Leadership and the low carbon economy

Abstract

This chapter explores the nature of leadership for sustainability and questions whether there is a currently sufficient leadership capacity to have any realistic chance of accelerating the shift to a low-carbon (and ultimately green) economy. It mines empirical research from a variety of (disparate) literatures for useful insight into the type of leadership that could support our efforts to make this shift and highlights some of the ‘actionable’ concepts emerging from three largely discrete disciplines: socio-technical transitions, place-based (or civic) leadership and systems’ leadership. Finally, it argues that the new and distributed leadership skills and qualities required to support this system-wide innovation requires a strategic approach to building leadership capacity in cities and other localities that embrace the political, public service, community and business sectors (Hambleton and Howard 2012).