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Urban governance, sustainability and environmental movements: post-democracy in French

and British cities
Vincent Bal
European Urban and Regional Studies 2012 19: 404 originally published online 21 December 2011
DOI: 10.1177/0969776411428562
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European Urban
and Regional
Studies

Article

Urban governance, sustainability

and environmental movements:
post-democracy in French and
British cities

European Urban and Regional Studies

19(4) 404419
The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0969776411428562
eur.sagepub.com

Vincent Bal

Kings College London, UK

Abstract
Drawing on an empirical study of environmental policies in Manchester (UK) and Saint-Etienne (France), this article
attempts to provide a periodization of the evolution of the management of urban environmental issues. The periodization
traces the shift in discourse from a focus on local environment to sustainable urban development. Three main
sequences are identified corresponding to three different ways of tackling environmental issues covering a period from
the late 1970s up to the present. The aim of this article is twofold. First, it will use environmental policies as a tool to
understand the transformations of urban governance, and in particular the transformations of the actors involved in
policy-making. Second, it will show how sustainable development policies are used by local elites to neutralize urban
conflicts by excluding environmental grassroots movements from the management of environmental issues. Finally, the
article will discuss how this marginalization should be considered as a sign of the emergence of a post-democratic era.

Keywords
British and French cities, environmental policies, governance, post-democracy, sustainability, urban politics

Putting together a governing coalition involves more

than identifying compatible partners; it also means
working out the terms on which cooperation can occur,
including the resources that each partner brings to the
relationship. Governing means also attracting passive
allies and taking into account potential sources of
opposition and how to keep them at a minimum.
(Clarence Stone, 2006: 30)
Much of the sustainability argument has evacuated the
politics of the possible, the radical contestation of
alternative future socio-environmental possibilities and
socio-natural arrangements, and silences the radical
antagonisms that are constitutive of our socio-natural
orders by externalising conflict. (Erik Swyngedouw,
2007: 26)

Over the last two decades, sustainable development

has steadily become one of the leading themes of
urban policy. Most European cities now have some
sustainable development policies and have included
sustainability as a meta-objective in their urban and
economic redevelopment strategies. This omnipresence may appear to contradict the spread of
urban entrepreneurialism (Harvey, 1989; Hall and
Hubbard, 1998). In fact, the reappraisal of the
Corresponding author:
Dr Vincent Bal, Lecturer, Department of Geography, School of
Social Science and Public Policy, Kings College London, Strand
Campus, London WC2R 2LS, UK.
Email: vincent.beal@kcl.ac.uk

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Bal
KeynesianFordist compromise during the 1970s
brought about dramatic changes in local government activities and in urban policies. Previously,
the economy was regulated at the national scale: as
regulationist authors have pointed out, a specific
state/economy relationship took place at that time,
creating a stable accumulation regime (Aglietta,
1977; Boyer, 1986). The reappraisal of this accumulation regime has enhanced the role of cities in
the regulation of the economy and of socio-environmental contradictions. During the Golden Age,
the main activity of local authorities was to implement the welfare policies designed at the national
scale. Currently, cities are said to be spatial fixes,
that is, spaces through which economic competition is organized, and they play a crucial role alongside other territorial scales in the regulation of the
economy of the post-Fordist era (Le Gals, 2002;
Brenner, 2003). The Fordist city, with its standardized demand-side policies, gave way to the
entrepreneurial city, which is characterized by
more diverse supply-side policies and by an overt
willingness to attract businesses and upper and
middle-class people. Whereas some have stressed
the subordination of social and environmental policies to economic strategies (Logan and Molotch,
1987; Mayer, 1994; Moulaert et al., 2005; Novy,
2011), others have shown that current urban policies not only are an outcome of economic strategies per se, but also are characterized by a new
investment in social and environmental dimensions of urban development (Peck and Tickell,
2002; Keil and Boudreau, 2006; Raco, 2007).
According to the latter argument, Western cities
are witnessing a new period of neoliberalization
the roll-out of the state which came about as a
new neoliberal regime to remedy the effects of the
growth first model of urban development (Brenner
and Theodore, 2002).
This article argues along with others (Whitehead,
2003; While et al., 2004; Krueger and Gibbs, 2007;
Keil and Whitehead, 2012) that this context of
urban restructuring explains the change within
urban environmental policies. Although environmental protection was largely absent from the
Fordist compromise (Lipietz, 1987), it has been
included as an important feature of the post-Fordist

economy. The new common goal of enhancing urban

environments through the creation of quality
spaces and diversified quarters, through the emphasis put on urban amenities and heritage, through the
green branding of cities and through the regulation
or the displacement of environmental degradations
(pollution, congestion, carbon emissions, etc.) is a
central element of the post-Fordist city. It shows
how the transformations of capitalism and the evolution of the relationships between capital and space
have affected the way in which environmental issues
are tackled at the urban scale. The environment is
increasingly considered as an extra-economic factor
of urban growth and as a tool to enhance urban competitiveness (Jessop, 1997; Smith, 2007; Bal, 2009).
As a consequence, the environment should be seen
not only as an alternative to neoliberalism any more,
but also as an advanced part of it (McCarthy and
Prudham, 2004).
This article attempts to understand the transformations induced by the rise of environmental issues
on contemporary urban agendas, and explores these
transformations through the lens of political economy and urban political science. Specifically, it will
consider environmental regulation as a good starting
point for thinking through questions of urban governance. The argument developed is twofold. First, it is
argued that there has been a dramatic change in the
way environmental issues have been tackled at the
urban scale in the last 30 years. Where environmental
policies in the 1970s and 1980s had been part of a
broader movement of politicization and democratization of urban policy-making, current environmental
policies are now incorporated into mainstream
competitive strategies. In other words, early urban
environmental policies were structured around the
politics dimension of local government activities,
whereas today these policies are structured by the
policy dimension of these activities.1 Second, the
article will show that environmental issues are a
powerful way of understanding the changes made
within urban democracy, by considering contemporary environmental policies as vanguards of the rise
of a post-democratic era (Crouch, 2004; Swyngedouw,
2009). Against the argument that sustainability can
revitalize urban democracy by including stakeholders in spaces of participation and deliberation, this

