Mobilizing Cities towards a Low Carbon Future: Tambourines, Carrots and Sticks

Leonardo Meeus and Erik Delarue

No 2011/04, RSCAS Working Papers from European University Institute

Abstract: In the transition towards a decarbonized energy system, we need city authorities to lead by example as public actors, to govern the actions of the private urban actors as local policy makers, and to conceive and manage the implementation of an integrated approach as coordinators, which we introduce in this paper as three levels of city smartness. Local governments however have institutional disincentives to act, and if they do act, they are confronted with urban actors that are reluctant to follow. This paper analyzes how city pioneers in Europe have been able to overcome these disincentives thanks to a combination of local circumstances and interventions by higher levels of government. We categorize the state of the art instruments that have been used by higher levels of government into “tambourines”, “carrots”, and “sticks”, and reflect on how the state of the art could be improved.

Keywords: cities; climate change; governance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-02-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/15638/RSCAS_2011_04.pdf?sequence=4 Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Mobilizing cities towards a low-carbon future: Tambourines, carrots and sticks (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rsc:rsceui:2011/04

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in RSCAS Working Papers from European University Institute Convento, Via delle Fontanelle, 19, 50014 San Domenico di Fiesole (FI) Italy. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by RSCAS web unit ().