Tackling climate protests: navigating contestation between democratic legitimacy and effective decarbonization in cities

Introduction

When citizens say no.

“The climate struggle is not won without conflict. It challenges strong interests. It is a cultural conflict and a generational conflict” (Left-wing politician, Oslo).

The past few years have seen a growing political and popular backlash against urban climate policies and governance across Scandinavia and beyond (Patterson, 2020, 2023; Huber, 2020; Bergem, 2022; Huber et al., 2022; Förell and Fischer, 2025). Yet few studies have explored the perceived democratic legitimacy of diverse climate protesters in relation to public agencies over particularly contentious climate-related issues arising from city climate action, even if contested legitimacy is central to understanding the recent climate policy backlash (Patterson, 2023; see also Bäckstrand et al., 2021 for an exception). Inspired by this knowledge gap, we compare how a selection of both reactive and proactive citizen climate protest groups perceive the implementation of climate action, raise grievances, and engage with public institutions to contest public authority and the legitimacy of climate policies and governance. We distinguish engagements in the input, throughput, and output phases of civic-public agency encounters. We suggest more attention be awarded to throughput legitimacy in both research and policy.

We know that popular, especially right-wing climate protesters, react with the highest degree of hostility to climate policies and science, claiming that the climate agenda is a cosmopolitan elite-dominated agenda and counter to people’s real concerns and interests (Krange et al., 2019, 2021; Kulin et al., 2021; Huber, 2020; Huber et al., 2022; Marquardt and Lederer, 2022; Lockwood, 2018). These groups are politically most distant from established society and mainstream policies and maintain a low level of (prior) trust in public institutions and politicians in charge of climate governance (Holmberg and Rothstein, 2020; Patterson, 2023; Aasen and Sælen, 2022; Krange et al., 2021; Marquardt and Lederer, 2022; Neuner and Wratil, 2020). On the other side of the political spectrum, left-wing or more radical pro-climate activist groups also criticize political elites and governments for not doing enough. They question the legitimacy and accountability of politicians, demanding more radical climate policies to safeguard the planet and future generations and tackle the climate and nature crisis (Nordensvard and Ketola, 2022; March, 2017).

Climate governance thus potentially spurs polarization between social groups, urban and peri-urban/rural communities, and across political parties, challenging public authority. At stake is diminishing legitimacy and trust in public institutions in response to a wider spectrum of climate actions affecting people’s everyday lives. Hence, climate governance is faced with a crisis of democratic legitimacy, efficiency, and effectiveness (Bulkeley, 2021; Ciplet and Harrison, 2020; Newell et al., 2022; Bulkeley et al., 2014; see also Haarstad et al., 2024; Hanssen et al., 2026). Examples are found across countries as different as the US, Brazil, and the Philippines (Marquardt et al., 2022), the UK (Patterson et al., 2023), Scandinavia (Förell and Fischer, 2025; Yazar and Haarstad, 2023; Wanvik and Haarstad, 2021), and France (Bergem, 2022). It seems that while climate policies and related governing are slow to establish, climate backlash locally or nationally can unfold fast (Förell and Fischer, 2025; Patterson, 2023).

Previous research has mostly focused on right-wing populism and its climate skepticism (input and output concerns) as a basis for protests (Lockwood, 2018; Huber, 2020; Marquardt and Lederer, 2022). In this study, we explore and compare perceptions of democratic legitimacy among a wider variety of civic protest groups than addressed in most articles (cf. Nordensvard and Ketola, 2022; Marquardt and Lederer, 2022), including two reactive movements—peri-urban anti-road toll groups and urban anti-densification groups that refute city climate-related policy actions—and two proactive types of groups—mainstream environmental groups/organizations, and radical pro-climate activist groups that want firmer climate action.

Based on observed patterns in diverse protest groups’ perception of democratic legitimacy, we compare the relevance of input, throughput, and output processes in their encounters with public agencies regarding climate-related action. Our contribution is thus a broader understanding of how climate-related policy and action is perceived, delivered, and governed by diverse protest groups (Broto and Westman, 2020; Bulkeley et al., 2014; see also Hofstad and Millstein, 2025). We indicate how these tensions are voiced and channeled through administrative-regulative channels or through collaborative governing spaces for citizen-public agency deliberation (Ansell et al., 2021, 2022, 2025).

In the following, we first provide a brief review of relevant theory and present our constructed analytical framework with a set of distinct co-determinants to understand relationships between citizen attitudes, grievances, governance, and legitimacy derived from combining several strains of literature (e.g., democracy/legitimacy, collaborative governance, populism/climate politics). Second, we explain our methodology and case studies, consisting of empirical studies of protests in four Scandinavian cities (Bergen, Oslo, Gothenburg, Stockholm). Third, we apply the analytical framework to four clusters of protesting citizen groups: two proactive and two reactive in relation to established climate policies, and outline the empirical observations of climate change-related tactics of the activist groups and interactional relationships, providing examples of their protests and avenues for directing these protests and how they perceive to be met by public institutions (regarding input, output, and throughput legitimacy). Finally, we discuss the results and draw conclusions showing that the democratic legitimacy of urban climate policies is negotiated through encounters between diverse citizen protest groups and public authorities, and that the decisive battleground is how policies are implemented and administered day to day. Consequently, we argue that legitimacy challenges concentrate in the throughput phase of climate policy implementation and governance, specifically concerning the perceived fairness, transparency, accountability, and inclusiveness of processes. Across groups, alignment between civic and administrative knowledge-making, representativeness, and procedural fairness shape acceptance; proactive groups favor collaborative settings and view outputs more positively when throughput is strong, while reactive groups rely on media and street action when throughput is weak.

Cities, politics, and legitimization of climate governance

A core puzzle in democracy is how to ensure that public decisions are both democratic and effective—turning attention to the legitimacy of policy design, implementation, and governing (Scharpf, 1999). For our purpose, legitimacy can be defined as the social and political acceptance of public authority, institutions, and processes that transform coercive power into voluntary obedience. It is considered critical for peaceful resolution of disputes and conflicts and, thus, stable governance.

The traditional way of ensuring input legitimacy is through election and representative democracy, which determines goals and policy design, while output legitimacy is ensured through the implementation of political decisions and governance built on professional/expert knowledge and mostly bureaucratic considerations. Collaborative governance or co-creation challenges this logic by presupposing that civil society, private actors, and local communities are legitimate contributors to policy design, decisions, and climate action (Røiseland et al., 2024; Durose and Richardson, 2015). The basic idea is that by engaging an array of relevant, concerned, or affected actors, both input and output legitimacy may be enhanced across social groups through the mobilization of alternative knowledge and added resources that ensure broader popular consent and public value for a larger share of the population (Fung and Wright, 2003; Torfing et al., 2017). Collaborative climate governance shifts the perspective from a monocentric actor (the municipality) to a polycentric perspective on who should take responsibility and thus on democratic legitimacy (individual citizens, organizations, businesses, and public agencies).

With the contested legitimacy of climate policies (Patterson, 2020, 2023), it has become increasingly obvious that co-creation strategies aiming to actively involve citizens in climate policies can play a role in recognizing and involving the diverse socio-political landscape of citizens and actors (Ansell et al., 2021, 2024; Vedeld and Hofstad, 2024; Lockwood, 2018; see also Vedeld et al., 2025). For such public-private-civic collaboration to emerge, the climate governance literature further insists on the importance of a politically competent and well-functioning civil society, entrepreneurial and engaged citizens, and private sector actors (for- and not-for-profit) with trust in public actors (Hanssen et al., 2026; Røiseland et al., 2024; Vedeld and Hofstad, 2024; Ansell et al., 2024, 2025; Boasson and Tatham, 2023; Boasson et al., 2023; Hofstad et al., 2022; Vedeld et al., 2021).