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European Urban and Regional Studies 19(4)

article will demonstrate that environmental decisionmaking is increasingly dominated by urban oligarchies. The elite consensus around the new way of
defining and tackling environmental issues has two
main consequences for urban democracy. First, it has
been synonymous with a process of selection and prioritization of environmental issues within the loosely
defined framework of urban sustainability. Second, it
has generated important changes in the composition
of policy networks mobilized around environmental
issues, and in particular has marginalized grassroots
actors and groups.
To support the argument empirically, two cases
have been chosen: Manchester (UK) and SaintEtienne (France).2 There are at least two main arguments behind this choice. First, Manchester and
Saint-Etienne could both be considered as part of the
category of European cities that is, cities with a
population of between 200,000 and 2 million that
have some common characteristics (Le Gals, 2002).
Since the 1980s, these cities have faced a similar set
of constraints and opportunities, which led to the
emergence of new urban policies and new modes of
governance. As a consequence, one could consider
that these two cities are comparable, which does not
mean that they are identical. In fact, and this is the
second point, they have different profiles. Whereas
Saint-Etienne is a medium-sized French city,
Manchester is a regional capital with an increasingly
internationalized economy. Moreover, Saint-Etienne
is considered to be a shrinking city demographic
loss, economic decline, middle-class flight from the
city centre, for example where entrepreneurial
ideas and policies have arrived only lately, whereas
Manchester is often depicted as a booming city
redevelopment of the city centre, vibrant cultural
and knowledge economy, for example and as a
paragon of urban entrepreneurialism (Peck and
Ward, 2002). Finally, Saint-Etienne and Manchester
are part of two different national urban policy frameworks. Since the 1980s, British urban policies have
experienced a spectacular neoliberal restructuring
and local governments have seemed to be increasingly constrained by the pressures of capitalism and
the control of the central state. In contrast, French
cities continue to enjoy relative autonomy and to be
partially protected by a residual welfare state. Hence,
it is possible to say that French cities embraced

entrepreneurial and neoliberal agendas later and

more weakly than their British counterparts. These
differences explain why the two cases might at some
point deviate temporally or even materially from the
general argument but, in turn, they make them more
representative of the general evolution of environmental policies and governance in European cities.

The evolution of the management

of environmental issues at the
urban scale
In order to understand the evolution of the management of environmental issues in European cities, the
analysis is based on an ideal-typical periodization
that draws on Peck and Tickells work on neoliberalization (2002). According to Peck and Tickell, the
process of neoliberalization needs to be broken
down into two phases. First, roll-back neoliberalism occurred in the 1980s and the 1990s, whereby
the state tried to dismantle the institutions and practices inherited from Keynesianism. Second, since
2000, roll-out neoliberalism has taken place,
whereby the state and local authorities have tried to
compensate and regulate the contradictions and the
crisis tendencies of the first market-led phase. This
roll-out phase has been characterized by investment
in social and environmental policies. Concerning
environmental issues, some authors have already
made connections between roll-out neoliberalism
and the way in which these issues are tackled at the
urban scale (Raco, 2005; Keil and Boudreau, 2006).
This article is an attempt to refine the work of Peck
and Tickell and to adapt it to environmental issues.
Three different phases will be analysed corresponding to three different ways of tackling environmental
issues (see Table 1 below). The first period (1975
90) can be called grassroots environmentalism, in
which environmental issues emerge at the urban
scale. The second period (19902000) is called rollback environmentalism to reflect the anaesthetization of environmental goals by the new imperative
of competitiveness. The latest period (200010),
roll-out environmentalism, corresponds to a stronger investment by urban elites in the management of
environmental issues and to a more entrepreneurial
way of tackling those issues.

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Table 1.The evolution of the management of urban environmental issues
Grassroots environmentalism

Roll-out environmentalism

Ideology

Political ecology

Ecological modernization

Type of policies
Model of politics
Role of the state

Endogenous development strategies

Adversarial
Weak (in terms of funding and of
urban policy definition)

Urban coalition

Councillors, bureaucrats, grassroots

organizations
Politics (for electoral competition)

Locational policies
Consensual
Strong (in terms of urban policy
definition) but weak in terms of
funding
Leader, senior bureaucrats, state
agencies, businesses, consultants
Policies (for the production of
urban policies)
Output-oriented legitimacy
Consultants

Resources mobilized
Sources and forms of legitimacy
Experts
Policy instruments
Main issues

Input-oriented legitimacy
Local NGOs, environmental groups
and associations
Community micro-projects,
contractualization (in France)
Industrial pollution, biodiversity,
wildlife

Grassroots environmentalism: the invention

of urban environmental policies
During the 1950s and 1960s, urban environmental
issues were relatively unimportant areas of local
policy-making in Western Europe. If one could
identify proto-environmental policies, especially in
the UK, environmental issues were mainly defined
as technical issues and indirectly tackled through
public health and planning policies (air and water
quality, preservation of green fields, and so on). A
range of factors made environmental policies politically more important in the 1970s. The post-1968
new social movements feminism, gay and lesbian
movements, youth revolts, environmentalism, and
so on were instrumental in politicizing environmental issues at the urban scale, and helped environmental and quality-of-life issues to emerge on
urban agendas. This period was also characterized
by the emergence of a new urban political elite. The
new urban left in the UK (Gyford, 1985) and the
lus militants in France (Borraz, 1998) set up a
progressive agenda based on post-materialist aspirations and centred around issues such as housing,

