ABSTRACT
In most countries, climate policy, i.e. measures dealing with climate change mitigation and adaptation, is not a compulsory task of local government. Nevertheless, an increasing number of cities all over the world have become more engaged in this policy area. How is this to be explained, particularly in cases where at present the direct consequences of climate change are hardly obvious and cannot even be readily identified as some kind of future threat? Furthermore, how are the differences in the responses of cities to the perceived challenges of climate change to be explained? Due to space constraints, this article cannot answer these questions with detailed reference to empirical studies. Instead, the article will present the conceptual framework on which some of the contributions to this special issue are based (namely – in addition to this one – the ones by Zimmermann et al., Benz et al. and Hoffmann et al.). However, since this conceptual framework has been developed in the context of an empirical study of the strategies and measures undertaken by the German cities of Frankfurt, Munich and Stuttgart to deal with climate change, some empirical evidence for the reasoning presented in this article will be given by referring to results of this empirical study.
