The Anchoring Effect and Politics of Local Climate Plans

Recent years have seen significant interest by geographers and political scientists in the role of multi scalar approaches to climate governance and the role of local action in climate mitigation strategies. The importance of local climate governance has been recognised since the Rio Earth Summit (1992) via Local Agenda 21 and has been studied extensively in the intervening period (especially in urban settings), but interest has accelerated with the emergence of the climate emergency movement and the declaration of climate emergencies by over 2,500 local authorities worldwide since 2016 (Bulkeley and Betsill, 2005; Climate Emergency Declaration, 2024; Fuhr et al, 2018).

In the UK, around 95% of local authorities declared climate emergencies by 2024 (Climate Emergency Declaration, 2024).

Local Climate Plans (LCPs) are frameworks formed by local governments, organisations, activist groups. communities etc to provide guidance on local climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies. LCPs are seen as an important way of mobilising actions by the private actor, community institutions and civil society pressure (Howarth et al., 2021).

Their advantages identified in literature includes their capacity to provide more participatory, democratic, and geographically sensitive approaches to reducing emissions and adapting to climate change compared with national policy (Williams et al, 2020), in addition to recognising that local governments have significant powers to reduce emissions in areas such as planning transport and housing.

However, local climate governance also faces significant challenges, not least a lack of funding to finance transformational changes, conflicting objectives of stakeholders affected by, or involved in the design and delivery of, LCPs, lack of capacity to influence emissions (e.g., energy generated and distributed through the national grid), lack of support from those outside the LCP, insufficient delegation of powers, and unsupportive or inconsistent national policies.

Another potential source of difficulties lies in the character of LCPs themselves. LCPs are developed with the aim of providing an overarching framework and targets for local mitigation and adaptation strategies. However, they lack the statutory powers to compel actions and enforce outcomes.

In contrast, the foundation of national climate change acts (CCAs) is the establishment of legally binding principles, obligations, and accountabilities "that define strategic approaches to climate policy and codify a policy consensus around which political actors can coalesce creating clarity about the future direction of travel" (Muinzer, 2021, p.421). These provisions include long-term emissions targets, carbon budgets, and the creation of independent bodies to monitor progress and uphold accountability.

Combined, these provisions provide CCAs with significant capabilities to influence the introduction and design of subordinate policies to reduce emissions in individual sectors in line with the CCA's goals, described as the anchoring effect (Bailey et.al., 2023). Little systematic research has been conducted on the processes and mechanisms through which local authorities have sought to utilise LCPs to galvanise climate mitigation activities within their jurisdictions.

Existing research on local climate governance has instead centred in mainstream approaches in local climate planning, the importance of LCPs in urban areas, trans-local urban climate governance and urban climate justice.

Important questions remain about the capacity of LCPs to catalyse and provide meaningful anchors for an acceleration of local climate mitigation and, underpinning this, the politics, and processes through which efforts efforts to utilise LCPs as anchoring devices for local net-zero ambitions. Consequently, this research develops the anchoring policy theory to introduce new concepts on its functionality within local scales, in different environments.