ABSTRACT
The findings highlight the need for deepening our understanding of the complex interplay between the opportunities and limitations of governance networks to support urban low-carbon transitions, and the local contextual enabling and constraining factors that influence their functioning and potential to perform this role. This chapter argues that considering such issues is important because implementing new governance initiatives based on the network model is an intervention into existing locational settings rather than de novo institution building. What follows from this observation is that delivering impact in terms of decarbonisation requires a parallel consideration of contextual change factors, existing networks, and the locally relevant niche roles that new multi-actor decision-making can (and should) play in the wider governance arrangements to better support low-carbon transitions. These conclusions are relevant to governance models providing different options for governing local low-carbon transitions: Transition Management and the intermediation perspective. Whilst both approaches emphasise the role of networks, such explicit links between context, networks and impact have so far not been discussed in detail in either literatures. Consequently, these approaches may overestimate the benefits that networks can offer in different places due to insufficient engagement with the conditions necessary for them to function well.
