Policy Choice in Local Responses to Climate Change A Comparison of Urban Strategies

Since the 1990s ‘beliefs’, ‘ideas’ or ‘knowledge’ as well as processes of communicative interactions such as persuasion, argumentation and learning have received increasing attention in social science for the understanding of political changes. This book makes a significant contribution to this scholarly debate and will be of interest to practitioners, showing on one side how climate change has received more and more attention in policy making at the local level and changed the urban agenda and on the other how different the responses of cities to this global challenge are – and how these differences between cities can be explained. This book was previously published as a special issue of Urban Research and Practice.

1. Introduction: how to explain differences in urban strategies and measures to deal with climate changeHubert Heinelt and Wolfram Lamping 2. The development of local knowledge orders: a conceptual framework to explain differences in climate policy at the local levelHubert Heinelt and Wolfram Lamping 3. The epistemologies of local climate change policies in GermanyKarsten Zimmermann, Jasmin Boghrat and Meike Weber 4. The trans-local dimension of local climate policy. Sustaining and transforming local knowledge orders through trans-local action in three German citiesArthur Benz, Jörg Kemmerzell, Michèle Knodt and Anne Tews 5. The effects of knowledge orders on climate change policy in urban land management and real estate management: a case study of three German citiesMarina Hofmann, Nikolas D. Müller, Christoph J. Stankiewicz, Andreas Pfnür and Hans Joachim Linke 6. Institutionalizing a policy by any other name: in the City of Vancouver’s Greenest City Action Plan, does climate change policy or sustainability policy smell as sweet?Meg Holden and Majken Toftager Larsen

Hubert Heinelt is professor of public administration, public policy and urban studies at the Institute of Political Science, Technische Universität Darmstadt. His current research focuses on European integration and urban studies. Wolfram Lamping is senior researcher at the Institute for Political Science, Technische Universität Darmstadt. His current research focuses on European Integration, multi-level governance, and urban studies.