Our presumption is that legitimacy is affected if the governance processes considered are related to approved and accepted goals and strategies, if participants in collaborative arenas are representative of their respective organizations, and if processes are open, accountable, and in dialogue with defined and relevant citizens (Sørensen and Ansell, 2021).

Analytical framework

Our analytical framework interrogates the perceived legitimacy of climate-related policy implementation and related governance processes. The framework is constructed by a defined set of key normative criteria for assessing legitimacy and contestation of legitimacy. It draws upon different theoretical strains, e.g., democracy, trust, and legitimacy (Scharpf, 1999; Schmidt, 2013, 2020; Holmberg and Rothstein, 2020); collaborative governance (Torfing et al., 2017; Nielsen et al., 2024; Ansell et al., 2021, 2022, 2024, 2025); and populism/climate/environmental politics and political attitudes (Bulkeley et al., 2014; Lockwood, 2018; Marquardt and Lederer, 2022; see also Vedeld et al., 2025).

Different normative criteria are used for assessing the contestation of legitimacy—observed as a potential conflict or trade-off between pursuing either input legitimacy through participation by the people (recognizing people’s deep-felt local concerns and influence on climate policy); throughput legitimacy judged in terms of how the governance processes evolve with the people (analyzed in terms of their efficacy, accountability, transparency, inclusiveness, and openness to interest consultation); or output legitimacy through effective solutions for the people (e.g., science-based climate action and reduced climate emissions through just approaches) (Schmidt, 2013; Schmidt, 2020; Scharpf, 1999, 2001). The criteria suggest that citizens’ understanding of what is deemed democratic, legitimate, and fair may shift depending on which channel or arena they voice their concerns and how those concerns are met—for instance, by planners and regulative authorities versus officials or politicians in collaborative modes of governing.

Figure 1 illustrates how the three normative criteria of democratic legitimacy (input, output, throughput) and related attitudinal factors represent a set of mutually dependent, intertwined, and iterative processes and concerns. We explore each of them and how they are intertwined in our analytical framework below.

Input legitimization

Input legitimacy focuses on the policy design process and whether citizens have had the opportunity to participate, as well as the policy’s responsiveness to citizen concerns. Active forms of citizen participation are favored by citizens’ political capacity/knowledge and capability, and when civic engagement is met by political-administrative responsiveness to these concerns and demands for political participation. Education, prior professional experience, and (political) knowledge of contingent circumstances are critical preconditions for more active political engagement (Holmberg and Rothstein, 2020). According to Putnam (2000, p. 35), if you do not know the rules of the game and the players, and do not care about the output (or are against the outcomes), you are unlikely to try playing yourself. Moreover, being affected by the policies, perceiving potential to influence them, or agreeing with the policy content also favor citizen participation.

With reference to Marquardt and Lederer (2022), we suggest that an added dimension of the ideational aspect of political attitudes relates to broader knowledge congruence, i.e., the knowledge foundations and the knowledge-making (narrative) by a civic group in relation to those adopted by public administrators, and if there is congruence between the two. Knowledge-making in relation to climate change and climate science is considered highly political and socially contested. Many scholars insist that knowledge-making on climate change is intertwined with (prior) values stemming from, e.g., anti-elitist and anti-science attitudes and the politics of knowledge-making (Norgaard, 2011; Huber, 2020; Huber et al., 2022), impacting also perceptions of legitimacy in throughput and output processes (Patterson, 2020; Patterson et al., 2023).

Throughput legitimization

Throughput legitimacy, according to Schmidt (2020, p. 25), is assessed according to five procedural concerns, here related to people’s perceptions of: (i) efficacy—which relates to efficiency in policymaking and governance processes according to goals/plans; (ii) accountability—defined as public officials giving an account and being held to account in techno-administrative and political forums as observed by citizens; (iii) transparency—defined as ensuring citizen access to (early) information about governance policies and processes; (iv) inclusiveness; and (v) openness—defined as public actors’ observed willingness to engage with citizens, discussed in terms of their successes or failures to consult with citizens in ways that ensure balance and fairness in representation.

Consequently, throughput legitimacy requires not only that people perceive efficacy and accountable, transparent, and accessible institutional processes (in the bureaucratic administration) but also legitimacy in deliberative relationships among actors in a wide variety of collaborative arenas and the coordination of discourses within a policy sphere (Schmidt, 2013, p. 17; Ansell et al., 2025). Throughput legitimacy is thus affected by action groups’ choice of tactics and political knowledge in channeling concerns and how they are responded to, either by traditional/hierarchical bureaucracies or (new) collaborative arenas, including by public administrators or politicians.

Furthermore, regarding procedural aspects of throughput, the public administration literature highlights the importance of perceptions of trustworthiness in the functioning of public institutions (Van der Meer, 2010; OECD, 2021; Holmberg and Rothstein, 2020). Van der Meer (2010) underscores that trustworthiness in public institutions is closely tied to citizens’ evaluations of performance for the common good or local public value, i.e., whether they judge public institutions/public officials to be competent, committed, and reliable. In addition, Winsvold et al. (2023) propose predictability as an added important dimension of people’s perception of the trustworthiness of public agencies in delivering services.

Finally, evolving value-based motives are critical when judging the legitimacy of public policies/institutions. Marquardt et al. (2022), building on the seminal work of Lockwood (2018), explain how anti-elite stances among (populist) groups constitute an ideologically driven ‘thin’ dimension producing hostility to climate change as a ‘cosmopolitan elite’ agenda, combined with ‘thick’ nationalistic or anti-globalization values (Aasen and Sælen, 2022; Krange et al., 2021; Lockwood, 2018; Neuner and Wratil, 2020). Anti-elite stances constitute an ideational and value-based dimension that always exists in a population, especially among right-wing groups, but may be reinforced through confrontations (Holmberg and Rothstein, 2020; Hawkins and Kaltwasser, 2017).

Output legitimization (effectiveness of policy outcomes for the people)

Lockwood (2018) suggests that anti-climate attitudes contesting the output legitimacy of climate policies among (right-wing) populists are vested mainly in reaction to material and non-material concerns.

The material concerns relate to whether climate policy is responsive to socio-economic demands, justice, and effective delivery for the people. In (right-wing) populist terms, this relates to the mobilization of followers based on the argument that climate policies are unresponsive to the socio-economic concerns of a group or to those ‘left behind’ by globalization (in our cases, e.g., higher road-toll rates, undermining of living conditions in denser neighborhoods, or harmful/ineffective climate mitigation investments). Citizens view the fairness of the socio-economic output of public policies as critical for their own assessment of legitimate and trustworthy public institutions (Holmberg and Rothstein, 2020).

Non-material concerns relate to whether local culture and values are recognized. A lack of recognition of local culture, cultural identity, and lifestyles in climate action taps into anti-elitist and populist stances (Lockwood, 2018). We are interested in how diverse protest groups perceive policy implementation as being cognizant of local culture, dignity, local values, identity, and lifestyles, including local collective opinions, sense of place, rights, and needs/wishes (in our cases, e.g., recognition of fossil car-dependent lifestyles, place-based cultures, and identities). Such non-material concerns are often the most significant in defining protesters’ political attitudes (according to, e.g., Lockwood, 2018).

