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This article has a twofold aim. First, inspired by collaborative governance theory, the article develops an analytical framework built around three ideal co‐creation strategies utilized by city governments for building capacity and addressing urban climate solutions. Second, this co‐creation framework is applied to a comparative case study of climate governance in two climate‐ambitious Scandinavian cities, Copenhagen and Oslo, to illustrate the role of co‐creation as an approach and tool for urban climate governance. The comparative analysis reveals how the two cities navigate differently within a polycentric ecosystem of actors depending on a variety of contextual factors and whether climate responses are geared mainly towards assembling and aligning public, private business or citizen actors, respectively, for collaborative efforts. The findings suggest that both cities combine two ideal co‐creation strategies, a whole of government strategy with an externally focused stakeholder strategy, while neither of the cities has adopted a full‐fledged externally focused civil society co‐creation strategy. The findings have implications for co‐creation theory and urban climate leadership. In both cities, the benefits of co‐creation are found to depend on support from both conducive institutional design and new forms of public leadership. Over time, leadership has started to congeal into a distinctive type of co‐creational leadership based on both hands‐on and hands‐off tools and instruments in climate responses. The findings suggest that a co‐creation approach benefits the debate on citizen participation in climate governance as it brings a nuanced understanding of the multiple roles that citizens can play in relation to both public and private services and business actors; as residents, consumers, climate agents, as well as voters with rights and responsibilities who can provide the city leadership with legitimacy but also oppose climate action.

Cities have emerged as important agents and sites in climate governance interventions, experimentations and networks. Drawing upon two strains of climate governance and collaborative governance literature, respectively, this article adopts a polycentric approach to the analysis of Oslo's urban climate governance. It unpacks the relationships between urban leadership, climate goal‐setting and institutional design, and reveals how these variables condition the employment of a combination of integrative and interactive governing instruments that foster both self‐governance and co‐creation in climate responses. The article argues that broad and long‐term political support facilitates the adoption of ambitious climate goals, utilization of regulatory powers, and the design and operations of innovative hybrid mixes of integrative and interactive governing instruments. The hybrid combination of instruments is what provides the basis for synergistic, predictable and dynamic forms of self‐governance and co‐created linkages among public and private ‘units’ within the wider urban climate governance ecosystem. Trans‐local and transnational networks play an important role in building such capacities for urban climate governance. Local processes of co‐creation and networked experimentations are ‘scaling up’ to change policies at city, national and international levels. The empirical observations from Oslo have implication for theories of polycentric urban climate governance and for the promise and limitations of co‐creation in the climate arena. The analysis draws upon qualitative interviews with close to 50 public and private stakeholders and policy document studies.

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