The Third Challenge

In formulating policy toward the Third World, U.S. decisionmakers have been hampered by a superficial understanding of events in developing countries, by a tendency to deal with Third World problems in terms of global considerations, and by the role of the United States as a superpower with responsibility for helping to manage regional security aff

This compilation has been a labor of love. For the past two years, I have poured my heart and soul out on paper through my blog. I have enhanced my favorite posts and turned it into this, my first book. It is truly like sending your child off to school, hoping that your daughter will make friends. It is one thing to control your blog site, but it is certainly another to send your baby out into the world where you can no longer protect her. No matter how she adapts, I will continue to write. Her youngest sister is already in the works, a novel this time. My hope is that this family continues to grow. As I always ended my posts, much love.

Drawing upon a variety of empirical and theoretical perspectives, The Urban Climate Challenge provides a hands-on perspective about the political and technical challenges now facing cities and transnational urban networks in the global climate regime. Bringing together experts working in the fields of global environmental governance, urban sustainability and climate change, this volume explores the ways in which cities, transnational urban networks and global policy institutions are repositioning themselves in relation to this changing global policy environment. Focusing on both Northern and Southern experience across the globe, three questions that have strong bearing on the ways in which we understand and assess the changing relationship between cities and global climate system are examined. How are cities repositioning themselves in relation to the global climate regime? How are cities being repositioned – conceptually and epistemologically? What are the prospects for crafting policies that can reduce the urban carbon footprint while at the same time building resilience to future climate change? The Urban Climate Challenge will be of interest to scholars of urban climate policy, global environmental governance and climate change. It will be of interest to readers more generally interested in the ways in which cities are now addressing the inter-related challenges of sustainable urban growth and global climate change. Chapter 9 and Chapter 11 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at www.tandfebooks.com/openaccess. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license.