This article assesses innovative climate governance in small-to-medium-sized structurally disadvantaged cities (SDCs) which have remained an under-researched subject area. Considering their deeply ingrained severe economic and social problems it would be reasonable to assume that SDCs act primarily as climate laggards or at best as followers. However, our novel empirical findings show that SDCs are capable of acting as climate pioneers. This article identifies and assesses different types and styles of climate leadership and pioneership and how they play out within multi-level and polycentric governance structures. It concludes that SDCs seem relatively readily willing to adopt transformational climate pioneership styles in the hope of creating 'green' jobs, for example, in the offshore wind energy sector and with the aim of improving their poor external image. However, in order to sustain transformational climate pioneership they often have to rely on support from 'higher' levels of governance. For SDCs there is a tension between learning from each other's best practice and fierce economic competition in climate innovation.

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Academic and political debate places great expectations on cities’ potential for furthering decentralized, bottom-up climate policies. Local policy research acknowledges the role of local agency to develop and implement sustainability, but also acknowledges internal conflicts. This partly reflects tensions between different functions of the local level, and different governance models related to them. In addition, local dependency on higher level competencies, resources, and overarching strategies is discussed. This article proposes a focus on political processes and power relationships between levels of governance, and among relevant domains within cities, to understand the dynamics of policy change towards sustainability. Researching these dynamics within local climate policy arrangements (LCPAs) is proposed as an approach to understanding the complexities of local constellations and contradictions within them. It makes the distinction between “weak” and “strong” ecological modernization, and relates it to two basic rationales for local governance. The resulting typology denotes constellations characterizing policy change ambitions towards local climate policy in crucial domains, including economic development, energy infrastructures, climate change management, town planning and housing, and transportation. This article argues that this approach overcomes the limitations of the predominating conceptualizations of urban carbon control strategies as consistent, and recognises the multi-level dimension of such internal urban processes.

This article assesses innovative climate governance in small-to-medium-sized structurally disadvantaged cities (SDCs) which have remained an under-researched subject area. Considering their deeply ingrained severe economic and social problems it would be reasonable to assume that SDCs act primarily as climate laggards or at best as followers. However, our novel empirical findings show that SDCs are capable of acting as climate pioneers. This article identifies and assesses different types and styles of climate leadership and pioneership and how they play out within multi-level and polycentric governance structures. It concludes that SDCs seem relatively readily willing to adopt transformational climate pioneership styles in the hope of creating 'green' jobs, for example, in the offshore wind energy sector and with the aim of improving their poor external image. However, in order to sustain transformational climate pioneership they often have to rely on support from 'higher' levels of governance. For SDCs there is a tension between learning from each other's best practice and fierce economic competition in climate innovation.

No abstract