Repositioning urban governments? Energy efficiency and Australia’s changing climate and energy governance regimes

Abstract

Urban local governments are important players in climate governance, and their roles are evolving. This review traces the changing nexus of Australia’s climate policy, energy policy and energy efficiency imperatives and its repositioning of urban local governments. We characterise the ways urban local governments’ capacities and capabilities are being mobilised in light of a changing multi-level political opportunity structure around energy efficiency. The shifts we observe not only extend local governments’ role in implementing climate change responses but also engage them as partners in conceiving and operationalising new measures, suggesting new ground is being opened in the urban politics of climate governance. A review of the Australian context provides important insights for the new politics of energy in the city as, internationally, energy efficiency is reframed as a climate change issue and the city is repositioned as an important strategic space in energy politics and the governance of energy systems.

Keywords

Australia cities climate governance energy efficiency geography local government

Introduction

As international attempts to build effective frameworks for global climate governance have remained mired in uncertainty and disappointment, national and local governance action has proliferated. Cities in particular have emerged across the globe as a key scale of climate governance (Anguelovski and Carmin, 2011; Bulkeley and Castán Broto, 2012; Hoffman, 2011). One measure of this is the scope of membership of urban climate action networks such as the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI),¹ Cities for Climate Protection, the Climate Alliance and the US Mayors’ Climate Protection Agreement. Another is the proliferation of the community-based Transition Town movement (Scott-Cato and Hillier, 2010).

Despite constitutional constraints,² urban local governments in particular have emerged as important players as they extend traditional powers and roles to climate governance and develop new roles that leverage their capacities to drive behaviour change, materialise low carbon built environments and economies, and enable transitions to low-carbon energy systems and practices. The widening role of urban local governments emphasises the need for multi-level understandings of climate governance³ (Leck and Simon, 2013) and, more specifically, for deeper understandings of the various ways local governments are being drawn into climate governance (Anguelovski and Carmin, 2011; Bulkeley and Schroeder, 2009; Gustavsson et al., 2009; While et al., 2009; Granberg and Elander, 2007). In this policy review, we contribute to developing those deeper understandings. Our interest in particular is in the ebbs and flows of local governments’ positioning and capacities in climate change governance in the Australian case and what this can tell us about the configuration of political power and the importance of the urban as a site of politics in the evolving governance of climate change. Our central contention is that energy efficiency has been recast as a climate change issue and positioned as the dominant response to climate change. As a result, the role of urban local governments is transforming as their capacities to work on and through urban communities and urban built environments are strategically mobilised both through local innovation and through shifts in multi-level relations with other scales of government. We suggest that both the recasting of energy efficiency and the repositioning of urban local governments have wider implications for the importance of the city as a strategic site and space in the governance of climate and energy and in their emergent politics.

In what follows, we review the recent evolution of Australia’s multi-level climate and energy governance regimes⁴ and trace the way this evolution frames energy efficiency as a climate change issue. We then consider the impacts of this evolution for urban local governments, focusing on New South Wales (NSW). We characterise the ways in which local government capacities and capabilities are being mobilised in three significant ways, in the context of a changing multi-level political opportunity structure around energy efficiency: (1) as drivers of the reconfiguration of local infrastructure; (2) as partners in energy efficient/low carbon energy experimentation⁵ and demonstration; and (3) as enablers of retrofitting the urban built environment. This, we argue, is not only engaging local governments in implementation but also as partners in conceiving and operationalizing new measures that, together, suggest new ground is being opened in the urban politics of climate and energy governance. As such, the Australian context provides important insights into how the urban is implicated in evolving climate change mitigation responses, climate governance regimes and, crucially, in the evolving architecture and politics of energy governance. Our insights reveal the complex and ever-shifting context that configures urban local governments’ role in climate governance and the multiple political arenas in which climate governance is activated.

Local government and climate governance: The Australian context

A review of the Australian context offers unique insights. Internationally, there is an uneven landscape of cooperation, collaboration and policy alignment between national and sub-national governments when it comes to climate and energy governance. National enabling frameworks for local government are highly variable (Bulkeley et al., 2011; Martinot, 2013). While national/local relations and policy frameworks in the European context have generally been supportive, the US context has been more antagonistic (Selin and VenDeveer, 2009). In Australia, as the climate governance regime continues to take shape, such alignments are evolving with significant implications for local government. Australian local government lacks constitutional status, being a creature of state government with limited wider regulatory powers and limited finances derived chiefly through local land and property taxes or rates. Federal and state political authorities have historically granted them limited institutional recognition and have been reluctant to recognise them as legitimate partners in climate governance (Storey et al., 2012; Urbis, 2010). Like local governments internationally, Australian local governments are largely dependent on the resources and the politically-driven priorities of federal and state government (Bulkeley, 2000). Broader metropolitan-scaled functions (strategic planning, infrastructure provision, urban services) are state government responsibilities. Urban local government authorities (LGAs) are fragmented (e.g. Sydney has 43 LGAs) and tasked with the provision and maintenance of community facilities, local services, and local roads as well as local town planning and development approvals. When it comes to climate change responses, urban local governments’ capacity has been limited by inadequate cooperation and coordination with state government and by both federal and state reluctance, to date, to align climate policy with city development issues (Jones, 2012a).

