Planning for Sustainability in Non-democratic Polities: The Case of Masdar City

Introduction

Following the spread of the sustainable development paradigm, agendas aimed at environmental sustainability are now being pursued by a variety of political systems ranging from liberal democracies to longstanding authoritarian regimes. However, the procedures linked to sustainability objectives rest on political values and practices commonly associated with democratic institutional arrangements such as governance, public participation, political accountability and a transparent bureaucracy (Meadowcroft, 1997; Stiglitz, 2002; Lafferty, 2004; Whitford and Wong, 2009). As Midlarsky observes

Theorists and policy-makers have been eager to put forward the virtues of democracy as a benign political influence on the environment, especially in contrast to the obvious environmental degradation under Communism that became obvious after its fall (Midlarsky, 1998, p. 341).

Indeed, if some early debates in the field of environmental policy have sought to determine whether authoritarian solutions might be more efficient at tackling environmental problems (Walker, 1988; Barry, 1999), it seems that a consensus has been reached whereby democratic forms are deemed necessary for reducing environmental impacts (Dryzek, 2000; York et al., 2003; Ward, 2008).

The most common argument in rejection of non-democratic attempts at environmental sustainability rests with the conviction that authoritarian rulers lack incentives to adopt sustainable policies (Ward, 2008). Autocratic leaders, the argument goes, are unlikely to prioritise sustainable development goals because

Their control of a high fraction of society’s resources encourages them to pay off members of their relatively small support coalition by allowing them to pillage the ecosystem (Ward, 2008, p. 386).

If this were the case, however, then how do we explain that a number of authoritarian governments still choose to adopt policies and initiatives aimed at pursuing more sustainable forms of urbanisation? In the following pages, I try to answer this question by considering the case of Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The aims are twofold: first, to examine the motivations of Abu Dhabi’s autocratic state in establishing and fostering environmental sustainability objectives; secondly, to discuss the implications of this particular political environment on the pursuit of such objectives.

Before presenting the structure of the article, a preliminary remark should be made here regarding the use of the ambiguous concept of sustainable development (Jacobs, 1999; Davison, 2008; Connelly, 2007)—while more will be said later about its ‘contestedness’. Although sustainable development is a widely used concept in academic and policy discourse, there is no consensus about its exact meaning and contents (Mebratu, 1998). In the scholarly literature, it is generally seen as encompassing three dimensions of sustainability—economic, social and environmental. However, in policy-making, the relative weight attributed to each dimension very much depends on local features and institutional arrangements. In Abu Dhabi, the interpretation of sustainability is clearly skewed towards the search for a combination of economic success and environmental progress. To reflect this reality, the use of the term ‘sustainability’ thus refers in this paper—unless stated otherwise—to the economic and environmental dimensions of sustainable development.

The next section provides an overview of Abu Dhabi’s most pressing environmental challenges, as well as an introduction to an initiative expected to contribute to tackling these problems: Masdar City. I then attempt to account for Abu Dhabi’s recent engagement with environmental sustainability by calling upon an institutionalist approach to the politics of regime survival in neo-patrimonial societies. The third section discusses the progress and pitfalls of Masdar’s implementation to date. In the last section, I consider the paradox whereby the Abu Dhabi government is adhering to environmental sustainability objectives while continuing to subsidise unsustainable lifestyles among the local population.

The empirical material draws upon a three-year research project funded by the MOVE Network, a collective research endeavour involving several Swiss universities. The author conducted fieldwork in Abu Dhabi in February–March 2010. The data—visual, oral and written material—were collected through qualitative research methods including various visits to the Masdar building site; 14 semi-structured interviews with officers at the Masdar Initiative, local planners, real estate agents and environmental experts; and several additional informal discussions with the same informants and others. It must be noted that, although freedom of speech in the UAE is theoretically guaranteed by the Constitution, discourses and behaviours which do not please the authorities can have unpredictable consequences. As a result, it can be challenging to have genuine conversations with informants ‘on the record’ and I found that some of the most enlightening information was obtained in informal discussions rather than during interviews. In order to respect my informants’ peace of mind, all references to their views and statements have been kept as anonymous as possible.

Abu Dhabi: From Petro-urbanism to Urban Sustainability

Since the discovery of vast oil reserves in the early 1960s, followed by independence from British rule and the creation of the UAE Federation in 1971, the city of Abu Dhabi has undergone one of the most rapid and grandiose processes of urbanisation ever witnessed in modern times. With jurisdiction over approximately 90 per cent of the UAE’s total oil resources (8 per cent of global resources), the then ruler of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, was able to transform the Emirate “from rags to riches” (Al Fahim, 1995) in less than 30 years by undertaking massive construction programmes in urban housing, infrastructure and services.

