Quantifying European Urban Climate Governance Using Bipartite Networks: Evidence from Climate City Contract Co-Signatories

Cities play an essential role in tackling climate change, yet climate governance remains vertically fragmented across multiple levels of governance and horizontally across urban actors. Effective urban ecological transitions therefore depend on the involvement of a broad range of actors who collectively co-own transition processes. This is particularly important in cities, the level of governance closest to citizens, which account for a substantial share of greenhouse gas emissions and where municipal actors are frequently accused of working in silos. In this paper, the term “governance embeddedness” refers to the extent to which urban climate governance is integrated across diverse urban actors and policy sectors, rather than being confined to a narrow set of organizations working on siloed policies. The EU Cities Mission offers a suitable empirical policy context to examine this governance embeddedness. The EU Cities Mission introduces Climate City Contracts (CCCs) as soft governance instruments intended to foster integrated, multi-stakeholder urban climate action. CCCs must result from a co-creation process involving public, private, and civil society actors who may co-sign the “contracts” and thereby become co-owners of their city’s ecological transition. In doing so, they voluntarily commit to the objectives of CCCs, that usually aim to make cities climate neutral by the end of this decade. However, empirical evidence on how inclusive and integrated these governance arrangements are, remains limited. If an ecological transformation is to occur, then as many actors as possible must co-own the urban ecological transition. This article addresses this gap by analyzing CCC co-signatories and quantifying urban climate governance embeddedness using bipartite network analysis. Drawing on a novel dataset of 2308 actors across 77 cities from the EU and its neighborhood, the paper examines which actor types and policy sectors are involved and represented in CCCs, and assesses the degree of urban climate governance embeddedness at the city level. Conceptually, the analysis builds on the notion of embeddedness, understood as the extent to which urban climate governance connects diverse actors across policy domains. The findings show variation in governance integration across cities. While CCCs mobilize a broad range of stakeholders beyond municipal administrations, especially from the private sector, participation remains concentrated across a more limited set of policy sectors. Despite some cities involving substantially larger and more diverse coalitions of transition co-owners, no significant differences are observed between Northern, Western, Eastern, and Southern European cities, nor according to the political affiliation of mayors, suggesting that regional location and party affiliation play a limited role. Cities characterized by broader actor diversity and wider sectoral coverage consequently exhibit higher levels of governance embeddedness. More broadly, this analysis can thus be understood within debates on urban Europeanization, where EU policy instruments reshape local governance practices and coordination capacities of cities’ ecological transition. The article also demonstrates how network-based methodological approaches may be used to empirically assess the governance of urban climate transitions and to evaluate the integrative potential of the EU Cities Mission.