The discursive construction of urban climate policy

Recently, a change in the international climate policy debate elevated cities as integral to achieving global climate targets. How did this shift occur? This paper mobilizes the concept of discourse coalitions to showcase how cities were framed as an arena of intervention in the context of international climate policy, placing emphasis on three dimensions. First, a focus on new alliances reveals how the urban, which emerged as a fringe topic, was promoted by forerunners who came together in formal and informal networks. These groups contributed to the formulation of strategic frames, which helped operationalize urban climate policy. Second, these frames were institutionalized within international organizations, contributing to their stabilization. Third, urban narratives gained structuration through their diffusion across a growing number of organizations and embedding into systems of knowledge. A discursive perspective highlights that the rise of cities was not a neutral development, but a process of argumentative struggle in which certain views on urban climate action were foregrounded. The analysis draws attention to the growing self-evidence of urban narratives, which raises concerns related to the reiteration and invisibilization of underlying political-economic interests.