Mediating Low-Carbon Urban Transitions? Forms of Organization, Knowledge and Action

Abstract

Increasingly at the scale of cities, strategies and plans to respond to the challenges of climate change and constrained resources are being developed. A range of climate change plans, low-carbon strategies, peak oil preparations and so on have been developed, often with ambitious aspirations. At the same time, new and reconstituted “intermediary” organizational forms are working between the priorities of these plans and the contexts of their “application”. This is the movement between the “what” of the plans, strategies and preparations and the priorities they embody and the “how” of attempts at their accomplishment. Drawing on research in Greater Manchester, in this paper we examine the organizational contexts constituted for such a purpose and ask fundamental questions about whose priorities are being advocated, where and how this is organized and what the implications of this are for forms of urban transition.