Mainstreaming decarbonization through local climate budgets in Norwegian municipalities

Research on norm domestication in multi‐level governance structures is overlooked in urban climate governance and policy literature. This paper conceptualizes multi‐scalar interactions of norm domestication for local climate actions. The city of Phoenix, which operates under the “purple” (blue cities and red legislatures) state of Arizona, is analyzed to illustrate how a local government can take up the climate actions left in the void at the state and federal levels. The empirical findings reveal important temporal politics at the state level that influenced the local government's climate norm domestication. The period of Democratic party leadership diffused climate norms at the state‐level and positioned the local government more as a climate policy‐taker, adopting decisions from the state legislature. Swings in the state‐level executive orders under the subsequent period of Republican leadership, however, forced the local government to seek some common ground for norm domestication, usually related to the nonpartisan goals of economic development. Consequently, local climate actions are subject to depoliticization of climate change from the higher‐level governance structures. Overall, decarbonization targets are not being directed in ways that lead to a broader shift in the socio‐technical system but would support short‐term emission reductions if multiple institutions, both at the state and sub‐state levels, created spaces for collaboration rather than competition.

The level of coordination between cultural, ecological, and economic systems directly affects the sustainable development of the Yellow River Basin (YRB). However, researchers have neglected the importance of cultural elements in the social-ecological system and have paid insufficient attention to the interaction of cultural, ecological, and economic systems in the YRB. Therefore, a framework of coupled cultural-ecological-economic (CEE) systems was constructed based on service-dominant logic, and the spatiotemporal distribution, evolutionary trends, and factors influencing the coupled coordination of different systems in 76 major cities in the YRB were analyzed by using an entropy-weighted TOPSIS model, coupled coordination model, spatial Markov chain, and panel spatial Dubin model. The results were as follows: (1) the cultural, ecological, and economic systems of the YRB showed a growing trend, the economic system grew faster than the cultural system and the ecosystem, and the ecosystems dominated sustainable development in the YRB. (2) From 2011 to 2022, the type of coupled CEE system coordination in the YRB was mainly in a state of slight incongruity, with the different regions showing temporal consistency and synchronized growth, with the upstream area mainly in a state of moderate incongruity, the midstream area mainly in a state of slight incongruity, and the downstream area concentrating in general coordination. (3) The spatial coordination level of CEE system coupling in the YRB showed the characteristic of “gradually converging to coordination from upstream to downstream” and exhibited upstream low-value agglomeration and downstream high-value agglomeration. Meanwhile, there was a clear trend of spatial spillover in terms of balanced regional development, and 67.11% of the cities in the region and neighboring areas maintained stable development. (4) Tourism development (TD), foreign trade (FT), the human environment (HE), government control (GC), and other factors significantly positively impacted the sustainable development in the YRB. In the future, the focus should be on improving the transregional infrastructure and transportation service systems in the YRB, to enhance cooperation and exchanges between different regions. This research provides new insights and methods for the coordinated development of cultural, ecological, and economic systems at a watershed scale.

Multi-lateral aid come from various Bilateral–aid agencies that play a crucial role in supporting developing nations around the world to address climate change issues. Despite significant effort from aid agencies, it is not clear how aid is received and distributed at local level in recipient countries. This paper highlights some of the challenges associated with funding obtained and utilised particularly to address climate change adaptation via case study of Kathmandu, Nepal. This empirical research is funded by the Government of Australia.This research draws on PhD research including a review of the literature and in-depth interviews with governing actors such as local planners in Kathmandu, climate experts, academics, and community members. The study focused on understanding the impacts of international and aid agency investment in climate action at the local urban scale. Key findings reveal that over the past decade significant resources were spent in capacity building programs nationally, but with limited contribution at the level of local adaptation in the urban regions. Local governing agencies and authorities have little capacity to address urban scale needs. Results of the study suggest that the process of distributing aid funding and evaluation of its impact is not transparent. This raised a number of questions around the legitimacy of governing climate change adaptation programs from the top down.

