The meaning of leadership in polycentric climate action

Abstract

Previous research points to leadership as a key ingredient in mitigation of and adaptation to climate change. We adopt a polycentric perspective and use focus group interviews with Swedish actors within the business sector, politics, and government agencies, to analyse participants’ views on what it means to lead, preconditions of leadership, and division of responsibilities, in a context of transformative change. Our results suggest that participants focus on collective dimensions of leadership rather than front-running but see multiple ways of demonstrating climate leadership as being available to actors across governance levels and issue areas. Challenges to these views on leadership include the request for shared rules and regulations, and courage among leaders to enact coercive top-down leadership to handle conflicts and trade-offs. We conclude that polycentric transformative leadership is by default polysemic and will require multiple leadership roles at different scales changing over time.