Over the past decade, municipal governments and their leaders have often been cast as the vanguards of global climate action. Mayors and municipal leaders, bolstered by transnational municipal networks and their policy advocates, have embraced a narrative that situates municipalities as the central locus for confronting the climate and broader ecological crises. This framing draws legitimacy from widely deployed data on urbanization: cities are where a majority of people currently and in the next century will inhabit (UN Habitat, 2024), where the majority of emissions are generated (Wei et al., 2021), and where some of the most severe climate impacts are often experienced (Kumar, 2021). In contrast to the long stagnating inertia of climate multilateralism or the national politics underpinning them, the city is positioned as nimble, grounded, and the most proximate government to the people, a democratic counterpoint to the gridlocked statecraft that, 30 years on, has failed to achieve the promised pathways for more sustainable futures.

Academic and policy literatures have largely reinforced this view, arguing that cities are overcoming scalar rigidities through experimentation, networked partnerships, and other novel modes of governance (Acuto and Rayner, 2016; Gordon and Johnson, 2018). Indeed, urban governance is increasingly presented as the most hopeful arena for climate problem-solving by municipal leaders, policy advocates, and transnational governance networks, who frame cities as sites of pragmatic action capable of bypassing national gridlock and delivering measurable climate outcomes. However, as Van Der Heijden (2019) notes, it is easy to be drawn in by this heroic framing of the archetypal heroes (selfless mayors) overcoming the wicked problems of the city (the climate crisis). Who would not welcome their city stepping into the vacuum left by flailing states?

And yet, the gap between rhetoric and reality is increasingly difficult to ignore, challenging the depth and durability of municipal climate action. In most cities around the world, climate plans remain either non-existent or aspirational at best (Van Der Heijden, 2019). Even among the ostensible frontrunners, progress tends to be symbolic, performative, and uneven. The very governance architectures celebrated for their dynamic polycentric flexibility are often marked by entrenched fragmentation, or the durable institutional silos, disjointed time horizons, symbolic planning, and bureaucratic reproduction of inaction that have served as key barriers to substantive and effective climate action, especially as they become firmly established and difficult to change (Boehnke et al., 2023; Fünfgeld et al., 2023; Hamin et al., 2014; Kristianssen and Granberg, 2021; Measham et al., 2011; Moser and Ekstrom, 2010; Rogers et al., 2023; Jensen et al., 2016; Lindbergh et al., 2022; De Ruschi et al., 2024). In many cases, these are not pathologies of urban climate governance but their very foundational characteristics. Rather than treating this gap as a failure of policy design alone, this article approaches municipal climate governance as an implementation process shaped by interacting institutional arrangements, political incentives, administrative routines, and situated forms of agency.

Despite the growing literature on urban climate governance, much existing work continues to rely on policy documents or elite interviews that privilege formal plans and stated intentions over the everyday realities of implementation. As a result, we still know comparatively little about how municipal climate action unfolds in practice: through informal routines, workarounds, interpersonal dynamics, and the procedural frictions that shape what can and cannot be done inside city bureaucracies. This article addresses the gap by foregrounding the lived, relational, and uneven nature of municipal climate implementation, drawing attention to how governance barriers are experienced, reproduced, and occasionally contested in everyday administrative work, rather than treated as static constraints or discrete variables.

To probe these barriers, this article draws on two years of embedded ethnographic fieldwork conducted within Los Angeles's municipal government and among climate policy stakeholders. Los Angeles, considered by many to be a climate policy “pioneer,” is the largest city of the State of California, itself often presented as a pioneering government leading on climate action. Since its initial climate planning efforts in the early 1990s, the municipal government of Los Angeles, not to be confused with the County of Los Angeles, has adopted a series of climate strategies under successive mayoral administrations to ostensibly reduce emissions, create lower-carbon energy systems, reduce pollution, and encourage sustainable development. These efforts culminated most recently in the 2019 Green New Deal, crafted by the Mayor's Office of Sustainability as a comprehensive “greenprint” for the city's climate goals.¹ Yet, half a decade into its implementation, and amidst a new mayoral administration, questions remain: What are the dominant barriers to implementation in Los Angeles? How are these barriers reproduced or challenged across governance scales? What enabling conditions can be identified?

