Trans-local action and local innovations in climate change policy. A comparative analysis of German major cities

The trans-local dimension of local climate policy has gained increasing attention in local policy research. It has become a common assumption that the incorporation of cities and urban areas into global strategies against climate change is crucial. Urban areas produce higher greenhouse gas emissions and consume more energy than rural areas due to their higher population density. At the same time, the effects of global warming are most severe in urban spaces. This might lead to greater awareness of climate change issues and increasing acceptance of climate change mitigation. Furthermore, cities play an important role as innovators, policy laboratories, and role models as they develop lighthouse projects concerning energy saving, energy efficiency, and the integration of renewable energy sources. In view of highly fragmented global agreements, the incorporation of the local level seems inevitable to reach ambitious emission reduction goals. Observers emphasize the positive effect of trans-local action on policy innovations, because such action provides several opportunities for cities, e.g. privileged access to best practice solutions or support of collective interest representation of municipalities. Simultaneously, trans-local activities are regarded as an instrument of local actors to push their policy preferences forward. Some studies examine trans-local activities – e.g. the membership in municipal networks and the implementation of network goals – as dependent variable. They explain the scope of such activities by structural and institutional factors (e.g. Sharp et al. 2011) or by motivational dispositions of local actors (e.g. Benz et al. 2015). Others concentrate on the political functions of those trans-local networks (Kern and Bulkeley 2009). What is lacking so far, at least in the European context, is comparative research on the impact of those activities on local climate policies in a narrower sense. The proposed paper aims to ascertain the explanatory power of trans-local activities against institutional and socio-economic variables. Applying Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), the paper will contribute to the debate on the role of cities within transnational and multi-level governance structures. Therefore, it poses two interrelated questions: First, do trans-local activities substantially contribute to the range and scope of local climate policies or are they rather of symbolic nature? Secondly, if there is an obvious influence of trans-local activities, is this a singular effect or rather an artefact of underlying conditions, like the availability of resources or the general socio-economic situation? The proposal is based on a new dataset of climate mitigation policies in all German major cities (cities with more than 100.000 inhabitants). The dataset is established on behalf of the German Research Foundation and includes questionnaire based survey data as well as official statistics.