An Odd Couple or a Perfect Match?: LA and Ho Chi Minh City's Energy Partnership

• In Event: Poster Session: Constitutional Law and Jurisprudence; Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations & Science, Technology and Environmental Politics
  In Poster Session: Science, Technology and Environmental Policy Posters

Abstract

The September 2018 climate summit held in California to explore the role of non-state and sub-state actors in climate change policy created a renewed buzz around city global governance networks. While sub-national actors, like cities, are being taken more seriously as key actors in climate change governance through initiatives like C40, Mayors Compact, ICLEI, and COP meeting side events, the question still remains: what role do cities play in global climate change governance? To help answer this question, I look at one particular case study of the August 2018 kick off of an energy alliance between the City of Los Angeles and Ho Chi Minh City which focuses on knowledge and technology sharing for the in order to build more robust clean energy markets in both California and Southeast Asia. This partnership illustrates two interesting examples of cities attempting to distance themselves from their respective national governments through leadership, innovation, and collaboration in global environmental policy.
This alliance is also of particular interest to study as there are currently few studies of city climate governance in the Global South. A recent report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Conference on City Climate Governance, released in December 2018, listed the need for “more evidence [...] to understand the impacts and effectiveness of different forms of governance, to solve tensions and reduce trade-offs, negotiate business practice and information use and create enabling conditions for effective city-based action.” Additionally, due to the “significant deficit in governance capacity [Global South cities have] compared to those in the Global North,” (IPCC 2018) conducting a case study on one attempt to create channels of knowledge and technology transfer between cities in the Global North and Global South may provide useful information on best practices, limitations, and successes in these types of partnerships. I use a combination of interviews of city sustainability employees in Los Angeles and Ho Chi Minh City as well as related policy documents and news coverage of this partnership, applying patterning techniques (Fujii 2018) and thematic analysis (Shenav 2015) in order to construct an initial model and theory of how cities choose, engage in, and implement collaborative global partnerships to address climate change. Through this analysis of multiple sources using multiple analytic tools, this paper presents the perspective of actors within the city itself, each partner city’s perception of the other, as well as an international perspective on the partnership to build a layered understanding of the impact cities in global climate governance. This particular project, though narrow in scope, had a broad impact on our collective understandings of how cities form and execute climate change actions. Furthermore, these methods could be replicated and applied to study other city partnerships and actors within global city climate change networks. As cities become more motivated to take on adaptation and mitigation policies for a variety of reasons, understanding the potential role that cities could play, as well as where cities fall short, in global climate governance becomes critical to environmental policy scholarship.

Author

• Devon Kyla Cantwell, University of Utah