Multi-level miscommunication
Erica Russell, Ian Christie · 2025
Effective climate policy and implementation require coherent orchestration of activities across multiple levels of governance and among cross-sectoral partners of central and sub-national public authorities. Recent research has focused mainly on funding, policy instruments, incentives, and institutional powers and responsibilities. Much less attention has been paid to the part played by inter-institutional communications and problem framings in the uneven development of multi-level climate governance. We offer an analysis of pathologies of communicative governance of climate action . We show that weak empowerment of sub-national actors in climate policy is exacerbated by serious problems of climate communications and contested framings of the climate crisis. Firstly, we demonstrate a lack of congruence between framings and messages concerning climate action between top-down central government actors and bottom-up local actors; and similar tensions across ideological lines at all levels. Secondly, we highlight the inadequacy of institutions for dialogue and consensus-building in multi-level governance, as indicated by recent deliberative democratic experiments in climate policy. And finally, we argue there are communicative issues in relations between institutions in the development of climate policy.