Cities have been widely promoted as an important political scale for addressing climate change. As Sara Hughes’ Repowering Cities rightly points out, however, much of the research on city climate efforts focuses on the adoption of greenhouse gas reduction goals. Hughes is interested in an even more pressing question: once goals are adopted, how do cities move forward with the complicated process of governing emissions? To answer this question, she offers an excellent synthesis of years of scholarship on cities and climate change, then builds on it with her own study of New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto. In doing so, Repowering Cities offers a useful illumination of the political challenges of achieving city climate goals.
Hughes’ main argument is that cities share a set of governance strategies that help them overcome the complexity and uncertainty that define greenhouse gas reduction efforts. These strategies are institution building, coalition building, and...