Administrative coordination, integrated plans, and policy capacities for local climate policy implementation

Abstract

The literature has gone to great lengths to describe how administrative coordination can support climate policy implementation. Yet few studies have adopted both a configurational and an actor-oriented perspective to understand which combination of policy capacities and policy design features bureaucrats perceive as necessary or sufficient to effectively engage in administrative coordination for climate policy implementation. Analyzing eighteen local departments implementing climate plans in four cities (Bologna, Lausanne, Padua, Zurich) and across various policy sectors, a configurational approach based on mixed methods allows testing two hypotheses: the first (H1) is that a combination of multiple, high-level organizational capabilities is sufficient for effective coordination. The second one (H2) is that both integrated planning and high organizational policy capacities together are sufficient for effective coordination. Finding evidence for H2, this paper contributes to the ongoing debate regarding the integrative policy capacities needed to foster the ecological transition at the local level. It makes a distinctive contribution by systematically clarifying how the interplay between policy capacities and policy design features shapes administrative coordination outputs.