Shielded, Defiant, or Constrained Cities: Local Climate Policy in Multilevel Governance

As global climate commitments falter, subnational governments are increasingly called upon to lead climate action while bearing growing responsibilities for responding to escalating climate impacts such as extreme heat and flooding. U.S. cities have actively developed climate action plans since the 2000s, yet whether cities adopt them varies even among cities facing similar levels of climate risk and public pressure. Why do some cities act while others do not? Existing literature offers only a partial answer, tending to focus on local-level drivers while overlooking the broader institutional landscape in which cities operate—most notably, the role of state governments in enabling or constraining local climate action.This dissertation employs Qualitative Comparative Analysis, focusing on the largest city in each of the 50 U.S. states, to identify configurational pathways that explain the adoption and non-adoption of formal climate action plans. Three findings emerge. First, public support is not a necessary condition for adoption; institutional conditions, particularly Democratic mayoral leadership and local government capacity, are more consistent drivers. Second, home rule authority functions as a critical shield against state preemption, and where it is absent, cities must mobilize multiple compensatory conditions to overcome institutional barriers. Third, applying an inaction typology to climate governance reveals that non-adoption reflects distinct configurations of institutional and political conditions rather than a simple absence of them.
This dissertation makes three contributions. First, it advances the local policy adoption literature by introducing a multilevel institutional lens, identifying climate policy as an emerging frontier of state preemption, and developing a “Sword and Shield” framework applicable across policy domains. Second, it challenges assumptions of uniform policy diffusion, demonstrating that home rule authority is a critical, undertheorized determinant of whether cities can act independently. Third, it demonstrates the explanatory value of inaction typology, treating non-adoption as a theoretically meaningful outcome and revealing that why cities do not act is as analytically significant as why they do. These findings suggest that understanding local climate governance requires attending not only to what cities do, but to the institutional terrain shaping what they can do but choose not to.