Municipal climate mitigation policy and policy learning - A review

Abstract

Cities are expected to contribute to climate mitigation by providing effective climate policy actions in a multilevel governance context. Yet, it is unclear what we actually know about the strengths and weaknesses of urban climate policy measures and how municipal policy learning could be enhanced. In this article we present a comprehensive review on cities’ experience in climate mitigation policy and policy learning, focusing on research published in journal articles. We provide observations from the literature on municipal experience in policy practice and on how local governments manage learning in urban mitigation policy. The review provides valuable examples and reflections on individual policy initiatives, both in terms of policy framing and policy instruments, but finds sporadic evidence on systematically successful policy learning and capacity building processes in the scientific literature. The number of scientific articles on empirical assessments of local policy learning are few, and the research found, published in numerous journals, potentially addressing different research communities, provides limited knowledge on policy learning in terms of lessons learned, lessons drawing and capacity building. Moreover, the literature builds mostly on case studies within particular institutional contexts, which makes the transferability of findings problematic. While evidence on policy learning is still limited, there are indications that under the right conditions, cities can “learn to learn”.