Yet internationally, in a context whereby neoliberal (amongst other) thrusts have seen the divisions between public/private authority in urban governance reworked and reconfigured (McGuirk and Dowling, 2009), established channels of local government policy making, implementation and forms of authority have been rearticulated and some of the most advanced carbon management strategies have been put in place within the local government sector (for instance through their involvement in Cities for Climate Protection: http://archive.iclei.org/index.php?id=10315).⁶ Despite their constitutionally and structurally weak positioning, Australian urban local governments are no exception here. Their active role in inconstant circumstances has seen them undertake innovative climate governance initiatives and projects, especially in the larger cities,⁷ often in partnership with other local government authorities, other levels of government, corporations or community organisations (for a recent review see Storey et al., 2012; Urbis, 2010; Zeppel, 2012). Recent research focused on Australia’s capital cities confirms the extent of local government activity around mitigation, highlighting again the importance of partnership but also the capacity and propensity for urban local government to act independently (Dowling et al., 2013). Moreover, local governments have played an active advocacy role, repeatedly lobbying for national carbon regulation, consistent legal and policy frameworks to support climate governance at state and federal levels, and resourcing and recognition of local government capacity as climate change actors (Hoff, 2010; Storey et al., 2012).

Against this backdrop the dynamism in Australian multilevel climate and energy governance and the tight coupling of the energy efficiency and climate change policy agenda are repositioning urban local governments and, by implication, the city. We explore the drivers, dynamics and implications of this repositioning below.

Energy efficiency and the city in Australia’s shifting climate and energy governance

While energy efficiency has traditionally been associated with the security of energy supply, it has progressively been reframed internationally as a climate change issue (Urge-Vorsatz and Metz, 2009). In the Australian case, this is resulting in a notable intensification of the energy efficiency imperative as one means of addressing the intransigence of fossil-fuel dependency in Australia’s energy supply system. Crucially though, the need for energy efficiency to be realised through local responses means that mobilising the energy efficiency agenda strategically repositions urban actors – and urban local governments particularly – in governing the energy system. In turn, this is reworking the multi-level relationship between federal, state and local levels of government (see Anguelovski and Carmin, 2011; Betsill and Bulkeley, 2006).

In the Australian case, the strategic importance of the city as a site for energy efficiency gains relates to a wider set of political economic relations. The nexus of Australia’s climate and energy governance reflects two conditions that have limited any thorough-going transition in the energy supply system and suggested energy efficiency as a more effective and immediate climate governance pathway. First is Australia’s current (unsettled) regime of climate governance, which reflects the political-economic conditions of its formation. From a climate policy perspective the country has a ‘difficult economic profile’ in that it derives its competitive advantage from plentiful cheap energy (especially coal) and from its location in the lucrative energy markets of the Asia-Pacific (Curran, 2009). The nation’s status as producer and net exporter of energy has shaped the fossil-fuel based energy production system that underpins the Australian urban-economic system. Currently, electricity generation is the single largest producer of greenhouse gases (accounting for 35% of total emissions) (DCCEE, 2012) and 75% of electricity generation is coal-fired, making Australia’s electricity industry one of the most carbon-intensive electricity production systems in the world (Commonwealth of Australia, 2011). The influential position of mining and energy interests in the political economy and in the climate policy community have presented formidable obstacles to significant energy transition. The national climate governance regime reflects both a reluctance to dislodge the country’s fossil-fuel dependence (Bulkeley, 2001; Harrison, 2012) and a fractious climate politics in which, despite government discourses of ecological modernisation,⁸ environment and economy continue to be pitted against each other (Curran, 2009; Williams and Booth, 2013). Moreover in the arena of federal politics, positions on climate policy have been divided along party lines. Federal Labor pioneered Australia’s signing of the Kyoto protocol (2007) under Kevin Rudd, and the introduction of a Clean Energy Act including a price on carbon under Julia Gillard (2011). The ‘carbon tax’ proved politically unpopular and contributed to the victory of the Abbott⁹ Coalition government in the 2013 federal election. Abbott’s government is in the process of attempting to undo key elements of the Clean Energy Act and repeal the carbon tax. In this fractious political atmosphere, actions on the imperative for energy efficiency are more easily advanced than are more radical actions aimed at restructuring the energy production system.

