Climate change in Ethiopia’s capital city of Addis Ababa is characterized by an increase in rainfall and subsequent flooding and severe temperature with more heat waves. The city government has now recognized climate change as a serious threat, including it being a reason for loss of life and livelihoods. Even though governance has become a key mechanism to address a reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions and vulnerability to climate change, the practice of climate-change governance has been undermined by different factors. Thus, this study examined factors affecting climate-change governance in the city. The research adopted a mixed research design and depends on primary and secondary data sources. The binary logistic regression model and descriptive statistics were both used to analyse the quantitative data, while the descriptive method was used for the qualitative data. The results reveal that a lack of coordination, political will and leadership are the major factors that hinder the practice of governance in the city, followed by inadequate finance, policy, strategy, and regulation. In addition, a shortage of knowledgeable experts, lack of access to information and technologies had their own contributions to the ineffectiveness of climate-change governance. Thus, the city administration should place emphasis on climate change, giving it comparable weight to other crosscutting issues, and enabling the functioning of the steering committee with a strong accountability system. In addition, the city administration should take aggressive measures, including revising or formulating new policy, strategy or regulation, and even creating an independent institution for climate-change issues. Furthermore, the Addis Ababa City environmental protection and green development commission should create an enabling environment to attract non-state actors, in general, and NGOs, in particular, and should assign one directorate to mobilise finance, following the approach taken by the federal environmental protection commission. The commission should implement a mechanism to efficiently utilize the budget by applying continuous monitoring and evaluation. The commission should also provide continuous training and capacity building for leaders and experts at sub-city and Woreda levels.

Addis Ababa is one of the eleven cities in Africa that have been taking bold action in meeting the objectives of the Paris Agreement. At the present time, the city is working toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions and enabling the city to be resilient to the impacts of climate change. To make the city carbon neutral and resilient to climate change, the coordination of different sectors and actors is crucial. To this end, the planning and implementation of mitigation and adaptation measures needs effective climate change governance. Thus, this study was intended to explore the effectiveness of climate change governance in Addis Ababa City, Ethiopia. The study followed both quantitative and qualitative research approaches and relied on both primary and secondary data sources. A survey of 232 respondents, who were environment experts at different levels, was conducted using questionnaires. In addition, interviews and observations were conducted to gather relevant data. Secondary data were collected from different sources. The quantitative data were analysed using relative importance index (RII) analysis. The study found that existing environmental policies, strategies, regulations, proclamations, laws, and implementations in the city were facing major challenges in terms of weak accountability, the poor enforcement of regulation, and the failure to involve key actors, especially NGOs, communities, and private sectors; these failures were characterized by weak institutional setup and a lack of formal systems allowing actors (private sectors, communities, and NGOs) to interact to respond to climate change. Hence, climate change governance was ineffective in terms of accountability, participation, law enforcement, equity, institutions, the role of actors, and partnership. Thus, the Addis Ababa City Environmental Protection and Green Development Commission should give more emphasis to the coordination of other actors (NGOs, communities, private sectors, and research institutions) to respond to climate change in the city. In addition, the commission should provide training to the lower layers of experts and mobilise the community for climate change response, particularly in the undertaking of adaptation measures. Furthermore, Addis Ababa City administrators should give due attention to climate change response through an established strong accountability system to enforce regulation, rules, proclamations, laws, policies, and strategies in different sectors.