Can Cities Overcome Fragmentation in National-Level Policymaking and Pioneer Integrated Solutions to Environmental Problems on the Local Level? The Case of Climate Change and Air Pollution Policies in Italy and Milan

While environmental issues are always complex and interconnected, states’ environmental policies generally proceed in simplistic, siloed ways. For example, air pollution and climate change overlap in both sources and effects, but their respective governance arrangements are entirely separate in most states. This precludes the realisation of co-benefits and avoidance of trade-offs at different environmental regimes’ intersections, making policy integration a key challenge and necessary governance innovation for achieving sustainability. This paper will examine whether cities can address this challenge where states have failed, using the integration of climate and air pollution policies in Italy and one of its main cities, Milan, as a test case. Literature on urban environmental governance has not specifically addressed policy integration and its general insights are inconclusive on the matter: On one hand, cities are seen as innovative hubs where, due to their limited spatial extent, different actors cooperate more closely and in denser networks, allowing governance innovations to flourish. This is often contrasted with large, distant, unwieldy national-level bureaucracies. On the other hand, however, the scholarship cautions that cities lack the resources, legal authority, and administrative capacity of national governments and therefore cannot make up for all the state’s failures. This presents a puzzle: Does cities’ natural propensity for cooperation mean they fare better at environmental policy integration than states, or do their limited capacities preclude this? Climate and air pollution governance are a good test case for untangling this puzzle as they offer clear opportunities for urban leadership: Worldwide, most greenhouse gas emissions are produced in cities and some of their main sources – notably transport and heating – are also crucial contributors to urban air pollution. Furthermore, cities’ populations suffer the worst effects of both issues due to the heat island effect and urban smog they are exposed to. Hence, they have both the opportunities and motivations for integrating policies on these issues. This paper will analyse how integrated climate and air pollution policies are on the national and city-level and compare if levels of integration differ between these jurisdictions, using analytical frameworks developed in the policy integration literature and with Italy and Milan as cases for comparison. These were selected as the Italian government is seen as a laggard in environmental policy while Milan presents itself as a leader and is among the most prominent members of the C40 Climate Leadership Group – a city network that frequently highlights pollution-climate linkages in its advocacy. Regarding the differences between integration of climate and air pollution governance, Italy and Milan thus constitute a crucial case, where differences between the national and urban level are most likely to occur and – if they exist – will be particularly visible. While single case studies cannot yield general theories, this crucial cases design allows testing hypotheses on the above puzzle with relatively high certainty, thereby advancing our understanding of the understudied issue of urban leadership in policy integration considerably. The paper is part of my doctoral research under the ClimAirPathways project (Research Council of Finland, 2023-2027).