The second condition relates to the interaction of these climate politics with the complexity of Australia’s federal governance structure which has limited the capacity to drive systemic transition in the energy supply system and to effect climate governance measures. Australia’s constitutional arrangements require multilevel cooperation to induce significant change in governing areas critical to climate response (e.g. energy policy and infrastructure (federal and state), land use planning and building (state and local), transport (federal, state and local)). This, along with the policy vacuum derived from delays in cohering piecemeal federal efforts into an effective national climate response, has created a characteristically multilevel climate governance ‘regime’ widely critiqued as overlapping, reactive and ad hoc (Daley et al., 2011; Griffiths et al., 2007; Jones 2012b; Productivity Commission, 2011). Frustration, fuelled by growing environmental sentiment in the electorate, led state governments to take leadership, especially in NSW and Victoria. Simultaneously, urban-based local governments emerged as internationally-networked climate activists despite their limited powers and weak constitutional position (Bulkeley and Schroeder, 2009; Jones, 2012a). Thus, alongside federal policies and programmes, a profusion of state and local government policy responses and climate initiatives have emerged, paralleled by an uneven landscape of initiatives by business and NGOs reflecting the plural and particular stake-holder interests of diverse sectors.¹⁰ The complexity, inconstancy and uncertainty associated with this mosaic of fluid programmes and short-lived projects have presented intense challenges to systemic transition in the energy supply system, significantly constraining investments in renewable energy infrastructures and technologies (Daley et al., 2011).

These two conditions have meant that while energy efficiency has been on the governance agenda in Australia since the 1980s, it has risen to prominence particularly as part of the climate change debate and is becoming strategically central to Australia’s efforts to manage its energy production system and to address carbon reduction commitments. Internationally, energy efficiency entered the policy agenda in the 1970s in association with oil shocks and wider concerns for housing quality and fuel poverty (Lovell, 2004). At this stage, some states in Australia introduced action to promote residential and commercial energy efficiency and a National Appliance and Equipment Energy Efficiency Committee was established in the 1980s. In the 1990s the issue was coupled with greenhouse gas reduction as the NSW government established a Sustainable Energy Development Authority (1996) which included a specific remit to reduce emissions through energy efficiency measures. While these actions were effective in producing some demand reduction (Geller et al., 2006), Australia’s history of cheap and relatively unlimited energy supply have meant that it has generally lagged behind international best practice on energy efficiency (PMTGEE, 2010). In 2010, the International Energy Agency found Australia to have fully implemented less than 20% of its 25 key energy efficiency recommendations (PMTGEE, 2010: 36).

However, the innovative coupling of energy efficiency with climate change and emissions abatement by the NSW state government in the late 1990s has more recently been generalised as the climate governance regime has increasingly turned its attention to energy efficiency as a means of meeting its new policy ambitions. Crucially, this has had flow-on effects for the strategic importance of the urban in the climate governance regime. The National Framework for Energy Efficiency and National Appliance and Equipment Energy Efficiency Framework, introduced in 2004, were supplanted in 2009 by a National Strategy on Energy Efficiency (NSEE). The NSEE was agreed across federal and state governments and has aimed to improve minimum standards for energy efficiencies across buildings, equipment and appliances and to accelerate the uptake of new energy-efficient products and technologies. This was particularly intended to prepare households and business for the anticipated energy price impact of a price on carbon introduced by the federal Labor government in 2012.¹¹ Nonetheless, investment in energy efficiency has arguably been inhibited by the priorities of energy transmission and distribution companies, which have favoured investment in network upgrades to address peak demand. Of the current average Australian household electricity bill, 51% is related to network charges (Australian Government, 2012). Major energy price increases in Australia attributed to these ‘gold-plating’ strategies¹² have been extremely politically contentious, in recognition of the significant tension between network upgrade and demand management/energy efficiency approaches (West, 2013). By 2010, the Prime Minister’s Task Group on Energy Efficiency (PMTGEE, 2010: 1) could still position energy efficiency as ‘Australia’s untapped energy resource’ and also observed that the NSEE did not address the key issue of governance and the proliferation of overlapping and inconsistent federal, state, territory and regional measures.