Local Agenda 21, performance

indicators, best practices
Climate change, congestion,
eco-building, eco-district, ecomarketing

quality of life, environmental protection and the

democratization of urban political process. It tried
to create and maintain support in the population
(especially among the middle class) for electoral
competition through environmental policies. As a
consequence, environmental groups, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and organizations
were strongly involved in the policy process. Their
expertise and their links with the population were
essential for local governments. In this period, environmental regulations were centred on politics logics, that is, the search for resources for electoral
competition, and were used in input-oriented legitimacy strategies. So, it was more an extension of the
class/welfare-based system of politics and parties
(Andrew and Goldsmith, 1998) than a reappraisal of
this system.
Manchester was deeply hit by the economic crisis of the 1970s, which had led to deep economic
and demographic recession. The 1970s were also
characterized by the emergence of new social
movements in the city. Feminism, gay and lesbian
activism, anti-nuclear campaigns and environmentalism became more important within the urban

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European Urban and Regional Studies 19(4)

society (Doherty, 2002). At that time, there was not

any willingness in the city council to create political
links with these movements. Local political elites
just contented themselves with their traditional electoral base, that is, the working class and the trade
unions. There was a dramatic change in 1984, when
a group of young radical councillors led by
Graham Stringer successfully contested the leadership of the old guard of Labour. This new generation of left-wing councillors brought about the
emergence of a progressive and radical agenda centred on post-materialist issues such as the empowerment of ethnic and sexual minorities, nuclear
disarmament and the democratization of urban policy-making. The position of environmental issues
on this agenda was less important than in other
British cities such as Bristol, Leeds or Leicester.
However, the environment was used strategically by
local political elites to exercise their ideological
opposition to the Thatcher government and to
enhance their political base.3 The public funds distributed through the Urban Programme particularly those of the Inner Area Programme were
very important in this strategy. They allowed the
council to create numerous programmes such as
Impact or a Community Initiatives Fund in order to
support local community groups and NGOs in the
implementation of environmental projects. In 1989,
approximately 1 billion had been distributed to
local groups. This had two main consequences.
First, it allowed local political elites to compensate
in part for the dismantling of the welfare state,
which was, during the Golden Age, the main vehicle
for creating and maintaining political support
among the working class.4 Second, it allowed the
new urban left to forge contacts within the environmental movement. These links were facilitated by
the Manchester Socialist Environment and
Resources Association, which operated as an intermediary between the council and the public around
environmental issues. Thus, at that time, environmental groups were important in policy-making.
Manchester Friends of the Earth (MFoE), Manchester
Wildlife or even radical activists who, in the 1990s,
gathered under the banner of Earth First! were
included in decision-making and participated in the
elaboration of urban environmental policies.

In Saint-Etienne, the emergence of environmental

issues took a different path from that of Manchester.
In the 1970s, local struggles in the city were mainly
focused on economic and social issues because of
the bankruptcy of key companies (for example, Les
Houillres, Manufrance, Creusot-Loire, Thomson).
For different reasons, such as the industrial characteristics of the city, the strong presence of the state in
the local economy and the social structure of the city,
the new urban elites described in Manchester
appeared only in the mid-1990s. In the 1980s, the
environmental policies of Saint-Etienne were very
weak. In a planning document dating from 1989, the
right-wing mayor explained what he considered to
be the environmental policy of Saint-Etienne. This
was the creation of a municipal golf course and the
laying out of green spaces for recreation on the
periphery of the city. However, the environmental
agenda increased steadily during the 1990s. The creation of an environmental administration within the
municipal bureaucracy and the establishment of an
inter-municipal structure of cooperation (communaut de communes) played a significant role in the
improvement of this environmental agenda. In 1995,
after the election as mayor of Michel Thiollire a
young right-of-centre politician who experienced a
lot of difficulty in asserting his leadership key local
ecological figures were included in the municipal
and metropolitan teams. Several contacts were established with local environmental networks and groups
for example, the Fdration Rhne-Alpes de
Protection de la Nature (FRAPNA) and the Ligue de
Protection des Oiseaux (LPO) and the municipality
created an extra-municipal environmental commission to bring together local politicians, officials and
groups from civil society. However, the impact of
these efforts was limited and the policies designed at
both the municipal and the metropolitan level were
weak. Owing to a deep-seated conflict between the
mayor and the cabinet member in charge of the environment, environmental policies were neutralized in
order to prevent the rise of a political rival within the
municipal team. So, based on this, it is evident that
politics logics are important here because, first, the
environment was used by the mayor to differentiate
himself from the previous administration which
was not environment friendly and to create

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Bal
electoral support among middle-class groups, and,
second, the neutralization of environmental policies
served the goals of the mayor, allowing him to assert
his leadership by marginalizing an influential cabinet member of his team.