The article begins with a brief overview of the ethnographic methodology shaping the analysis of this case. I then outline the specific characteristics of climate governance in Los Angeles, a city at once unique in its city council-mayor relationship and position within the state's governing bodies, but nevertheless reminiscent of other American and global cities in the barriers, strategies, and solutions proposed to address its climate governance crisis. Next, I introduce a typology of municipal climate governance barriers, focusing on institutional, epistemic, bureaucratic, political, and spatial barriers. Finally, I identify a set of enabling conditions and mechanisms that have, in some instances, empowered climate action. I conclude by discussing limitations of this case and broader implications for the burgeoning literature on barriers and enablers to effective climate governance in cities.

This article is based on a two-year case study built on sustained ethnographic encounters with Los Angeles's municipal climate actors. From September 2021 to August 2023, I collected primary and secondary data through participant observation of closed-door city activities and semi-structured interviews with government actors, green policy elites, and climate activists, all of whom provided verbal informed consent. Ethnographic subjects and interviewees were selected through a combination of purposive and snowball sampling, beginning with individuals occupying formal climate-related roles within the Mayor's Office and key municipal departments, and expanding outward through professional networks, interdepartmental collaborations, and recommendations from interlocutors.

Attuned to what Knox (2020) models as “thinking like a climate,” I bring into focus the situated practices of climate planners in their bureaucratic settings. In Los Angeles, as in other municipal governments located in climate policy epicenters where support for climate policy among the general public and policy innovation are strong, the routine challenges faced by civil servants and professionals working on climate initiatives often present more substantial obstacles to emissions reductions than overt denialism or skepticism about climate change (Knox, 2020, p. 14). This study similarly focuses on the difficulties of managing material transformations within bureaucratic, institutional, and social frameworks (Knox, 2020, p. 14).

Over the course of hundreds of hours of fieldwork, I observed the largely private routines, meetings, and informal encounters that shape municipal climate governance. This included scrutinizing the everyday tasks of municipal technocrats both within and beyond their formal organizational settings—their “coffee talk,” email writing, partnership outreach, internal presentations, and relational negotiations with individuals whose work ostensibly contributes to the project of climate action, as defined and bounded by these actors. Saturation was assessed pragmatically, as recurrent patterns of barriers, coordination failures, and workarounds appeared consistently across departments, roles, and moments of political transition.

My ethnographic sample centers “green policy elites” (Cohen, 2017), predominantly from a professional class. To gain access, I granted individuals—including higher-ranking political officials—anonymity; therefore, all interlocutors are reported anonymously. These climate planners have largely attended a cluster of elite universities on the west and east coasts, predominantly live in wealthier neighborhoods characterized by Davis (2018) by their “fortress architecture,” and largely drive higher-end electric vehicle models as their predominant mode of transportation to and from work. I also followed these actors as they work and travel with transnational municipal networks for climate action, including C40 (Cohen, 2017, p. 147; Bulkeley and Kern, 2006).

The social positioning of these subjects stands in sharp contrast to much of Los Angeles's population, particularly low-income and racialized communities who experience climate impacts most acutely through heat exposure, air pollution, housing precarity, and infrastructural neglect, yet remain structurally underrepresented in the institutions and professions shaping urban climate policy. My own positionality—as a researcher embedded within municipal governance spaces through a formal fellowship role—both enabled access to otherwise closed institutional settings and shaped the relationships through which data were generated, requiring ongoing reflexivity regarding proximity, power, and the partiality of elite-centered perspectives.

Fieldnotes and interview materials were coded inductively in ATLAS.ti using iterative thematic analysis, moving between empirical observations and existing literatures on urban climate governance, policy implementation, and institutional capacity. Coding focused on identifying recurring forms of obstruction, coordination, and improvisation, as well as moments where barriers overlapped or were temporarily mitigated through informal practices.

Beyond the immediate field of municipal government, I also conducted 24 months of participant observation with local climate social movements at organizing meetings, protests, and trainings in Los Angeles. While not the core focus of this article, this ethnographic engagement provided insight into how youth and frontline communities experience and contest climate governance, often reframing barriers as manifestations of deeper political, racial, and socio-spatial inequalities. It allowed for an understanding of the informal practices, resistance, and bottom-up initiatives that complicate official narratives of local climate leadership, offering a counter-perspective to the often-flattened typological models of climate governance. This direct observation captured the granular procedural and emotional dimensions of climate action from the ground up, complementing the formal analyses of municipal plans and policy actor interviews by revealing the contested nature of authority and the lived realities of climate implementation.

This article engages further with collected evidence from secondary sources, including policy and planning documents provided by interviewees or accessed in public or private municipal databases. Interviews and observations—cross-checked to verify findings—provide insights into the social construction and operation of local climate politics in Los Angeles.