However, the scene has since shifted, along with the positioning of the urban in the multilevel governance regime. The Labor federal government’s Clean Energy Future climate change plan, introduced in 2011 against a volatile political backdrop, went some way towards creating a more coherent governance framework. The plan included four key elements: (1) the much-contested Clean Energy Act¹³ (passed in late 2011) which introduced a fixed-price tax on carbon for major emitters, due to convert to an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) in 2015; (2) support for clean technologies, specifically a A$10b Clean Energy Finance Corporation to invest in renewable energy, low pollution and energy efficiency technologies. This included strong investment in measures to support technical innovation that could maintain the fossil-fuel energy sector (e.g. Clean Coal technologies and Carbon Storage and Capture); (3) support for direct action in the farming and land management sectors; and, crucially, (4) significant additional support to promote energy efficiency (Commonwealth of Australia, 2011).

The Clean Energy Future package induced a new dynamism in the policy environment. All Australian states agreed to review their existing climate change programmes with a view to their complementarity with a national ETS. The effects of this review rippled out across the multilevel policy landscape as state and local governments reacted to the new position of the federal government through institutional rearrangements, programme rationalisation and re-imagining. Together, the NSEE, the Clean Energy Future package and the governance dynamism it induced ensured that energy efficiency – and indeed the urban as a site of energy efficiency gains – was consolidated at the heart of the newly emergent climate governance regime. The federal coalition, elected in 2013, is attempting to unpick central elements of the Clean Energy Act and Clean Energy Future package. For instance, it has introduced a Clean Energy Legislation (Carbon Tax Repeal) Bill (2013) to repeal the carbon tax in favour of a ‘Direct Action’ plan which will pay companies, farmers and other actors for emissions cuts. Its proposed actions are highly contested. Yet, even if they are fully implemented, they are unlikely to shift the tight coupling of the energy efficiency and climate change policy agenda. It is this coupling that creates the specific context for a distinct repositioning of urban local governments as their enrolment in governing climate, especially through enabling and implementing energy efficiency initiatives, is being reimagined and reinstitutionalised.

Urban local governments and strategic repositioning in climate and energy governance

Despite lacking substantive powers over key policy areas relevant to climate change, local governments in Australia have been climate activists, reducing emissions through ‘self-governing’ measures targeting the emissions of the local government authority and its operations, and promoting broader community emissions-reduction through a range of ‘enabling’ activities (e.g. education, information provision and local service provision) (see Bulkeley and Kern, 2006; Jones, 2012a; Pillora, 2010). They have been innovators and experimenters (for recent reviews see McGuirk et al., 2014; Storey et al., 2012; Urbis, 2010; Zeppel, 2012). Yet the absence of a national ETS had meant they have been unable to enforce any ambitious emissions reductions targets they may set (Jones, 2012b). Their effectiveness and strategic importance has been constrained by the lack of cooperation and coordination with state government, by the lack of institutional recognition granted to them by federal and state governments as legitimate partners in climate governance and, crucially, by federal and state reluctance to align climate policy with city development issues (Storey et al., 2012; Urbis, 2010). Nonetheless, they have been active agents, particularly with regards to mitigation. Recent developments around the politics of energy efficiency point to their increasing strategic importance to the climate governance regime.

There have been indications of a growing willingness to recognise and institutionalise local governments’ role in climate and energy governance beyond the traditional expectation that they should manage community engagement, behaviour change and awareness campaigns. Federal support of local governments’ role, which had characteristically been at arms-length,¹⁴ has become more direct and, arguably, more strategic. One example is the federal support for the production of local government climate change toolkits to assist with mitigation and adaptation activities. Another was the establishment of the Australian Council of Local Government (2008) ‘so (federal government) can hear from and talk to all levels of government’ in key domains affecting climate governance such as urban planning and infrastructure development (cited in Pillora, 2010). Moreover a referendum on granting constitutional recognition to local government was planned, to be held alongside the 2013 federal election. This recognition would enable federal government to provide financing directly to local governments, for example for infrastructure investment. While the referendum did not materialise,¹⁵ its inception hints at the growing recognition of local governments’ strategic capacity as part of the delivery of climate governance. The emergent policy and programme context around energy efficiency, however, provides particularly persuasive evidence of a shifting positioning that not only locates local government centrally in the implementation of climate and energy governance measures, but increasingly engages local government as partners in conceiving and operationalising innovative and strategic governance measures.

