Sustainability in City-Regionalism as Emergent Practice: The Case of the BRICS

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The summary of the paper is written in a clear and comprehensible form, with the essential points of this work. The objective of this paper is to highlight the extent to which sustainability is present as a driver towards city-region governance, using countries within the still underexplored BRICS cluster as cases studies. Thus this paper shows that in practice the connection between environmental sustainability and city regionalism remains mainly limited and fractious. In all cases, however, there are emergent connections which offer the potential for stronger connections. Most importantly, public reaction to a mounting environmental crisis in the BRICS is obliging the actors of governance, concerned with sustaining their public legitimacy, to establish or strengthen inter-jurisdictional and collaborative relationships across city-regions. There are however significant limits to these endeavours, especially where levels of social trust are low, or where sustainability problems are rooted within unsustainable national growth paths.

Keywords (city-region 1; urban sustainability 2; environmental politics 3; environmental govern-22 ance 4; BRICS; 5. comparative method) cover the essence of the paper.

1. Introduction

gives a transparent description of the sustainability concerns. New writings on sustainability, focused on environmental governance and intermediate scales such as the urban region, which do not correspond to traditional levels of government hierarchy are refered.

The author relies on data from the BRICS + City Lab network, which provided both contextual insight into each country of study as well as logistical support when visiting individual countries. The BRICS are a diverse grouping in terms of physical size, population, economic structure, growth, constitutional arrangement, political culture, and more, but I follow an approach in which comparison is attentive to repetition, connection, and difference. This review article draws on work from each of the BRICS, much of which is still to be adequately integrated into the dominating literatures. Thirty-five in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted in cities across the BRICS in the period 2016 to 2019 as well as an analysis of the grey literatures and scholarly work within the respective contexts. This empirical work provides the knowledge setting on city-region governance that underpins the focus of this review article on the sustainability dimension. The article continues below with three comparative tables that provide a synoptic description of the developmental, political and sustainability context of the BRICS before focusing in turn on each country, level discussions focus on the nature of city-region governance and its relationship to sustainability motivations and drivers.

It is clear written!

2. Developmental, political and sustainability context

The BRICS includes 94 one country within the high-income category (Russia), three in the middle-income cate-95 gory (China, Brazil and South), and one that is categorized a low-income (India).

Table 1 reveals the extraordinary diversity of the BRICS. It shows a geopolitical cluster of countries with immense variation in population and economic size but also of considerable differences in developmental status and human condition.

Table 2 indicates, the BRICS includes federal, unitary, and hybrid states, with political systems that range from single-party authoritarian to multi-party democratic.

Table 3 provides a comparative account of sustainability indicators for the BRICS. It reveals a cluster of countries with severe but varying sustainability challenges.

The situation of each county is described.

I suggest to repointed 2. The Brazilian Federation etc. to 6. Republic of South Africa as subtitles 2.1 to 2.5.

3. Analysis

I propose to introduce a separate point 3. Analysis and record the analyzed (partly from the 7. Conclusion).

The BRICS study reveal the limitations and possibilities of city regionalism in addressing sustainability concerns. The first limitation rests in the scantiness of the current practice of city-regionalism. The current structures of city-region governance are hardly adequate to the task of addressing the complex, cross-cutting concerns of environmental sustainability. There are no instances in the BRICS where there are functional, multi-facetted forms of city-region governance across all major urban regions. ETC by countries...

A second limitation rests relates to the spatial scales at which sustainability concerns can be addressed.

The third limitation relates to the politics of sustainability.

The method of analysis should be visible here!

4. Conclusions

To write main points of analysis (other in 3. Analysis).

The article is interesting and actual; the impression of a scientific approach to analysis is missing.

I suggest corrections in the sense of the above, so the purpose of written will be much more transparent to the reader.

Author Response

I appreciate the comments and suggestions you have made. I have renumbered the sections as you suggested which certainly helps in clarifying the structure of the paper to the reader. To avoid repetition, however, I have combined the final two sections. In relation to the comment made on the "scientific approach", I do wish to clarify, that I have presented the contribution as a "review article". While I have conducted  a series of semi-structured interviews on city-region governance in the BRICS which provides underpinning knowledge, the approach I have taken is to provide an interpretive analysis of the current state of knowledge on the city-region governance/ sustainability nexus in each context. 

Reviewer 2 Report

This is a very interesting paper with potential to help increase our understanding of city-region governance and how urban regions have come under increasing pressure to adapt to the imperatives of mobility, including greater freedom of travel, rising trade volumes and global economic networks. Whereas urbanization was once characterized by the concentration of services and facilities, urban areas now have to ensure the exchange of goods, services and information in a much more complex, interrelated, highly competitive, and spatially dispersed environment. Therefore, cities are challenged to ensure the functionality of infrastructure while mitigating negative environmental and social impacts. This means a deep examination of public reactions, as the authors state very clearly, to the environmental crisis in the BRICS and how the actors of governance, concerned with sustaining their public legitimacy, seek to establish or strengthen inter-jurisdictional and collaborative relationships across city-regions. The exploration of the   limitations to these endeavors, especially where levels of social trust are low, or where sustainability problems are rooted within unsustainable national growth paths, is very important and I commend the authors for focusing on this.

Author Response

I appreciate the positive comments on the submission and note that there is no specific recommendation to respond to.

Reviewer 3 Report

The manuscript presents an interesting work on sustainability in urban areas of the five countries in BRICS cluster (Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa). It is well structured and formally well organized.

Only, one minor comment:

Page 2, line 96: South Africa instead of South in “(China, Brazil and South)”

Author Response

I appreciate the positive overall comment, and also the alert to the error on page 2.