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In the face of the looming climate crisis, the European Union has launched the EU Mission for “100 Climate Neutral and Smart Cities”, setting cities on a trajectory to climate neutrality by 2030. The governance of such climate neutrality transitions by and in city bureaucracies has not been comprehensively documented yet. This thesis hence presents a qualitative, exploratory investigation of how municipal public administrations govern urban transitions to climate neutrality, and which administrative capacities they need and develop to this end. Relevant civil servants in the mission cities were initially identified through online desk research. Semi-structured exploratory interviews were then conducted with respectively one interviewee from 19 different European cities. This thesis presents comprehensive qualitative descriptions of salient governance and implementation challenges; cities’ adopted governance structures and instruments including used ICT artefacts; cities’ administrative capacity needs and availability; and cities’ capacity building and monitoring measures around urban climate neutrality transitions. A summary of the interviewed civil servants’ provisional assessment of the EU Mission and its impact is further presented. This contribution can aid researchers and practitioners alike in establishing a factful understanding of the urban administrative viewpoint on climate neutrality transitions and provide an analytic entry point for subsequent theory-building research in this domain.

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Engineering sciences. Technology