Cities are increasingly perceived as key actors in global climate governance. However, the rising number of climate emergency declarations and carbon neutrality commitments reveal the actual gap between those aspirations and actual implementations. Cities struggle to meet reduction targets and demonstrate real socio-economic sustainability transformations. From one hand the academic literature highlights how carbon neutrality efforts often encounter many governance hurdles because of industries’ lobbies and business as usual stakeholders and people’s behaviours. On the other hand, many networks of cities and evidence from the ground clearly report the challenges in promoting and keeping in the long run, for example, the figure of the City Resilience Officers (practical implementation of the integration among sectors, domains and risks in managing adaptation), or any other effective policies integration toward climate resilience development (as defined in the IPCC AR6).

Even pioneers’ cities face difficulties mainstreaming climate policies effectively, failing to upscale successful but fragmented pilot projects. Rigid and siloed organizational structures, incoherent and too slow bureaucratic processes, lack of structured innovation funding linked to gaps in technical knowledge across cities’ departments, are just the tip of the iceberg which significantly slow down the implementation potential of cross-sectoral climate policies. Last but not least, the key point to enable and accelerate effective action is not dependent from cities administration only but linked to the multi-level governance nature of climate governance. The lack of policy coherence, support and coordination between administrations’ levels – prioritizing some short-term specific adaptation respect to longer term mitigation goals, or simply different political priorities at different scales – explains why better understanding the network of barriers is a priority to re-think how climate governance is organized.

This Frontiers in Sustainable Cities Research Topic seeks to investigate the actual multi-levels network of barriers to climate governance, to identify and frame possible mechanisms for un-locking implementation. The goal is to shade light on the generic claim (and evidence) of poor and fragmented climate action, to provide a systematic and critical classification of the climate governance barriers (across scales, sectors, domains) and thus guide research and policies toward a wiser framing of the proper enabling conditions for climate urbanism to change our cities and economies.

There are also many key research questions which needs to be defined and addressed to guide the framing of those enabling conditions, for instance the need of a better understanding how to account for Scope 3 emissions in cities, or to measure outcomes indicators of adaptation, and which are the co-benefits among adaptation, mitigation, health within economic prosperity in a globalized world and society. Thus, the special issue goal is twofold: from one side to critically un-pack and critically situate the climate governance barriers network (to define which are the key mainstreaming and multi-level implementation gaps) and from the other identify which are the key research contributions supporting the definition of ad-hoc enabling condition to overcome these barriers (i.e. understanding knowledge gaps hampering the structuring of these enabling conditions).

We are looking for contributions from different disciplines, addressing quantitative and qualitative aspects of climate governance. Original articles, review articles as well as case studies are welcomed. Topics of interests include but are not limited to:

- Systemic or contextual analysis of climate governance barriers hindering the development and / or implementation of climate policies.
- Analysis and examples of enabling governance practices mainstreaming transformative actions.
- Longitudinal case study on urban climate governance explaining multilevel governance fallacies leading to maladaptation, climate gentrification or climate risks trade-offs.
- Approaches guiding the shift from local-based climate governance toward a consumption-based carbon accounting approach.
- Example of successful community resilience approaches enabling community empowerment, highlighting which are usual barriers to this and which the situated resources, knowledge, behave, institutional enabling conditions.
- Evidence on the use of artificial intelligence supporting the identification and visualization of climate governance network, its barriers and optimization toward integration and multilevel and multi-sector alignment.

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Frontiers in Sustainable Cities

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