Climate labs versus unused potentials: Examining the rural-urban divide in local climate mitigation

The National Climate Protection Initiative (NKI) in Germany provides a strong external incentive for municipalities and districts to develop local climate mitigation strategies and to become climate labs with their own climate change mitigation management. Yet, the latest evaluation of the NKI confirms that there is a great disparity in the distribution of funding across the regions. Taking this regional fragmentation across regional climate mitigation management in Germany as a starting point, we explore climate change mitigation management across local governments, identifying characteristic features and asking: How can we explain disparity in the amount of funding for climate mitigation management across districts? In order to answer the research question, we draw on climate policy literature pointing to the role of socio-economic and institutional determinants rather than the role of actors. Accordingly, using data from the German Federal Ministry for the Environment on climate funding in the context of the NKI, we study 400 cities and districts to systematically test hypotheses concerning the disparity in the likelihood of urban versus rural areas to apply for climate funding, as well as the amount they receive. Further, we take socio-economic data from the regional statistics offices, Eurostats, the umbrella organization of the district parliaments, and the websites of the city parliaments. With multilevel ordinary least squares (OLS) and logistic regression, we show that in most districts there is still no climate protection management in place despite Germany’s climate protection goals and funding scheme. Our analysis indicates that the existence and quality of the climate management correlates with the level of urbanisation in a district, whereas structural or partisan factors seem to have less influence. We argue that despite an increasing number of local climate labs, there is important unused potential for climate mitigation in districts. In order to tap into these potentials, we propose a new research agenda focusing on climate mitigation in rural areas.