Methodology and empirical basis

Our article adopts a qualitative and comparative case study research approach involving in-depth interviews with key leaders and representatives of relevant protest groups and of concerned public administrators and politicians engaged in contentious encounters. The unit of analysis is climate protest groups and their perception of democratic legitimacy. The approach required investigating their protest attitudes/grievances and how these translate into perceptions of democratic legitimacy in encounters with public agencies. We adopted a twofold objective for the study:

• What patterns do we observe in diverse protest groups’ perception of the democratic legitimacy of climate-related policies in design, implementation, and climate governance?
• What is the comparative relevance of input, throughput, and output processes to the perception of democratic legitimacy among climate protest groups?

The sample consists of 24 organizations protesting in four selected major cities within two Scandinavian countries during the period 2021–2023.

The empirical sample is selected from among climate protest groups engaged in what we considered the most representative and acute climate-related local conflicts with the potential to undermine perceptions of legitimacy in the four largest cities in Norway and Sweden: Oslo, Bergen, Stockholm, and Gothenburg. Therefore, they are arguably suitable cases for examining how the tensions of climate urbanism unfold in practice.

Our approach was to initially map the protest landscape in each of the four cities, focusing on both proactive and reactive protest groups involved in highly visible and contentious climate-related actions. Considering this combined landscape of protest groups, we selected transport/road toll and urban densification, and related climate mitigation issues, as three representative domains for ongoing climate-related protests, covering both reactive and proactive protest groups. Our hypothesis was that a high level of expressed disagreement over climate action that would affect everyday life in the local community would impact perceptions of the democratic legitimacy of policies. Active engagement in local climate politics and conflicts was thus a main criterion for selecting relevant and representative action groups and movements. The reactive movements engaged with specific parts of the compact city development agenda: densification and sustainable mobility policies. The proactive movements tended to focus on climate mitigation and sustainability policies more broadly, where densification and sustainable mobility were two important issues among several they engaged with. We thus compare the types of action groups/movements, proactive versus reactive, rather than the cities themselves.

The data collection and selection process for protest groups began by mapping climate-related conflict areas, neighborhoods, civic protest groups, and encounters with concerned public agencies. In each city, planning archives, media reports, and scoping interviews were used to identify the most pressing conflicts and the groups, other actors, and public agencies engaged in them. To reduce the effect of researcher positionality as much as possible, preliminary findings were discussed among members of the interdisciplinary research team. As further elaborated below, these Scandinavian cities were selected because they have ambitious climate goals but still experience protests when these goals materialize into concrete climate-related action on the ground.

The mapping and field visits resulted in the selection of 24 distinct and particularly active climate protest groups and social movements, presented below. The relevant protest action groups and interviewees were thus identified through a snowballing and strategic sampling approach. These obviously represent only a small sample of the total number of active civic environmental groups in each city, yet they are representative of the relevant protest groups and types of protests we chose to study. Several field visits to relevant communities where selected action groups were engaged in each city were conducted during 2021 and 2022. The evolving dynamics in each of the cases underscore the importance of temporal and socio-geographic contexts, with the protest events being studied over a particularly intense period beyond our fieldwork (from around 2016 to 2023).

We interviewed 95 informants through 75 in-depth interviews across the cases. We divided them into three groups (cf. Table 1 outlining the number of interviews and Table 2 providing an overview of the protest groups):

• Reactive movements: The groups requested a rollback of policies and climate-related actions or solutions. They represented a) urban neighborhood action groups against densification in their community and b) peri-urban protest movements against measures to curb CO₂ emissions from transport through initiatives such as road tolls and related financing of public/rail infrastructure with user fees/charges.
• Proactive movements: They voiced concerns for more ambitious policies and solutions. They represented a mixture of a) mainstream/traditional national environmental organizations with local chapters, combining local community engagement with a wider, national, and global orientation, and b) more radical climate activist groups.
• City leaders: They included political leaders and administrative personnel involved in formulating and/or implementing climate-related policies regarding densification, road tolls/sustainable mobility, and climate-related mitigation action.

Table 1. Number of interviews across proactive and reactive protest groups and city leaders in the four cities.

*Number of interviews, with total number of informants in brackets.

**Responsible for urban planning/densification, transportation/road tolls, climate mitigation.

***Position and opposition to climate-related policies.

Table 2. The reactive and proactive protest groups interviewed across the four cities.

We chose to interview informed leaders as representatives of each of the most prominent organizations engaged in either contesting climate action or demanding more proactive or radical climate action. This approach allowed us to grasp the organizations’ formally adopted policies and the experiences of those most engaged in the processes. These leaders thus represented more than their own perspectives related to their political attitudes and perceptions; rather, they were spokespersons for their respective organization or protest group. We conducted a mix of individual and group interviews, which lasted from 1 to 1 1/2 h, employing a semi-structured interview guide tailored to the interview groups (cf. Appendix 1: Semi-structured interview guide protest groups and 2. Semi-structured interview guide, city leaders). The interviews were subsequently transcribed and analyzed through inductive thematized synthesis, writing thematic overviews and macro-level takeaways with key insights on interviewees’ attitudes and behavioral actions related to core themes of the analytical framework. Trends and clusters of opinions were observed and compared. A comparative analysis of each city’s climate strategies and core relevant planning documents provided insight into the city leadership arguments and helped to contextualize the political processes and underpinning of public agency arguments. Table 3 provides an overview of the core documents reviewed in each city (cf. references). We subsequently wrote summaries of the temporary unfolding and dynamics in selected protests as case studies related to key legitimacy dimensions of the analytical framework. The case studies were later tabulated, condensed, and presented as in the article (Table 4). The final round of analysis focused on core high-quality interviews and the selection of representative, illustrative, or surprising quotes.

Table 3. Core documents reviewed across the four cities (cf. reference list).

Interviews were conducted during a period when climate policies were higher on the cities’ political agenda than today, and the various groups studied were also engaged to a much greater extent in intense battles over these climate-related policies.

The comparative analysis of the empirical material engaged seven researchers with expertise in social movements, urban climate governance, social justice, compact city development, and urban planning. We began by conducting a collective thematic analysis, dividing the data material according to the organizations’ proactive/reactive positions in encounters with climate-related actions by city leadership. Findings across groups and cities were outlined by researchers in visual padlets according to core themes and jointly discussed, with findings agreed upon, thus strengthening the validity and reliability of research findings. After identifying and conducting a preliminary analysis of the perceptions of protest groups and the opinions of concerned administrators and politicians, we revisited the theoretical framework and the identified factors representing specific political attitudes expressed by the protesters (as our ‘codes’). We then analyzed selected interviews with references to each of these to consider specific concerns related to these framework factors. We adjusted the framework in view of our findings. The approach was thus abductive, combining inductive and deductive reasoning. We started with an incomplete empirical observation of the protest groups’ engagement—informed by theory—and then worked backward to formulate the most logical and probable hypothesis and explanation of what we observed.

By combining sources from in-depth interviews of civic leaders, their programs, media coverage, social media sources, and the opinions of city administrators and politicians and related policy documents, we were able to build layers of meaning and perspectives on similar contentious issues and the legitimization processes in civic-public agency encounters, comparing perspectives of diverse protest leaders with those of city leaders (administrators/politicians). The interviews were combined with an analysis of the groups’ programs at the time of interviewing (websites; FB posts; SoMe) and a review of official policy and planning documents, including climate strategies and municipal land use/master plans. These background documents revealed the rationale behind the climate-related policies and the political-administrative positions adopted in response to the protests.

