The importance of local governments in developing and implementing policies to mitigate and adapt to global climate change has been widely recognized across social science disciplines. However, scholars have also observed that many local governments and their administrations, with their traditional, siloed structures, are ill-equipped and too inflexible to deal with the unprecedented, cross-sectoral challenge posed by climate change and its impacts. One solution to strengthen the climate governance capacity of local authorities in Germany, which has been funded by the German federal government since 2008, is the appointment of so-called “municipal climate managers”. These managers are municipal staff tasked with developing and implementing local climate policies and strategies, and are expected to act as entrepreneurs of new ideas and measures, integrating different sectors and local actors. However, little is known about how this institutional innovation has diffused and why some German municipalities decide to appoint climate managers while others do not. To address this gap, this paper examines a novel dataset on the appointment of climate managers by all 421 cities and municipalities located in the central German state of Hessen. Descriptive statistics show how the appointment of climate managers and employment relationships have evolved over time. An event history analysis shows that vertical diffusion dynamics based on funding by the federal government are increasingly combined with horizontal dynamics and learning processes, in which climate managers are increasingly appointed by municipalities at their own expense, i.e. without federal funding. These findings advance our understanding of policy diffusion processes and how such processes can be actively governed to address climate change and promote local resilience.