Roll-back environmentalism: the emergence

of sustainable urban development
During the early 1990s, there was a shift in the treatment of urban environmental issues. Most European
cities started to design entrepreneurial policies in
this period (Harvey, 1989; Hall and Hubbard, 1998).
The hegemony of economic development objectives
led to a dismantling of the grassroots framework of
environmental management. It is important to note
that this sequence was a transitional one, a period of
restructuring characterized by a discursive shift from
the management of the local environment to the
management of urban sustainability. This discursive reshaping usually took place through the development of Local Agenda 21 (LA21) and it had
several effects. First, there was a process of environmental mainstreaming through sustainability.
Environmental objectives were weakened by their
integration in various urban policies, such as transport, housing and regeneration. Second, there was a
profound change in the actors involved in environmental policies, such that the role played by local
environmental NGOs, groups and organizations in
the policy process was in constant decline. This marginalization often occurred as a result of conflicts
between environmental protection and economic
development. Contrary to this, however, there was
an emergence of new actors characterized by an
entrepreneurial ethos within environmental policymaking, such as chambers of commerce, utilities,
urban developers and consultants. Finally, local
elected officials and officers who worked on environmental issues also lost their room for manoeuvre.
They were increasingly limited by the new constraints on European cities (state restructuring, globalization, urban competition, and so on) and by the
executive shift in urban governance (Quilley,
2000; Borraz and John, 2004; Pinson, 2009). This
period is termed roll-back environmentalism
because the shift from local environment to urban

sustainability created a favourable context leading

to the renewal of actors, networks of actors and practices around the management of environmental
issues.
In Manchester, the organization of the Global
Forum in 1994 the first Forum after the Rio Earth
Summit triggered the emergence of sustainable
development as a policy theme.5 It is debatable
whether this event was successful; however, it had a
strong influence on Manchesters environmental
policies. Urban elites were interested in strengthening the image of the city and as a consequence they
gave responsibility for elaborating a scheme to the
planning committee of the city council, which was
renamed the Environmental Planning Committee.
It produced a document for the Forum the
Manchester 100 which was the first attempt to
link environmental policies and the overall goal of
improving the image of the city through urban marketing. After 1995, two main conflicts between environmental objectives and economic development
objectives occurred and accelerated the transition
towards a period of roll-back environmentalism. The
first concerned air pollution, after a public inquiry
stressed that the city centre of Manchester was the
most polluted in Britain. At that time, the council
had refused to make the outcome of this inquiry public. However, the local media the Manchester
Evening News encouraged by some of the local
NGOs, and especially MFoE, decided to make this
information public and started to publish articles on
the theme The most polluted city in Britain. The
second conflict concerned the building of a second
runway at Manchester Airport, to allow a tripling of
the number of passengers between 1995 and 2005.
This triggered a campaign protesting against this
decision, and it opposed on the one hand the council,
the private actors of the North West region, the government and its agencies, and on the other hand
some local and national environmental activist
groups and several NIMBY groups. The protestors
stressed the destruction of listed buildings and of
wildlife areas and the disregard of Green Belt
legislation.
These two conflicts created some controversies
surrounding environmental issues and led to a public
conflict between the leader of the council and the

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European Urban and Regional Studies 19(4)

chair of the planning committee. The strong media

coverage of these two conflicts also tended to reinforce the fears of local political elites around environmental issues. These elites did not want to create a
bad image for the city, which had just started to be
considered in governmental and economic circles as a
model for urban regeneration and governance. The
executive leadership therefore rejected the draft
LA21 because of it mentioned support for an aviation
fuel tax. The LA21 Forum the group of actors in
charge of the development of the LA21 strategy
was dissolved and a new group was created, comprising mainly economic actors.6 Even though many
local and regional environmental champions (the
Co-operative Bank, United Utilities, Amec Plc, for
example) and environmental experts (for example,
Sustainability Northwest) were involved in this group,
sustainability never became an important issue. The
new LA21 was more a document that allowed economic elites to communicate about their actions and
as a consequence to enhance their environmental
image. The group did not manage to bring about a
broad mobilization through LA21, and the final draft
met with total indifference in 2002. It is argued therefore that the executive shift in environmental decision-making was a means to neutralize environmental
conflicts, which in turn would also stabilize the overall entrepreneurial strategy of the city.
In Saint-Etienne, an important shift in environmental policy-making has also taken place since
2001. The way of conceptualizing the urban crisis
and of thinking about the redevelopment of the city
changed. Whereas previously the response to the
recessionary period in Saint-Etienne had been centred
on economic development and real estate policies,
after 2001, local elites started to redirect their approach
towards regeneration and marketing policies. This
change in policy for redeveloping the city triggered
the emergence of sustainable development. The elaboration of an LA21 started and, in spite of a weak
political commitment to this project, sustainability
was immediately identified as a tool to enhance the
attractiveness of the city. The deputy leader of the
metropolitan structure who works on environmental
issues claimed that: Our territory is concerned about
attracting investment and wealth flows. It is the reason we need to improve our sustainable development

policies to be competitive at the national and the

international levels (interview, 19 April 2005). Thus,
sustainability objectives were included in the priorities identified by urban political elites for the redevelopment of the city. This process went hand in hand
with an evolution of the networks of actors involved
in environmental policies. Apart from local politicians and officers, the main actors involved in the
elaboration of environmental policies between 1995
and 2001 were from the local environmental activist
sector, namely the FRAPNA and the LPO. However,
after 2001 these actors were marginalized, and new
actors began to take a leading role. They were mainly
environmental consultancies such as the Centre
International de Ressource et dInnovation sur le
DveloppementDurable (CIRIDD) and the Rseau
Conseil en Dveloppement (RCT).7 As in Manchester,
these new actors worked closely with the business
community and were characterized by an entrepreneurial ethos.