The urban context

Oslo, Bergen, Stockholm, and Gothenburg all have ambitious climate goals, yet their exact formulations vary in both clarity and timeframe (City of Oslo, 2020; City of Bergen, 2022; City of Stockholm, 2020; City of Gothenburg, 2018, 2021). To pursue climate goals, each city has adopted a compact city and sustainability approach, within which densification and mobility issues represent the most contentious areas. Invariably, for more than two decades, this approach has included the introduction of advanced and integrated systems of toll rings with road toll posts and congestion charges to curb traffic into the city and reduce emissions from transport. This is combined with the promotion of densification around public transport hubs or rails, channeling a major share of the road toll funds to large-scale public transport and infrastructure projects, and diverse measures for climate mitigation (in energy, transport, housing, waste policies) (Hanssen et al., 2026; Hofstad and Vedeld, 2021). Transport constitutes a major CO₂ emitter in these cities and is thus tied to frontline decarbonization policies, reflecting that, e.g., energy transition has largely occurred in Swedish cities (electricity provided through biofuel combined with hydropower and nuclear power), and electricity in Norwegian cities is mainly produced through hydropower. The approach to compact city planning ideals carries many similar elements and forms a contextual backdrop to the studied climate protests.

The protest cases are embedded in relatively high-trust democratic societies known for efficient, responsive, and legitimate public institutions on the environment, climate, and welfare. The characteristic local democracy and administration mix in Scandinavian cities represents a particular blend of social division and cohesion over climate politics and urban policy implementation; each of the cities studied are frontrunners in climate and sustainability governance (Haarstad et al., 2024; Hofstad et al., 2022; Vedeld et al., 2021). In general, the public sector in these countries reveals a layered, complex, and hybrid (Nordic) administrative reform model in which new reform elements tend to be added to existing ones. Management perspectives are considered agile and adaptive, dominated by modern managerial and performance-based perspectives coupled with participation, experimentation, and consultation (co-creation), and an awareness of the need for coordination in platforms and networks and a continued focus on openness and transparency (Greve et al., 2020). Therefore, they are arguably suitable cases for examining how the tensions of climate urbanism unfold in practice and the perceptions of legitimacy among impacted citizens.

However, the contextual setting of the Nordic social democratic welfare state certainly provides conditions that must be considered in relation to the broader applicability of the findings. Despite variations in economic and political structures, these countries share a democratic governance model characterized by extensive welfare politics, high attention to climate change, consensus politics, capacitated local government autonomy, and institutionalized cooperation between state and civil society organizations. Within this framework, the public sector assumes primary responsibility for welfare provision, while voluntary organizations and social movements function largely as intermediary actors between citizens and political institutions, thereby creating interacting channels for political influence. The movements analyzed thus operate within a context that provides relatively favorable conditions for political engagement and influence.

We consider these cities as relatively politico-institutionally similar and valid for testing general hypotheses regarding how popular protest over climate-related policies evolves, divides society, and contests legitimacy and public authority. If local public government and hybrid governance in these cities are unable to cope, adapt, and further democratic and legitimate climate governance, there is reason to draw wider conclusions from the observations and possibly question the role of liberal democracy in tackling climate-related policy implementation more generally.

To this end, the city councils and municipalities in both countries have highly devolved democratic mandates, ample resources, and leeway to formulate their own climate, transport, and urban densification policies (Haarstad et al., 2024). Popular participation in planning is legalized in planning acts and widespread, albeit with many limitations in actual operation (Hanssen et al., 2026). Climate policies are developed by climate/environment agencies with large responsibilities, but more so in providing technical background for policies and strategies rather than implementing these and engaging directly with citizens. The Norwegian climate agencies have slightly broader mandates and greater coordination and driving capabilities than the environment-cum-climate agencies in Sweden, which are in control only of the ecological dimension of the climate agenda. In contrast to the strong local mandate of Planning & Building Agencies in housing, land use, and urban development policies, transport policies and implementation of toll rings in both countries are highly centralized and mandated to state Road authorities and national government with limited experience or tradition for popular involvement of citizens (Westskog et al., 2020; Hanssen et al., 2022, 2026).

Empirical observations and analysis

In this section, we unpack how the four types of climate protest groups formulate narratives, adopt contested political action, and perceive the legitimacy of public policies in input, throughput, and output processes. By considering how the selected factors or relationships of the analytical framework are reflected in the respective climate activist group’s political attitudes and perceptions, we are able to contextualize which dimensions of legitimacy come to the fore.

In Table 4, we summarize the empirical findings. It outlines observed attitudes of four types of civic groups and compares diverse concerns, tactics, and how encounters unfold in relation to perceptions of legitimacy in input politics, output, and throughput processes. The comparison helps to determine how legitimacy in climate action is contested relative to input, throughput, and output legitimization, and to explain the dynamic interplay between them. In referring to the protest groups’ tactics, we highlight the channels of interaction with public agencies each group chooses to use. This provides a picture of the relative responsiveness of the political-administrative (bureaucratic) channel versus the collaborative governance channel, and how and when media or SoMe are employed to enhance public attention and mobilize support for protests. The comparative analysis thus provides a test of the usefulness of the analytical framework. We are particularly interested in how throughput legitimacy judgments interact with output (normally considered to be most critical for people) (Holmberg and Rothstein, 2020; Schmidt, 2013) and input legitimacy (inclusion/participation).

Table 4. Civic engagement and contestation of climate policies and role of public agencies (PAs) in climate governance: Legitimization through input politics, output effectiveness, and throughput in Scandinavian cities*.

*Bergen, Gothenburg, Oslo, Stockholm.

Input legitimization—perception of responsiveness to citizen concerns and demand for political participation

Among the four types of groups, only the proactive mainstream environmental organizations largely agree with the main city climate goals, narratives, and policies. But along with the more radical climate activist groups, they still demand that climate policies be translated into more ambitious climate measures and actions on the ground. The suburban/rural anti-road toll movements are most clearly against the city’s overall climate policies, especially the climate-related transport and road toll policies, which they feel undermine a car-friendly lifestyle, while the anti-densification groups invariably support the overall climate policies but react negatively to how concrete densification programs directly impact their local neighborhoods. From other studies of these protest groups, we know that members of anti-road toll movements frequently express right-wing or conservative sentiments and climate change denial (Aasen and Sælen, 2022), but those leaders we interviewed could not be classified as such.

Interestingly, all the protest groups, except the established environmental organizations, brought alternative, science-based views to the table on what they perceived as sound city climate policies, which were at odds with what the city planners presented. They did not see the proposed actions achieving much CO₂ reduction, while not recognizing people’s cultural and material concerns. Especially the anti-road toll and anti-densification groups questioned the knowledge base and narratives of the planners and provided alternative, scientific evidence to prove their own claims. They utilized their own academic expertise and did not, as observed among right-wing anti-climate protest groups, turn to alternative and non-scientific climate skepticism, with some exception within the populist anti-road toll movement in Bergen (cf. Aasen and Sælen, 2022). Hence, they simultaneously questioned the technical competence of city planners on what they considered appropriate climate action.

