Municipal capacities and institutional responses in the age of climate uncertainties

Municipal governments in the global South with weak governance capacities and resources must urgently build their capacities to address climate impacts. Building on the concept ‘bringing the state back in’, the paper discusses the influence of ideational evolution within municipal governments on their capacity to pursue contextual climate policies. Ideational evolution within the government was traced by unpacking policymaking processes (learning, puzzling, and powering) and actors (governmental and non-governmental) involved. The framework explains how a global South municipal government improved its capacity to formulate and adopt an integrated, cross-sectoral and contextual climate policy without any domestic or international mandate. Triangulated information –(climate) policy documents, existing literature, interviews with policymakers- forms the basis of the study. In theorising from and for the global South, the study presents a framework, supported by empirics, on the influence of local and contextual ideation on municipal decision-making capacity to institutionally respond against climate change.