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Study on the roles and interactions of German municipalities in climate action published as a conference paper
The 21st century has been called the “century of the cities”, emphasizing the role of the local level in climate action. Thus, there is high interest in understanding municipalities' capabilities and limitations for creating impact. With the study, we aim to contribute to this field.
The study examines the different roles municipalities embrace as well as their network of interactions with actors outside their administration. For this we contrast in-depth interviews with 17 selected representatives from cities and experts on municipal climate action with a broad survey of 554 German municipalities. We find that climate action is an important issue for German municipalities and they primarily see themselves as role models. Other than that, they take on various different roles and are in active exchange with citizens and other municipalities. In regards to higher levels of government, interactions are more limited.
The broad survey was conducted in summer 2020 by the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research as part of the NostaClimate project. It is part of work package 2, which focuses on the analysis of climate protection activities of non-state actors, in particular municipalities, and asks about their motives and strategies for climate protection activities and the interaction of these actors with state actors.
The study was presented in a panel contribution at the eceee Summer Study on energy efficiency from 07. to 11. June 2021.