While Abu Dhabi has experienced faster development than many other cities in the Gulf, it nonetheless exhibits political, socioeconomic and environmental patterns of ‘petro-urbanism’ (Riad, 1981) that are characteristic of the region’s self-proclaimed ‘oil societies’. First, on a political level, whereas support for the sheikhs was traditionally based on tribal allegiances, the magnitude of oil revenues has enabled the rulers to secure popular endorsement by providing the population with widespread material well-being. Urban areas have disproportionately benefited from this pattern of ‘developmental patrimonialism’ (Kelsall and Booth, 2010), with the emergence of

the traditional sheikhs as benevolent distributors of oil wealth and the builders of cities with their modern welfarism and good life (Khalaf, 2006, p. 245).

Secondly, from a socioeconomic perspective, the deep demographic changes generated by the new oil-based political economy have profoundly altered Abu Dhabi’s demographic profile. These changes have been marked by tremendous population growth and ethnic diversification. While the city’s population has grown from a few thousand in the late 1960s to over one million today, Emirati nationals constitute only about 20 per cent of the total. The other 80 per cent is composed of an impressive mix of migrants from all over the world, although predominantly from South-east Asia and the Indian sub-continent (Heard-Bey, 2005). This situation is believed to harbour a number of possible problems for future urban development, most notably with regard to the ways in which exclusionary practices towards different migrant groups have been expressed spatially in the UAE (Khalaf, 2006; Elsheshtawy, 2008). The various population groups are generally kept apart in segregated housing quarters through a conspicuous pattern of state-devised socio-spatial segregation, a practice regarded by Emiratis as a necessary means towards preventing their cultural heritage from being swept away by an overflow of foreign customs. To support this politics of differentiation, landownership by non-Emiratis is forbidden by law, except for a few designated ‘investment areas’. Many of my informants in Abu Dhabi identify this as a major impediment to encouraging greater environmental awareness among foreign residents, for their inability to own land in physical terms also engenders a lack of ownership in symbolic terms. Indeed, combined with the fact that the legal status of foreign residents defines them as ‘visitors’ and precludes them from obtaining citizenship regardless of the time spent in the country, these restrictions exacerbate their sense of transience and make it “difficult to convince them to preserve and protect a land in which they have no stake” (personal interview with an environmental expert, 18 February 2010).

This takes us to the third dimension of ‘petro-urbanism’, the environmental dimension. Precipitous urbanisation driven by oil revenues has come at a heavy environmental price in Gulf countries. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the UAE has the worst carbon footprint in the world—over five times greater than the global average—and the highest rate of greenhouse gas emissions per capita (WWF, 2008a; Davidson, 2009). The Emirates also feature among the world’s major producers of waste. Abu Dhabi’s annual waste per household is almost 30 per cent higher than the OECD average (Khaleej Times, 2010). To make matters worse, the availability of cheap oil has made the use of private cars a fundamental lifestyle trait in the Emirates, with planning policies aimed at facilitating driving. Reliance on private transport, in turn, has favoured urban sprawl and the expansion of cities into the desert. Land policies have also encouraged urban sprawl, for if landownership is forbidden to foreigners, it is considered by the native population as a fundamental right—to such an extent that Emiratis regard living in an apartment as “an infringement on their full citizenship” (Khalaf, 2006, p. 258). Thus, since the 1970s, the government has been handing out thousands of plots and sponsoring the construction of vast numbers of individual villas for Emiratis (Kakande, 2008), thereby contributing to a growing pattern of suburban sprawl. Finally, water scarcity is a pressing concern. The UAE is the world’s largest per capita consumer of water. In Abu Dhabi, per capita water consumption stood at 550 litres per day in 2010 (Stanton, 2010) and it is expected to increase throughout the decade (Walters et al., 2006). ¹ Given the scarcity of fresh water in the region, as much as 98 per cent of water needs are met through energy-intensive desalination. Most of the salt residue is thrown back into the sea, hence generating even larger concentrations of salt in seawater.

