Developing a typology of co-creational political leadership for urban climate governance

Global goals, as the Paris Agreement and EUs Green Deal, together with national and local climate goal-setting frames and requires climate transitions at local level, and strong climate leadership by elected politicians and the city administration. When reviewing the most central contributions to the urban climate governance literature, we find three themes attracting particular attention: urban experiments as a tool for climate governance innovation; city networks as platforms for learning and innovation; and cities as leaders and/or pioneers at global and regional level (see Hofstad and Vedeld, 2021). These contributions generally address the particular leadership role taken by the cities within the urban or wider global domain. The variety of more specific leadership roles and instruments adopted by public leadership at the city level to navigate, engage, mobilize and adjust within a polycentric system are seldom addressed. More systematic and in-depth knowledge on the leadership strategies applied by cities is needed in order to explore how local governments relate and govern their bureaucracy, their service delivery, their relationship with private actors and their citizenry in order to adapt to a changing climate and attain ambitious climate goals. Earlier research have found that hybrid forms of climate governance is needed, and that climate leadership having a co-creational leadership style increase the possibilities for goal attainment (Hanssen and Tønnesen 2021, Hofstad and Vedeld 2021, Sørensen and Torfing 2019). This paper explores how local climate leadership proactively works to attain bold climate goals in diverse institutional settings conditioning their instrumental toolbox and the enactment of leadership. It suggests a typology of co-creational political leadership for urban climate governance as it unfolds in three settings – city (metagov), regional (multilevel) and international (intercity). These settings make up three dimensions of co-creational leadership for urban climate governance. The following questions guide the identification of co-creational leadership forms in these settings: How to define co-creational political leadership for urban climate governance? How are co-creational leadership articulated and performed at key institutional settings? To what extent and in what way are hybrid forms of governance developed? The aim is to identify categories that together make up key characteristics of co-creational leadership for urban climate governance as it unfolds in a city, regional and international setting. The goal is that these under-categories of co-creational leadership will expand our knowledge of key leadership strategies when cities seek to move to the limits of their traditional toolbox and influence the broader ecosystem of actors to reach their climate goals. The empirical basis of the paper is qualitative studies of the cities of Oslo, Copenhagen, Gothenburg and Cape Town, including document studies and qualitative interviews.