Doing ethnography in the Anthropocene also demands that we pay attention to the entanglements of human and non-human forces, including technical and material infrastructures like data, models, graphs, and digital systems that climate planners routinely engage with (Knox, 2020). Understanding how municipal officers respond to climate change demands an ethnographic practice that goes beyond conventional reflexivity rooted in cultural relativism. Rather than centering narrative and belief alone, the task of my ethnography attends to how social life emerges through its co-constitution with planetary processes, material artifacts, and technological devices. My ethnographic practice ultimately observes the situated encounters between people and the materialized forms of climate knowledge that mediate how climate is made intelligible and actionable, including objects, measurements, and representations.

Knox (2020) further proposes the method of “thinking like a climate” as as an orientation that resists predefining what counts as climate change a priori. Instead, climate change takes shape in specific settings through data, visuals, models, and instruments. The ethnographer must then explore how these forms circulate and exert influence. This approach does not presume that climate change is always about sustainability, green politics, or ecological discourse; instead, these associations should be treated as ethnographic findings themselves rather than starting assumptions. Climate change is not inherently a fixed hyperobject but a contingent and relational formation that becomes visible through its effects and affiliations with other processes and materials. What I identify here in this article as climate action emerges from the field, manifesting through proxy objects and fluctuating relationships. This ethnographic work is thereby attuned to the layered and unstable ways that climate change is made present in institutional and bureaucratic life.

In adopting the above orientation, this article endeavors to uncover not just what constitutes a barrier to municipal climate action, but how these impediments are socially constructed, operated, and emerge from the entangled human and non-human forces that define climate change and actions to redress or adapt. This view complements and extends the extensive scholarly work. The literature on barriers to municipal climate action has expanded considerably over the past two decades, mapping an array of obstacles that hinder the transition from agenda-setting to planning to implementation. Much of this work emerged from a foundational concern with the clear gap between ambitions and substantive outcomes.

Barriers are understood here as context-specific impediments that obstruct particular actors from pursuing particular forms of action (Eisenack et al., 2014; Moser and Ekstrom, 2010). This formulation highlights the relational and contingent nature of barriers: what hinders action in one municipality may not in another, and barriers are not experienced or valued uniformly across actors or institutions. They may impede action by raising costs, delaying implementation, or reducing the overall effectiveness of a climate plan, for example through fragmented departmental mandates, unstable funding streams, or misaligned regulatory timelines.

Importantly, barriers and enablers are not treated as opposing or fixed categories. Following insights from policy implementation theory (Hudson et al., 2019), the same institutional arrangements, actors, or practices may function as barriers in some moments and enabling conditions in others, depending on political alignment, resourcing, and timing. The typology developed in this article therefore serves as an analytic heuristic rather than a causal model, designed to illuminate how implementation is shaped through interaction, contingency, and institutional friction. Barriers are dynamic, shaped by social and institutional configurations, and often entangled with one another. They can emerge from actors themselves, the systems they operate in, or the socio-material environments they seek to govern, and they may be rooted in longer histories of structural inequality, dispossession, or policy failure. Barriers can in principle be reduced or overcome through political will, creative institutional arrangements, shifts in resource allocation, or new governance practices.

A range of typologies have since categorized climate governance barriers under broad categories, from institutional, economic, political, social, and informational, among others (Moser and Ekstrom, 2010; Biesbroek et al., 2013). Institutional barriers dominate many accounts, focusing on the challenges of fragmented multilevel governance, limited mandates, siloed bureaucracies, and path dependencies within municipal administration (Araos et al., 2016; Boehnke et al., 2023; Burch, 2010; Hamin et al., 2014; Kristianssen and Granberg, 2021; Lindbergh et al., 2022; Measham et al., 2011; Rogers et al., 2023; Jensen et al., 2016). Political barriers are also frequently invoked, identifying the lack of sustained leadership, shifting priorities across election cycles, and the political risks of ambitious climate action (Anguelovski and Carmin, 2011; Uittenbroek, 2016; Fünfgeld et al., 2023; Hamin et al., 2014; Kristianssen and Granberg, 2021; Measham et al., 2011; Rogers et al., 2023; Jensen et al., 2016). These barriers are faced both in municipalities that are developing climate action plans for the first time, as well as in “pioneer cities” facing difficulties in mainstreaming climate policies and upscaling pilot projects.