With a population expected to triple over the next 40 years, Abu Dhabi presents the picture of a city set on an utterly unsustainable course of urban development. This bleak prospect, however, has given way in recent years to world-wide praise following governmental announcements about the adoption of very ambitious initiatives of urban sustainability. This new agenda culminated in 2009 with the establishment of a partnership between Abu Dhabi and the World Economic Forum’s ‘Slim Cities Initiative’ to develop a global code of best practice for sustainable urban planning (Arnold, 2009) and in the nomination of Abu Dhabi as one of the top 10 sustainable cities of the future by the Ethisphere Institute, a US-based think tank. ²

Among the various projects currently underway, the most famous of Abu Dhabi’s sustainability schemes is unarguably Masdar City. Masdar has been heralded by the international media as the world’s ‘first sustainable city’ (Vidal, 2008). The development, whose construction commenced in January 2008, was presented to the public as a new, entirely master-planned city expected to host 47 500 inhabitants and 1500 businesses on 6 square kilometres. The Masdar project has set many ambitious targets, which include exclusive reliance on renewable energies, a zero-carbon policy and the recycling of all waste and as much as 80 per cent of used water (WWF, 2008b). Masdar City is also supposed to provide a car-free environment. Transport needs are expected to be met by an electricity-powered network of individual vehicles serving the city intra muros as well as a mass-transit system connecting it to the centre of Abu Dhabi. Designed by Foster and Partners, Masdar has been presented by the Abu Dhabi authorities and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) as having been conceived according to the principles advocated by ‘One Planet Living’, a sustainable planning scheme inspired by the famous BedZed experiment in South London (WWF, 2008b). Following the international attention garnered by BedZed, the environmental consultancy behind the scheme (Bioregional) and WWF have joined forces to formulate a replicable model of urban sustainability known as ‘One Planet Living’. While there is a One Planet Living community in the making on every continent, Masdar has been presented by WWF as the first full embodiment of the model’s principles (WWF, 2008b).

Masdar City constitutes an incredibly ambitious initiative in the field of environmental sustainability, aimed at providing not only a real-life laboratory of sustainable urbanisation but also a model for other cities to follow, as emphasised by its slogan: “One day, all cities will be built like this” (ADFEC, 2010). However, given Abu Dhabi’s poor track record in the environmental realm, the question worth asking is: why this change of heart? In other words, what were the motivations for the adoption of the ‘deep sustainability’ (Dinica, 2006) principles presiding over the formulation of Masdar? To address this question, I propose to turn to the political science literature on issues of regime stability and change in neo-patrimonial societies.

Imitative Institution-building as a Legitimation Strategy

When political commentators became doubtful that ‘third wave democracy’ (Huntington, 1991) would ‘take’ in the Arab world (Hudson, 1996; Heydemann, 2002), scholars of Middle Eastern studies sought to understand the reasons for the ‘failure’ of the region to democratise at that time (Schlumberger, 2000). Among the many works on the subject, Albrecht and Schlumberger’s (2004) analysis of the determinants of stability and change in neo-patrimonial states is particularly enlightening with regard to the UAE.

The authors postulate that non-democratic regimes suffer from an inherent lack of legitimacy and that their endurance crucially depends on their ability to devise legitimating survival strategies. The legitimacy of contemporary neo-patrimonial states of the ‘sultanistic’ type found in the Arab world (Chehabi and Linz, 1998) is generally thought to be rooted in the personal authority of the rulers coupled with rentierism—that is, the allocative power derived from oil income (Quilliam and Kamel, 2003; Davidson, 2005, 2009). Davidson defines this as a “monarchical social contract” which

has allowed the UAE’s monarchs to trade a package of economic benefits and legitimacy resources in exchange for their population’s acquiescence (Davidson, 2009, p. 118).

However, given the finite nature of oil reserves and the pressures for democratisation exerted by a growing population and the international community, over time Arab regimes might be facing decreasing legitimacy. In order to retain their allocative power in the post-oil era, ³ many Gulf states have thus actively started to diversify their economies (Fasano and Iqbal, 2003). Within this context, Albrecht and Schlumberger identify a set of four core strategies of regime legitimation used by neo-patrimonial states in the Arab region. They label these strategies as ‘change for stability’: ‘élite change’ refers to an attempt to adapt economic and political élites to a changing environment; ‘imitative institution-building’ corresponds to the establishment of Western-style institutions; ‘co-optation’ serves to widen the regime’s power base and weaken potential opposition; and ‘external influences and constraints’ are transformed into economic and political opportunities (Albrecht and Schlumberger, 2004, pp. 375–376).

