Sidelining Mitigation: Climate Delay Discourses Among Municipal Legislators in Southeastern Brazil

Abstract

This study investigates how municipal legislators frame climate mitigation and how these framings shift responsibility, narrow the perceived scope of municipal authority, and reduce the urgency or feasibility of local action. We analyzed 31 interviews with city councilors serving on Permanent Environmental Committees across municipalities in the Piracicaba, Capivari, and Jundiaí River Basins, one of Brazil's most industrialized and urbanized regions. The study makes two contributions. First, it extends the climate delay literature by showing how mitigation-relevant framings are articulated within local legislative arenas. We identify eight non-mutually exclusive discursive strategies with delay potential: invoking natural variability to dilute anthropogenic causation; questioning scientific consensus; fatalistic framings; emphasizing the socioeconomic downsides of mitigation; construing the municipality as a marginal emitter; individualizing responsibility; redirecting agency to executive branches and higher levels of government; and prioritizing non-transformative technological or market-centered responses. These strategies are often hybridized within single accounts, producing narratives that appear pragmatic and reasonable while lowering expectations for legislative engagement and stabilizing discursive boundaries around what counts as legitimate municipal mitigation. Second, it shows how environmental discursive traditions and the systematic analysis of discursive dimensions strengthen the critical analysis of delay discourses. The findings also point to practical interventions in local climate governance, including capacity-building efforts and the co-production of reflexive tools that can help expose and challenge discursive logics that displace responsibility and restrict policy by repertoires.