Waterfront Toronto, an independent corporation established in 2001, is in the process of redeveloping 800 hectares of land along Toronto’s shore of Lake of Ontario with ambitious green building standards and district energy infrastructure. Redevelopment is Waterfront Toronto’s primary goal, but the corporation has also set energy efficiency and greenhouse gas reduction targets. Minimum Green Building Requirements, a central feature of Waterfront Toronto’s decarbonization efforts, have increased Toronto’s development industry’s capacity for green building, and continue to ratchet-up green building education, research, and standards. The neighbourhoods involved in the project have become an exceptional pilot space that allows for experiential learning, which can inform traditional governance. In fact, City of Toronto officials are learning from the Waterfront Toronto standards and regard the initiative as upholding “best practices”.

Waterfront Toronto’s efforts to transform the building and construction market in order to broadly engender lower carbon urban development offer important lessons. Key among these lessons is that there are both benefits and limitations to the strategy of using pilot urban spaces to try to catalyze broader decarbonization. In addition, the international connections made by Waterfront Toronto to other urban redevelopment projects shows how conscious copying of decarbonization interventions in different places may lead to islands of decarbonization rather than widespread transformation unless decarbonization is catalyzed beyond the pilot space.

The C40 Electric Vehicle Network (EVN) introduced as a pilot project in 2009 with five participating C40 cities (London, Toronto, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Seoul) and formalized less than a year later with fourteen C40 cities. The Clinton Climate Initiative (CCI), which initiated the network, focused on Electric Vehicles (EVs) as a “low hanging fruit” that could provide meaningful emissions reductions without requiring significant behaviour change. The network has continued to expand its membership and evolve its organizational form. The C40 has taken over the EVN from the CCI, the scope of activities has broadened from a strict focus on EVs to all modes of low emissions transport (the initiative was re-labeled as the Low Emissions Vehicle Network in 2014), and a greater emphasis has been placed on outreach, inter-city interaction, and information sharing.

The EVN initially worked to build capacity within local governments by providing information on the benefits of EVs and encouraging the development of EV charging infrastructure in order to stimulate demand. EVN’s capacity building initiatives have since shifted to facilitating more city-city interactions to create opportunities for knowledge transfer and enhanced market opportunities for commercial actors in the EV sector. It remains unclear, however, whether these interactions have meaningfully encouraged or shaped EV governance at a local level, as there are both active and inactive cities belonging to the EVN. Active cities, especially those such as Bogota who have implemented the spin-off initiative Hybrid and Electric Bus Test Program (HEBTP) have experienced high levels of success in their EV efforts. The HEBTP, although only active in a small number of cities, has fostered stronger inter-city and manufacturer coalitions, especially as compared with early efforts by the EVN, and shows the greatest evidence of and promise for future scaling. Overall, EVN activity is underrepresented in C40, but there is evidence of successful transformation in some cities as well as indications of organizational adaption that may contribute to enhancing transformative uptake in the future.

In 2003, the Ontario Liberal Government under Dalton McGuinty initiated the Ontario Coal Phase Out. The legislation aimed to shut down all coal burning power plants by 2015. After facing several initial setbacks, the phase-out was completed ahead of schedule when the last coal power plant was closed in 2014. The Ontario Coal Phase Out is considered to be “the single largest GHG reduction measure in North America,” and resulted in a 55% decrease in greenhouse gas emissions in Ontario’s electricity sector since 2007. Additionally, air quality has improved significantly. On the other hand, electricity prices have increased from about 5 ¢/kWh to 10 ¢/kWh since 2003, although major infrastructure projects have most likely contributed to the increase.

The Ontario Coal Phase Out was driven in large part by the determined lobbying efforts of the Ontario Clean Air Alliance (OCAA) in collaboration with the Ontario Medial Association (OMA). This coalition was successful in convincing all three provincial political parties of the need to phase out coal in the lead up to the 2003 Ontario election. Public health concerns were the impetus for the OCAA and OMA’s lobbying efforts, with the environment as a secondary consideration. Both the work of the OCAA, the OMA, and successive Ontario governments demonstrate the GHG emission reduction benefits of phasing out coal power plants and hopefully serve as a model for other jurisdictions.

Energiewende is a series, or ecosystem, of German energy policies focused on transforming Germany’s energy supply from coal, oil and gas and nuclear energy to renewable energy. In 2010, a key policy document called the Energy Concept paper enhanced the coherence of previously disconnected policies dating as far back as the 1970s. The paper was aimed at uniting various policy initiatives, securing funding, and setting efficacy targets. The Energy Concept paper brought coherence to Germany’s Energiewende, but Energiewende is not a paper, policy, or an act. It is better defined as “a movement that coalesced over several decades.”

The decentralization of energy governance, as well as the growth of energy cooperatives, is an example of self-organized scaling through which Energiewende has created additional opportunities for decarbonization. The increased coherence between formerly disparate policies has also helped create a space where cities, originally pursuing climate action in isolation, could coordinate efforts. This drove a greater uptake of climate action by cities and states and contributed to the success of the energy transition. Furthermore, community ownership of energy has created a group of voters who benefit from renewable energy feed in tariffs, enhancing the program’s irreversibility and entrenchment. The laws that have been passed to enable Energiewende, such as those that institutionalized FITs, have also contributed to entrenchment via lock-in.