Exploring nascent climate policies in Indian cities: a role for policy mobilities?

Cities are key actors in addressing climate change. Through local policies and regulation, participation in national programmes, and membership in transnational networks, cities have been shown to play an important role in the new configurations of climate change governance beyond the nation-state. There has so far been little attention, however, on how cities in the global South fit into this agenda and how climate policies become integrated and transformed in local municipalities with varying levels of development and differing urban priorities. This paper addresses this gap by bringing together literatures on cities and climate change with urban policy mobilities to explore how mobile urban climate policies are understood and embedded within municipal governments of second-tier cities in India. Based on the empirical work in five municipalities, this paper shows how a municipal network seeks to make climate policies mobile and how local municipal governments engage with such mobile policies. I suggest ...