Whereas all four strategies may be at work in the UAE, two are directly related to the adoption of principles of environmental sustainability: imitative institution-building and the transformation of external influences into opportunities. Both phenomena are in fact closely connected. While the question of external influences relates to the pressures exerted by global ideological paradigms, imitative institution-building provides a means of responding to these pressures by adopting the formal institutions they require while keeping intact the underlying, real power structures. As Albrecht and Schlumberger observe

There has been a renewed drive towards this imitative type of institution-building since the 1990s. The specific functions such institutions take on in authoritarian polities enhance the persistence of authoritarian regimes. While informal rules, procedures, and decision-making structures remain mostly unaltered, formal institutions have gradually been changed to resemble what is expected internationally from Arab governments with respect to democracy and market economy (Albrecht and Schlumberger, 2004, p. 382).

Among the international pressures weighing on Gulf governments today, the global sustainability paradigm and the fight against climate change have become near inescapable policy concerns. In the UAE, Heard-Bey notes that the authorities

have always been very sensitive to the views of the outside world. In order to face off criticism from abroad, the federal governmental agencies … now seem very keen, indeed, to satisfy world opinion on a number of issues (Heard-Bey, 2005, p. 372).

For instance, commenting on the announcement that the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) would be hosted in Masdar, the local newspaper The National wrote that this would contribute to

boosting the country in its aim of being recognised as a progressive state that is tied into the international community and planning for its oil future (Stanton, 2009).

Should we infer that Abu Dhabi’s ‘sustainable turn’ is merely an answer to the pressures exerted by the global sustainability agenda? Masdar’s sceptics have used this perspective to accuse the Abu Dhabi government of ‘greenwashing’ (Wigglesworth 2009)—that is, of using Masdar as a façade for the world while avoiding clamping down on unsustainable domestic lifestyles and public infrastructure. However, I believe that the desire to respond to international pressures represents only one part of the story.

As already mentioned, Albrecht and Schlumberger argue that complying with external standards and constraints becomes more acceptable to authoritarian regimes when these constraints may be turned into opportunities. In other words, the outside world’s opinion tends to matter more to autocratic governments when it aligns with the prerogatives of their internal agenda. This appears to be the case in Abu Dhabi. Faced with a fast-growing population and a host of environmental challenges, the rulers are well aware of the need to establish a more viable development path for the Emirate. A further incentive may also stem from the fact that the UAE ranks among the countries that are highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change such as rising sea levels and increased water demand and scarcity (Janardhan, 2007). In this context, the availability of practices and technologies which have proved successful elsewhere constitutes an attractive solution, thereby offering a convenient way of combining the search for external legitimation with that for environmental sustainability. Masdar’s adhesion to One Planet Living is a case in point. One Planet Living and its BedZed prototype have received such praise and publicity that they have acquired ‘celebrity status’ throughout the world (Lovell, 2008). Adhering to this model has thus allowed the Abu Dhabi government to send a strong signal to the international community by stating its commitment to sustainability objectives. If we follow Bulkeley in seeing the adoption of best practices as “a means of reward and recognition” (Bulkeley, 2006, p. 1037), Masdar can then be interpreted as a “political rationality” (p. 1029) through which Abu Dhabi’s dedication to urban sustainability is performed and enacted.

Furthermore, among the sectors identified and prioritised for economic diversification by Mubadala, the state company behind the development of Masdar, expansion into green and renewable energies has been singled out as one of the most promising. According to an official spokesman, this ensues from the fact that

Abu Dhabi knows the energy business rather well [and] enjoys competitive advantages allowing it to successfully establish these new industries (Ameinfo, 31 January 2007).

Masdar, with its focus on high-tech, low-carbon solutions, fits well with this new economic strategy, as well as with the dominant global approach to urban sustainability which concentrates on zero-carbon developments as key solutions to global warming. This approach emphasises techno-economic solutions over social and institutional ones, thereby making zero-carbon best practice schemes more easily transferable from one local context to another (Lovell, 2008; Rydin, 2010). In Abu Dhabi, this focus on techno-economic issues provides a convenient framework as it allows the authorities to subscribe to the global sustainability agenda while setting aside the institutional and social dimensions of sustainability which may constitute a more sensitive aspect of the pursuit of sustainable development in the UAE. Now, if the adoption of sustainable planning in Abu Dhabi corresponds to a political strategy designed to boost external legitimacy (through imitative institution-building) and internal legitimacy (through economic diversification), one may wonder about the consequences this may have for the implementation of Masdar and its ability to reach stated objectives. In the next section, I try to examine Masdar’s performance to date.