Roll-out environmentalism:
the antinomies of the coming
era of urban environmentalism
A third sequence started in the early 2000s. This was
a period of roll-out environmentalism which saw a
stronger investment by urban elites (both political
and economic) in the management of environmental
issues (Keil and Boudreau, 2006). It also corresponds to an entrepreneurial and neoliberal way of
tackling those issues. Since 2000, environmental
issues have been seen by urban actors not as an end
in themselves, but rather as risks that threaten economic growth. The process of ecological modernization at the urban scale fuses with the dynamics of
neoliberalization (Desfor and Keil, 2004; Keil,
2007).8 Urban elites are in search of a sustainability
fix to ensure the strengthening of the competitiveness of the city by improving the quality of life and
respect for the increasingly restrictive European and
national environmental requirements, without threatening the good business climate created during the
1990s (While et al., 2004). Indeed, the new urban
environmental policies are seen less as alternatives
to neoliberal economic development policies and
more as stabilizing complements to these policies.

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This roll-out has also been synonymous with a strong
evolution in the activities of urban political elites. In
the grassroots phase, they were strongly involved in
politics logics, whereby their legitimacy was based
on their ability to respond to changing urban
demands and to involve some part of the population
or some representative groups in the policy-making.
In contrast, the roll-out phase is characterized by a
new investment by urban political elites in policy
logics. They have started to use environmental
issues and their new frame as a way to elaborate
strategies, build coalitions and marginalize actors,
and generally speaking create a capacity to govern
(Stone, 1993).
In Manchester, the roll-out environmentalism
phase began in 2005. The city had already achieved
an impressive but uneven physical transformation
of its urban infrastructure. The city centre had been
repopulated and gentrified and it is considered with
its cultural industries, its caf culture and its vibrant
night-life to be a model of urban renaissance. In this
context, a new priority emerged for the city council,
in that it had to maintain and perpetuate the mobilization that gave birth to the influential publicprivate
coalition that governs the city. This coalition was
very successful in the 1990s and it was characterized
by its extraordinary capacity to grab grants and to
deliver major projects, such as the two Olympic bids,
the Hulme city challenge, the city centre regeneration
after the IRA bomb and the organization of the
Commonwealth Games. However, urban elites considered that, in order to maintain its efficiency, this
coalition had to evolve, to restructure its market-led
agenda which was previously limited to propertyled regeneration, competitiveness and urban marketing in the 1990s and to adapt to the new urban
context. This context triggered the rise of environmental issues, which took three different directions.
First, the city designed environmental regeneration
schemes with the incorporation of environmental
standards in construction, specifically with the objective of creating several eco-districts, which played
the role of flagship environmental projects in
rebranding derelict spaces.9 Second, there has been
an overt goal to enhance the environmental performance of the city, which can be seen in the project
called Manchester Green City. This project was a

partnership comprising a broad set of actors such as

urban developers (for example, Urban Splash, ASK
Developments), the universities, quasi-autonomous
non-governmental organizations (for example,
Manchester Knowledge Capital) and consultants
(for example, Sustainability Northwest, Creative
Concern). Third, there was a goal to position
Manchester as a new green model of urban policies.
This objective can be seen in the Green City Project,
but it is arguably more visible in the climate change
strategy, which was launched in 2008, and in the
project to implement a congestion charge scheme.10
These policy strategies demonstrate how Manchester
council has tried to position itself at the top of the
hierarchy of environmental cities:
A clearly articulated policy position is needed with
respect to climate change legislation. There is a choice
between going with the flow and taking a strategic
decision to harness assets to position the city-region at
the forefront of the global environmental industry. The
latter is more likely to lead to first mover advantage,
which is likely to confer greater economic benefits.
(Deloitte, 2008: 10)
As the world economy is hit by recession, rather than
shelving or delaying action, there is increasing
recognition of the potential for a green new deal that
drives economic recovery, environmental improvement
and helps to alleviate poverty and strengthen social
inclusion . . . Across the world successful, modern,
confident, outward-looking cities are beginning to
develop different responses to climate change in tune
with their core values and objectives. Cities like New
York, Stockholm, Vancouver and Melbourne are
finding that action they take to move towards lower
carbon ways of living also has positive benefits for the
citys quality of life and attractiveness to people to live,
work and invest. The recent Manchester Mini-Stern
Review highlights the economic advantages of setting
out a positive agenda for climate change action in
Manchester over simply going with the flow . . .
Manchester led the world in driving social progress
through innovation. Within the UK and perhaps
beyond, the field is open to take a lead on climate
change action and, where it makes sense to do so, to
pre-empt and influence rather than follow the path of
national legislation and policy and market changes.
(Manchester City Council, 2009: 34)

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These two quotes exemplify the Manchester attitude towards environmental issues, which is nothing more than an extension of the attitude it
developed in regeneration policies during the
1990s. In fact, speaking about Manchester in the
1990s, Kevin Ward stressed how the council had
understood that if it could complete its entrepreneurial turn before any of its competitors, then it
might benefit from, although not of course challenge, the change in the rules and norms of the
game(Ward, 2004: 277). Urban political elites
seem to be developing the same reasoning process
around environmental issues, considering them as a
new niche for revitalizing urban governing arrangements and for maintaining the tradition of grantgrabbing in the city.
In Saint-Etienne the situation was slightly different. The redevelopment of the city has been less
successful and local elites thought that environmental issues were less important than economic
development and urban regeneration objectives.
However, there was a change around 2005. At that
time the mayor chose to bid for the European
Capital of Culture in 2013. The selection was made
by the European Commission after a competition
between most of the medium and large cities (for
example, Lyons, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Toulouse,
Strasbourg). In 2005, a study trip was organized to
prepare the bid. The mayor and his closest followers went to London in order to examine Londons
bid for the Olympic Games and to scrutinize some
regeneration schemes such as Bedzed.11 The group
returned with the conviction that London was successful because of its environmental and sustainable development policies, and, as a result, this
study trip contributed to upgrading the environmental agenda in Saint-Etienne. This led to the
signing of the Aalborg Charter on sustainable
development, the publication of an LA21, and so
on. Sustainability was also identified as a central
concept that could differentiate Saint-Etienne from
the other cities. Although the bid was unsuccessful
(Marseilles was the successful contender), it nevertheless influenced how environmental issues were
defined and tackled, and it contributed to a strengthening of the citys environmental policies with the
building of an eco-district. The city also entered a