Shaping local response – The influence of transnational municipal climate networks on urban climate governance

Climate change governance increasingly emphasizes local-level decision making, where communities directly experience climate risks and implement adaptation strategies. Within this context, the role of women has gained growing attention due to their close interaction with natural resources, household management responsibilities, and community leadership roles. This paper examines the role of women in local climate governance and decision-making processes using secondary data drawn from international reports, national policy documents, academic literature, and institutional datasets. The study highlights how women’s participation contributes to more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable climate actions at the grassroots level. Evidence from global and Indian contexts indicates that women’s involvement enhances community resilience, improves resource management, and strengthens climate adaptation outcomes. However, structural barriers such as socio-cultural norms, limited access to decision-making platforms, and inadequate institutional support continue to restrict women’s effective participation. The paper concludes by emphasizing the need for gender-responsive policies, capacity-building initiatives, and inclusive governance frameworks to strengthen women’s role in local climate governance.

Although Dutch cities were among the forerunners in local climate policy, a systematic overview on climate mitigation and adaptation policy is still missing. This study aims to fill this gap by analysing 25 Dutch cities using indicators for the level of anchoring in policy, organisation and practical implementation as well as multi-level relations. Since Tilburg, Amsterdam, Den Haag and Rotterdam show a higher performance than other Dutch cities, these four cities are used as reference cities. The findings suggest that structural integration of climate mitigation and adaptation is limited in Dutch cities. The study points at three recent trends in local climate governance in the Netherlands: (i) decentralisation within municipal organisations, (ii) externalisation initiatives that place climate policy outside the municipal organisation and (iii) regionalisation with neighbouring municipalities and the provincial government.

Impact of a climate network: The role of intermediaries in local level climate action

To talk about Latin America and globalization seems to be an almost tautological exercise. Not only has the region been closely related to other parts of the world for more than 500 years, its integration into a European-dominated world system after 1492 also marked one of the most important moments of modern “globalization,” particularly in terms of connecting all parts of the world to one another. Since then, the countries of Latin America have been part of large regional economic, political, social, and cultural systems, first, as European colonies, later as more or less peripheral political and economic systems with a rather limited space of independent action. This, however, in no way means that Latin America’s entry into the processes of accelerated globalization, particularly after the end of the Cold War, has been smooth or unproblematic; or that the region’s national, regional, and other particular characteristics—not least its relative geographical isolation and its historical dependence on a single powerful neighbor—do not play a role in this process of integration into a globalized world.

What effect does extreme weather have on climate policy? Existing studies show that weather shocks have negative economic impacts and increase public awareness of climate change. These findings help identify the impacts of climate change on economic and social systems, and provide reasons for governments to adopt climate policy reforms. However, questions remain about the overall link between local extreme weather shocks and government climate policy. I investigate the effect of temperature shocks and natural disasters on a range of national, international, and subnational climate policies in samples spanning 1990–2018. I find that neither temperature shocks nor natural disasters generate climate mitigation reforms. Given that climate policy is currently insufficient to manage climate change and climate impacts are expected to increase this century, these findings suggest that future climate shocks are unlikely to catalyze meaningful climate action.

Taking Guangdong Province as a case study, this paper examines the ways in which experts engage in China’s local climate governance. The paper first explains that most prominent experts in Guangdong’s climate governance are those who work in semiofficial institutions or universities. The paper then illuminates the policy work of Guangdong experts by scrutinizing their engagement with three national policy pilot programmes promulgated by China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC): the low-carbon provincial pilot programme, the emissions inventory, and the emissions trading scheme. Lastly, in order to contextualize the knowledge–policy interface in the Chinese authoritarian context, the paper adopts the notion of the ‘politics of knowledge’ to explain how the political environment and local authorities’ considerations influence the conduct of experts in China’s local climate governance. While the previous literature mainly focuses on the role of experts in policy formulation, this study extends the understanding of the role of experts in climate governance by detailing the contribution of Guangdong experts to practically all of the stages of the policy process, including the capacity building, policy formulation, implementation, and evaluation phases of the policy cycle.