Masdar in Practice

Masdar’s development is led and overseen by the Masdar Initiative, the first major initiative launched by Abu Dhabi’s Future Energy Company (ADFEC), a state-owned corporation created by Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan in 2006. Upon signing an initial agreement with the Abu Dhabi government in 2008, WWF released an announcement stating that

Masdar plans to exceed the requirements of the 10 sustainability principles of the One Planet Living programme, a global initiative launched by WWF and environmental consultancy BioRegional. It is expected this will make it a global benchmark for sustainable urban development (WWF, 2008b).

In spite of these auspicious beginnings, the relationship between the Masdar Initiative and One Planet Living has proved more complex than expected. According to a BioRegional officer, in June 2009 Masdar’s leaders had still not signed the One Planet Living action plan

They [Masdar representatives] have not agreed to commit to the rules required by One Planet Living, although they are using the One Planet Living brand name … but they don’t want to be constrained by another scheme or organisation (personal interview, 21 May 2009).

A key difficulty rests on the fact that One Planet Living schemes do not focus exclusively on environmental issues but also address the social dimension of urban sustainability. The discourse surrounding BedZed has been criticised by some authors for its emphasis on the technological, energy and economic performance of the scheme over its social, behavioural and administrative innovations (Lovell, 2008). However, in practice, BedZed was explicitly designed with a comprehensive approach to sustainability. This also applies to One Planet Living. For each new One Planet Living community, a tailor-made action plan addresses a series of sustainability challenges. As regards the 10 One Planet Living principles for Masdar, only five concern the low-carbon, techno-economic dimensions of sustainable urban development. The other five requirements relate to: the supply of sustainable food; the protection of habitats and wildlife; the preservation of local values and heritage; issues of social equity and fair working conditions; and the provision of events and facilities to promote health and happiness for all demographic groups (WWF, 2008b). Some of these principles—social equity or the provision of infrastructure for all population groups for example—call for the establishment of planning practices that are far removed from the developmental patterns which have been the hallmark of Abu Dhabi’s urbanisation over the past 40 years.

Principle number 9 has been of particular concern. It calls for

fair wages and working conditions for all workers (including construction) as defined by international labour standards (WWF, 2008b).

The UAE’s poor track record concerning the treatment of low-skilled migrant workers is an iniquitous feature of the Emirates’ rapid urbanisation and has regularly been denounced by external observers and human rights organisations. Whereas most of the blame has been targeted at Dubai’s ‘labour camps’ and slave-like construction companies (Davis, 2007), construction workers face similarly appalling working and living conditions in Abu Dhabi (Walters et al., 2006). This is a sensitive issue as the UAE authorities have often turned a blind eye to the—sometimes illegal—employment practices of construction companies.

In February 2010, while I was conducting research in Abu Dhabi, WWF had just carried out a review of Masdar and reaffirmed its collaboration with the project. In the Masdar Initiative’s brochure entitled ‘Why is Masdar City sustainable?’ (ADFEC, 2010), one could indeed read that Masdar was committed to One Planet Living’s framework. However, the framework published in the brochure differed from WWF’s initial version. Any reference to labour issues had been removed. Instead, the revised principle number 9 now vaguely stated that Masdar must

ensure that the community’s impact on other communities is positive: Masdar City is committed to helping the broader Abu Dhabi community, the UAE, the region and the world (ADFEC, 2010).

The problematic issue of labour standards had been avoided to accommodate local agendas and practices.

From a wider theoretical perspective, this is a situation where an imported scheme has been renegotiated to suit local institutional arrangements and resistances to change. These findings support the recent literature on the ‘mobility’ of best practice policies (McCann, 2011; Peck and Theodore, 2010), which calls for a close examination of the ways in which ‘mobile’ policy models are renegotiated by the agents involved in their transfer. Indeed, when imported models ‘touch ground’ in host environments, they are rarely copycat versions of the original model but hybrid schemes altered by the mutations undergone along the way—as appears to have happened in the transfer of One Planet Living to Abu Dhabi. More generally, this issue raises the question of the replicability of models of urban sustainability beyond local, national and regional borders. Indeed, the definition and contents of the “essentially contested concept of sustainability”, even when considered from a purely environmental perspective, remain “slippery” and “shape-shifting” in nature (Davison, 2008, p. 191; see also Connelly, 2007; Newman, 2007). In other words, the discursive and policy interpretation of sustainability in any particular local context is not a given, but the result of political struggles about the direction of social and economic development (Jacobs, 1999). Therefore, if the definition of sustainability embodied in an imported model of urban sustainability does not match that of the ‘recipients’, the replicated scheme is likely to drift away from the original.

