Divided Landscapes: Mapping the Struggle for Urban Environmental Coalitions

• In Event: Political Economy of Environmental Policy

Abstract

Developing cities across the Global South have taken the lead in adopting local environmental regulation. Yet standard models of environmental governance begin with the assumption that local actors should have no incentives for protecting ``the commons.'' Given the benefits of climate change regulation are diffuse, individual local actors face a collective action problem. Why do some city governments choose to bear the cost of implementing environmental regulation, while most cities choose to free-ride?

Focusing on the local mayor, I examine three classes of incentives: ideological, symbolic, and material. I argue that the presence of urban informality undermines coalitions for local environmental policy. Environmental regulation is only feasible when urban coalitional politics on the Left is characterized by compatible incentives. In developing cities, the informal poor often illegally settle on land designated as environmentally protected areas. I demonstrate how this creates a split in the political coalition between green parties with ideological incentives for addressing climate change and other parties of the local Left with the symbolic incentives to signal a pro-poor (i.e., anti-environment) stance. Thus, the presence and geographic overlay of “slums” with protected areas in cities polarizes Left-wing politics in local elections, precluding environmental policy. To test the argument, I examine the prevalence of informal “slum” settlements across Brazil’s over 5,500 municipalities. I spatially join and calculate in GIS the extent of geographic overlap between “slums” and protected areas. I combine these data sets with measures of local partisan coalitions and of coalitional splits coded from elections data. The findings illustrate the contradictions between pro-poor interests and urban sustainable development goals, and their consequences for environmental regulation in cities.

Author

• Alice Z Xu, University of Pennsylvania