In both Bergen and Gothenburg, the establishment of new road toll stations in the city outskirts was introduced through top-down nationally determined programs by state Road authorities and was perceived by the two anti-road toll movements as taking place with limited information or real participation of local citizens in the scheme design. The climate narratives and attitudes of protesters were clearly at odds with the mainstream road toll policy and related policy to restrict private automobile use, curb CO2 emissions, and use the congestion charge funds to invest in public transport. The groups’ spokespersons did not agree that road tolls would benefit the climate much; a view that may also largely find some support in the scientific literature (Westskog et al., 2020). The protesters felt the new road toll would result in increased costs and limited benefits to them as suburban dwellers. Hence, they were in sharp disagreement with road toll as a climate-friendly policy and argued for no more tolls and diversion of car user fees to public railway infrastructure. One interviewee argued against politicians in support of road tolls and expressed strong anti-green politician sentiments:

“They are so left-extreme within the environment sector. It is so politicized” (Representative of Demokraterna, Gothenburg).

Hence, in both Bergen and Gothenburg, protest movements were rapidly formed to oppose the introduction of new toll stations and higher congestion charges. They actively used social media to attempt to influence local politicians and administrators, but with limited success. The movements were unable to engage either the Road authority or local politicians. They received no or very limited response to their grievances and concerns regarding the road toll planning processes. As stressed by a manager in the Climate Agency in Bergen, appropriate arenas and measures for dialogue often do not exist or do not function well concerning transport and road toll conflicts.

“The transport sector is characterized by democratic deficit… strong state governance, un-democratic and long processes, and themes that are hard to understand” (Municipal Director, Bergen).

Subsequently, the anti-road toll movements in both cities formed their own political parties to enhance their political influence (see below).

Regarding anti-densification protests in built-up urban core areas in Oslo (Grefsen) and Stockholm (Bromma), the plans were mainly motivated by goals of providing new housing to a growing population but were also firmly vested in compact city and climate goals to reduce CO₂ emissions through more dense living and concentration around public transport hubs. The local citizens were taken by surprise by the new densification plans, but once they heard about them, community members quickly organized action groups through social media and local gatherings. Community leaders interviewed stressed the lack of openness and information from planning authorities. They felt they were informed about the plans for their neighborhood only late and to a limited degree, and were insufficiently involved in the design. The Grefsen group felt the new densification plans would destroy their built-up community with limited climate mitigation benefits. They hired local experts to counter the city’s expert documentation, which they also felt lacked a good rationale and documentation. They held that their area was already densely populated and were provoked by the plans for rapid densification. As one representative said:

“I am really climate-conscious and in support of the city climate goals, but I disagree with the proposed measures, and I find it provoking that they tell me how I should live” (Representative, Grefsen group).

The pro-climate mitigation environmental groups, such as Nature Conservation (all cities), Grandparents Climate Movement (Bergen), and Sustainable Life (Bergen, Oslo), are the only groups that support the main city climate policies, while also raising critique and demanding more profound measures and progress on the ground, Gothenburg being a case in point.

“…. (M)ost political parties speak about the importance of the climate agenda and climate policies. But nothing much is done” (Representative of Nature Conservation, Gothenburg).

These are established organizations with long-standing relationships with public authorities. They also depend on financial and administrative support from the government for their own operations. Reflecting that they invariably possess both technical know-how and political knowledge on how and when to engage officials, they maintain a regular and amicable dialogue with city agencies on core climate policy input.

However, even if they feel well-respected and are met with recognition and can influence policies, complaints are also put forward, e.g., about a lack of permanent arenas for dialogue or frequent interactions. Some interviewees perceive, however, that the municipality may appear as both a hindrance and a resource to achieve sustainability.

“…. (O)ften the municipality is both a hindrance and a resource (for our work). It is thus key to be conscious about which tactic we can use to engage the municipality” (Representative Sustainable Life, Bergen).

The radical pro-climate activist groups, such as Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion (Oslo and Gothenburg) are more recent and youth-based groups that push for radical city climate policies. They are at odds with general city goals and urge politicians to act now. Extinction Rebellion in Gothenburg stays away from the road toll/tunnel issue, however, since they feel it confers such strong sentiments among people. They protest through street demonstrations and spectacular events, including civil disobedience actions, and engage through social media and mainstream media. Fridays for Future, Norway, springs from Nature Conservation Youth, which is a well-established and respected environmental organization providing a platform and network of well-trained citizens, many of whom later are found in city climate/environmental agencies and related networks. Hence, they use such networks for interaction with like-minded public administrators and influence politicians to some degree on salient issues.

Throughput legitimization—perceptions of efficacy, accountability, inclusiveness, competence, predictability, and anti-establishment sentiments

It is in the throughput encounters that the greatest contrast and largest discrepancy in perceptions between the reactive and proactive protest groups arise due to how protesters perceive climate-related policies are conceived by planners and implemented on the ground by city leadership with disregard for local concerns and views. It is also in throughput implementation processes that the most significant conflicts and contestation of legitimacy arise.

Among the four types of protest groups studied, it was only the mainstream environmental organizations that perceived the public agencies and politicians to be largely open and positive to their participation in deliberative arenas around policy implementation. As one representative said:

“I experienced the process with the citizens’ initiative very positively, and there are a number of formal opportunities to influence here and also a number of informal opportunities. And we used them all.” (Board member, Groruddalen Environment Forum).

The interviewees from these organizations expressed no anti-elite sentiments, but they would argue for greater civic empowerment and support of bottom-up engagement to counter weak mainstream climate policy implementation and political-administrative powers.

In contrast, each of the anti-climate activist groups, such as Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future, invariably revealed concerns about a lack of openness in information sharing by public agencies, unpredictability in interventions, and limited involvement in climate action. They also questioned the climate knowledge rationale for interventions regarding densification and road tolls, and thus the climate knowledge competence of public officials. Furthermore, they felt they were neither truly recognized nor listened to. This affected attitudes towards public authority and legitimacy. For example, to compensate for a lack of recognition and involvement with the authorities, Extinction Rebellion in Gothenburg organized civil disobedience events against the city, labeling it Sweden’s “fossil fuel capital,” to stop fossil fuel dependence. They took action through various media and social media platforms, utilizing their own media and communication team to reach the general public and politicians (Leader, Gothenburg).

Representatives of the anti-toll road movement in peri-urban Bergen also exposed clear anti-establishment sentiments and, to a lesser degree, populist attitudes that emerged during confrontations. Once the new road toll policy was to be implemented and it became clear that user funds would be used to finance a public light-rail project, a few local entrepreneurial citizens responded by utilizing Facebook to form a local anti-road toll action group: “the People’s Action—No More Road tolls!” Subsequently, feeling they were not being listened to, the followers of this group formed a political party—the People’s Party. Thus, forming a political party was a reaction to the protesters feeling let down by established politicians on the road toll issues (cf. Vedeld et al., 2025; Böcker et al., 2024; Aasen and Sælen, 2022; Hanssen et al., 2022; Wanvik and Haarstad, 2021; Westskog et al., 2020; Eliasson and Jonsson, 2011). The Gothenburg anti-road toll protest had a longer history and peaked in 2014 due to the introduction of a new road toll at the time, known as Stop the West Link. The road toll was in part a measure by authorities to fund a railway tunnel under the city (West Link). Hence, these peri-urban citizens revolted against both the road toll and the financing of the tunnel, from which they saw limited benefits. The authorities’ decision to introduce the road toll was perceived to be in violation of a public poll majority held to obtain citizens’ views of the project. The city council’s decision to still adopt a new road toll discredited city politicians in the eyes of the citizens and created widespread negative attitudes towards the political establishment in Gothenburg that linger on today. The members of the road toll movement later formed or joined a larger centrist political party, Demokraterna, to enhance political standing and influence on urban transport policies.

