This research project analyses local climate policy in cooperation with Prof. Christine Jocoy and Prof. Christine House-Peter from the Department of Geography at California State University, Long Beach, CA. As principal investigator, I designed and coordinated this study, obtained its funding, and carried out the study together with an international team and several student researchers.
The research project team consisted of Christine Jocoy, California State University; Lily House-Peter, California State University; Melanie Nagel, University of Tübingen; Melanie Schäfer, University of Bayreuth and Volker Schneider, University of Konstanz.
The funding had been provided by the Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst Baden-Württemberg together with the California State University CSU in the reserach exchange program “Creating Climate Change Collaboration (4C). Baden-Württemberg – California State University Austauschprogramm für Forschende”. Further funding was provided for the research activities conducted at the University of Tübingen by the Excellence Strategy of the University of Tübingen.
This study is based on a most similar cases design. Baden-Württemberg and California are, compared to other states (Länder) in Germany and USA, especially supportive when it comes to climate change actions and measures. We selected in both states each two local climate change processes with different outcomes in terms of success and sustainability of the measure. This research design enabled us to investigate and find out more about the following questions: Who shapes climate policy in those areas? How is policymaking in these areas embedded in the overall multilevel governance architecture of the German/US federal system and what are typical challenges? Furthermore, we aimed to examine how climate change mitigation and local development are linked in subnational climate governance processes in urban areas.
In the first part of this research project, we focued on the public discourse utilizing a discourse network analysis and gained various important insights into the public perception of these climate protection projects. In the second part we interviewed several key actors that we had identified in the dicourse analysis before.
We published the comparative case study of the two German cities Karlsruhe and Mannheim in the paper Nagel, M., & Schäfer, M. (2023). Powerful stories of local climate action: Comparing the evolution of narratives using the “narrative rate” index. Review of Policy Research, 40(6), 1093-1119. https://doi.org/10.1111/ropr.12545
The second study with an analysis of the two German and two American cities by Christine Jocoy, Lily House-Peter and Melanie Nagel entitled “Towards a Refined Climate Urbanism Typology: Comparing Policy Networks in German and American cities” will be published soon.
PD Dr. Melanie Nagel 