This risk does not only concern the social dimensions of Masdar’s sustainability. So far, the project has also failed to keep pace with its initial environmental objectives. To begin with, the city’s construction has fallen behind schedule. According to most observers, the initial 2016 deadline for completion of the first phase of construction has been delayed by at least four years. In early 2010, the only building that was close to completion was the Masdar Institute of Technology, a research university borne out of a partnership between the Abu Dhabi government and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (see Figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

The Masdar Institute of Technology. Photograph: Kate Geddie.

In the wake of the global economic crisis, the project’s leaders have sought to reduce costs by reworking important aspects of the master plan. In February 2010, a major review of the entire project was thus conducted at the request of state authorities. According to Waleed al Muhairi, Mubadala’s chief operating officer

Real estate has been slow. It is not unreasonable to expect a review is going on. In fact, don’t you think that’s prudent? That’s what anybody would do. And so, obviously, we are undergoing that right now and we are supportive of that review process and will make whatever changes we need to in order to ensure both the economic viability and in order to meet our mandate (Fitch, 2010).

The sustainability division at the Masdar Initiative was worried about the implications of the review for the attainment of Masdar’s objectives. Their concerns turned out to be well-founded as one of them informed me a few weeks later that the division had been shut down and that most of its collaborators had been dismissed.

Since the initial master plan, the project has been altered in several ways. First, in an attempt to diffuse financial risks, the Masdar Initiative has decided to outsource construction to third-party commercial developers. Although the Masdar Initiative remains the chief developer, it is now doubtful that it will be able to retain the necessary oversight throughout the construction process to ensure compliance with sustainability principles. Secondly, energy and technology choices have been re-evaluated. Computer tests have shown that the construction of large solar panels would be less effective than anticipated due to local dust storms, with solar power output reduced by at least 40 per cent. A further disappointment is the abandonment of on-site energy generation, which had been expected to represent Masdar’s only source of power. The city will now have to purchase energy from off-site locations. The initial master plan was also counting on the desalination of groundwater with solar energy, a key issue given the scarcity of fresh water in the UAE. So far, however, Masdar’s water comes from an energy-intensive desalination plant in Abu Dhabi which is powered by gas (Vidal, 2010). Furthermore, the futuristic automated electric ‘podcars’ known as personal rapid transit (PRT), the flagship feature of Masdar’s car-free strategy, have been discarded as they are now considered unable to meet the city’s transport needs. Of further concern is the realisation that the planned systems of mass transit—a light rail network and a metro—devised to connect Masdar City to the capital have been delayed.

Thirdly, while the Masdar Initiative had initially counted on state subsidies to offset the higher costs of using renewable energies, by early 2010 no subsidy plan had been approved. In the words of a Masdar Initiative officer

With the economic crisis, the Abu Dhabi government is no longer throwing money at the Masdar Initiative. Now the project is expected to stand on its feet and to be commercially viable. This generates a conflict between the sustainability team and the commercial team (personal interview, 08 February 2010).

As a result of these revisions, Masdar appears to be drifting away from its grandiose aspiration of becoming the world’s first truly sustainable city. Echoing the downgrading of Masdar’s goals, the future city is now branded as ‘carbon-neutral’ rather than ‘zero-carbon’ (Bsat, 2010). When asked about the reasons for these diminished expectations, most of my respondents invoked the greater prudence engendered by the global economic crisis. However, whereas Abu Dhabi undoubtedly suffered important financial losses as a result of the crisis, the damage has been nowhere near that incurred by Dubai, and its economic power remains colossal. One only has to consider the impressive projects steered by the Abu Dhabi Urban Planning Council (UPC) over the same period. The UPC was founded in 2007 to act as Abu Dhabi’s official planning authority. Its creation represents a revolution in Abu Dhabi’s urban history. Prior to its existence, there was no development review process as such. Planning approval was granted directly by the Sheikh on the basis of drawings and aerial pictures on which he personally made handwritten amendments (personal interview with a UPC planner, 09 February 2010). The UPC, with its formal rules and procedures, thus represents a cornerstone in creating a culture of planning in a city previously devoid of such institutional arrangements. Although it has received less international attention than Masdar, the UPC’s flagship project, a medium-term planning framework for Abu Dhabi’s development entitled ‘Plan Abu Dhabi 2030’, constitutes an attempt to achieve managed urban growth in the Emirate. Interestingly, whereas in early 2010 Masdar’s objectives and procedures were being questioned and re-evaluated, UPC planners seemed confident that Plan Abu Dhabi 2030 would not be affected by the crisis in any significant way. According to a UPC senior planner:

The crisis is interesting if you look at it from the perspective of planning. … private development proposals may be affected by cash flow and financing concerns and hence be slowed. But when it comes to public planning projects, it’s steady as you go. Proof of that is the Capital City District. In 2009 we completed the master plan for Capital City, and now we’ve hired a project management company to begin execution (Koolhaas and Reisz, 2010, p. 216).