Finally, the anti-densification groups in both Oslo and Stockholm raised concerns about a lack of recognition of their views. Both groups questioned the competence and behavior of the Planning Agency and its planners regarding issues such as a lack of early information about interventions, and limited openness, efficacy, and accountability. They observed a lack of willingness on the part of the planners to genuinely consult with them. For example, the Grefsen group referred to the lack of predictability in presenting the new densification plan for their area and went so far as to question the respectfulness, commitment, and even trustworthiness of the planners. As one representative insisted:

“I do not think it is implementable. And how do I then respond? Will I be motivated to take part? Or do I resignate … If they provided climate goals that I perceive I could contribute to, I would become much more motivated to join” (Representative Grefsen group).

The Grefsen group, in particular, exposed clear anti-establishment stances in their contest of the densification plans, reinforced through the long-standing confrontations that endured for more than a year. The lack of responsiveness among city planners and administrators led the group to turn to the media for public attention. Subsequently, they mobilized local and later city-level politicians for support and redress.

The radical climate activist groups were also not invited into public arenas or actively listened to by administrators or politicians, except through ad hoc contacts with like-minded individuals. They championed policies of empowerment for youth and citizens in general and expressed limited trust and belief in urban/public government. They did not perceive public institutions to be accountable, inclusive, and respectful, or to be taking the climate agenda seriously enough. They believed that established government institutions colluded with private firms and developers and did not respect climate science and the academic pursuit of tackling the climate crisis now. Representatives of Extinction Rebellion, in particular, displayed strong anti-establishment/pro-people/future generation agitation and likely recruited among young people with prior anti-establishment sentiments.

Engaging in arenas of conflict demands, however, both competence and courage from public officials and politicians, which is one reason why collaborative forums are not always chosen. As suggested by a local politician:

“…. (Y)ou need to stand up to the storm and dare to disagree and meet critique” (City councillor 2, Bergen).

Output legitimization—output effectiveness in relation to socio-economic responsiveness and cultural/identity recognition

The two anti-densification groups in Oslo and Gothenburg both felt the outputs of urban plans were unresponsive—even destructive—to their socio-economic and cultural concerns. They reacted to the perceived unfairness of their neighborhood being subjected to densification. More importantly, they felt the outputs failed to recognize their local culture, lifestyles, place-based qualities, and the identity of their unique community. However, as observed at Grefsen, the initial conflict was finally resolved through political dialogue where the protesters were able to engage the politicians in the city council.

“We obtained a good collaboration with local politicians after some time. They came to trust us, understood what we meant and what we stood up for. They dared to collaborate” (Representative Grefsen group).

Similarly, the anti-road toll movements disagreed with the added costs of private transport and felt strongly that outputs did not recognize ‘car-dependent’ lifestyles, values, and identity. As suggested by a representative of Demokraterna in Gothenburg:

“We believe that motorism/car culture has a role to play even in the future. the reason being the strong electrification of not only the cars but also buses and lorries” (Representative Demokraterna, Gothenburg).

The radical climate activist groups also referred to city policy outputs that did not recognize the urgency of the climate crisis. They took to street-level and spectacular protests such as organizing ‘climate screams’ in front of Parliament and school strikes, as well as a variety of open protests/street theater. More than the other groups, they were preoccupied with climate and social justice issues and considerations for future generations.

The mainstream environmental organizations were the only groups that felt their views about climate-related action output were occasionally recognized and thus adopted by public officials and politicians. They thus felt public policies were largely responsive, even if they also threatened to become more activist to gain greater influence and enhance climate change outputs (ref. interview with Nature Conservation in Bergen).

Comparative insights

The pattern-based findings derived from the cross-case thematic synthesis show that the democratic legitimacy of urban climate policies is negotiated through encounters between diverse citizen protest groups and public authorities and that the decisive battleground is how policies are implemented and administered day to day. Comparing the contentious encounters between four types of protest groups with public authorities in four Scandinavian cities, drawing on 75 interviews across 24 protest groups, the comparative analysis demonstrates that legitimacy challenges concentrate in the throughput phase of governance: the perceived predictability, responsiveness, transparency, accountability, and inclusiveness of processes. When citizens experience planning and implementation as opaque, unresponsive, or procedurally unfair, trust erodes more rapidly than when they simply disagree with input policy goals or output. Conversely, implementation of climate-related action that is predictable, open, and accountable can repair legitimacy even after intense conflict, as several cases demonstrate. This is derived from the comparisons elaborated in Table 4 and is not a statistical claim. Other scholars have also found that positive attitudes (e.g., to road tolls) may emerge with sound interactive policies and governance (cf. Nilsson et al., 2016; Börjesson and Kristoffersson, 2015; Eliasson, 2014; Eliasson and Jonsson, 2011). Hence, the cases underscore that democratic deliberation done well can enhance legitimacy.

To this end, by exploring how diverse protest groups engaged in conflict over three different climate-related policy domains (densification, transport/mobility, climate mitigation), we revealed interesting variability in protest motives, repertoires of action and interaction, and perceptions of legitimacy in climate-related action by different public agencies. This shows that the climate positions of a variety of citizen groups are complex, not just those of right-wing groups (Delin, 2023), and that perceptions of legitimacy are composed of many, layered concerns. This broad protest landscape motivated a more extensive analytical framework for studying climate action and perceptions of democratic legitimacy than typically found in the existing climate governance literature (Marquardt and Lederer, 2022; Lockwood, 2018; Drews and van den Bergh, 2016; cf. also Vedeld et al., 2025). Hence, our approach offers potential for novel theoretical and practical insights.

Our framework represents an application and extension of Schmidt’s original (2013; 2020) input–throughput–output model to urban climate governance and the implementation of climate policies. It proved useful and necessary to enrich the framework with several concepts or factors for the analysis of the protest groups’ perceptions, e.g., the concepts of knowledge-making/congruence and recognition drawn from populism and geographic literatures (Marquardt and Lederer, 2022; Bulkeley et al., 2014), and several concepts related to procedural concerns, deliberation, trustworthiness, and predictability from the governance literature (Ansell et al., 2025; Patterson, 2020, 2023; Winsvold et al., 2023; Van der Meer, 2010).

From our findings, we suggest that recognition in throughput processes is an essential factor explaining the highly diverging experiences and perceptions of protesters regarding legitimacy (in line with Lockwood, 2018; Marquardt and Lederer, 2022). Recognition is considered in the literature as a core premise for how procedural and distributional justice and legitimization unfold (cf. Young, 2006). Those who feel their habits or ways of life are not observed tend to experience stigmatization and disadvantage (Kohon, 2018). The reactive movements especially expose such experiences, although they do not represent marginalized groups in society, which is the normal object of study in climate policy and governance research (Hughes and Hoffmann, 2020; Lockwood, 2018). In a sense, observed conflicts and perceptions of legitimacy are a matter of proximity. Citizens’ political values and engagements are amplified when they are affected by a policy at an individual or community level, in their everyday lives (Patterson, 2023). Climate surveys show how support for climate policies declines when climate action moves into people’s personal sphere (Aasen and Sælen, 2022), while they feel powerless in response to the action.

