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As nations agreed on a bottom-up approach to establish the Paris Agreement in 2015, Non-state Actors (NSAs) became increasingly acknowledged as key players in the implementation of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). In a mostly urbanised world, local governments have a major part to play in designing and implementing climate policies that will help overcome carbon lock-in and enable the transition to a sustainable lowcarbon future. Transnational municipal networks (TMNs) have a well-documented history of contributing to multilevel climate governance and supporting experiments in local climate action in many countries. In Brazil, urban climate experimentation has increased since 2005 and accelerated after 2015. Based on empirical evidence from a national survey and two Brazilian metropolises, the study demonstrates that TMNs have been drivers of the municipal climate agenda in Brazil, but there is no evidence so far that urban governance experiments have resulted in significant greenhouse gas emission reductions. Furthermore, the collective impact of cities' experimentation on the national climate agenda is yet to be verified. In light of multilevel climate governance and the urban experimentation conceptual framework, we contend that while there is no documented evidence that local climate action has affected Brazil's ability to meet its mitigation goals, cities' paradiplomacy and policy experiments have strengthened a multilevel approach to climate governance and contributed to positive change towards a sustainable transition. Furthermore, a closer look at policies across scales and their interactions will help our understanding of how to improve t'he institutional framework for climate governance in Brazil and secure GHG emission reductions, thus contributing to global goals beyond 2020.

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Analyzing the effect of individual participants on collaborative governance processes in environmental management has been elusive due to lack of theoretical frameworks and data limitations. This study uses pattern matching to contrast identity theory with original data from 7 individuals participating in waste management and urban agriculture collaboration in Florianópolis, Brazil. What started as a self-organized initiative to manage an environmental problem, due to precarious waste management services, was scaled up to a citywide policy. Findings demonstrate that as the collaboration evolved over time, individual participants in municipal government transitioned between roles, organizations, and departments which affected their influence on the collaboration according to two transition styles: integrators (overlapping different roles) and segmenters (aligning roles with contexts without ambiguity). While the integrator-style participants were key to increasing sectoral diversity during the activation stage of the collaboration to produce innovative actions, segmenters contributed to formalizing the collaboration with appropriate institutional designs. However, the success of the collaboration after the institutionalization stage depended on the individual transition style and the power of municipal agents to have agency for influencing the collaboration. These findings have implications for adapting collaborative settings to respond to contextual changes that involve urban environmental issues.

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While there is abundant literature on Transnational Municipal Networks (TMNs) and collaborative governance regimes (CGRs) to respond to environmental change, few studies address TMNs as exogenous agents driving CGRs dynamics locally. TMNs have emerged as important actors in multilevel governance, providing formal structures for local governments to share best practices, access funding and influence the international policy arena on global environmental change. We argue that TMNs also have a pivotal role in the activation of CGRs and in strengthening the four dimensions of Capacity for Joint Action (CJA) identified by the literature: structural arrangements, leadership, knowledge and learning, and resources. Through the analysis of empirical evidence, based on semi-structured interviews and data sources (2014–2021), we investigate how TMNs built capacities and facilitated the emergence of a CGR in the case of waste management and composting initiative in Gangtok, India. In this case, two TMNs developed a toolkit to enable the local government to assess climate risks in the context of urbanization, poverty and vulnerability in Asia. Furthermore, at a certain point the local actors started to provide knowledge to the TMNs to be shared among other local governments and activating new CGRs, such as the case of Gangtok, which is active in sharing its knowledge in composting and climate change actions with other cities.