When asked about the differences between planning work in authoritarian and pluralistic contexts, a Canadian planner at UPC explained that a fundamental advantage in Abu Dhabi was that

The Crown Prince makes it much easier to make swift decisions [and that] here you realise there is actually a chance of seeing what you have planned getting implemented, a rare thing for planners (personal interview, 10 February 2010).

In the same vein, Vancouver’s former planning director, Larry Beasley, who acts as a special advisor to the UPC, stated that

In this culture, when the leadership endorses something, then magical things happen … unlike my culture. It’s not that way in my culture (Koolhaas, 2010, p. 212).

It appears, thus, that the global economic downturn can only provide a partial explanation for Masdar’s reduced ambitions. In the next section, I attempt to offer another explanation by arguing that imitative institution-building, as a legitimation strategy, is flawed when the imported institution is too distant from local values and policy practices, especially if the imported model directly challenges other sources of legitimacy.

Subsidising Unsustainability

I have argued that the practice of imitative institution-building reflects a quest for external legitimacy (i.e. legitimacy in the eyes of the international community) that is characteristic of neo-patrimonial autocracies. Yet what happens when the imported institution challenges some of the very features from which the political regime is deriving its internal legitimacy (i.e. legitimacy in the eyes of the local population) in the first place? Since the discovery of Abu Dhabi’s vast oil reserves, the state has been providing for the local population in almost every possible way—from lavish infrastructure and services to mass employment in the public sector. ⁴ The redistribution of oil income has been channelled into unbridled consumerism and profligate lifestyles which have become the hallmark of ‘decent’ Emirati life. In the environmental realm, while many Western governments are using financial and tax incentives to bolster environmental awareness and behavioural change among their population (Rydin, 2010; Reiche, 2010), Abu Dhabi’s government has been heavily subsidising water, electricity and land consumption for national citizens. As noted by Reiche

very cheap and subsidised energy is an integral part of the wealth transfer to the domestic population from oil and natural gas generated revenues (Reiche, 2010, p. 2397).

Although water is a scarce resource in Abu Dhabi, Emiratis—considered by the Abu Dhabi Electricity and Water Authority (ADWEA) as ‘subsidy customers’—consume it for free, ⁵ whereas foreign residents buy it for a small fee. Electricity is priced for all, but at a heavily discounted rate to Emiratis. As regards land consumption, I have already highlighted that land use practices encourage urban sprawl and the use of private cars. Let us consider a concrete example. In August 2009, a new body created by the Urban Planning Council, called the Abu Dhabi Centre for Housing and Service Facilities Development, announced that 17 000 new houses would be built in the Emirate over the next five years. The Centre’s General Director, Mr Al Suwaidi, explained that most houses and plots would be awarded to Emirati citizens free of charge. To justify the size and public cost of the programme, Mr Al Suwaidi stated that

The Government wants locals to have a high standard of living …. We are not compromising on quality for the locals. … What the Government is having in mind for Emirati housing is huge (quoted in Gillet, 2009).

Another illustration of the government’s tendency to use land property as a social subsidy can be found on a YouTube video featuring Abu Dhabi’s late ruler Sheikh Zayed addressing the speaker of the UAE’s Federal Council

I swear by God Almighty that I don’t understand how there are [UAE citizens] in apartment buildings who are still renting. … How is it possible that they are living in rented apartments? How does a ruler have the right to let a citizen live in rent? … How many times have I asked you to write down who doesn’t have anything … who doesn’t have any farmland, or real-estate or any other income … to write their names down and give them to me (quoted in Sultan Al Qassemi, 2010, p. 195).

The subsidisation of consumption of environmental resources is a practice which has become deeply entrenched in the relationship between Abu Dhabi’s rulers and the local population. In other words, the government is openly subsidising environmentally unsustainable behaviour. As a close adviser to the Sheikh told me

Emiratis are very grateful to the Sheikhs for sharing oil revenues and wealth with the population, and ensuring good standards of living. Calling Emiratis’ lifestyles and behaviours into question is not an option for the Sheikhs (personal interview, 14 February 2010).

