征稿函 | JCPA地方气候政策与治理比较专刊征稿

JCPA Special Panel

on Local Climate Policy and Governance

from a Comparative Perspective

The 2022 Annual Conference of the Asian Association of Public Administration

Shanghai, December 3-4, 2022

Local cities are at the forefront of combating climate change. While climate change has been thought of as a collective action problem of a global scale, scholars also argue that cities are more efficient, nimble, familiar with local knowledge, and closer to the ground-level implementation. Despite their critical role in climate change and sustainability solutions, city governments worldwide face challenges of limited capacity and accountability to adopt comprehensive measures and achieve appropriate targets. This is even the case for world’s most populous and wealthy cities. New York City, for example, released Roadmap to 80×50 plan in 2016, establishing a strategy to achieve 80% emission reduction by 2050. However, up until 2020, the city has only achieved 17% emission reduction compared to 2005, far lagging behind the city’s own climate agenda.

A subfield of research has thus emerged in order to understand how city governments could better use innovative measures to tackle climate problems when facing capacity constraints and accountability problems. Most of these discussions answer questions such as: When and why do city government engage, commit and ultimately enact innovative climate measures? How can city government make a comprehensive and feasible climate action plan, which not only addresses global responsibility but also secures local interests? How can city government motivate and mobilize local actors to enhance its capacity in the implementation of local climate plans and policies? How can city government interact and collaborate with other governments at different levels to enhance the efficiency and efficacy of regional climate agenda?

Answering these questions from a comparative perspective helps us better understand the dynamics of local climate governance. Climate change presents a unique opportunity to revisit the existing knowledge on public policy and governance. The complexity of global climate change and the diversity across regions and localities call for more comparative research on local policy process and governance strategies that enhance local governments’ civic, fiscal and managerial capacity in climate change mitigation and adaptation. Solutions might be generated from comparative analysis of innovative climate policy instruments, allowing lesson-drawing and extrapolation across different local contexts.

Thus, the panel seeks to bringing together an international comparative scholarship on local climate policy and governance, and to find novel exploration to the aforementioned questions by identifying innovative practices, developing new explanations, and utilizing cutting-edge methodologies. In the spirit of this year’s conference theme on “new governance challenges towards sustainable development goals”, we welcome papers that bring a comparative perspective for understanding local climate governance and innovations in different countries and regions (Studies of international comparison are particularly encouraged). We welcome submissions from different disciplines such as public policy, public administration, urban planning and governance, to provide a holistic understanding of the strategies that city governments might adopt when facing climate challenges.

This panel is sponsored by Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice, an SSCI-index, internationally renowned journal that aims to stimulate the intellectual development of comparative policy studies and the growth of an international community of scholars who research the challenges and benefits of global inter- and intra-policy making.

Deadline for abstract: September 7th, 2022

Deadline for full paper: November 15, 2022

Submission to:

Zhilin Liu, Co-Editor, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis; Tsinghua University (zhilinliu@tsinghua.edu.cn);

Lu Liao; Renmin University of China (luliao@ruc.edu.cn);

Iris Geva-May, Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis; Simon Fraser University and Carleton University, Canada