Transforming urban climate governance : Capacities for transformative climate governance

Climate change actions in cities worldwide are driving deep changes in urban governance. However, to date, urban climate governance fails to deliver the radical and effective actions necessary to reduce emissions and protect from climate impacts. This thesis contributes to explaining and evaluating how urban climate governance is being developed and advanced, whether these efforts manifest in capacities for transformative (climate) governance in cities and how such capacities can be strengthened. I enhance understanding about what transformative climate governance could look like and how it can be strengthened vis-à-vis existing urban governance regimes. I argue that enabling transformative climate governance requires the development, and better understanding, of new governance capacities so as to create institutional space for and facilitate those actions that can purposefully contribute to the transformation required for dealing with climate change and unsustainability in cities. The contribution of this thesis is both theoretical and empirical: a framework of capacities for transformative climate governance and empirical evidence to compare whether, how and by whom such capacities have been created in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and New York City, US