Two Cities, Two Playbooks: How Shenzhen and Darebin Tackle Carbon From the Top Down and the Bottom Up

When national governments pledge to slash greenhouse gas emissions, the hard work of actually cutting carbon tends to land on cities. It is in urban transport systems, building codes, electricity grids and neighborhood planning that climate targets either materialize or quietly evaporate. Yet the way cities pursue decarbonization differs dramatically depending on who holds power, how levels of government interact, and whether ordinary residents get a seat at the table. A new comparative study published in the journal Global Public Policy and Governance examines these questions through two strikingly different cases: Shenzhen, the sprawling technology hub of southern China, and the City of Darebin, a municipality in Melbourne’s north that made global headlines as one of the first governments anywhere to declare a climate emergency.

The research team, led by Chen Li of The Education University of Hong Kong together with Ying Xu of the Central University of Finance and Economics, Min Jiang, Mee Kam Ng of The Chinese University of Hong Kong and Weishi Zhang of Tianjin Normal University, applied the analytical framework of multi-level governance, or MLG, to both cities. MLG is a concept developed originally to describe the layered decision-making of the European Union, in which authority is dispersed not only vertically across supranational, national, regional and local tiers of government, but also horizontally among government agencies, private firms, civil society groups and citizens. The framework distinguishes between a vertical dimension, concerning how different levels of government share and negotiate authority, and a horizontal dimension, concerning how non-state actors and citizens participate in shaping policy. By holding these two dimensions constant and comparing two cities from radically different political systems, the researchers could isolate how governance architecture itself shapes climate outcomes.

The choice of cases is deliberate. Shenzhen, a metropolis of well over seventeen million people, has been designated by China’s central government as a pilot zone for low-carbon development and ecological civilization, and it hosts some of the country’s most ambitious experiments in electric transport, green building and zero-carbon communities. Darebin, by contrast, is a modest local council of around one hundred and sixty thousand residents in the Australian state of Victoria, but it earned international attention in 2016 when it became what is widely regarded as the first government in the world to formally declare a climate emergency, a gesture that has since been echoed by more than two thousand jurisdictions representing roughly one billion citizens worldwide. One case showcases state-led transformation at massive scale; the other showcases citizen-empowered localism in a federal democracy.

In Shenzhen, the study finds that low-carbon development is propelled primarily by the joint efforts of central and local governments, reflecting what the authors describe as a flexible vertical dimension of multi-level governance. China’s central government sets broad national targets, including the country’s pledge to peak carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060, and then deploys a system of pilot programs, performance evaluation and fiscal incentives to mobilize provincial and municipal governments. Shenzhen, as a Special Economic Zone with considerable administrative autonomy, has been able to translate these national signals into local policy with unusual speed. The municipal government embeds low-carbon objectives in its Five-Year Plans, promotes electric buses and taxis across its entire public fleet, supports green building standards, and develops demonstration projects such as the Dameisha zero-carbon community, which was showcased internationally as a model at United Nations climate conferences.

What makes the Shenzhen case analytically interesting, however, is that vertical hierarchy is not the whole story. The researchers document how the city supplements top-down mandates with coordination and partnerships involving non-governmental stakeholders at the community level. Enterprises, research institutes, community organizations and residents are drawn into the implementation of low-carbon projects, particularly in neighborhood-scale experiments where household behavior, energy use and waste management must change for targets to be met. This hybrid arrangement allows the party-state to retain strategic direction while enlisting social actors in delivery, a pattern the authors link to broader scholarship on flexible authoritarianism and regulatory pluralism in Chinese environmental governance. The result is a governance model in which the vertical dimension dominates but is deliberately softened by consultative and cooperative mechanisms at the grassroots.