Economic and financial barriers also recur across cases, highlighting how a lack of funding mechanisms, financial autonomy, or budgetary flexibility can constrain municipal abilities (Fünfgeld et al., 2023; Hamin et al., 2014; Measham et al., 2011; Rogers et al., 2023; Jensen et al., 2016; Lindbergh et al., 2022; Bick, 2025). Whether small or large, having formal climate strategies or not, municipalities often rely on external grants and other levels of government for resources (Anguelovski et al., 2014). Limited staff capacity and competing priorities within departments, such as municipal climate action plans coming into tension with master plans, further compound these barriers. Municipal employees are also often asked to mainstream climate action without sufficient training or resources (Runhaar et al., 2018; Fünfgeld et al., 2023; Measham et al., 2011; Rogers et al., 2023; Kristianssen and Granberg, 2021; Jensen et al., 2016). Knowledge and informational barriers thereby persist, including uncertainties around climate risks, difficulties in downscaling data, or a lack of internal expertise on strategies (Eisenack et al., 2014; Fünfgeld et al., 2023; Hamin et al., 2014; Measham et al., 2011; Rogers et al., 2023; Jensen et al., 2016). Some studies highlight how local officials rely on ad hoc and external consultants, as well as self-selecting community volunteers, to fill such knowledge gaps. However, this practice raises questions around continuity, legitimacy, and the embeddedness of knowledge within municipal systems.

The established literature often distinguishes between generic vs. context-specific or place-based constraints, and between barriers internal or external to municipal government (Biesbroek et al., 2013). There is also recognition that barriers can interact with one another in recursive and mutually reinforcing ways. For instance, limited institutional capacity may reduce a municipal government's ability to secure external funding, which can in turn hamper implementation and weaken political will. Despite this growing complexity, much of the literature continues to treat barriers as obstacles to be removed through better planning, improved coordination, or capacity building. However, this technocratic framing can sideline more structural critiques, including the roles of neoliberal governance reforms, austerity, and broader political economies of urban development (Bulkeley et al., 2014; Castán Broto and Westman, 2020).

Alongside the literature on barriers to municipal or urban climate governance is a more recent body of literature rooted in interstate climate policy focusing on the implementation or ambition gap. This literature, and its deployment in policy settings such as the UNEP's annual emissions gap report, identifies the failure to meet inter-state climate targets into multiple forms of slippage: between the goals set by leaders and the policies they adopt, and between adopted policies and their actual outcomes. While this work primarily examines inter-state and national level mitigation commitments, its core insights are relevant to the municipal and urban scale, even though they remain somewhat detached from municipal climate research.

The implementation gap, as often deployed in this literature, generally comprises two components: a policy adoption gap (the distance between pledged targets and policies on the books) and a policy outcome gap (the distance between adopted policies and the real-world effects they produce) (Fransen et al., 2023; De Ruschi et al., 2024). Both components speak directly to municipal challenges, particularly when municipalities publicize ambitious goals or climate plans that are not matched by enforceable, well-resourced, or institutionally supported action.

This work on the implementation gap draws attention to how political incentives, institutional capacity, and interest group dynamics shape whether climate policies are adopted and whether they succeed in practice. The literature points to strategic pledging, public pressure, and domestic institutional features such as bureaucratic autonomy and state capacity as key factors influencing policy follow-through (Fransen et al., 2023). These dynamics are not exclusive to national governments. Municipal governments, too, often set aspirational climate targets to build legitimacy or attract investment and votes while lacking the political or bureaucratic means to realize them. The distinction between adoption and outcomes is particularly resonant at the municipal level, where mayoral climate plans often exist without corresponding legal mandates, enforcement mechanisms, or budgetary allocations. This framework helps clarify why so many municipal climate action plans remain partially implemented or stall after initial momentum.

This literature often resists the technocratic assumption that policy design alone determines outcomes. Instead, it highlights the role of feedback loops, political backlash, and the coevolution of policy and its constituencies. For example, even well-crafted municipal policies may be undermined by developer opposition, inter-agency conflict, or shifting political leadership, echoing national-level analysis of interest group politics and institutional fragmentation (Fransen et al., 2023).

Bridging the implementation gap literature into municipal climate barrier scholarship encourages a shift in emphasis from describing barriers in static typologies to analyzing dynamic processes of political and institutional (mis)alignment. It also encourages researchers to pay attention to the divergence between municipal commitments and their materialization, and to the structural forces that shape such divergences. Rather than focusing exclusively on the presence or absence of plans, this perspective asks whether policies are being designed to survive contestation, adapt to new conditions, and produce outcomes both measurable and impactful to residents on the ground.

