Reconfiguring spatial boundaries and institutional practices: Mobilizing and sustaining urban low carbon transitions in Victoria, Australia'

Abstract

Carbon and efforts to decarbonize are reconfiguring urban processes and relations. As we witness increasing numbers and ranges of low carbon urban experiments attention inevitably turns to how they are sustained (Castán Broto and Bulkeley, 2013a) and how, as part of this process of sustaining, urban low carbon intermediaries (Guy et al., 2011; Hodson et al., 2013) at the local scale operate across existing boundaries, between civil society, policy and the private sector, in deliberative ways. In this chapter we develop earlier work (Moloney et al., 2010; Horne and Dalton, 2014; Moloney and Horne, 2015; Moloney and Funfgeld, 2015) focusing on the role of emerging quasi-government networks operating as intermediaries within and between not-for-profit, government and business organizations and across spatial and jurisdictional boundaries. We propose that the ways in which these types of organizations create spaces for experimentation across local government boundaries - through projects, relations and strategies - can be understood as intermediation, and that this is particularly important work in weak institutional settings, where climate change policy is contested and interests are distributed