Climate action beyond government leadership: Workarounds, Alternative Authorities, and the Politics of Governing in an Era of State Retrenchment

Climate governance is increasingly shaped by cities, regions, Indigenous governments, communities, firms, civil-society organizations, courts, investors, universities, and transnational networks. This growing diversity of actors has challenged the assumption that national governments are the sole or dominant providers of climate leadership. Yet governments may be unwilling, politically constrained, institutionally fragmented, fiscally limited, captured by incumbent interests, or actively opposed to ambitious climate action. They may also establish commitments without implementation, withdraw institutional support, or delegate responsibilities without sufficient authority or resources. Polycentric, multilevel, transnational, and experimental governance can enable innovation, learning, coordination, and locally responsive action, but may also generate duplication, uneven capacity, weak accountability, greenwashing, and fragmented authority. Existing research therefore leaves important questions about when alternative forms of climate leadership produce durable and equitable outcomes, how they redistribute power and resources, and whether they complement public authority or normalize governmental abdication. A more systematic investigation is needed into climate action amid contested and uneven state presence.This Research Topic aims to examine how mitigation, adaptation, resilience, just transition, and climate accountability are organized and contested when governmental leadership is weak, inconsistent, absent, or resistant. It will investigate the conditions under which non-state, subnational, Indigenous, community-based, and hybrid authorities can generate effective and durable action; the mechanisms through which they coordinate, scale, or influence policy; and the implications of these arrangements for legitimacy, accountability, democracy, and climate justice. Contributions may ask when workarounds build political capacity and pressure governments to act, and when they instead reproduce inequalities, displace responsibility, or privilege voluntary commitments over enforceable regulation.To gather further insights into climate action under conditions of inadequate, fragmented, or obstructive governmental leadership, we welcome articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:• Climate action by cities, regions, provinces, states, and local governments amid national inaction or policy reversal.• Transnational municipal, regional, and city-to-city networks, including their influence, performance, capacity, and accountability.• Indigenous-led, community-led, cooperative, and place-based approaches to climate action.• Community energy, energy democracy, local ownership, and distributed infrastructure.• Civil-society mobilization, social movements, youth activism, advocacy coalitions, and knowledge networks.• Climate litigation, rights-based strategies, administrative complaints, and accountability mechanisms.• Private governance, corporate commitments, investor action, disclosure, procurement, supply chains, and voluntary standards.• Climate finance and philanthropy in contexts of public underinvestment.• Universities, professional associations, public utilities, health systems, and other organizational climate governors.• Policy experimentation, diffusion, learning, replication, scaling, and institutionalization.• Adaptation and resilience governance in under-resourced or fragmented institutional settings.• Climate obstruction, delay, backlash, retrenchment, and strategies for countering them.• Democratic legitimacy, participation, transparency, representation, and public authority.• Justice implications across regions, sectors, communities, and the Global North and Global South.• Measurement of emissions impacts, adaptation outcomes, additionality, durability, distributional effects, and double counting.• Comparative analyses across weak, fragmented, authoritarian, populist, or fossil-dependent governance systems.The Research Topic welcomes empirical, theoretical, methodological, comparative, historical, ethnographic, participatory, Indigenous, decolonial, qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods, network-based, geospatial, and systematic review contributions. Topic editors: Erika Allen Wolters, Tamara Krawchenko Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/86205/climate-action-beyond-government-leadership-workarounds-alternative-authorities-and-the-politics-of-governing-in-an-era-of-state-retrenchment