Global climate agendas for the local level: municipal policy capacities for public policy translation
Global agendas, which are created and agreed between national governments and international organizations, bring challenges for implementation at the local level. There is an apparent incongruity here, because in order to be global, these solutions need to be generic; however, for implementation to be effective, the solution needs to be specific and translated to the local context. Although municipal governments in Brazil all have the same institutional structure, there is a wide variation in municipal policy capacities. Translating policies to local contexts is a major challenge for public policy managers, as the policy itself depends not only on the formulators, but also on the state structure, resources, diverse interests and the actions of policy makers. It has been observed an increased presence of transnational cities networks working in different capacities (as policy advisory organizations) alongside subnational governments to formulate local Climate Action Plans. Hence, the object of this research is local Climate Action Plans and its objectives are (i) to understand what policy capacities are required in this process of translating the climate agenda into public policy in subnational territories and (ii) to analyze how co-production takes place between government and policy advisory organizations (transnational networks of cities) in the construction of Climate Action Plans. The research will be divided into two stages: the first will mobilize the policy capacities literature to understand the conditions necessary for municipalities to translate the climate agenda locally; the second will analyze the co-production between government and policy advisory organizations (transnational cities networks) in the construction of the Plans. As for the method, the Qualitative Comparative Analyses (QCA) configurational method will be applied to understand which conditions are necessary or sufficient for a given result to occur, and comparative study to understand translation at the local level. The proposed research is expected to produce knowledge about the conditions necessary for the local implementation of the climate agenda, dialoguing with the literature on policy capacities and the translation of public policies, especially in the climate area.