The ongoing fluidity and dynamism in Australia’s climate governance regime means that a complex landscape of measures governing energy efficiency persists. Policies and programmes target cross-cutting sectors through a variety of governance practices, yet there is a discernible focus on measures to promote energy efficiency in the built environment and, more specifically, in buildings. This reflects the growing recognition that energy consumption in buildings accounts for 20% of Australia’s emissions (Commonwealth of Australia, 2009). The result for urban local governments most particularly is that their position and role in the governance and the implementation of energy efficiency measures is being reconfigured in recognition of their capacity as key actors in the regulation and management of buildings and as curators of multiple energy-consuming public facilities and infrastructures. Table 1 summarises the key federal and NSW state policies and programmes that have set a wider enabling framework for energy efficiency and that explicitly mobilise local government capacities and capabilities in three distinctive if interconnected ways that we elaborate on.

Table 1.

Key federal and NSW state government energy efficiency policies and programmes with implications for local government roles.

Role for local government	Federal and state energy efficiency policy/programme and function
Federal level
Sets national enabling framework	National Energy Efficiency Strategy: Agreement between national, state and territory governments to set out a work plan for energy efficiency improvements in all sectors of the economy.
	Renewable Energy Targets (RET): Sets the framework for the supply and demand of renewable energy via a Renewal energy certificates (REC) market. Requires energy retailers to provide 20% of their energy through renewables including through the purchase of tradable certificates produced by business and/or householders.
	Clean Business Australia: Included: (1) Green Building Fund: support to commercial buildings for retrofitting and retro-commissioning to improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions; (2) Retooling for Climate Change: support to SME in manufacturing to improve energy and water efficiency in production; (3) Climate Ready: support for R&D and commercialisation.
	Energy Efficiency Information Grants Programme: Fund to assist industry associations and NFPs to provide information and advice to the small and medium enterprise and community organisations on smart energy choices. Aims to demonstrate how individual sectors can be more energy efficient.
Reconfiguring local infrastructure	Community Energy Efficiency Programme: Fund to assist local governments, not-for-profits and community organisations to undertake energy efficiency upgrades to community-use buildings, facilities and lighting. Aims to demonstrate and encourage the adoption of improved energy management practices.
	Local Government Energy Efficiency Programme: Support local governing authorities to install solar or heat pump hot water systems in local community facilities to improve energy efficiency and reduce energy costs.
Partners in energy efficient/low carbon energy experimentation and demonstration	Solar Cities: Series of demonstration projects by consortia of local governments with energy, finance and land corporations with a stake in urban and energy development. Designed to trial and demonstrate new solar and energy efficient technologies to showcase market viability and energy efficiency gains, while collecting data on use and costings. Being implemented in seven separate electricity grid-connected urban areas around Australia.
	Smart Grid Smart City: Demonstration project, focused on Newcastle, NSW, to deliver Australia’s first commercial-scale smart grid in partnership with the energy sector. Aimed to gather robust information about the costs and benefits of smart grids to help inform future decisions by government, electricity providers, technology suppliers and consumers.
	Green Precincts Fund: To support project initiatives that encourage water and energy saving and efficiency measures at the community level. Provides matching funding between $500,000 and $1.5 million, for up to 50% of project costs to deliver high profile energy and water savings projects that demonstrate their achievements to the community.
Enabling retrofit	Performance standards for buildings (Building Code of Australia): Energy efficiency standards. Part of the Building Code, covering new house and additions to existing houses.
	Low Income Energy Efficiency Programme: Fund to assist consortia of government, business and community organisations to trial approaches to smarter energy use in low income households across Australia. Involves data capture and analysis to drive future approaches.
	Environmental Upgrade Agreements: Framework for tripartite financial agreement between building ownership, financiers and local governments to fund energy efficiency environmental upgrade works to existing buildings.
State level
Sets state enabling framework	NSW Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme: Baseline and credit emissions trading scheme. Uses emissions intensity rules to regulate electricity retailers, requiring them to meet mandatory benchmarks based on their market share.
	NSW Solar bonus: Provides feed in tariff with small solar or wind generators that are connected to the grid.
	NSW Home Savers Rebates: Rebates to NSW households for climate-friendly hot water systems, ceiling insulation, dual flush toilets, hot water circulators, rainwater tanks or water efficient washing machines. Funded by NSW Climate Change Fund.
	NSW Energy Savings Scheme: Provides a financial incentive to implement energy efficiency activities via the sale of tradable energy savings certificates. Electricity retailers, who are mandatory scheme participants, buy certificates to meet legislated targets.
	Energy Efficiency Community Awareness Programme: Information service providing practical advice on saving energy at home and work. Includes auditing techniques, Power Pledge personal action plans.
	Energy Efficiency for Small Business Programme: Provides small business with subsidised energy assessment, development of energy action plan, and 50% subsidy to cost of installing improvements.
	Energy Saver: Aimed at medium to large organisations. Offers subsidised energy audits, develop provide business cases with payback periods and an implementation plan covering technology upgrades and retrofits, improved maintenance procedures or staff behavioural changes. Funded by NSW Climate Change Fund.
	Energy Savings Action Plans: NSW largest energy users (267) required to produce Energy Saving Action Plans which require approval.
	NSW Energy Efficiency Action Plan: Sets framework for competitive, market-based delivery of energy efficiency services across homes, business and government. Strong focus on enabling building retrofit, support for low income households and addressing information and skills gaps.
Reconfiguring local infrastructure	Public Facilities programmes: Funds water and energy savings in public and community facilities in NSW. Aims to showcase technologies in action to encourage uptake by the wider community. Seventy-one demonstration projects funded (demonstration stream funding ceased following 2009 rationalisation). Funded by NSW Climate Change Fund.
	NSW Fleetwise Partnership: Targets NSW based businesses, not-for-profit organisations, and local councils that have 20 or more fleet vehicles to assist reduction in fleet emissions via information, online tools and advice.
Enabling retrofit	Environmental Upgrade Agreements: Framework for tripartite financial agreement between building ownership, financiers and local governments to fund energy efficiency environmental upgrade works to existing buildings.
	BASIX: Mandates energy and water savings targets (compared to pre-BASIX baseline) as part of the development approval (DA) process for new residential developments and renovations requiring DA. All residential development applications require a BASIX certificate. Online programme allows builders and homeowners to assess the most cost effective options to attain the required energy and water savings.
	CitySwitch: A partnership between the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage and local government, established initially with the LGAs of City of Sydney, North Sydney Council, Parramatta City Council. Now a national programme, led by the Council of Capital City Lord Mayors. Works in partnership with businesses in local government commercial districts to reduce the energy demands and enhance the energy efficiency of major office tenancies.
	National Australian Built Environment Rating System: National rating system for the environmental performance of existing buildings. Managed by the NSW government on behalf of the national, state and territory governments.

