Constructing legitimacy for climate change planning: A study of local government in Denmark

Existing research on climate change planning has tended to adopt an overly simplistic approach to analyzing how agency and structure mediate local governments' responses to climate change. This research contributes to scientific capacity to predict and explain patterns of climate change planning by focusing on the concept of legitimacy and examining its influence upon the dialectic between structure and agency. A conceptual framework foregrounding legitimacy is developed based upon new institutional theory. An initiative to institutionalize climate change planning in Aarhus Municipality, Denmark, is used as a case study to validate four propositions derived from existing research but filtered through the conceptual framework. Validation of the propositions evidences a hierarchy in the salience of different forms of legitimacy, with moral and ethical arguments for undertaking climate change planning having limited social traction in Denmark in the absence of significant extreme climatic events. The analysis also generates thicker, more nuanced explanations for real-world patterns of climate change planning. The findings thereby provide a corrective to a number of assertions made in the literature, notably in relation to the role of agency in the institutionalization of climate change planning. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.