ABSTRACT
An early sustainability focus allowed the city to prepare the ground for leadership in this policy area by creating a knowledge order that tied together the implications of both a changing climate and the new landscape of aiming to generate a holistic, sustainable city. Zeroing in on climate has provided urban professionals with a welcome focus for their knowledge and expertise within the vagueness of sustainability, writ large. The thrust of the Vancouver case study research presented here is that a ‘mature’ city in sustainability and climate change policy can be defined as a city that has undergone institutional change in addressing sustainability and climate change; that has recognized the necessary coupling of institutional change knowledge with cognitive knowledge about the substantive dimensions of becoming a greener city. We demonstrate that the learning involved in the GCAP process has primarily entailed institutionalization of an integrative climate change strategy throughout the city organization. The importance and slow nature of institutional change in a large government organization are key aspects of this learning. The local policy agenda related to climate change, arriving at the doorstep of an institution with a preexisting degree of readiness based on local sustainability policy experience, has allowed the City an opportunity to ‘upgrade’ the climate change agenda to the top of the local policy priority hierarchy, and keep it there (see Heinelt and Lamping, this issue). This has enabled the City politically to take on local leadership in climate change policy at a time when provincial leadership has faltered and to see climate change policy as commensurate with an agenda to bolster local democratic processes.
