ABSTRACT
In this section, we examine how representatives of the municipal administrations of the cities Frankfurt, Munich and Stuttgart engage in trans-local arenas. We identify predominant action orientations and explain how trans-local action contributes to the mechanisms of local knowledge orders and to local policy decisions. In a first step, we explore the trans-local activities of the three cities expressed in relevant official documents and council proceedings of the cities in order to show how trans-local action is referred to in important milestones of the cities’ climate policy. In a second step, based on in-depth interviews with high-ranked civil servants, we discuss the actor orientations regarding trans-local spaces and the possible impact of trans-local activities on local climate policy by tracing mechanisms of formation and reproduction of local knowledge orders that refer to the trans-local arena. In line with the overall cognitivist outline of this Special Issue, we turn to actors’ ideas about how they perceive their task, why they choose certain actions and what consequences they expect to result from local energy and climate policies.3
Third, we will discuss possible impacts of trans-local action on local climate policy based on selected illustrations of EU projects, the CoM and the EU-launched competition ‘European Green Capital Award’.