These perspectives remain underrepresented in the barriers literature. While some work has interrogated how power relations shape what is seen as a barrier and whose interests are served or excluded in local climate processes (Culhane et al., 2021; Basseches et al., 2022; Diezmartínez and Short Gianotti, 2022; Bick, 2025), the uneven geography of climate governance between cities with different capacities, or even between elite and marginalized urban communities within a given city, is often flattened in typological models. Similarly, there is limited engagement with climate justice frameworks that might reframe barriers not simply as implementation inefficiencies but as manifestations of deeper political, racial, and socio-spatial inequalities (Anguelovski et al., 2016; Hughes and Hoffmann, 2020; Fünfgeld et al., 2023; Rogers et al., 2023). Fewer studies examine how frontline communities experience or contest these barriers, or how resistance, conflict, or bottom-up initiatives complicate official narratives of local climate leadership. The result is a literature that often centers the sole perspective of municipal governments as rational actors facing technical or managerial challenges, rather than sites of contested authority operating within broader structural constraints.

Many empirical studies also continue to rely on interviews with policy actors or document analysis of formal plans, offering limited ethnographic or embedded insights into the informal practices, workarounds, and frictions that characterize everyday municipal climate governance. As a result, many accounts remain detached from the granular procedural and emotional dimensions of implementation work, including the role of burnout, interpersonal dynamics, or bureaucratic inertia. Addressing these gaps requires methodological shifts that can capture the lived, uneven, and relational nature of municipal climate implementation.

Before analyzing how these barriers manifest in practice in Los Angeles, it is essential to first understand the intricate and fragmented governance structure of the City of Los Angeles, as this structure profoundly influences how barriers are encountered, contested, and potentially overcome. Municipal climate governance in Los Angeles, like other cities across the world, is a patchwork of polycentric governing agents not simply confined to the municipal government. While the Los Angeles Mayor's Office, namely the Mayor's Office of Energy and Sustainability (formerly the Mayor's Office of Sustainability), has long orchestrated the mayor's climate initiatives, the network of governing agents is long and complex. As just one of 88 incorporated cities and approximately 140 unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County, many siting in neighboring proximity to the city's borders, the City of Los Angeles is the largest municipality in the area and often serves as a trendsetter for the greater metropolitan region, which expands to neighboring counties and cities.

The governance structure of the City of Los Angeles is shaped by its status as a charter city, a system designed to centralize executive authority while distributing legislative and administrative powers across multiple entities. The Mayor, as the Chief Executive Officer, holds limited power over city management, encompassing the authority to appoint and remove General Managers or department heads (subject to City Council confirmation), issue executive directives, and represent the city in intergovernmental affairs. The Mayor also oversees the preparation of the city's annual budget, which must be submitted to the Council and can be modified by it; however, the Mayor retains the power to veto individual line items, subject to override by a two-thirds Council majority.

The City Council, comprised of 15 members elected by district and representing nearly four million residents and millions more workers, commuters, and tourists, exercises legislative power, oversees city departments through committees, and can override certain mayoral actions, but does not have direct administrative authority over departments, which are lead by General Managers appointed by the Mayor, subject to the confirmation of Council, and removed by the Mayor, with the right to appeal through Council. City Council is key for passing legislation, especially that which requires significant funding beyond the Mayor's Office's relatively small budget. While the Mayor can veto actions of the City Council like ordinances, resolutions, and budget-related items, the veto can be overridden with two-thirds vote.

Meanwhile, the city governs three proprietary departments—Airports, Harbor, and Water and Power—through autonomous boards of commissioners, each acting as head of their respective department. These departments are granted significant independence, including control over their assets, funds, operations, and general management. Each board is empowered to appoint and evaluate its general manager, control departmental revenues via special funds, and exercise broad authority over franchises, permits, leases, and infrastructure development related to departmental purposes. While subject to certain checks—such as Council oversight for long-term leases and bond issuance and Mayoral/Council confirmation of general manager appointments and removals—the proprietary departments operate with a high degree of operational and fiscal autonomy. This structure was designed to enable specialized, efficient management of essential infrastructure systems while maintaining public accountability through Charter-defined procedures and periodic reporting to the City Council. However, like much of the city's unique structure, the efficiency and accountability of these proprietary departments remain contested.

Further complicating the governance landscape is the fragmented relationship between the City and County, with overlapping responsibilities in areas such as public health, social services, and even climate planning, and additional interdependencies with the state and federal governments authorized by charter provisions that permit the consolidation or delegation of services across levels of government. This complex institutional system, while designed for flexibility and local control, frequently creates coordination challenges that constrain coherent and equitable responses to climate change.

