Governing spatial scaling within, across, and beyond and cities

Expectations that cities can manage the growing challenges of climate change have increased. However, it has become evident that a lack of national and regional support cannot be compensated by local initiatives, in particular in smaller cities and towns. Therefore, we argue that the decarbonization of cities requires deliberate scaling within, across, and beyond cities. Scaling within cities means that place-based experiments need to be rolled out from one neighborhood to other neighborhoods. Scaling across cities refers to horizontal interactions between cities, which is facilitated by networks such as the Climate Alliance. Finally, scaling beyond cities implies the emergence of vertical relations between local governments on the one side and regional and national governments on the other. This paper combines these three dimensions of spatial scaling with four modes of governing climate change in cities, ranging from hard to soft instruments: (1) regulation, planning and monitoring (such as local heat plans or legislation which makes solar roofs mandatory for new buildings); (2) provision and funding (ranging from local funding programs for heat pumps to national funding programs such as the German Kommunalrichtlinie; (3) voluntary action and enabling (such as agreements between local actors or carbon agreements between cities and the national government); (4) Self-organization (such as climate-neutrality goals for own facilities or setting up a local climate council). Our analysis focuses, first, on a mapping of experimental climate policies, which are scaled within, across, and beyond European forerunner cities. Starting from this general overview, we will then ask whether and how German forerunner cities differ from these general trends. Second, we will compare the development in German cities in three selected areas (electricity, heat, mobility) in more detail by analyzing how local climate experiments and the mix of policy instruments have changed over time. In general terms, we find that German forerunner cities lag behind cities in Northern Europe, which have developed and introduced new instruments such as carbon budgets and climate contracts. Moreover, we see a hardening of soft instruments in German cities, in particular in the area of heat transitions. Overall, the study shows that the mix of policy instruments is changing. We see not only a hardening of soft instruments but at the same time also a trend from scaling within and across cities towards scaling beyond cities, i.e. regional and national policies focusing on local climate action seem to be on the rise.