Climate capacity in medium-sized German cities: (how) do smaller municipalities implement mitigation and adaptation policies?

Eckersley, P ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9048-8529, Otto, A, Haupt, W and Kern, K, 2025. Climate capacity in medium-sized German cities: (how) do smaller municipalities implement mitigation and adaptation policies? npj Climate Action. ISSN 2731-9814 (Forthcoming)

Text 2448393_Eckersley.pdf - Post-print Restricted to Repository staff only Download (704kB)

Abstract

Although research has begun to examine local mitigation and adaptation approaches in parallel, it has tended to focus on leading cities and adopt large-N approaches that focus on published climate plans. We know little about whether smaller local governments are able to address these twin challenges simultaneously, or whether and how they are implementing their planned policies. Drawing on analysis of 194 German cities, supplemented by fieldwork interviews in ten of these municipalities, we find that smaller cities are focusing increasingly on both mitigation and adaptation at the institutional level. However, concerns remain about implementation and the long term development of infrastructure projects. Moreover, there is a risk that our knowledge of local climate policy, much of which is based on climate planning documents, may be distorted because municipalities are incentivised to produce highly ambitious and unrealistic plans, and often rely heavily on external experts to draft these documents.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	npj Climate Action
Creators:	Eckersley, P., Otto, A., Haupt, W. and Kern, K.
Publisher:	Springer
Date:	28 May 2025
ISSN:	2731-9814
Identifiers:	Number Type 2448393 Other
Divisions:	Schools > Nottingham Business School
Record created by:	Laura Borcherds
Date Added:	05 Jun 2025 07:31
Last Modified:	05 Jun 2025 07:31
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/53692

Actions (login required)

Edit View

Statistics

Views

Downloads