Institutionalizing urban climate governance in the global South? Evidence from Tehran urban management, Iran

ABSTRACT Local governments across the world have an increasingly significant role to play in climate change resiliency at both community and city levels. Urban climate governance has been increasingly a popular concept and framework for building capacity towards urban resiliency. Nevertheless, and despite the considerable vulnerability of Iranian cities and on top of that the capital, Tehran, to climate change threats, few studies have evaluated the barriers and challenges of the city’s local governments for enhancing the capacity of climate governance. This paper assesses the urban climate governance capacity in Tehran urban management system. Methodologically, this study uses previous successfully deployed analytical frameworks, developed by Tanner et al. (Urban governance for adaptation: Assessing climate change resilience in Ten Asian cities (IDS Working Paper 315). Institute of Development Studies, 2009) and updated the variables through various newly released research on urban climate governance in developing countries, particularly in Asia and the Middle East. The results show that, through the lens of assessing variables, Tehran municipality faces a handful of problems in institutionalizing urban climate governance in its setting due to the unintegrated urban management structure as well as the unwillingness of the local body (Islamic City Council) along with urban branches of the national government to function in an integrated way in term of urban climate policy.