The emergence of climate change policy entrepreneurs in urban regions

Abstract

The development of climate change policy in cities has been closely tied to the efforts of particular individuals, policy entrepreneurs. However, there is still much we do not know about the conditions underlying the emergence and spread of policy entrepreneurship both generally and in support of climate change policies specifically. In this paper, we shed light on these issues using data from 371 mid-sized cities throughout the Great Lakes region of the USA. Building upon scholarship from the public choice literature, we explore the role that fragmentation, that is, the number of independent but connected governmental units both within the city itself as well as in the city’s regional metropolitan or micropolitan area play in explaining the emergence of climate entrepreneurship. We show that not only does fragmentation at both of these levels help predict the emergence of climate change entrepreneurs in individual cities, but also exchanges between these levels could drive the rapid development of policy entrepreneurship and related policy innovations throughout urban systems.