Abstract
Climate change and its challenges have long been incorporated into the policy-making process. Advocacy actions urge to strengthen the socio-ecological resilience through engagement with stakeholders, feedback recollection, and testing of solutions. Several initiatives have been born to boost cities’ actions toward climate change mitigation and adaptation. Institutional coordinated actions such as transnational municipal networks (TMNs) and non-institutional, grassroots movements for climate action, are among them. The study focuses on four TMNs and two grassroots movements, which have an impact on the European and/or worldwide contexts. They are investigated qualitatively, reflecting on the roles and contributions to climate change that they provide both alone and together. The research questions focus on the instruments/elements/factors that they put in place to support the transition, the key messages, and how these are conferred to their key targets. The initiatives have been investigated in both the grey and scientific literature. The main results show that grassroots movements for climate action and TMNs have the potential to better support cities in their climate transition. However, local governments are urged to take advantage of both initiatives’ ability to develop networks of support, innovation and a sense of belonging. In conclusion, the research states that the two initiatives should be effectively connected and integrated with a complementary role concerning planning actions.
Highlights
Climate change is widely recognized as one of the major issues of the current century.According to the last IPCC report [1], the entire human community is far from being on track to mitigate and adapt to climate change
Achieving the objectives of mitigation and adaptation to climate change requires an evolution of the model of city government, moving from a “vertical” approach to an integrated governance approach, based on continuous collaboration between the different territorial actors
Several transnational municipal networks (TMNs) are present at the worldwide level
Summary
Climate change is widely recognized as one of the major issues of the current century. According to the last IPCC report [1], the entire human community is far from being on track to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The anthropogenic influence in warming the climate at an unprecedented rate is recognized. Achieving the objectives of mitigation and adaptation to climate change requires an evolution of the model of city government, moving from a “vertical” approach to an integrated governance approach, based on continuous collaboration between the different territorial actors (the economic world, academia, civil society, public administration). The construction of collaborations and alliances with a larger constellation of actors with a stake in societal issues is part of the debate on socio-ecological resilience. The resilience literature states that the adaptation and flexibility of a system (in this case, cities) increases with the enlargement of the actors participating in extending its capacity to react to challenges [2]
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