ABSTRACT
This chapter explores situated practices of imagining and seeking to enact a city of net zero emissions through an account of urban climate governance in the City of Melbourne. It traces the City’s target for community-wide carbon neutrality from its 2003 strategy for Zero Net Emissions by 2020 (ZNE2020) to its 2018 Climate Change Mitigation Strategy 2020 to 2050. The City’s overriding political commitment to realise net zero emissions across the municipal territory has remained consistent throughout this period. However, the policy narratives, timeframes, geographies, technologies, and scales framing this objective have changed substantially, shifting most notably from a preference for carbon offsets towards investing in renewable energy. The analysis applies the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries to explore how emissions sources and sinks are known and organised through the City’s successive climate mitigation strategies. These efforts towards an urban green transition reshape conceptual boundaries around the urban environment and reconfigure relationships within and beyond the city in varied ways. Charting these phases against a backdrop of shifting circumstances – political, technological, and environmental – unveils persistent tensions between local government ambition and authority to act and between conceptions of the net zero emissions city as locally discrete and globally networked.
