Fragmented Structures, Fragmented Evidence: Policy Integration and Evidence-Based Climate Governance in Multilevel Settings

Local governments have become increasingly central actors in climate mitigation and adaptation. Yet, even within similar institutional settings, municipalities display substantial variation in their capacity to diagnose climate risks, coordinate responses, and use evidence consistently in decision making. While existing research has highlighted the role of administrative capacity, leadership, and access to data, less attention has been paid to how the internal organisational architecture of municipal administrations shapes the production, circulation, and use of evidence for climate governance. This paper argues that the degree of policy integration within local governments constitutes a critical but underexplored condition for evidence informed climate policymaking in multilevel contexts. The paper brings together the literatures on policy integration and evidence informed policymaking by focusing on the organisational foundations of local climate governance. Policy integration is understood as the extent of horizontal and vertical coordination across administrative sectors addressing the same public problem (Candel & Biesbroek, 2016; Tosun & Lang, 2017). Evidence use is conceptualised not merely as data availability, but as a set of practices embedded in organisational routines and coordination mechanisms that shape how knowledge is interpreted and mobilised in decision making processes (Head, 2016). From this perspective, fragmented administrative structures are expected to constrain information flows, reduce diagnostic coherence across sectors, and encourage reactive rather than anticipatory uses of evidence, particularly following extreme climate events. Empirically, the paper draws on a qualitative study of 20 Brazilian municipalities located across ten states and all five macro regions of the country. Brazil provides a useful comparative laboratory, as municipalities operate under a shared institutional framework while displaying substantial variation in administrative capacity, exposure to climate risks, and governance arrangements. The analysis is based on semi structured interviews with policymakers and technical staff, thematically coded to examine organisational architectures of climate action, practices of evidence production and circulation, mechanisms of intersectoral coordination, and processes of organisational learning following climate related shocks. The findings indicate that organisational fragmentation remains the dominant pattern in municipal climate governance. Departments tend to operate with isolated diagnostics and datasets, coordination relies heavily on individual initiative, and evidence is mobilised primarily in response to crises rather than as part of anticipatory planning. In contrast, municipalities that have developed more integrative arrangements such as interdepartmental commissions, transversal climate units, or shared information systems display greater capacity to align diagnostics, anticipate risks, and mobilise evidence strategically across policy domains. By foregrounding the organisational conditions that enable or hinder evidence use, the paper contributes to debates on policy integration and evidence informed policymaking and offers a comparative framework for understanding divergent municipal responses to climate challenges in federal and multilevel systems. Candel, J. J. L., & Biesbroek, R. (2016). Toward a processual understanding of policy integration. Policy Sciences, 49(3), 211–231. Head, B. W. (2016). Toward more “evidence‐informed” policy making? Public Administration Review, 76(3), 472–484. Tosun, J., & Lang, A. (2017). Policy integration: Mapping the different concepts. Policy Studies, 38(6), 553–570.