Comparing Climate Change Policy Adoption and Its Extension across Areas of City Policymaking

Public policies increasingly address complex problems such as climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation that require forging connections across existing areas of policy activity. Despite the emerging prominence of these types of policymaking challenges, more research is needed to understand policy responses to them. In this paper, I use survey responses from 287 cities and a hurdle model to comparatively examine the factors that underlie the adoption of climate change mitigation and adaptation as issues influencing city policymaking and their extension across areas of city policymaking. I find evidence that while social change, crisis, and conditions supporting nascent coalitions were associated with adoption, extension across areas of policymaking was associated with the city's prevailing political economy as well as the resources for expanding communities of interest. In the process, I offer empirical evidence for existing similarities and differences in cities' considerations about climate change mitigation and adaptation; particularly that the number of policymaking areas influenced by mitigation was associated with financial factors while the number influenced by adaptation was associated with socioeconomic ones.