Tackling climate protests: navigating contestation between democratic legitimacy and effective decarbonization in cities

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides a novel framework linking collaborative governance and processual legitimacy to explain climate protest dynamics, useful for urban climate governance research.

🏢実務担当者:Offers practical guidance for city climate teams on designing inclusive deliberation processes and building trust to reduce contestation.

🏛政策担当者:Highlights the importance of throughput legitimacy and tailored engagement for civic groups in climate policy implementation.

Urban climate governance sits at the crossroads of democratic legitimacy and decarbonization, with public discourse polarized around inclusion, decision-making, and delivery. Navigating this tension requires more nuanced knowledge about the positions and values activated by climate policies and how political processes engage with diverse positions among civic groups. As such, we develop an analytical framework combining collaborative governance with processual legitimacy to explain when climate action is accepted or contested by diverse citizen groups. The framework is applied to a diverse set of climate protest groups in four Nordic cities—Bergen, Oslo, Gothenburg, and Stockholm—drawing on 95 interviews and policy documents (75 informants across 24 protest groups). We distinguish four different protest logics and link them to input, throughput, and output legitimacy. Throughput legitimacy, defined by day-to-day fairness, accountability, openness, inclusiveness, and responsiveness, emerges as the strongest predictor of contested legitimacy, surpassing policy goals alone. Place-based identities and anti-elite sentiments further modulate perceptions of the legitimacy of climate action when personal burdens and few benefits are observed during implementation. We find that knowledge framing matters, with congruent scientific or local frames fostering constructive dialogue. Input legitimacy, as it unfolds through diverse channels of interaction, also matters: opaque bureaucratic processes erode legitimacy; well-facilitated collaborative arenas build legitimacy; while media campaigns can create conflict and undermine trust and legitimacy. The study argues that contested legitimacy can be addressed by strengthening throughput and trust while maintaining a clear climate direction, advocating a hybrid governance model that pairs rigorous targets with inclusive deliberation, tailored engagement for distinct civic actors, attention to distributive and place-based effects, and robust accountability to reconcile legitimacy, inclusion, and effectiveness in city climate action.

• crossref https://doi.org/10.3389/frsc.2026.1876132first seen 2026-08-18 05:21:39