At the most straightforward level, a suite of programmes have directly enabled local governments to act as drivers in reconfiguring the energy efficiency of local infrastructure, through providing various forms of funding. For example, the federal government Local Government Energy Efficiency Programme has provided $24m to assist local governments in installing energy efficient solar or heat pump hot water systems in local community facilities. Similarly the Community Energy Efficiency Programme (CEEP) assists local governments, not-for-profits and community organisations in undertaking energy efficiency upgrades to community-use buildings, facilities and lighting. This was closely mirrored in the NSW government’s Public Facilities Programme. The CEEP scheme has provided $112m to 170 local governments and not-for-profits for energy-efficiency projects including many projects for upgrading street lighting across local government jurisdictions to low energy forms: something that had been initially piloted by the Cities for Climate Protection network. In this sense, local governments commenced implementing energy efficiency upgrades independently but have now been resourced to consolidate and extend these roles. These schemes have enabled local government by providing directed finance and positioning them, amongst others, as demonstrators of improved energy management practices to encourage wider adoption.

While the above schemes primarily involved local governments in bounded project-level implementation, several other federally-supported governance programmes have extended local governments’ roles strategically by driving cross-sectoral collaborations that locate them as key partners in energy efficient/low carbon energy experimentation and demonstration. The large-scale Solar Cities and Smart Grid Smart City programmes, for instance, are large-scale federally-subsidised demonstrations which have experimented with wider visions of energy system transformation. They work through complex, multi-sector partnerships that position local government at the innovative edge of emergent governance mechanisms. The Solar Cities programme has been implemented in seven urban sites around Australia, including the Blacktown LGA in Sydney, one of the most populous LGAs in Australia. It subsidised consortia of local government with energy, finance and land corporations with a stake in the urban and energy development of the city to trial a complex array of new solar and energy efficient technologies and showcase market viability and energy efficiency gains. The Smart Grid Smart City initiative is funding a $100m demonstration project in Newcastle and Sydney, NSW, involving local government in a multifaceted experiment aimed to deliver Australia’s first commercial-scale smart grid in partnership with the energy sector. Analysis of smart grid costs and benefits is targeted to inform future decisions by governments, electricity providers and technology suppliers. These schemes leverage local government capacities to nurture local partnerships, to mobilise community interest and buy-in, and to provide crucial legitimacy to governmental programmes aimed at energy transformations, efficiency and demand reduction. Such experimental projects are expressly designed to innovate, gain experience and promote learning. For the partners, urban local governments included, learning and experience may be just as much political as it is technical.

