From sustainable development to carbon control: Eco-state restructuring and the politics of urban and regional development

By A. While, Andrew E. G. Jonas, David Gibbs. 2010

377 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The management of carbon emissions holds some prospect for challenging sustainable development as the organising principle of socio-environmental regulation. This paper explores the rise of a distinctive low-carbon polity as an ideological state project, and examines its potential ramifications for the regulation of economy–environment relations at the urban and regional scale. Carbon control would seem to introduce a new set of values into state regulation and this might open up possibilities for challenging mainstream modes of urban and regional development in a manner not possible under sustainable development. But low-carbon restructuring also portends intensified uneven development, new forms of state control and a socially uneven reworking of state–society relations. In order to explore these issues we start by setting out a framework for conceptualising environmental regulation based around the idea of eco-state restructuring. This idea is introduced to capture the conflicts, power struggles and strategic selectivities involved as governments seek to reconcile environmental protection with multiple other pressures and demands. Overall the paper seeks to make a distinctive contribution to theoretical work on state environmental regulation and the emerging spatial dimensions of climate policy.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a8828630236edf85ba6aaf8ce3ec58876d2d035e

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In Global and Planetary Change

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

David Gibbs

In Political Science and International Relations

Citations in the corpus

Renewable energy for sustainable rural development: Synergies and mismatches (2020, background): “Through actively diverting a threat into an opportunity in search of new profitability (Bakker, 2009), solutions to environmental and economic problems become part of the capitalist sustainable development logic (While et al., 2010) – an approach, which is aligned with the large-scale investments in”
Geographies of energy transition: Space, place and the low-carbon economy (2013, background): “There has been a rise in interest in ‘‘carbon’’ in some of the more progressive local authorities and some high profile initiatives involving major cities (While et al., 2010).”
Beyond green niches? Growth strategies of environmentally-motivated social enterprises (2014, background): “These approaches need to be understood in relation to wider contextual/institutional factors, which can be both enabling and constraining, including societal norms affecting the demand for the services/products involved, public policies intended to support a nascent low carbon economy (While et al.,”
Smart Cities and Green Growth: Outsourcing Democratic and Environmental Resilience to the Global Technology Sector (2014, background): “Such ‘market environmentalism’ gives rise to further social and spatial inequalities under the guise of ‘sustainability’ (While et al, 2010, page 77).”
Building a green economy? Sustainability transitions in the UK building sector (2015, background): “In the process, however, the green economy has often become transformed into the narrower conceptualisation of a low carbon economy – where the aim is to reduce carbon emissions as part of attempts to stabilise carbon levels in the atmosphere (While et al., 2010).”
Accumulation by Conservation (2014, background): “…significant in this process, as it represents an attempt to unite the two principal contemporary conservation concerns – biodiversity and climate change – under a common banner as the latter increasingly displaces the former as the main focus of global environmental attention (While et al. 2010).”
Municipal Food Strategies and Integrated Approaches to Urban Agriculture: Exploring Three Cases from the Global North (2013, background): “Within urban literatures there are a number of conceptual frameworks that analyse local government responses to emerging ‘sustainability’ policy issues (MacRae 1999; Bruff and Wood 2000; Chatterton and Style 2001; McCann 2003; van Bueren and ten Heuvelhof 2005; While, Jonas, and Gibbs 2010).”