If significant sections of the polity feel that climate policies neither recognize their values nor address their claims in design, implementation, and governance, questions of legitimacy tend to be raised (Patterson, 2023). The establishment of new authoritative relations between the city and its citizens may thus result in contested legitimacy, a key driver when backlash mechanisms emerge in response to hard climate policies such as road tolls/taxes or other local requirements (ibid). Questions of legitimacy are raised precisely when a new burden or compulsory expectation is perceived as incurring all costs with no or limited benefits, combined with a feeling of being excluded from its governance.

In our study, such contested legitimacy claims are made by reactive movements questioning the procedural justice and throughput legitimacy of implementation processes. They disagree with the knowledge foundations of proposed projects and experience a lack of openness and professional judgment in weighing concerns, as well as limited predictability in processual steps and decisions. Reactive movements argue that these forms of exclusion hamper their ability to comment on and criticize suggested solutions and engage politically on equitable terms. This sense of exclusion from the policy process is a shared feeling among informants from the reactive movements. What raises most concern is the mutual sense among reactive movements of being manipulated and led astray. Our material indicates that this erodes trust in political processes and the political system and undermines the legitimacy of climate policy solutions. The proactive mainstream movements’ experience is rather the opposite; they feel included in governance processes. Proactive and reactive movements converge, however, in their shared advocacy for more collaborative governance processes. Reactive movements contend that such approaches will enhance policies better aligned with local needs and aspirations, while proactive movements regard co-creation as a mechanism for expanding the legitimacy of climate policies.

We thus find that reactive movements, such as anti-road toll campaigns and opposition to large transport projects like Stop the West Link in Gothenburg, mobilize around perceived neglect and lack of recognition of their care-based lifestyles by centralized road planning authorities. They also highlight the enhanced social and economic costs imposed on everyday mobility. Reactive neighborhood groups, exemplified by anti-densification mobilizations in the middle-class neighborhoods of Grefsen (Oslo) and Bromma (Stockholm), foreground a lack of recognition of place-based identities and the quality of local environments, challenging planning logics that feel detached from community life. Proactive radical groups, including Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future, and Nature & Youth, center urgency and intergenerational justice claims. Since their views are not acknowledged, they rely on media or street-level protest and civil disobedience. They are largely kept at arm’s length by formal governance venues. Only mainstream environmental organizations such as Nature Conservation, Sustainable Life, and Alternative City generally support city climate goals, feel respected, and thus engage in regular dialogue with public administrators, often with some formal recognition and even financial support. Even so, they maintain a critical stance on the pace, design, and distribution of climate action.

Across this spectrum, groups contest not just “what” is decided (policy inputs and outputs), but “how” authority is exercised. The study’s analytical framework integrates collaborative implementation and governance and processual legitimacy to examine input (participation and responsiveness), throughput (procedural quality and administrative conduct), and output (effectiveness and fairness) as co-determinants of acceptance. While some degree of tension between these dimensions is inevitable, the evidence from the interviews indicates that throughput concerns are the principal fault line. This finding is underscored by participants often reporting limited early involvement, unpredictable interventions, insufficient feedback loops, weak accountability, and even a lack of scientific evidence for administrative choices of plans to curb CO₂ emissions. In transport and densification conflicts in particular, engagement opportunities were experienced as late, formalistic, or poorly matched to the stakes at hand. They questioned the lack of convincing evidence for the climate rationale of the interventions as presented to them. In such contexts, mistrust thrives, especially where prior skepticism toward planning or climate authorities is already present. Administrative closure thus transformed technical/knowledge disagreements into political crises about the legitimacy of public authority itself.

These findings complicate the conventional expectation that citizens primarily judge policy implementation and governance by outputs (cf. Holmberg and Rothstein, 2020). Protest groups frequently weighed legitimacy through the interplay of input access, throughput fairness, and output distributional impacts. The analysis identifies trade-offs that can push systems out of balance: efforts to widen input participation may slow or politicize decision-making, thereby complicating throughput. Conversely, narrow output orientations focused on technical compliance or efficiency can marginalize citizen voice and fuel backlash. The result is not a simple zero-sum game; throughput quality conditions whether expanded input strengthens legitimacy and whether efficient outputs are accepted as fair.

We also find that the politics of venue choice also matter (cf. bottom Table 4). Protesters strategically navigated invited spaces (hearings, consultative forums) and invented spaces (media campaigns, street actions), while authorities oscillated between bureaucratic regulatory closure and co-creative openness. Mismatches between preferred arenas and interaction styles escalate conflicts. Reactive activist groups often resort to media and direct political channels when administrative responsiveness falters, whereas proactive mainstream organizations continue to work within institutionalized consultative arrangements. Radical groups, facing limited informal and few formal openings, assert claims through visible public action. That these tactical choices are patterned across group types suggests that legitimacy is negotiated not only in public decisions, but in the choreography of encounter—who meets whom, where, when, and under what rules or institutions. Curiously, both of the anti-road toll movements, reflecting prior anti-politician/political party stances, formed or joined new political parties, which they perceived to be more people-friendly and favorable to fossil car lifestyles. The formation of political parties to influence mobility policies also reflects the centralized policies of the sector and the lack of inclusion and invited deliberation by road authorities in road toll planning.

Importantly, the temporal dynamics of conflict and repair are non-linear. Backlash can mobilize quickly, as seen in anti-road toll and anti-densification movements, yet several high-profile protests faded or de-escalated over time. In Grefsen, initial confrontation gave way to negotiated adjustments after city council engagement, and actors acknowledged that protests pave the ground for better solutions. This underscores that throughput legitimacy is not static: transparent, patient, and dialogic processes can rebuild trust and enable adaptation, even where the opening position is hostile. Moreover, the material suggests that citizens and officials may be closer on practical solutions than their initial public positions imply, if afforded opportunities to deliberate trade-offs without rigid political identities dominating the exchange. Keeping in mind the limitations of the study (sample size, short period of fieldwork, located in high-trust Nordic governance contexts), we still suggest our observations speak to the robustness of the democratic system in tackling climate protests and contested legitimacy.

Conclusion

By applying a novel framework to the analysis of the interplay between input, throughput, and output legitimacy in climate-related politics, we show how citizen groups engage the climate agenda through markedly different logics and channels of interaction. The framework helped compare the relevance of input, throughput, and output processes across the groups. Proactive mainstream environmentalists were the only groups that tended to accept the dominant scientific framing of climate change by planners and engage constructively in collaborative arenas. Proactive radical activists did not share establishment perspectives on the climate agenda. They pressed for bolder, faster transitions and viewed formal arenas as insufficient but still potentially useful, questioning the public interpretation of what they perceived as an urgent climate crisis. In contrast, reactive mainstream neighborhood groups and reactive anti-road toll groups were more skeptical about policy content, process, or both—often perceiving a lack of recognition, exclusion, opacity, and elite-driven decision-making. When these non-material or value-based perceptions converge with socio-economic concerns, distrust in institutions emerges, governance capacity erodes, and polarization deepens.

Our findings underscore that the democratic quality of climate policies is judged as much by how institutions engage with dissenting publics (throughput legitimacy) as by who is included (input legitimacy) and what is delivered (output legitimacy). Specifically, perceived transparency, representativeness, knowledge-making congruence (alignment between civic and administrative knowledge frames), procedural fairness, and perceptions of competence are decisive for whether citizen groups accept or resist climate action. Where knowledge frames and values diverge and where authorities fail to acknowledge local identities, place-based concerns, and distributive effects, conflict escalates and trust and legitimacy decline.

