Sustainability and climate change: Understanding the political use of environmental terms in municipal governments

While research on urban climate change and sustainability policies has grown tremendously over the last 20 years (Bulkeley and Betsill, 2013; Krause, 2012; Hughes et al., 2018) and the terms permeate the academic and practical knowledge, less is known about how municipal practitioners use and understand these terms in their daily operations (Tozer, 2018; Foss, 2018a). City governments utilize the term sustainability frequently and often interchangeably with climate change to refer to aspects of environmental plans, yet there is little understanding of the motivations behind the use of the term sustainability over other terms (Foss, 2018a). This distinction is useful to better understand why cities adopt the climate change policies they do.