Concours Eco-quartiers competition launched by

the national government in order to present awards
to several eco-district and eco-city schemes.12 This
new investment in environmental issues intensified
the shift from community and grassroots partnerships to elite partnerships and generated significant
changes in the composition of the policy networks
mobilized around environmental issues. As a result,
the involvement of grassroots actors in the new
environmental policies of Saint-Etienne is very
limited and these groups have been marginalized
by the change in the political resources required in
urban governance.

Roll-out environmentalism or rollback of democracy?

Urban environmental policy-making has often been
considered to be a vehicle for political innovation,
and the emergence of sustainable development has
been regarded by academic and policy circles as a
catalyst for democracy. Although scholars have
highlighted the role of environmental policies in the
development of urban democracy, they have largely
failed to understand how these policies are relevant
to the transformation of urban democracy. This section of the article analyses the shift in democracy
generated by the current vogue for environmental
issues, which has been described as environmental
populism (Swyngedouw, 2009). Two main characteristics of urban democracy will be analysed: the
pluralism of policy ideas and solutions; and the
involvement of environmental grassroots movements in current urban decision-making.

Urban sustainability as a process

of selection and prioritization of
environmental issues
The recent consensus around environmental issues
has given way to a new realism in the urban management of the environment. This evolution has gone
hand in hand with a loss of pluralism in terms of
policy solutions and this section will examine the
proposition that the roll-out environmentalism
phase is characterized by a strong strategic

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selectivity of policy ideas and solutions (Jonas et al.,
2004). It is important to understand that nature, the
environment and, more obviously, sustainable
development are social and political constructs
(Smith, 1984; Harvey, 1996; Heynen et al., 2006).
These sociopolitical constructs tend to naturalize
particular visions of nature. During the 1980s, there
was a plurality of such visions and of political solutions to protect the environment, whereas the emergence of sustainable development led to a decrease in
this pluralism. Different kinds of issues urban sprawl,
eco-urbanism (for example, eco-building and waterfront regeneration), community-building and, more
recently, climate change have been prioritized and
considered as prerequisites in most urban environmental policies (without questioning their environmental
effectiveness or their social equity). This process is a
permanent feature of environmental policies:
[E]nvironmental regulation will always be selective in
terms of objects, subjects, spaces and scales of
environmental and ecological regulations. This is
partly because there is no single object of environmental
regulation, but rather a range of potential and
potentially competing objects of environmental and
ecological governance. (While et al., 2010: 81)

However, this tendency has increased with the emergence of the loosely defined concept of sustainable
development and it is visible both in Manchester and
in Saint-Etienne, where the reframing of environmental policies in the 2000s has privileged a small
number of environmental problems.
Although local actors have had an influence on this
process, the selection and prioritization of environmental issues have mostly been externally imposed on
local authorities. The state has played a major role in
this selection. Recent works on state restructuring
have highlighted the increasing capacity of the state,
as well as transnational organizations, to define priorities and to explain the terms of the politically feasible
and deliverable (Jessop, 2002; Brenner, 2003; Le
Gals and Scott, 2010; Theodore and Peck, 2012).
Regarding environmental issues, three main factors
could explain this selection and prioritization.

First, there has been the influence of locational

policies, which serves the global agenda of urban
competitiveness (Brenner, 2003). In French and
British cities, these incentives to redirect environmental policies towards urban growth and competitiveness are visible in the emphasis placed upon the
quality of urban spaces and building (for example
through the new environmental standards or indicators) or in the new interest in city centre redevelopments, which seems to be justified by the desire to
stop urban sprawl.
Second, urban environmental policies have been
shaped by the need to keep debates about environmental policies well away from questioning the productive system (Smith, 2007). As such, some new
niches have been created for economic actors in the
energy, building or transport sectors. The recent
interest of urban developers in environmental issues
can be seen as a strong sign of this.
Last but not least, urban environmental policies
have been selected in terms of what is considered to
be politically feasible and deliverable, which is
largely externally imposed. On the one hand, what
is politically feasible and deliverable has been
framed by the supply of policy solutions produced
by different international or national think tanks
such as the Atelier projet urbain in France or the
Urban Task Force in the UK. These are just a few
examples, but this transnational consultocracy
(Saint-Martin, 2000) seems to be more and more
influential in the production and policy transfer of
so-called best practices and in the definition of
what is feasible. On the other hand, it has been
influenced by national policies in which the way to
tackle urban environmental issues is increasingly
linked to what can be measured and quantified
(Bevan and Hood, 2006). This evolution is very
visible in the UK, where a new bureaucratic revolution is taking place through the rise of new public management tools of government (Le Gals and
Scott, 2010). It has just started in France, where the
Grenelle de lEnvironnement has been a tipping
point in the reshaping of environmental policies
around performance indicators on issues such as
energy and climate change.