Amidst this complex governance framework, the City of Los Angeles began its formal engagement with climate governance in 1995, when the City Council voted to join ICLEI (Local Governments for Sustainability). Subsequently, the Council approved the City's entrance into ICLEI's Cities for Climate Protection Campaign, committing to reduce fossil fuel use and develop a local greenhouse gas reduction plan. In 1999, LADWP customers were provided the options to directly purchase energy from more renewable resources, with a goal of reaching 10% of energy from renewables. In 2001, Council adopted its first Climate Action Plan aiming to reduce municipal emissions by 30% from 1990 levels by 2010, alongside other commitments including purchasing 10% green energy, retrofitting buildings, and using alternative fuel vehicles. In 2005, RENEW LA, a 20-year waste management strategy, shifted the city's waste disposal to a resource recovery goal. This effort was followed in 2005 by the LADWP Renewable Portfolio Standard and goal to increase the share of renewables to 20 percent by 2010 and 35 percent by 2030. This was followed by Council's motion to plant one million new trees, and to participate in the California Climate Action Registry in 2006, enabling the city to establish emissions baselines and align with Kyoto Protocol methodologies.

In 2007, Mayor Villaraigosa's office released the Green LA Action Plan, which set a goal of reducing citywide GHG emissions 35% below 1990 levels by 2030. The plan quantified emissions and outlined sector-specific sustainability strategies. Executive Directive No. 7 soon after required city departments to develop sustainability policies. In 2008, the Mayor's Office then introduced ClimateLA, a departmental implementation strategy. After further greenhouse gas emissions reductions and building codes, the next Mayor, Eric Garcetti, issued Executive Directive No. 7 alongside the Sustainable City pLAn with more stringent greenhouse gas reductions, renewable energy goals for LADWP, a climate action plan, and the installation of Departmental Chief Sustainability Officers to better coordinate the city's fragmented departments under a singular plan. Only after Council passed a motion committing the city to a 80% reduction in emissions below 1990 levels by 2050 did these goals become more legally binding. 2008 was also an important year for buildings and transit, as the Council passed the Green Building Ordinance requiring LEED certification for larger new projects, and voters agreed to expand the transit system via a countywide sales tax. Finally, the 2019 Mayor's Office's Green New Deal and the 2020 LA100 report and 2023 LA100 Equity Strategies commissioned by LADWP furthered the city's climate commitments and orchestration. The Green New Deal, for instance, set further 50% GHG reductions by 2025, 100% renewable electricity by 2035, and net-zero buildings by 2050, alongside over one hundred broader sustainability commitments.

While the city's climate governance is often characterized by its proponents as heroic and pioneering, many initiatives have struggled to overcome a host of entrenched barriers, from institutional fragmentation, uneven implementation capacity, and enduring reliance on fossil-fuel systems. While emissions reductions have been recorded, it is hard to determine whether they reflect trends at the city, state, or utility level, or elide the broader mechanisms shifting emissions out of boundary altogether, rather than the result of coherent local governance. Ongoing legal battles over the status of oil drilling bans and budget struggles over climate initiatives like building decarbonization or even the City's Climate Emergency Mobilization Office, responsible for resilience and heat strategies, reveal the disjuncture between symbolic climate leadership and the slow structural transformations compounded by interjurisdictional complexity. Coordination gaps with county, regional, state, and federal authorities, funding gaps, and more exemplify the tensions of urban climate governance that persist despite policy innovations that have led to characterizations of Los Angeles as a pioneering climate city (Boehnke et al., 2023; Lindbergh et al., 2022; Fransen et al., 2023). The following section offers a typology of barriers to urban climate governance observed during participant observation within City Hall.

Based on inductive coding of field notes capturing climate governance practices within Los Angeles City Hall, I have organized the key governance barriers into a typology of nine categories found in Table 1: (1) institutional barriers are rooted in organizational structure, mandates, and internal operations; (2) political barriers stem from political dynamics, power relations, and shifting priorities; (3) economic barriers are rooted in structural and resourcing challenges that limit funding and equity; (4) scalar barriers relate to coordination failures across jurisdictional levels; (5) bureaucratic barriers deal with administrative constraints that delay or obstruct implementation; (6) epistemic barriers emerge from the operationalization of different information, expertise, and the legitimacy of different knowledge systems; (7) social and cultural barriers stem from normative, behavioral, and relational constraints to public engagement or equity; (8) infrastructural and technological barriers are rooted in physical and systemic limitations embedded in the built environment and technological systems; and finally, (9) legal and regulatory barriers stem from the risks of overstepping jurisdictional authority.²

Within each category, I identify particular barriers to the implementation of climate policies and goals that planners face on a daily basis. I try to make no normative claims about the efficacy or content of the policies or practices themselves here. That would be a rather different article, but one that warrants equally critical attention. Instead, this article focuses more empirically on how these impediments arise and are experienced in the daily work of municipal climate governance, particularly as they reflect and perpetuate the deeper political, racial, and socio-spatial inequalities that shape whose interests are served or excluded in local climate processes, whether in the informal stages of policy conception, the deliberation period prior to adopting motions, or the practices of execution and enforcement once entered into law or practice.

