Local Democracy in a State of Emergency? Potentials and Limits of Climate Emergency Declarations for Participatory Climate Politics

If the transformation of today's cities into climate-neutral cities can be understood as one of the central social tipping points of global society, how could this change be set in motion? What does the "climate emergency" declared by many municipalities mean in concrete terms for local democratic governance and planning policy? This paper addresses the scope for action by municipalities in a climate emergency and places it in the framework of a political-economic understanding of power and planning policy. The analysis focusses on the way in which German municipalities that have declared a Climate Emergency in 2019 translate conflicts over post-fossil futures into concrete political and planning strategies. Although more than 2,200 authorities around the world have already declared a climate emergency, research on the impact of these resolutions on the political orientation of municipalities is still very limited. Given the dangers and potentials of emergency framing for local democracy, the research focus of this paper is on the effects on specific local political power relations and administrative constellations. For this reason the power field of municipal planning politics as a theoretical framework for the analysis of power relations at the local level is elaborated and applied here. This framework is based on critical theory on the communicative model of planning and the Community Power debate. Thus, this practice-related and explorative paper connects empirical insights from the German medium-sized city of Marburg, Hesse, with the innovative framework of a local power field. In general, the (ongoing) transformation process of municipal governance constellations is revealed, with questions of the implementation of democratic innovations such as citizens' councils, participation processes or climate reservations at its core. The paper discusses how municipalities, in the context of persistent tensions over the post-fossil transformation in Germany, on the one hand hold on to business-as-usual approaches, but on the other hand also set political impulses for rapid transformation.