Empirical contributions

The study’s empirical contribution is twofold. By comparing perception patterns of legitimacy among four clusters of protest groups across four cities, the research extends the scope of study beyond right-wing populism to include a broader spectrum of protest group types, without claiming to map the full landscape of climate contention. All groups, whether reactive and proactive, traditional or idealist, conservative or radical, advance knowledge claims and often contest expert planning on its own terms, without necessarily defaulting to climate skepticism. Their grievances intertwine distributional fairness (who bears burdens and secures benefits) with recognition of identities and place values. Normatively and analytically, the study demonstrates that throughput legitimacy is an underrated determinant of robust climate governance, and that legitimacy across input, throughput, and output dimensions is mutually conditioning. Strengthening one dimension cannot reliably compensate for persistent deficits in another.

Implications for theory

The empirical analysis suggests three different lessons for theory related to:

The analytical framework: Our results support extending and enriching the input–throughput–output framework with an explicit dimension of “knowledge congruence” to capture how alignment in problem framing and evidence use shapes perceived legitimacy. “Recognition” of local lifestyles and cultural identities emerged as another important dimension defining legitimacy relationships.

The populism-climate nexus: The findings nuance the link between populist attitudes and climate skepticism by showing how local identity, knowledge framing, distributive concerns, and process fairness and predictability interact to produce support or resistance in urban contexts across a spectrum of popular protesting social groups. To this end, the rural anti-road toll movements most visibly raised anti-politician concerns. They chose to create their own new political parties, joined new like-minded parties, and advocated for pro-people, fossil car-friendly lifestyles and identities. They expressed limited regard for or disregarded the climate change agenda or climate arguments. The radical climate activist groups, in contrast, raised strong anti-government and anti-capitalist sentiments, arguing the establishment did not take the climate agenda seriously enough compared to a perceived climate crisis. They embraced measures to empower people (e.g., through democratic citizen assemblies), localize political action, and bring fair policies in socio-economic terms. Hence, across the spectrum from climate skeptics to pro-climate activists, groups are preoccupied with the throughput legitimacy of climate policy implementation and governance, but on highly different grounds.

The political dimension of co-creation: The study reinforces that co-creation is a critical strategic policy instrument for enhancing legitimacy but that it is inherently political, with asymmetries, representational conflicts, competing narratives, and different potentials across policy areas (e.g., mobility, densification/housing, and climate mitigation policies) due to diverse agencies and governing structures being involved (e.g., centralized road authorities with limited experience in citizen involvement, planning agencies with limited capabilities/willingness to engage, and environmental agencies with limited mandates to engage). The typology of proactive versus reactive civic actors helps theorize when and how collaborative arenas emerge and function as consensus-building spaces versus arenas of contestation and exclusion.

Implications for policy and future research

First, if enhancing legitimacy is a concern for democracy, improving throughput legitimacy is a suggested priority: establish predictable timelines; create early and meaningful engagement with clear feedback loops; articulate the rationale for climate interventions and contested trade-offs; and strengthen accountability and recognition at the street-level interface, including procedural justice training and professional facilitation for contentious encounters. Moreover, throughput quality requires improved formalized standards for transparency, representativeness, disclosure of evidence and trade-offs, and clear mandates for co-creation arenas.

Overall, the empirical findings suggest that pragmatic, locally sensitive approaches that combine firm climate direction with inclusive, accountable engagement can reduce backlash, broaden coalitions, and enhance both democratic and legitimate design and implementation of decarbonization policies. In this regard, the study points to climate politics as a new rallying ground for enhancing legitimacy on a broad scale in civic-public interaction. The findings suggest that climate and related environmental politics have grown important to local residents across urban/peri-urban and rural electorates in all four metropolitan regions of these Scandinavian cities, even if a temporary dip in attention to climate issues may emerge as a (temporary) obstacle.

Second, enhancing legitimacy requires engagement strategies designed for plurality and tailored to distinct civic actor groups, including those that are skeptical or distrustful. This implies offering varied participation channels to motivate and match specific groups’ capacities, preferences, and contexts. For example, anti-toll constituencies can benefit from credible transparency on costs, earmarking, and equitable transition pathways; neighborhood groups need assurances on design quality and identity recognition; mainstream environmental organizations can be enlisted as co-producers of monitoring and evaluation; and radical activists require structured avenues to press urgency claims without relegating them to the streets as their only arena for influence. Moreover, deliberative mini-publics or citizen assemblies may allow for structured dialogue between citizens and planning authorities outside of formal hearing procedures (e.g., for climate activist groups or anti-densification groups). Adaptive consultation frameworks can be built in early and provide iterative feedback loops, particularly at the agenda-setting stage before technical plans are finalized. Conflict-sensitive planning procedures can mandate facilitated and documented engagement processes for contentious issues (e.g., for road toll movements).

Finally, sustaining legitimacy requires depolarization and broad political support that outlasts electoral cycles. Climate governance in cities will continue to traverse cultural and generational cleavages. Yet the evidence here suggests that legitimacy is recoverable: when authorities listen carefully, explain candidly, and adapt visibly, protests can evolve from vetoes into inputs for better policy. The critical lesson is that durable climate policy action depends as much on the quality of public authority in action—the throughput—as on the inclusiveness of agenda-setting and the effectiveness of outcomes. Getting the “how” right is the most credible path to reconcile legitimacy, inclusion, and effectiveness amid the societal transformations that climate action requires.

Regarding future research, the material suggests a need for longitudinal designs that track how trust/legitimacy, participation, and policy acceptance evolve across policy cycles from agenda-setting to implementation and evaluation and learning, especially as benefits and costs materialize locally. The reactive-proactive distinction of groups maps onto a temporal dimension: proactive groups that feel excluded or ignored may over time adopt more reactive and confrontational repertoires, while reactive groups that succeed in gaining access to governance processes may modulate their opposition. These dynamics are an important area for longitudinal follow-up research. Moreover, further studies should pursue justice-centered transitions that investigate the effectiveness of compensation and social policy linkages in reducing potential backlash through policy packages and enhancing perceived fairness and thus legitimacy during rapid decarbonization.

We also recognize that the typology of proactive versus reactive civic actors may map onto different political cleavages in contexts outside the high-trust Nordic welfare state tradition with weaker or less capacitated institutions, or lower-trust governance settings. We suggest that the Scandinavian institutional context likely constitutes a most-favorable case for the kind of throughput legitimacy deficits we document. However, if procedural grievances can generate the levels of political mobilization and trust/legitimacy erosion observed in Bergen, Gothenburg, Oslo, and Stockholm—cities with comparatively responsive and well-resourced governance systems—then the throughput dynamics we describe are likely to be at least as pronounced in lower-trust contexts. Considering the limited data (sample size, four cities/two countries, period of fieldwork), we still flag the transferability question as an important direction for future comparative research. This research should extend the framework to diverse politico-administrative contexts and socio-economic settings beyond Scandinavian cities to test the generalizability of the actor typology, the theoretical framework, and legitimacy dynamics.

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Supplementary material

The supplementary material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frsc.2026.1876132/full#supplementary-material

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Footnotes

Edited by: Jan Whittington, University of Washington, United States

Reviewed by: Haoyu Yue, University of Washington, United States

Khoren Mkhitaryan, Armenian State University of Economics, Armenia