Policy in Motion: Semantic Drift of EU Climate Objectives in EU-Funded Municipal Projects

EU climate ambitions increasingly reach municipalities through funding architectures rather than through direct command. Yet, as climate transition is a “wicked problem”, local authorities rarely implement supranational objectives as fixed packages; instead, they negotiate them within multi-actor, multi-level governance networks that include EU institutions, national and regional managing authorities, intermediary organisations, consultants, utilities, local businesses, and civil society. This paper examines how municipalities act as players in these networks by translating EU climate objectives into locally intelligible and politically legitimate project narratives—and how this translation produces semantic drift as goals travel towards the local level. We approach EU-funded climate action through the lens of policy translation, conceptualising localisation as an actor-driven process of editing, reframing, and selective appropriation. Crucially, translation is not treated as a deviation from compliance but as a form of local leadership under constraints: municipalities must simultaneously align with programme templates, meet administrative and financial requirements, and maintain legitimacy among citizens by embedding projects in local problem definitions and value frames. As a result, EU climate objectives can be narrated locally as energy security, affordability, infrastructure modernisation, health and air-quality improvement, or social cohesion—frames that mobilise support and fit existing local development agendas. Empirically, we analyse municipal project proposals submitted under the climate-related priority of EU Cohesion Policy (PO2) in Poland (2014–2020), triangulating three textual layers of the governance network: EU programme and regulatory documents, regional (voivodeship) implementation frameworks, and municipal application texts. The design combines qualitative close reading with computational text analysis. We use semantic similarity measures and frame-matching to detect alignment and divergence across governance levels, and interpret these shifts through qualitative coding of problem diagnoses, promised benefits, target groups, and local justifications. This mixed-method strategy allows us to trace where and how meaning changes: whether drift is primarily produced by regional templates that compress municipal narratives, by consultant-driven standardisation, or by municipal actors crafting locally resonant framings. The paper contributes to debates on climate transition governance by showing how local authorities enact leadership through discursive work inside funding networks, and how semantic drift becomes an observable indicator of local agency, legitimacy-building, and multi-level coordination in EU-funded climate action.