Presenter: Miles Gordon
Mentor: Ronald Mitchell, Political Science
Oral Presentation
Majors: Political Science and Philosophy
This paper seeks to examine unilateral action taken by individual cities on climate change. I do this through the lens of the Tragedy of the Commons, which is an excellent description of the problem of climate change. I test the following hypotheses as to the cause of this action: local and formalized knowledge of the problem, a strong civil society that can apply pressure, transmunicipal network ties that help disseminate effective ideas, and the realization of co- benefits to action on the part of the local government. The cities I compare are in South Africa, a nation in the Global South that has relatively meager resources and is hence subject to the economic logic of a developing country. I compare Durban (a city that has taken substantive action) to Khara Hais and George (two cities that have not taken substantive action). Information on these cities and their respective actions was culled from case studies, policy briefs from the respective municipalities, and reports of NGOs on the ground. Using this information, I find that motivation for climate change action is based in part on all four of these, but that ultimately the most effective motivator is the realization of co-benefits. This is because when confronted with issues of incapacity, environmental protection alone is often not strong enough a factor to provoke action. These results, while not wholly generalizable due to the fact that they were obtained within a single nation, are significant to the issue of climate change action because they provide a rough blueprint for how best to pressure local governments (particularly those in the third world) to take their own action, thus creating an opening for a movement on climate change that is truly “from the ground up”.