Understanding the varieties of green-driven growth: Cities and renewable energy in the Global South

An increasing number of emerging market cities have to find ways of dealing with rising energy demand while facing the need to find more sustainable ways of economic development. In order to contribute to the academic debate about this city/energy nexus, this dissertation combines current scholarship in the field of economic geography with the sustainability transitions literature.
Chapters 1 and 2 take an economic geography perspective and propose a constructive critique towards the world city network discourse and its tendency to focus on the largest metropolitan centres in the most affluent economies. The author argues that medium-size cities in the Global South are more integrated in global economic networks than the common investigative tools suggest.
Chapter 3 investigates how city authorities in India deal with major bottlenecks and financial restrictions when implementing sustainable policies. The author argues that the private sector has an important role to play. This is captured in the concept of green-driven growth, which emphasizes the potential benefits of a local green industry to a city’s quest for greater resilience: green jobs and green products.
Chapters 4 and 5 take the sustainability transitions literature as a starting point and look into recent experiences in Cape Town and Casablanca when dealing with the effects of a growing international business interest in renewable energy. The author highlights the need to investigate more closely the notion of green-driven growth in order to understand patterns of economic development in the context of (national) energy transitions.