Localizing the Climate Agenda: A Multilevel Governance Challenge

The intensification of the climate crisis has made the localization of climate action an increasingly important yet contested multilevel governance challenge. While international agreements and national strategies establish overarching goals, the implementation of mitigation, adaptation, and resilience measures depends substantially on local and regional governments, territorial institutions, the private sector, and civil society actors. Climate governance therefore involves not simply implementation across levels, but processes of translation, coordination, negotiation, and contestation across scales.
This panel examines how the climate agenda is localized under conditions of increasing uncertainty, territorial inequality, institutional fragmentation, and democratic strain. It asks how global and national climate objectives are translated into territorially differentiated policy agendas, how authority and responsibilities are distributed across levels of government, and how uneven policy capacities affect the ability of territories to respond to climate challenges. Particular attention is given to governance asymmetries: while climate impacts and vulnerabilities are unevenly distributed, governmental capacities, resources, institutional arrangements, and opportunities for participation are likewise differentiated.
The panel approaches climate localization as more than an implementation problem. It considers it a process through which policy goals, knowledge, priorities, and responsibilities are negotiated and potentially transformed across levels and scales. This raises questions about coordination, policy integration, democratic legitimacy, accountability, and the balance between nationally or internationally defined priorities and locally grounded understandings of climate risks and development needs.
The panel welcomes theoretical, comparative, and empirical contributions addressing questions such as: How are global and national climate commitments translated into local and regional agendas? What forms of multilevel coordination enable or constrain effective climate action? How do territorial inequalities and differences in policy capacity shape climate governance? How do local actors negotiate, or contest priorities established at higher levels? And what role do participatory arrangements play in enhancing democratic legitimacy?
Bringing together perspectives from the Global North and Global South, the panel seeks to advance understanding of climate localization as a dynamic process of multilevel negotiation, contributing to broader debates on authority, coordination, territorial asymmetries, and democratic legitimacy under conditions of uncertainty.