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

The report emerges from the REAL post-growth research project, funded by a European Research Council Synergy Grant and led by Giorgos Kallis and Jason Hickel of ICTA-UAB together with Julia Steinberger of the University of Lausanne. In this research tradition, economic growth is treated not as an unqualified good but as something closer to an addiction: a pursuit that no longer reliably improves people’s lives while progressively compromising the resources and environmental stability on which future well-being depends. Post-growth scholarship therefore seeks ways to raise quality of life without depending on continued expansion of production and consumption, which is increasingly doubtful in viability and incompatible with the limits of a finite planet. The Catalan study translates that abstract ambition into a concrete inventory of interventions, each calibrated to the region’s actual socio-environmental conditions.

The report’s principal investigator, Salvador Pueyo, acknowledges that there are reasons for pessimism given the scale of global and everyday problems, but he insists that the game is not over, and that defining solidly grounded policies is an immediate necessity for emerging from the current crisis. Giorgos Kallis, principal investigator of REAL, describes the work as a fundamental study, the first to calculate how a region can transition toward a post-growth future, demonstrating that such a transition is feasible. A central methodological contribution of the report is its quantification of the resources demanded by current modes of living and production, compared against the potential capacity of Catalonia and of the planet as a whole. Pueyo emphasizes that the analysis does not focus on individual responsibility but on the potential for collective change, while conceding that a collective shift of this magnitude will inevitably also involve changes in consumption habits.

Nowhere is the quantitative rigor more evident than in the energy chapter. The report presents data showing that moving away from fossil fuels is urgent and, crucially, is not currently happening. Meeting Catalonia’s entire present energy consumption exclusively through renewable sources, the authors calculate, would require occupying the equivalent of 4.9 percent of the region’s territory, a burden with consequences that would be difficult to bear; increasing consumption further would make the problem even worse. To avoid this, the plan calls for a sharp reduction in energy use combined with the sequential deployment of renewables, beginning in locations with lower environmental impact and moving later to higher-impact sites, preserving future opportunities to mitigate damage. Notably, the report finds that the bulk of current electricity consumption could be covered using rooftops and degraded land, provided the Catalan government, the Generalitat, plays a proactive role: covering 60 percent of available rooftop areas is estimated to require an investment equivalent to 4.5 percent of the Generalitat’s non-financial budget over five years, an outlay the authors consider recoverable.

Mobility receives equally specific treatment. To cut energy consumption and environmental impacts, the report proposes curtailing private motorized traffic while strengthening public transit, and redirecting subsidies for electric cars toward leasing services, vehicle-sharing systems and community fleets. Air transport is singled out as a sector in need of rapid contraction, addressed through targeted fiscal tools. The report demonstrates that sharply reducing air traffic would save resources, reduce impacts and lower vulnerabilities while simultaneously generating public revenue and tempering housing prices, a combination of benefits that makes it one of the more politically attractive proposals in the plan. The document also draws attention to the emerging challenge posed by data centers, whose swelling energy appetite threatens to undermine any conservation gains achieved elsewhere in the economy.

The agrifood chapter offers perhaps the study’s starkest accounting. Catalonia, the authors find, lacks the agricultural capacity to feed both its human population and its livestock industry simultaneously, even if meat exports were halted completely, while sustainable extensive farming could cover only a small fraction of current consumption levels. The report therefore deems a drastic reduction in the consumption of animal-based products indispensable, and prescribes a transition toward an agroecological model centered on small-scale farmers rather than large corporations, prioritizing food security over exports. Agroecological intensification, the report argues, would maintain high productivity while delivering far greater benefits for sustainability, rural livelihoods and public health. Beyond Catalonia’s borders, the authors identify a coordinated international reduction in animal-source consumption as perhaps the last remaining hope for the climate, because even the rapid phase-out of fossil fuels, more necessary than ever, is no longer sufficient on its own to respect the 1.5 °C limit. On the emissions side, to avoid exhausting the carbon budget compatible with that limit by 2028, the report proposes a 7 percent annual reduction in fossil emissions in Catalonia beginning in 2026, alongside the food-system shift.

The economic pillar of the plan is inseparable from these physical transformations. As Pueyo puts it, a post-growth transition requires a profound transformation of economic, fiscal, labor and social policies, because economic tools must drive sustainability even at the expense of growth, and when growth ceases to be a priority or is simply no longer viable, redistribution becomes key to meeting basic needs. The report proposes an adaptive eco-voucher scheme (EVA) that combines an environmental consumption tax with a complementary currency distributed to citizens, penalizing higher polluters while compensating those with a lower environmental footprint. A progressive land value tax would curb speculation and lower housing costs, with revenue earmarked to expand public rental housing, support housing cooperatives and fund social spending. These instruments, the authors argue, allow fiscal policy to reward low-impact behavior rather than simply punishing consumption, a design intended to protect low- and middle-income households through the transition.

On labor and social rights, the plan proposes a cushion income (renda coixía), a tailored welfare benefit protecting low- and middle-income households, and, as an alternative or complement, a job guarantee focused at least on those facing the greatest difficulty finding work, estimated to cost 2.4 percent of the Generalitat’s budget. Recommendations include shortening the workweek to improve quality of life and share caregiving duties, and guaranteeing public or cooperative employment for workers displaced by the eco-social transition. The governance layer of the plan is equally ambitious: a commitment to ethical banking, the cooperative model and public-community partnerships, binding citizens’ assemblies for strategic decisions, and mechanisms to ensure that leadership positions are held by individuals motivated by the common good. The method underlying the whole report is data and statistical analysis, grounding each policy in measured resource flows rather than rhetoric.

Perhaps the most politically consequential finding concerns unilateral action. Globally, the authors argue, there is no alternative path to improving everyone’s quality of life; yet implementing post-growth policies unilaterally is far more difficult for a specific territory, especially one inside the eurozone. Research under the REAL project has advanced post-growth economic policy for the eurozone as a whole, but a major challenge remained: determining what Catalonia can do while the rest of the currency union has yet to act. Pueyo admits that at the outset the team feared Catalonia’s margin for unilateral maneuver would be minimal, but they are now more optimistic, having compiled existing policies and developed new ones that can, in principle, be applied without waiting for external coordination. The researchers hope these policies will serve as a benchmark for other countries, and that even if unilateral implementation is insufficient on its own, Catalonia’s example could supply the leadership needed to drive the international coordination that major global challenges demand. The report frames the present global landscape as the failure of the globalized economic model, and its central challenge as articulating a new form of cooperation focused on people and the planet, drawing on historical precedents that demonstrate the viability of such collective action.

Subject of Research: A quantitative post-growth policy study modeling how Catalonia can maintain resilience and well-being while decoupling from economic growth.

Article Title: Can Catalonia survive without economic growth? A new study says it can

Article References: Can Catalonia survive without economic growth? A new study says it can. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: post-growth, Catalonia, ICTA-UAB, climate emergency, energy transition, agroecology, renewable energy, land value tax, job guarantee, eurozone, 1.5 °C limit, degrowth policy