This doctoral study is situated within key debates relating to a recognised need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. National governments have been subject to binding targets through the Kyoto Treaty and linked EU legislation, with many governments implementing their own climate change programmes. One consequence of this is that sub-national governing organisations are being confronted with a need to re-think their own governing logics. This includes new strategies for reducing emissions and perhaps different ways of viewing spaces within their jurisdiction. Research in this area requires more empirical and conceptual development (although see While, Jonas and Gibbs, 2010). This study investigates carbon reduction policies in the English regions between 2005 and 2009, with a focus on practices of re-imagining, calculating and connecting the region as a 'carbon space'. The PhD contributes to contemporary research on climate change policy in three key ways. First, although some scholars (for example, Bulkeley and Betsill, 2003) have explored the role of cities in climate change governance, few have engaged theoretically and empirically with debates around the spatial politics of carbon reduction. This thesis helps to fill this gap, and contributes to conceptual debates around low-carbon transitions and the political impacts of carbon management in Western states.Second, the thesis draws from the work of John Allen (2003), Harriet Bulkeley and colleagues (cf. Bulkeley et al. 2005; 2007) and Multi-level Governance theories to develop a nuanced 'multi-level power modalities' account of governing practices. This particularly focuses on the mediations and translations between actors as governing technologies are deployed. This helps to highlight, third, an emerging 'multi-scalar politics of carbon' in particular relating to knowledge and evidence. This alludes to, first, the politics surrounding centralised regulation of spatial carbon emissions; and, second, a rising sub-national carbon 'elite' of policy professionals with greater access to carbon knowledges, thus able to better interpret and manipulate top-down imposition of carbon targets than others.
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Sheffield Hallam University (United Kingdom).