Finally, local governments are central to the task of rolling out energy efficiency measures for buildings based both on their traditional roles in regulating the built environment through development approval and administering national building codes, and through new extensions to those roles derived from collaboration with federal and state government initiatives. In NSW, for example, the local government development application process incorporated a Building Sustainability Index – BASIX – as a new standard in 2004, first in Sydney and then across NSW. BASIX requires energy and water efficiency targets to be met for all new residential buildings through design strategies for lighting, heating, cooling, and ventilation. In 2006, the coupling of energy efficiency and the climate governance imperative led to BASIX being extended to renovations to existing residential buildings (above a given value) in recognition of the need to retrofit the existing urban built environment for resource efficiency.

In one sense, local governments’ role in managing and promoting urban retrofit is a straightforward extension of their traditional town planning roles. However, the newly developed mechanism of Environmental Upgrade Agreements (EUAs) reposition local governments as major drivers of energy efficiency retrofits in city buildings and also as significant players in the financialisation of energy efficiency. The mechanism was pioneered in California in 2009 and was introduced by the Victorian state government in 2010 and followed in 2011 by NSW, while South Australia committed to the same in 2012. EUAs have some parallels to the C40/Clinton Climate Initiative Energy Efficiency Building Retrofit Programme. They promote investment in environmental upgrades in commercial and multi-occupancy residential buildings. Through EUAs, local governments mobilise an innovative market-based ‘environmental finance’ product which mediates the provision of funds from financial institutions to commercial and multi-residential building owners for environmental retrofitting works, through a brokered three-way agreement between the local government, building owner and financial institution. Crucially, funds are recovered not directly by the financial institution but by the local government, by levying a new form of statutory charge – the environmental upgrade charge – which is linked to rates (property tax) collection. Echoing financial mechanisms in the UK’s Green Deal, the charge remains on the rateable land until the funds have been repaid in full.¹⁶

Significantly, EUA adoption was facilitated by the federally-established company Low Carbon Australia which established the Australian Environmental Upgrade Fund, and worked with major financial institutions National Australia Bank and Eureka Funds Management, as a special purpose vehicle to provide EUA finance. However, state governments have been enthusiastic advocates. EUAs require changes to state legislation to enable the financial mechanisms to operate and, thus far, NSW and Victoria have enacted the amendments necessary, with South Australia likely to follow. Some highly significant urban local governments have adopted them: City of Sydney, North Sydney, Parramatta and Penrith and the City of Melbourne, representing the CBDs of Australia’s two largest cities and the leading local government climate change activists (Acuto, 2012; Bulkeley and Schroeder, 2009). Newcastle, Lake Macquarie and Wollongong, all adjoining Sydney’s greater metropolitan area, have also adopted the enabling legislation (Storey et al., 2012). EUAs are founded on a multilevel strategic collaboration. They have the capacity to drive new networks of relationship between local governments, state and federal government and to shift the pattern whereby few initiatives connect local governments with private sector actors towards a nexus of closer relations (Bulkeley and Schroeder, 2009; Hoff, 2010). EUAs signal one significant mechanism through which local government climate change activism – thus far especially in Sydney and Melbourne – is being recognised and formally integrated into Australia’s climate and energy governance regimes.

The fortunes of local government are driven through processes and events at other scales. Australia’s change of federal government may rework the specific dynamics and mechanisms through which urban local governments have recently been incorporated into the climate governance regime. Detail is scant on the federal government’s ‘Direct Action’ plan for emissions reductions. Yet, the Federal Minister for the Environment recently outlined his vision for how urban local governments might participate in the plan, securing federal payments for emissions reduction generated through energy efficiency measures (Hunt, 2013). Recasting energy efficiency as a climate change issue has produced a governance regime in which urban local governments have been advancing their capacities and political powers in climate change response. Simultaneously, state and federal governments have been mobilising the strategic capability of urban local governments, to build their own capacity to deliver on climate governance. Despite the change of government, the strategic importance of the urban to advancing energy efficiency gains suggests that the repositioning of urban local governments is unlikely to recede.

Conclusion

Urban local governments – in Australia and elsewhere – have a history of climate activism and of enacting energy efficiency and wider carbon reduction initiatives, including through their connection to international networks such as Cities for Climate Protection. Their particular capacities to advance energy efficiency have now become harnessed to national and state policy trajectories around climate governance, offering, in part, a readymade ‘solution’ to the climate change problem. This is changing the strategic positioning of urban local governments – and indeed of the urban – as they become more centrally enrolled in the climate governance regime and its growing reliance on energy efficiency as a climate change response. This repositioning sees local governments extending their roles beyond traditionally-expected involvement in community awareness and behaviour change initiatives and even beyond the role, nurtured by Cities for Climate Protection, of ‘self-governing’ local governments’ own energy efficiency. Together these shifting alignments are opening new ground in the urban politics of climate and energy governance, the lineaments of which are not yet entirely clear.