Together, these practices constitute municipal climate planning, distinct from the broader field of urban climate planning, which unfolds across a wider array of actors and networks including businesses, NGOs, and other entities operating beyond the formal apparatus of the state. Although my position within City Hall, indeed the institutional nexus of urban governance, afforded me access to this wider network, this article primarily foregrounds the municipality itself as the principal site of orchestration, coordination, and contestation in climate planning. Nonetheless, this typology remains attentive to the ways municipal planning intersects with, responds to, and is shaped by this broader constellation of actors, including social movements.

The barriers to implementation faced by municipal climate planners also exist along a continuum between two ideal types: endogenous barriers (internal to the municipal apparatus) and exogenous barriers (external to municipal government). As heuristic constructs, ideal types serve to clarify complex realities by accentuating distinguishing features; in this case, helping to identify which barriers may be addressed in-house and which require coordination with actors beyond the municipality. While this typology maintains broad analytic categories, it also emphasizes that many barriers emerge from hybrid dynamics that blur the boundary between internal and external forces.

Rather than detailing each barrier individually, which would exceed the scope of this article, the following section presents cross-cutting cases, grouped into condensed categories, to illustrate the layered complexities of everyday climate governance. While the typology analytically distinguishes among categories of governance barriers, the empirical analysis that follows demonstrates how these barriers frequently overlap and compound in practice, particularly across institutional, political, bureaucratic, and scalar domains.

While the barriers to municipal climate governance in Los Angeles are numerous, dynamic, and often overlapping, fieldwork also revealed specific conditions and mechanisms that enabled or facilitated action—albeit unevenly. These enablers did not necessarily resolve underlying structural contradictions, but they mitigated frictions, built institutional memory, and created footholds for more effective coordination. Below, I identify several key enabling conditions that, when present, allowed staff to move from policy aspiration toward implementation, often by improvising within and beyond formal mandates.

First, adaptive coordination structures were crucial to circumventing institutional silos. Although the monthly DCSO and Climate Cabinet meetings were limited in frequency and scope, they served as rare, institutionalized venues for cross-departmental climate coordination. When sustained by staff initiative, these meetings helped maintain continuity amid turnover, clarified points of contact across agencies, and allowed departments to anticipate overlapping timelines or funding opportunities. Its success, however, relied less on formal authority and more on consistent participation, staff willingness to follow up outside the meetings, and the informal labor of relationship maintenance. These networks of trust and habitus functioned as critical infrastructure for collective action (Burch, 2010; Aylett, 2015; Jensen et al., 2016; Kristianssen and Granberg, 2021).

Second, instances of embedded institutional memory and staff continuity proved decisive in maintaining momentum across political transitions. Longstanding staff, particularly those who spanned multiple mayoral administrations, acted as de facto stewards of climate goals. Their retention of relational, procedural, and tacit knowledge allowed them to translate broad mandates into operational strategies, to navigate bureaucratic bottlenecks, and to reconstitute institutional alliances disrupted by turnover. These individuals often became informal mentors and institutional repositories, connecting new staff to relevant histories and collaborators.

Third, certain policy alignment mechanisms helped bridge scalar and temporal mismatches. These included efforts to synchronize city planning with state and federal timelines—most visible in the strategic framing of budget proposals and grant applications to match federal funding cycles. In cases where departments conducted scenario analysis or long-range planning (such as LADWP's LA100 study), forward-looking policy instruments became vehicles for aligning short-term decisions with long-term objectives. These instruments were most effective when paired with sustained leadership and political cover, protecting them from administrative disruption.

Fourth, several staff members leveraged community knowledge and activist monitoring as tools of accountability. In cases where formal processes lacked enforcement mechanisms or where political will wavered, partnerships with community-based organizations and climate justice advocates kept pressure on departments to follow through. One city official explicitly described activist groups as “shadow governance,” maintaining attention on climate commitments and shaping public narratives around equity. While these relationships were fraught and often asymmetrical, and had the potential to lead only to performative action, they functioned as counterweights to bureaucratic inertia and as sources of epistemic legitimacy beyond technocratic metrics.

