban sustainability; environmental politics; environmental governance; BRICS; comparative method (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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