Governing the environment in European cities: Reshaped patterns of stakeholders in urban policy-making

This article focuses on the evolution of the actors involved in environmental decision-making at the urban scale covering a period from the early eighties up to the present. Through the cases of Manchester (United Kingdom) and Saint-Etienne (France), we aim at showing that the shift in discourse from "local environment" to "sustainable development" lead to a dramatic change in the actors involved in the production of urban environmental policies. This evolution will be explained by a transformation of the sources of legitimacy of local political elites (with the rise of output-oriented legitimacy) and a transformation of the political resources they mobilised. This evolution could be analysed as a stronger investment of urban political elites in the "policies" dimension of their work. (C) 2010 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.