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In search of responsible partners:

Changing patterns of civil society
involvement in policy-making
Alongside the decrease in the range of choice in
urban environmental policy-making, the roll-out
phase has been synonymous with a dramatic change
in the actors involved in policy-making. Because the
environment is considered by local authorities to be
a top priority issue, the networks of actors mobilized
around these issues are increasingly elitist. Indeed,
during the first phase, grassroots groups or NGOs
played an important role in environmental urban
decision-making and they adopted a particular stance
of both cooperation with and criticism of local
authorities. They also had a significant role in the
politicization of local environmental issues through
inquiries and campaigns. For example, in SaintEtienne, the FRAPNA, in spite of its cooperation
with the council, decided to launch court cases on
controversial issues such as water pollution. It was
the same in Manchester, where, for example, green
groups were instrumental in the politicization of the
controversy over runway building in the mid-1990s.
During the 1990s, involvement by grassroots
groups became weaker and the transformations in
urban management the need to involve business
actors, the desire to design proactive economic
development strategies, the need to work behind
closed doors in order to facilitate cooperation
between actors, and so on have contributed to
make their stance inappropriate for the new way of
framing urban environmental problems (Mayer,
2007). This evolution had also been reinforced by
the rise of ecological modernization theories within
environmental circles. Furthermore, the increasing
involvement of urban political elites in policymaking networks has contributed to marginalizing
the resources such as links with the population, the
fact that these groups were intermediaries between
the claims of social groups and the council held by
these traditional environmental groups. As a consequence, from about 2000, if these groups were
involved in the design of environmental policies, it
was too frequently a symbolic inclusion aimed at
contributing to the legitimacy of these policies, but
devoid of real influence on the policy process. So, if

there is a desire to encourage participation by civil

society and social movements, it is more, to quote
Crouch, a wish to encourage the maximum level of
minimal participation (2004: 112). In contrast, these
environmental groups have been replaced by environmental consultants (CIRIDD and RCT in SaintEtienne, Sustainability Northwest and Creative
Concern in Manchester) and by private actors such
as the developer Urban Splash in the case of the
environmental regeneration of New Islington in
Manchester who have provided expertise around
environmental issues.
This transformation of the composition of the
policy networks mobilized around urban environmental issues has been induced by two main factors.
First, urban governance is more and more characterized by the need to prevent the emergence of urban
conflicts. In Manchester, environmental conflicts
that in the 1980s could be considered as conflicts
over particular issues have tended to become more
and more conflicts over the regulatory structure and
the principles of society (Dahl, 1982). They were
increasingly linked to the global entrepreneurial
strategy of the council and they were one of the main
threats to the legitimacy of this strategy. In order to
displace or avoid the emergence of such conflicts,
urban political elites have tended to select what
Crouch describes as responsible partners, that is,
actors who could participate in debates and express
disagreement but who operate within an overall
model of consensus and agreement on the general
objectives of urban market-oriented redevelopment.
Secondly, there has been a change in the nature and
forms of political legitimacy. As urban political
elites have increasingly oriented their legitimacy
strategies towards the outputs of their action
(Scharpf, 1999), they have given priority to actors
who own resources that could be used in the production of urban policies, for example, fund-raising
skills, money and the capacity to understand the new
language of governmental officials.
In Manchester as well as in Saint-Etienne, environmental groups have been confronted with a sharp
dilemma: to continue to be radical and to be
excluded from policy-making, or to adopt an accommodationist stance and to accept the new rules of
the game in terms of consensual urban politics. The

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case of MERCi is a good example of this new constraint. MERCi is an independent charity working
on urban sustainability. This organization was set up
by a group of green activists who took part in environmental protests in the 1990s. At first, and owing
to its activity in contesting the construction of a second runway for Manchester Airport, the group had a
marginal role in environmental policy-making. In
the early 2000s, MERCi started to attract a lot of
public funds from the central government and from
the European Union.13 This capacity to attract
money was crucial in the creation of links with local
authorities. Local political actors started to reconsider MERCi as a responsible partner with the
capacity to attract money and to deliver projects.
Like MERCi, some other groups in Manchester and
in Saint-Etienne have now adopted a self-limiting
stance (Arato and Cohen, 1992)14 in order to maintain their influence over policy-making. This evolution has led to a de-radicalization of these groups
as regards urban environmental issues, which often
takes the form of a shift from campaigning to
lifestyle.

Conclusion
This article has been centrally concerned with tracing the evolution of environmental governance and
regulation at the urban scale. It has argued that the
politics of urban sustainability should be seen as a
specific form of urban environmental regulation that
has dominated the 1990s and the early 2000s because
of the particular context. One of the key aspects of
this sustainability framework was the insertion of
environmental policies within the logics of ecological modernization, which promote urban competitiveness as a central imperative. This implied a deep
restructuring of urban environmental problems,
which are no longer considered as an end in themselves and which are increasingly dominated by an
elitist vision. As a consequence, some actors especially grassroots or radical ones and social groups
tend to be marginalized or ignored.
One of the key aims of the article has been to contribute to the literature on urban environmental regulation and governance, particularly in terms of

