Climate policy at a local level in a multi-level governance system

Abstract

The climate crisis is today one of the world’s biggest challenges. The climate policy framework is often sat by the national level but carried out at a local level. The local level’s climate policies can though be affected by several governance levels in today’s multi-level governance system. The intention with this thesis was to investigate how local level’s ability to make effective climate policies adequate to meet the challenges climate change is serving us, are affected by the multi-level governance system. Reykjavík is used as a case to illustrate the local level and the European Union is used to illustrate the European level in this research. Reykjavík is a unique case to study as Iceland is not a fully EU-member, but Reykjavík applied to be part of an EU driven initiative and got accepted as a participant after a comprehensive application process. It is hence interesting to investigate in which ways the EU climate policy affects climate policy at a local level, - where the local level is on the outside of a fully EU integration. The main findings in this thesis were because of an EU initiative (referred to as the 100 cities in this thesis) Reykjavík has moved their climate neutrality ambitions with 10 years before the national goal of fulfilling the objective of climate neutrality. Beside this, EU policies under the umbrella of the European Green Deal is steering for Iceland’s National climate Plan and sets the framework for dealing with climate change at the national and local level. Iceland not being a member-state is hence a paradox as the EU policies is strongly present for how climate policies and framework is formed in Iceland. Although the EU is a steering mechanism in the green transition in Iceland it has not been identified if the EU policies will internally lead to fulfil the objective of climate neutrality by 2030 and 2050. Regardless, the multileveled governance system is part of understanding how the EU is a steering mechanism in the green transition in a sovereign state, such as Iceland. This study is the first one to highlight the complexity of MLG in a Nordic country outside the EU when forming climate policy at a local level by using Reykjavík as a case study.