In terms of future policy implications, the Australian perspective suggests that local governments are likely to encounter conflicting pressures as a result of the increasing focus on energy efficiency that may both consolidate and unleash the parameters around their roles. As a climate change response, energy efficiency – with its emphasis on energy demand and consumption (rather than production and supply) – diminishes the challenges climate governance presents to the fossil-fuel dependent energy system that underlies Australia’s urban-economic complex. Hence it is politically attractive to national and state governments. The growing integration of local governments into multilevel, if still evolving, climate and energy governance ‘regimes’ targeting energy efficiency, may require them to perform in line with federal and/or state programme goals. For instance, national and state governments’ mobilisation of energy efficiency policy levers (such as the NSW state government’s 2013 release of an Energy Efficiency Action Plan) are likely both to mandate and to rely on the local delivery of key elements through, for example, local government development regulation.

Simultaneously, however, the necessity for the local activation of many aspects of the energy efficiency agenda enables new forms of social and material agency as local government is resourced to enact energy efficiency measures they have long aspired towards (see Bulkeley et al., 2007). In the Australian context where local government is so weakly resourced, the access to direct resourcing or indirect resourcing through partnership relations represents a major opportunity. These aspects are in line with local governments’ own calls for greater recognition that its ‘roles and activities should be seen as part of a systemic community- and economy-wide approach towards low carbon futures’ (Storey et al., 2012: 47). For example, as urban local governments are emplaced in partnership collaborations (e.g. low income energy efficiency initiatives, the Smart Grid Smart Cities programme, City Switch; see Table 1), they are provided with an architecture whereby they might translate their climate and energy governance roles, heretofore focused on ‘self-government’ measures, to govern through ‘enabling’ and ‘provision’ of new services and technologies (see Bulkeley and Kern, 2006). Here, where their experimentation is at its most pronounced, they have the capacity to push other government and private sector actors towards more transformative climate change and energy system responses. Such responses are less suggestive of technical and organisational adaptations to secure the resilience of existing systems and enable ‘business-as-usual’ but may enable more far reaching, if more challenging, transitions that are more likely to achieve low carbon futures (see Nelson et al., 2007; Pelling 2011). Such potential can be seen, for instance, in the City of Sydney’s bold experimentation with reworking its energy infrastructure, a challenging undertaking seen to be central to the attempt to secure low carbon transitions (Geels, 2012). The City of Sydney’s decentralised energy masterplans propose locating at least 360MW of low carbon generating capacity in precincts across the Sydney CBD. While this would be private sector owned and operated, its successful roll-out could historically reposition local government (and its ambition) in the energy supply system and locally transform that system, its socio-political basis and the climate impact of the city. Moreover, local government’s positioning in the multilevel governance landscape may be further strengthened by the synergies achieved by the ‘climatization’ (Rice, 2010) of local authority policy settings through the strategic gathering of wider issues of sustainability – for instance local food production, sustainable water use – under the rubric of climate change.

Nonetheless, some caution is warranted. While the City of Sydney example points to local government’s strategic respositioning as potentially empowered, progressive and transformative, this is not a foregone conclusion. Local government integration into multilevel policy approaches and partnerships to advance energy efficiency may be transformative or, alternatively, may result in local government being constrained to working with market-based and financialisation innovations to drive energy efficiency (e.g. EUAs), enacting ecological modernisation and a form or urban environmental entrepreneurialism (see Whitehead, 2013). This observation certainly suggests the importance of ongoing research attention to the role of urban local governments in the governance of climate change and energy transitions and the need for particular attention to the emergent new urban politics of climate change (see Bulkeley and Betsill, 2013). Moreover it suggests the need to attend to the diverse sites, means and scales through which climate governance regimes are being constructed. The unsettled nature of the Australian political context also highlights how events and processes outside the city play into the configuration of urban local governments’ positioning in the climate governance regime. As the city’s strategic importance as site and space in the governance of climate and energy intensifies, appreciating these multiscalar dynamics will be increasingly important. This observation may be moot in the global north, where there is a longer history of urban responses to climate change. However, as attempts are made to nurture urban responses to climate change in the global south, a key lesson is that policy responses within the city are merely one part of the equation. Urban responses to climate change are shaped and enabled through multiple political arenas.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the research assistance of Jennifer Kent, Nicola Vaughan and Áine Rickard, and the constructive input provided by the referees and editor.

Funding

Support for this research was provided by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant: Governing Carbon: Australian Cities and Carbon Control (DP110100081).

Notes

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