Leading the way with examples and ideas? Governing climate change in German municipalities through best practices

ABSTRACT

Radical uncertainties associated with climate change require cognitive, symbolic, and material resources to make responses manageable and governable. Best practices are often considered to provide answers to these challenges. At the national and international levels, it is usually taken for granted that the replication of best practice examples can lead to a policy change. However, this assumption lacks empirical evidence, as best practices feature sticky and place-bound characteristics. This limits their use for the diffusion of their content and the transition to a low-carbon society. This article critically investigates the main functions (enabling, lobbying, place-marketing, and replication) of best practices in the daily governance of climate change in municipalities. It draws on in-depth insights resulting from expert interviews, participatory observation, and documentary analysis of a set of German municipalities. Understanding the practicalities on the ground explains why the expectations about best practices and their actual effects differ significantly. This article illustrates that this mismatch can be understood not as a simple failure of a governing technique, but rather, as a result of the inherently conflict-laden interplay of rationalities and technologies of government.

KEYWORDS:

• Best practice
• governmentality
• urban climate governance
• sustainability transitions
• learning
• failure

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Peter Lindner, Iris Dzudzek, Alexander Vorbrugg, Susan Moore, Jeroen van der Heijden, Sirkku Juhola, Marc Wolfram, all participants of the INoGOV workshop in Amsterdam, Carsten Daugbjerg and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and feedback throughout the development of this article. In particular, I would like to thank all my interviewees who made this paper and my PhD research possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Nanja Christina Nagorny-Koring graduated at Goethe University Frankfurt/M 2010 in Human Geography with a Bachelor thesis on energy governance and 2013 in Economic Geography with a Master thesis on the economization of international climate governance. Nanja Nagorny-Koring started to work in 2013 at Provadis School of International Management and Technology as an education project manager for Climate-KIC - the EU’s main climate innovation initiative. Inspired by her working experiences, Nanja started in late 2014 her Climate-KIC funded PhD research on the role of so-called “Best Practices” in urban climate governance by investigating the German Masterplan 100% climate protection program and the Climate-KIC Transition Cities project. Since the compleation of her PhD in early 2018, Nanja Nagorny-Koring is back at Provadis School as a project lead for innovative and sustainable education projects. Her research interests are in the fields of best practice research, urban climate governance innovations, the politics of urban sustainability transitions and economization of climate and nature.

ORCID

Nanja Christina Nagorny-Koring http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7403-0884

Notes

1 Compared to adaptation measures, which are perceived as being tailor-made to the local context, mitigation actions (e.g. energy-efficiency measures) are often similar in different settings. Combined with the fact that climate adaptation, in comparison to climate mitigation, is quite a new topic in urban climate governance, this perceived ‘individuality’ might be a reason why fewer best adaptation practices are circulating (Busch, 2015). In this article, I, therefore, focus on mitigation practices.

2 Any relatively systematic way of thinking about government which determines the ontology of governing practices (Dean, 1999, p. 211).

3 Seventeen of them were ‘excellence’ municipalities in local climate action, funded through the ‘Masterplan-programme’ and three of them were ‘learning’ municipalities from another German support programme called ‘Regio Twin’ (www.regiotwin.de), matching pioneering cities with learning cities to transfer best practices and experiences.

4 Namely: C40, Climate Alliance, Metropolis, Energy-Cities, ICLEI, Covenant of Mayors.

5 2012–2018: 19 supported municipalities, varying in size from 7,000 to 700,000 inhabitants; 2016–2019: 21 supported municipalities. This research only takes into consideration the 19 municipalities of the funding programme’s first round. List of all participating municipalities: www.ptj.de/klimaschutzinitiative-kommunen/masterplan

6 Also, TMNs use best practices strategically as an asset and a means for ‘[…] profiling our network as an organization that […] really does have these pioneers in sustainability’ (Interview 23-Network, 2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by EIT Climate-KIC: [grant number I gratefully acknowledge funding from the EIT Clim]; EU COST: [grant number The author would like to acknowledge the financial support from INOGOV, a network of research excellence dedicated to understanding policy and governance innovation for climate change. INOGOV is funded by COST, which is supported by the EU Framework Programme Horizon 2020].