Enhancing Urban Governance for Climate Action

Unlocking governance for climate action through cross-department collaboration, and support to align climate policies across your local, regional, and national government for effective implementation.

The Policy and Governance Pathway supports your city to adopt innovative governance approaches to address both horizontal and vertical structural governance barriers. This pathway will provide you with the tools and knowledge to overcome siloed approaches and fragmented workstreams within public administrations, fostering enhanced collaboration across sectoral departments. It will support your city to develop integrated local policies and more effective governance settings.

This Support Pathway focuses on:

• Overcoming governance barriers: supporting your city in addressing horizontal and vertical governance challenges by promoting innovative approaches.
• Fostering cross-department collaboration: providing tools to break down siloed approaches within your public administrations, enabling more integrated and systemic workstreams.
• Enhancing multi-level collaboration: strengthening the dialogue between your city and other cities, regional, and national authorities to align climate policies and actions.
• Addressing regulatory and financial barriers: helping to facilitate cooperation across your city’s governance levels to tackle regulatory obstacles, financing challenges, capacity-building needs, and data limitations.

This Support Pathway helps to enhance governance for climate action through collaborative efforts across departments and by aligning climate policies at the local, regional, and national levels for effective implementation.

Key Challenges:

• Insufficient administrative and operational capacity: your city lacks the administrative and operational capacity needed to implement climate policies and plans effectively. This limitation is a significant barrier to progress, particularly in the absence of additional funding for capacity-building.
• Lack of cross-sectoral integration: development of climate agendas in your city is hindered by the absence of a mainstreamed cross-sectoral approach, resulting in fragmented responsibilities and limited collaboration across sectors.
• Fragmented multi-level governance and coordination: responsibilities across different levels of government are fragmented, and there is a lack of coordination, making it difficult to implement cohesive climate policies in your city.
• Need for guidance on climate policies: your city requires targeted guidance in developing and implementing effective climate policies and regulations to address the challenges posed by climate change.

The Policy and Governance Pathway and the Climate Transition Map

This support pathway relates to the following stages of the Climate Transition Map:

• Build a strong mandate
• Co-create a portfolio

The policy-related services offered to your city will support through the different phases of the Climate Transition Map. Policy aspects become increasingly important to consider during the third phase of the Climate Transition Map, when your city begins to develop a cohesive portfolio of decarbonisation interventions.

The governance services provided by the Mission Platform will help your city build a strong mandate both within your administration and across other levels of government. If your city currently lacks collaboration between departments on climate mitigation and sees limited cooperation with regional and national authorities, the services offered through the policy and governance pathway will help address this.

This pathway will also encourage your city to explore new policy approaches, such as innovation labs or regulatory sandboxes, by showcasing inspiring practices from other cities and promoting peer learning. These innovative approaches create spaces where cities can experiment with new actions and policies to overcome decarbonisation challenges. The pathway will further help your city identify policy barriers at national and EU levels that might slow down decarbonisation efforts, drawing insights from experiences shared in the NetZeroCities Policy Labs.