Finally, interstitial and informal labor emerged as an underacknowledged but essential enabler. This included the behind-the-scenes curation of spreadsheets, translation of policy documents, ad hoc strategy sessions, and emotional labor required to maintain morale in underfunded departments amidst turnover and politically uneasy periods. Such labor, while rarely institutionalized or compensated appropriately, often determined whether action was operationalized or languished.

Together, these enabling conditions point less to singular “best practices” applicable to every city than to situated practices of navigation, improvisation, and alliance-building within a particular fractured governance environment. They suggest that unlocking climate action in municipal contexts requires an ongoing cultivation of relationships, memory, and political strategy across institutional, scalar, and social divides. Recognizing and supporting this labor, particularly through stable staffing, long-term funding, and legally binding mandates with commensurate resources, may offer more durable paths forward than reliance on voluntary collaboration or commitments alone.

This article has examined the numerous and overlapping barriers that constrain the implementation of urban climate governance in Los Angeles. In doing so, it addressed three questions: what barriers most shape municipal climate implementation in Los Angeles, how these barriers are reproduced or challenged in everyday governance practice, and under what conditions action nevertheless becomes possible. Drawing on two years of participant observation within the city's municipal government, it offers a grounded typology of institutional, political, economic, scalar, procedural, epistemic, social, infrastructural, and legal obstacles. While based on a single-city case study, particularly in the better-resourced “climate core” of the Global North, the analytical framework presented here is intended to clarify patterns that may resonate across cities, especially those operating within fragmented, under-resourced, and politically volatile governance regimes. It is my hope that this article contributes to the burgeoning work taking stock of municipal governance, which taken as a whole, will contribute to a broader comparative mapping of urban climate governance barriers and enablers across diverse geographies and institutional contexts.

This study demonstrates that climate governance must move beyond setting ambitious targets or adopting progressive plans to understanding the political economy and institutional architecture in which such aspirations are embedded. The case of Los Angeles reveals how city governments often operate under the dual burden of symbolic leadership and material constraint, expected to act decisively while lacking sufficient authority, capacity, or coordination mechanisms.

While much of the existing literature focuses on barriers in the abstract or at the policy design level, this article highlights how obstruction unfolds in practice: in backstage meetings, frontstage press releases, memos, delays, leadership turnover, and performative gestures that fail to be translated into institutional change. Attending to the everyday practices of governance reveals how authority, knowledge, and responsibility are unevenly distributed, and why cities so often appear simultaneously active and constrained. Recognizing these dynamics shifts analytical attention away from plan design toward the political and institutional conditions under which climate action becomes possible, or stalls, in practice. The typology developed here may serve as a diagnostic tool for other researchers or city officials seeking to identify and address similar constraints in their own contexts.

This case also calls attention to the limitations of city leadership discourses that frame urban governments as agile, ambitious agents of climate transformation without recognizing the many barriers that exist. While such narratives may be politically expedient, they risk obscuring the structural constraints that cities, and even policy pioneers like Los Angeles, face: chronic understaffing, fiscal volatility, jurisdictional fragmentation, legal vulnerability, and dependence on higher levels of government that often defer responsibility downward without adequate support. These dynamics are not unique to Los Angeles. They are emblematic of a broader pattern of state restructuring under climate crisis.

Several limitations of this study warrant attention. As a single-city case located in a comparatively well-resourced climate policy context in the Global North, the findings cannot be generalized wholesale across cities with different political economies or governance capacities. Moreover, the ethnographic focus on municipal institutions necessarily foregrounds state actors and does not fully capture how barriers are experienced or contested by frontline communities outside City Hall.

Future research would benefit from extending this focus on implementation in several directions. Comparative analyses across cities—especially in the Global South—could further illuminate how barriers manifest under different political, economic, and institutional conditions. Equally important is the need for more robust scholarship on enablers: the strategies, coalitions, and institutional innovations that have allowed some cities to overcome or work around these barriers. Finally, this study invites reflection on the paradox of municipal climate governance itself: cities are compelled to act but rarely given the tools or mandate to do so effectively. Each local government is left to reinvent models of coordination, community engagement, and climate financing, often in isolation and with limited capacity. Recognizing these barriers are a necessary first step toward building the kinds of multilevel solidarities and both structural (endogenous) and systemic (exogenous) reforms required to meet the scale of the climate crisis.