ABSTRACT
Successful responses to climate change will involve broad networks of governance that link multiple actors. But key players in those networks have their own complex internal dynamics. To facilitate low carbon urban transitions we need to understand those dynamics. This chapter focuses on one key player, the municipal bureaucracy, to ask two questions. First, what institutional barriers block integrated municipal responses to climate change? Second, what reforms are necessary to create a municipal bureaucracy able to maintain sustained innovation in the context of changing circumstances? It is based on a case study of how one South African city, Durban, responded to an ongoing national electricity crisis that began in February 2008. This material is drawn from seventy interviews and participant observation carried out both before and during the crisis (between October 2007 and April 2009).
