Repowering Cities

As Sara Hughes's Repowering Cities rightly points out,... 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.

~Global Environmental Politics

I think specialist and non-specialist readers will enjoy this engaging and accessible book. For practitioners, who are often presented with case studies or best practices that highlight the policy options, it can help to equip them with an understanding of how they might pursue such an initiative in their own city. It provides clear examples that cities around the world can replicate immediately – whether they are already leading on climate change mitigation or seeking to catch up.

~Local Government Studies

With perhaps a decade to avert the worst consequences of climate change, is urban climate action a lost cause? Far from it, according to Sara Hughes, whose book provides a cross-case comparison of how three major North American cities—New York, Los Angeles and Toronto—have striven to mitigate climate change. Theoretically, Hughes's approach is a valuable contribution to the environmental policy and urban politics literatures, which have relied primarily on institutional, regime theory, and interest-group pluralism explanations for why cities commit to sustainability policies

~Perspectives on Politics

Sara Hughes offers a valuable lesson that climate change mitigation is no simple task. There is no template. Every city will face its own mix of challenges and must create its own policies. We can take from this volume the reality that it is not only later than we think, but that change is going to be harder than we imagine.

~Journal of Urban Affairs