Accelerating Climate Action in Challenging Local Environments: The Role of Policy Entrepreneurship
With the world grappling with climate change, local governments are increasingly feeling the pressure to spearhead initiatives towards achieving net-zero emissions. However, this expectation often clashes with the reality of their capacities, especially in less affluent areas. These regions, often overlooked in research, are crucial in understanding how local authorities can act decisively or even lead in mitigating climate change. This analysis uncovers how Blackpool Council in the United Kingdom, a quintessential underdog in climate action, managed to craft a commendable climate action plan despite operating in an unfavorable setting.
Analyzing policy documents and expert interviews highlights the essential role played by collective local policy entrepreneurship. Through innovative strategies, a group of policy actors accelerated climate action in Blackpool in a remarkably effective and timely manner. This calls for further investigation into similar ambitious efforts in other complex contexts.
Formulating Ambitious Climate Policies in Resource-Limited Local Authorities
Current studies majorly focus on affluent and large cities while sidelining smaller, resource-constrained localities. The scant attention paid to how agency influences climate ambitions in these neglected local authorities is termed the ‘frontrunner paradox.’ This paradox positions such regions as “off-the-map” in climate dynamics, leaving the intricate play of agency in shaping local climate ambitions inadequately explored.
Traditional views suggest economic constraints hinder climate action due to competing demands for resources, particularly in deprived areas. These regions often face severe funding cuts, exacerbating their limited capacity to hire climate policy officers or engage with international climate networks. On the other hand, large cities, bolstered by their robust economies and highly educated populace, are typically seen as hubs of innovation, overshadowing smaller authorities’ experimental capacities.
Understanding the Role of Agency in Unfavorable Policy Contexts
The literature sheds light on pivotal structural drivers of climate policies but leaves gaps in understanding how agency can pivot climate action in disadvantaged contexts. Limited studies show how cities battered by historical industrial decline, like maritime port cities, can still champion climate action due to innovative use of available resources.
This new approach advocates for moving beyond generalized explanations to more nuanced, specific analyses of local climate ambition, scrutinizing broad assumptions underlying existing literature.
Blackpool’s Unlikely Environmental Leadership
The case of Blackpool, a small English town facing significant socio-economic challenges, stands out as a curious anomaly. Despite high deprivation levels, dwindling industrial sectors, and being a higher education cold spot, Blackpool Borough Council has emerged as a strong advocate for climate action. Ranked in the top 30% of local authorities in Climate Emergency UK’s 2021 Climate Plan Scorecards, Blackpool offers valuable insights into integrating climate ambitions even within less favorable settings.
This case study underscores the agency of local policy actors in driving environmental goals, a sector crucially understudied amidst the growing spotlight on local government roles in UK climate policy.
Policy Entrepreneurship Explained
The theoretical framework positions policy entrepreneurship as a collective agency model through which actors promote novel ideas and policy innovations in navigating specific policy contexts. It diverges from the oft-romanticized notion of a solitary heroic individual bringing about policy change, emphasizing instead a coordinated effort among various actors.
This approach highlights the intricate motivators behind local climate action. Motivations can be both proactive, stemming from a quest for opportunities, or reactive, driven by urgency or external demands, underscoring complex interlocking incentives.
Exploring Strategies and Effects
Effective policy strategies in these contexts typically involve problem framing, developing feasible policy solutions, coalition building, and seizing opportune moments for advocacy. When successful, these strategies forge causal links that enhance the quality and timing of climate policy outputs.
Climate action plans materialize through these strategic efforts, often influencing wider climate norms, behaviors, and governance beyond initial expectations. Effects vary in direction and magnitude, potentially transforming or incrementally changing local climate ambitions.
Empirical Insights from Blackpool’s Success
Interviews and document analysis reveal the instrumental role of collective local policy entrepreneurship in Blackpool despite daunting socio-economic hurdles and scant financial resources. These findings address the critical challenge: understanding how less affluent, smaller local authorities can wield influence over climate policy, moving from rhetoric to actionable, sustainable change.
This paper advances our understanding of local climate actions by dissecting the motives, strategies, and effects framework within Blackpool’s context. It challenges practitioners and scholars to rethink approaches towards gauging local climate ambitions, encouraging an exploration of varying local contexts that yield innovative climate solutions.
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