By avoiding the fundamental questions of environmental awareness and behavioural change among the population, the rulers thus find themselves in a situation where environmental sustainability can be pursued only through technological solutions, the exploitation of renewable energies and smart spatial planning and physical design. While these are commendable objectives, as of today they can not suffice to meet Masdar’s ambition to become the world’s first sustainable city. As a sustainability manager at the Masdar Initiative warned

If the principles that have driven Masdar City have to be embraced, the UAE residents first have to comprehend, and then be willing to pursue, the concept of sustainability (Abbas, 2010, p. 244).

Raising the local population’s awareness, however, requires a radical departure from the current structure and contents of state incentives and communication. Without increased popular awareness and behavioural change, even if Masdar ultimately succeeds in delivering the innovative green design and technologies it promised, it is probable that its impact on the wider urban area—that is, beyond Masdar’s boundaries—will remain limited. According to a BioRegional officer, reports on BedZed have shown that even the most inventive green technologies require users to be at least minimally environmentally aware and willing to adapt their behaviour to new lifestyles (personal interview, 21 May 2009). Under current conditions, if living and working in Masdar requires some level of individual awareness and commitment, the project is likely to end up as an isolated community of like-minded inhabitants—most probably foreign, highly skilled professionals working for green-tech firms located in Masdar—rather than to become a model susceptible of spreading to neighbouring Abu Dhabi and the wider region. The fact that it has been designed as a walled city constitutes a telling metaphor. As a UPC planner observed

In addition to being physically isolated from the rest of the city, Masdar will be a walled neighbourhood … that’s very odd … how can you draw boundaries around sustainability? (personal interview, 09 February 2010).

Conclusion

Eco-developments and other attempts at creating sustainable communities can not be studied in abstraction from their local and national political contexts. In order to account for the successes and failures of urban sustainability schemes, their broader political narrative has to be told. In this article, I have attempted to interpret Masdar City’s early developments by examining some fundamental aspects of its political narrative. The findings do not concur with the assumption that autocratic regimes lack incentives to pursue sustainable development. On the contrary, in the case of neo-patrimonial regimes in the Arab Gulf, their dynastic approach encourages them to adopt long-term views that are well-suited to the philosophy embodied in the sustainable development paradigm. In particular, the sheikhs’ need to legitimise their on-going political domination—both internally and on the international stage—resonates well with the focus of sustainable development on meeting “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED, 1987, p. 43).

This is, however, only part of the story. Indeed, after an initial period of strong political and financial backing, some of Masdar’s most ambitious sustainability goals have faced declining state support. One consistent explanation for this waning political will appears to be the clash between the values embedded in Masdar’s ‘imported’ model of sustainability, and the absence of corresponding standards among local society. This does not suggest that there is no genuine commitment to environmental sustainability on the part of the rulers; but, given that the regime derives much legitimacy from the attainment of unrestrained lifestyles for the local population, the rulers are prepared to pursue urban sustainability insofar as it does not threaten the social contract. A conclusion to be drawn is that, in the pursuit of sustainable urban development, the (un)suitability of any particular political system cannot be decided a priori but needs to be examined in light of the core values on which the system hinges and the nature of state–society relations. A promising research avenue for scholars interested in the global circulation of sustainable planning policies therefore calls for a deeper engagement with the political motivations presiding over the adoption of imported policy knowledge.

The observations made in this paper also have implications for the debate on the concept of sustainable development and its contested meanings. Even if we set aside the social and economic dimensions of the concept to focus on environmental sustainability, the fact that its definition and contents vary from place to place has become an obvious observation. A more interesting issue raised by the case of Masdar, however, is that the interpretation of sustainability in a particular location can shift relatively rapidly as a result of political struggles and societal resistances. In 2010, a sustainable development expert was marvelling at Abu Dhabi’s “ability to conceptualise a solution and have it adopted as policy the next day” and considered that this “provides the single most important opportunity for advancing sustainability in an urban context” (Heid, 2010, p. 119). However, the evidence discussed in this article suggests that, even when a political administration has the ability to devise and adopt new policies overnight, it remains reticent to face the political costs raised by unpopular policy reforms. Given the rulers’ awareness of the need to ensure a sustainable future for the Emirate and the region, the search for viable and efficient environmental solutions will undoubtedly continue in Abu Dhabi. The extent and depth of the reforms adopted, as well as the political costs that the regime will be willing to incur, remain to be seen.