thinking through the selectivity of urban sustainability

concerning the targets of environmental management
and the actors involved in this management. Even
though sustainability seems to be more and more
superseded by the rise of climate change and carbon
control as new master concepts of environmental
regulations (Bulkeley and Betsill, 2005; While et al.,
2010), the trends outlined here could continue in the
future. Recent urban environmental restructuring
around climate change seems to be closer to an intensification of the sustainability logics than to a reconsideration of these logics. The prominence of
market-based solutions, the weight of symbolic strategies of green marketing, the executive shift in environmental management, the prioritization produced
both by the state and by local elites of certain issues
over others and the obsessive fear of conflicts and
adversarial behaviour seem to be becoming stronger
within the climate change framework.
Although one can say that environmental issues
are now taken more and more seriously by local
authorities, their reshaping in terms of both contents
and urban policy-making is far from unproblematic
in terms of democracy. In a stimulating book, Colin
Crouch (2004) stresses how contemporary Western
societies are characterized by an elitist consensus
between responsible partners around market-oriented policy packages. He stresses that the historical
peak of democracy is now over, and that Western
societies are witnessing a post-democratic era characterized by the rise of political communication, the
disempowerment of the masses, the rise of the flexible firm as the key model of organization and the
marginalization of social movements and trade
unions. Erik Swyngedouw influenced by the invigorating insights of post-Marxist philosophers such as
Zizeck or Rancire shows in some of his recent
works that the contemporary political framing of
environmental issues contributes to the consolidation of a post-political condition and that sustainability policies seem to be in the vanguard of the rise of
this post-democratic era (Swyngedouw, 2007, 2009).
The Manchester and Saint-Etienne cases have
revealed a similar evolution at the urban scale. The
shift from demand-side policies to supply-side policies, the influence of economic actors in environmental governance, the eviction/marginalization of

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urban environmental grassroots movements and the

attempt to avoid and displace conflicts are all strong
signs of the emergence of post-democratic urban
environmental policies and are also the darkest side
of the new involvement of urban elites in environmental issues.
Acknowledgements
I thank Chris Pickvance, Gilles Pinson, Erik Swyngedouw
and the anonymous referees who provided helpful comments on the various incarnations of this article. Thanks
also to Vickie Cooper and Julie Grange who greatly helped
me to improve the quality of the written English.

Notes
1. It is argued that two main logics can be identified in
the activities of local government: a politics logic,
driven by electoral competition and the construction
of an electoral base, and a policy logic, aimed at
producing urban policies and strategies and addressing urban problems. These two different kinds of
activity correspond to two different sources of legitimacy for local political elites: an input-oriented legitimacy and an output-oriented legitimacy (Scharpf,
1999).
2. The empirical data come from the analysis of urban
and environmental policies in Manchester and SaintEtienne. Each case has been studied in depth and
about 50 semi-structured interviews were conducted
with key actors (local councillors, senior officers,
environmental and community activists, private
actors, state representatives, etc.) in each city between
2005 and 2010.
3. The willingness of the Stringer administration to
extend its political base must be understood in terms
of the struggle between the old guard and the new
urban left. The old guard was not dominant in the
city, but it tried to contest Stringers leadership until
the late 1980s. An example of the will to intensify
links with social groups who had not been traditionally close to Labour was the support for the creation
of a Gay Village. Following Quilley (1997), this support was politically motivated during the 1980s and
the early 1990s, after which support for the Gay
Village was incorporated into the entrepreneurial
strategy of the council.
4. The environmental grants attracted by the city
were difficult to spend because of the lack of an

environmental culture within local communities. So

the council decided to conceal some traditional community projects which would normally have been
classified in the social component of the programme
in environmental projects.
5. The success of Manchester in this bidding process
demonstrates the good relationships that had existed
between the elites of the city and the government
since the time when Manchester made its entrepreneurial turn (Cochrane et al., 1996; Quilley, 1999,
2000; Peck and Ward, 2002).
6. Environmental groups and representatives of local
communities were less involved in this group. For
example, MFoE decided to withdraw from the
process.
7. These two organizations played an important role in the
elaboration of the LA21. The CIRIDD is a local consultancy that is mainly supported by the business community of Saint-Etienne, whereas RCT is a national
consultancy that specializes in local development.
8. Generally speaking, the process of ecological modernization relates back to a fundamental change in the
way of thinking about and tackling environmental
issues at the national scale. During the 1980s, central
governments moved from a bureaucratic and curative
stance to a proactive stance in which environmental
issues are seen not as a curb on economic growth but
as one of its driving forces. For example, from this
point of view, technological innovation is one of the
main tools used to tackle the ecological crisis (Hajer,
1995; Harvey, 1996). It is now obvious that a similar
evolution has also started in cities (Desfor and Keil,
2004; Pickvance, 2011).
9. One good example of this is the regeneration of
Cardroom Estate in Ancoats, now called New
Islington. In 1999, this estate was integrated into the
Millennium Community Programme, a programme
used to raise private investments by de-risking key
parts of the city for investors.
10. This project would have been partially funded by the
Transport Innovation Funds. It has been suspended in
consequence of the negative result of the local referendum organized for the inhabitants of Manchester
city-region in December 2009.
11. Some members of Angenius an organization created by Thanh Nghiem and some influential businessmen and experts in 2002 were present during this
study trip. The main goal of this organization was to
provide resources to local authorities and businesses to implement sustainable development strategies. This organization is very close to WWF and

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Bal
BioRegional. It was the instigator of the One Planet
Living standards in France.
12. This programme followed the Grenelle de
lEnvironnement organized by the French government in 2007. It was a large consultation of politicians, scientists, business people and academics on
environmental issues that led to the creation of a new
French environmental strategy. One of the outcomes
of the Grenelle de lEnvironnement was the Plan
Ville Durable (Sustainable City National Strategy)
launched by the French Minister for the Environment,
Jean-Louis Borloo, in 2008.
13. In 1998, MERCi attracted 115,000 from the
European Regional Development Fund for the sustainable refurbishment of several buildings. In 2000, it
obtained 70,000 from various private sources. In
2001, it was awarded 370,000 from the Lottery Fund
and 100,000 from the Esme Fairbairn Foundation.
14. According to Arato and Cohen (1992), self-limiting
radicalism relates back to the stance of social movements that try to change society without challenging
the main economic and political order. The aim of
these new social movements is not revolutionary.
They want to pursue reforms through existing political structures. This stance seems to be widespread
among environmental urban activists in the context
of the emergence of sustainability and of neoliberal
hegemony.

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