While coproduction of knowledge is growing in popularity in social sciences, and especially climate change research, we still need to better understand how to coproduce climate knowledge. In this paper, we explore how collaborative climate hackathons coproduce local adaptation knowledge, and what this method reveals about local climate governance. The data derives from two collaborative climate hackathons, called Klimathons, that attracted 73 and 98 participants in Bergen, Norway. The participants were practitioners and decision-makers from local, regional, and national institutions as well as researchers from natural and social climate sciences. The collaborative group work revolved around the challenges and solutions of local adaptation planning and uncovered how a diversity of key actors understand the local adaptation work in Norway. These interventions revealed that there are significant disagreements and divergent understanding of relevant laws, regulations and responsibility between practitioners working within the same governance system. Though the cross-sectorial interaction does not dissolve these divergences, they allow actors to renegotiate boundaries between divergent knowledge communities. The Klimathons helped us navigate the complexity of local climate adaptation by shifting the focus to how different actors make sense of and work on adaptation and showing the intertwining and interdependence of potential drivers for adaptation.

The role of the ‘place’ in delivering climate action is vital, however much action on climate change locally is fragmented. Independent place-based climate commissions are a novel structure of climate governance developing at the subnational level across cities, regions and counties in the UK. Little is known about these emerging forms of local climate governance and their experiences of navigating ‘mess’ in governance practices and processes. Building on Castán Broto’s framework of messy governmentalities, this paper seeks to assess the capacity of climate commissions to affect meaningful climate mitigation and adaptation action, to understand how they interact with existing climate governance structures and to consider their longer-term sustainability. This paper examines the nature and impact climate commissions have had on local climate action, drawing on qualitative interviews with chairs, commissioners, members of the secretariat and associated local authorities of the Edinburgh, Belfast, Leeds, Surrey, Yorkshire and Humber, and Lincoln commissions in the UK. Analysing the journeys of the commissions through a lens of messy governmentalities, and a focus on bodies, strategies and knowledges within them, we draw out insights on how climate commissions came about, their function and role, their impact and influence, and how they have evolved.

Local governments have led the way on climate action in the United States. While the federal government has largely stood to the side, local governments have made great efforts to adopt policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A large and robust literature in urban politics has explored the variables that influence local government action on climate change in the United States. Issue severity and resident ideological preferences have been identified as two of the most important factors in local climate action. Governments that are more likely to face major impacts from climate, such as coastal communities, and governments serving more liberal residents have both been found to pursue climate policy at higher rates. In this paper we suggest that these relationships are better understood as conditional. We argue that the effect of issue severity will be moderated by ideology. When residents are liberal, issue severity will matter. When residents are conservative, the impact will be muted. We find strong evidence for this hypothesis. Coastal governments and governments that have experienced drought adopt more climate policies, but this is conditional on the ideology of residents.

Regulatory Failure of Copyright Law Through the Lenses of Autopoietic Systems Theory

Climate change is a critical global issue with profound local impacts. Recent scholarship on local government action to address climate change has primarily focused on cities, with less attention paid to how smaller municipalities and rural communities are tackling the issue. Our research investigates how the capacity of urban and rural municipalities in New York State (NYS) affects their ability to take climate action, utilizing data from a statewide survey, interviews, and secondary data on municipal participation in the NYS Climate Smart Communities program. We investigated how municipal capacity (including individual, management, and broader contextual factors) influences climate change action in rural and urban communities. We find that only a quarter of NYS municipalities have taken climate action, and most are mitigation rather than adaptation actions. There is significantly more climate action and municipal climate network participation in urban versus rural communities. Most local municipal officials believe that climate change is occurring and feel the impacts, yet most are unsure about addressing it at the local level. Climate action is best predicted by individual municipal capacity variables of strong climate beliefs and knowledge, and contextual variables of being in an urban municipality versus a rural one, and participation in climate networks. Key barriers to local climate action include the lack of human, financial, and technical resource capacity. Municipal climate networks can help overcome capacity limitations, particularly for resource‐limited rural communities.