The role of municipal ownership for urban net-zero path creation

Particularly within recent years, the rising number of city actors worldwide
declaring climate emergencies and pledging commitments to carbon neutrality
has sparked a spatial turn in broader sustainable transition thinking, noting
the importance of the local level for governing sustainable transitions. Using a
Geographical Political Economy approach, this paper critically engages with path
creation theory and sustainable transitions literature to explore the potential of
urban net-zero carbon transitions in a multi-scalar governance framework. The
main argument is that municipal ownership across sectors has a fundamental
role in sustainable transitions at the city level. This paper makes a distinct
conceptual contribution to sustainable transitions literature by drawing on path
creation theory to illustrate how municipal ownership is a central tenet of
path creation by bringing together local actors and enabling political capacity
and agency to control and strategize integrated sustainable urban pathways.
Using the transport and energy sectors in Nottingham in the UK, it applies
the Path Creation Framework in an urban setting to illustrate that municipal
ownership stimulates a positive path creation through three main arguments.
First, municipal ownership enables a positive embeddedness and historical
legacy in the provision of sustainable urban energy and transport services;
second, it facilitates the establishment of skills and expertise that positively
reinforces urban political capacity for the pursuit of urban sustainability; and
third, it stimulates the creation of innovative urban projects for sustainable and
equitable pathways.