The paper contributes to the research on understanding local global warming politics. Strategic documents from The Cities for Climate Protection Campaign (CCPC) are analysed to show how CCPC has constructed climate change protection as a local issue. The paper's premise is that the climate change issue must be translated or framed to enable actors to work with this problem in a local context, and that successful framing requires establishing a coherent method of describing social reality. CCPC emphasises that the different elements of local and global sustainable development agendas can be mutually reinforcing, and that climate change protection can be reconciled with local priorities and initiatives that reduce greenhouse gases (GHG). It is argued that this framing of climate change makes it difficult to see why and how climate change should be an important concern for local communities. The modest reductions of GHG in CCPC cities thus far highlights that finding meaningful new ways of linking the global and the local should be a core concern of CCPC.

One of the key features of the post-Rio era has been how global environmental governance is mediated between local, national and global levels of government. In this article, we draw on experiences from local climate policy planning in Norway in order to discuss the ways in which climate change enters into a municipal policy setting. Based on the Norwegian case, supplemented with knowledge gained from an international literature review, we present a typology of six different categories of local climate policy. We highlight that local actors can both play the role as a structure for the implementation of national or international climate objectives, as well as that of being policy actors taking independent policy initiatives. We emphasize how the relationship between national and local authorities is a crucial factor if climate policy as a specific local responsibility should be further strengthened. (c) 2007 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Norway is often recognised as a pioneer country in environmental politics. Norwegian climate policy has changed considerably during the 1990s. It has evolved from a situation in 1989 where there was a broad consensus round the notion that a national target for stabilisation of CO2 emissions was the principal instrument for climate change abatement, to a situation at the turn of the century where Norway emerged as one of the most committed supporters of flexible mechanisms, the so‐called ‘Kyoto mechanisms’. We identify two main discourses in the Norwegian politics of climate change, and label them ‘national action’ and ‘thinking globally’. This paper gives insight into the core elements of these two discourses and how they act as basic knowledge systems when actors put forward standpoints on the climate change issue.

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In this paper I argue that environmental policy research could benefit from developing an understanding of how the concepts of ‘scale’, ‘scalar strategies’, and ‘struggles over scale’ play out empirically in processes of environmental policymaking and planning. I emphasise how scale, as an issue in environmental governance, is not merely an independent variable causing specific outcomes; rather, it is negotiable, allowing actors to adopt different strategies in order to pursue their varying agendas. I show how a local struggle can be represented as a global struggle: a case study concerning the domestic use of natural gas in the Norwegian city of Stavanger, and how this metamorphosed into a struggle about what was the appropriate geographical scale at which the environmental and climatic consequences of a natural gas project should be assessed, is described. By framing climate change as a global issue, local actors were able to portray the natural gas project as environmentally friendly. I argue that the realisation of this natural gas project should be seen in light of how strategies over scale—which were developed in the debate—fitted with climate discourses institutionalised in national policy and politics.