How to make them walk the talk: governing the implementation of energy and climate policies into local practices

Abstract

Urban policy mobility has become a lively field of research in recent years. One important argument has been that policies do not travel from place to place unmodified, but are transformed in the process of their implementation. Drawing on a research project on adaptations of climate protection policies in German cities we elaborate how discourse studies and work on governmentality can be brought into resonance with the policy mobility debate. We suggest that these theoretical concepts can be used to explain why, despite the growing number of laws and recommendations in this context, local adaptations of climate policies vary significantly between different cities. We argue that the concept of governmentality is particularly well suited to grasping the discrepancies between discursively produced guidelines and actual planning practices and to conceptualising these planning practices as effects of competing and often conflicting technologies of government.