Darebin presents an almost inverted picture. In Australia’s federal system, local councils possess limited statutory power and depend heavily on state and national governments for funding and policy direction, yet Darebin has used its democratic mandate to mobilize residents as co-authors of climate policy. The study finds that the City of Darebin empowers the local council and residents to collectively envision and decide on low-carbon initiatives, which the authors identify as a hallmark of the horizontal dimension of multi-level governance. Following its landmark climate emergency declaration, the council adopted a Climate Emergency Plan shaped through extensive community consultation, committed to powering its own operations with one hundred percent renewable energy, offered programs helping households electrify and improve energy efficiency, and joined collective procurement schemes such as the Victorian Energy Collaboration, through which dozens of councils aggregate their demand to purchase renewable electricity at scale.

The horizontal logic of Darebin’s approach extends to deliberate partnerships beyond the municipal boundary. The council works with community groups such as Darebin Climate Action Now, participates in Victorian state programs including neighborhood battery schemes, and engages with national frameworks such as Climate Active, the Australian government’s certification standard for carbon-neutral organizations, under which the council has published public disclosure statements. This dense web of collaboration across civil society, other councils and higher levels of government compensates for the council’s modest formal powers. Where Shenzhen’s model channels authority downward from the center, Darebin’s model builds influence outward from an engaged citizenry, demonstrating that a small municipality can punch far above its administrative weight when horizontal networks are strong.

The comparative findings carry implications that reach well beyond the two cities. The authors argue that neither the vertical nor the horizontal mode is inherently superior; each has distinct strengths and vulnerabilities. Shenzhen’s state-led model can mobilize capital and infrastructure at extraordinary speed, as the electrification of an entire bus fleet within a few years illustrates, but its effectiveness depends on sustained central commitment and can leave limited room for independent citizen scrutiny. Darebin’s participatory model generates deep local legitimacy and adaptive capacity, but it remains exposed to the vagaries of higher-tier politics, as Australian federal climate policy has oscillated sharply between successive governments. The study suggests that effective low-carbon transitions ultimately require both dimensions: the coordination capacity of vertical governance and the legitimacy and innovation that flow from horizontal participation.

The research also contributes to a growing body of scholarship that treats cities not as passive implementers of national climate policy but as active governance arenas in their own right. Earlier work on urban climate experimentation, eco-city development and multilevel environmental governance in China and Australia has shown that local governments frequently act as laboratories where new technologies, policies and social practices are tested before diffusing more widely. The Shenzhen-Darebin comparison extends this literature by systematically mapping how the roles of multiple stakeholders and their interactive relationships vary across nations, and how those variations translate into different pathways and paces of low-carbon development. The authors ground their analysis in documentary sources including government plans, council publications and climate emergency records, alongside interviews with stakeholders, some of which remain anonymous and cannot be publicly shared.

As cities worldwide confront the arithmetic of decarbonization, the lesson from this study is that governance design is not a technical afterthought but a decisive variable. A megacity can be steered from above with remarkable force if national and municipal governments align, and a suburban council can lead from below if residents are genuinely empowered to shape the vision. Shenzhen and Darebin, separated by geography, scale and political system, thus function as a natural experiment in climate governance, revealing that the route to a low-carbon city is not singular. What matters is whether the layers of government and the people they serve are wired together in ways that convert ambition into action, whether that wiring runs from the top down, from the bottom up, or, as the most successful transitions may eventually require, in both directions at once.

Subject of Research: Multi-level governance of low-carbon city development in Shenzhen, China and Darebin, Australia

Article Title: Low-carbon city development from a multi-level governance perspective: a comparative study of Shenzhen, China and the City of Darebin, Australia

Article References: Li, C., Xu, Y., Jiang, M., Ng, M. K., & Zhang, W. (2025). Low-carbon city development from a multi-level governance perspective: a comparative study of Shenzhen, China and the City of Darebin, Australia. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(1), 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-024-00105-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-024-00105-5

Keywords: multi-level governance, low-carbon cities, Shenzhen, Darebin, climate policy, urban governance, China, Australia, carbon neutrality, local government, climate emergency, comparative study