In recent years, climate governance has become more conflictual, and there has been a growth in both pro-climate activism and climate-sceptic discontent, in Europe as well as in Scandinavia. This increasing politicisation of climate policy plays out at various levels and platforms. In this article, we question to what extent cities have the institutional capacity to handle climate protests and channel them into decision-making. The article is based on extensive fieldwork in four Scandinavian cities (Oslo, Bergen, Stockholm and Gothenburg) studying civil society protests and cities’ responsiveness in two main areas of climate policy: densification and mobility. Using an institutional governance perspective, we map formal channels for citizen activism and analyse how these institutional structures influence the ability of urban leadership to respond. Overall, we find a gap between the ambitions of cities for citizen participation on the one hand and local governments’ institutional capacity to manage input on the other. There are significant differences in “institutional logics”between the two main policy areas. In densification and land-use planning, there are legal, institutional channels for citizen engagement, while there are no established channels within mobility. This has had clear implications for political processes in the cities – materialising in mobility controversies, sparking the establishment of new political protest parties. Our findings underline the importance of political responsiveness to citizens protests, in order to avoid populist backlash and delay in climate transformations.

In this article we examine the limitations of democratic governance of climate transformation in cities. Advancing the literatures on urban climate governance and climate urbanism, the article asks, how do urban governance institutions manage the variety of demands and pressures on the climate agenda? We investigate how urban governance institutions in four Scandinavian cities (Oslo, Bergen, Stockholm and Gothenburg) respond to proactive and reactive demands on their climate agenda. We find distinct differences between the institutional engagement with proactive versus reactive citizen groups. Proactive groups more effectively navigate city bureaucracies and align their agendas with those of the city, while reactive groups are less connected and therefore reliant on more confrontational tactics. We argue that urban climate governance must find ways to be more broadly inclusive of those who do not immediately support the agenda, or else risk further populist backlash and disengagement.

In this article, we unpack and compare how differently reactive protest groups and movements respond to climate-related policyimplementation and engage with public institutions to raise grievances and change the course of climate action. We argue thatas the climate agenda has become integrated into broad-based policies, such as urban densification and transport/road-tolls, arange of contestations emerges that cannot be reduced to anti-elite sentiments and climate scepticism, as often held in studiesof populism and climate politics. The article offers an analytical framework to study how such reactive protest movements andtheir leadership respond to climate-related policy implementation in several distinct areas of contestation. The approach is testedwith empirical observations from four case studies of popular protests in four Scandinavian cities. We found that the hostilityand grievances of the protesters included a mix of ideological and material/socio-economic concerns not perceived, recognisedor responded to by public institutions. Citizen action groups thus actively engaged with a diversity of public agencies and politi-cians to influence climate-related decisions and actions. We observed that these interactions and resulting effects were highlyplace-based and context-specific, and dynamic. We suggest that engaging with popular/populist climate politics needs to observechanging contextual circumstances and more firmly distinguish between responsiveness to economic, cultural recognition/identity, anti-elitist and knowledge foundations it is entangled in. This includes aspects related to the procedural functioningof public institutions and officials. Relationships are complex and multilayered. A processual and qualitative multi-case studyapproach facilitated these observations.

Megaprojects are vehicles of change and spatial products of policies from near and far. In this paper, we demonstrate how insights from the policy mobility literature can contribute to a critical analysis of the legitimization of megaprojects. Through a study of the planning of a new ‘world-class' hospital in Stockholm, we show that ideas, experiences and practices from abroad played a decisive role in legitimizing this megaproject. Policies mobilized from elsewhere were strategically used to construct, modify and (re)present a legitimizing narrative centred on the aspiration of excellence and international competitiveness. This narrative emphasized the need to transform both the spatial structure and the organization of the studied welfare institution based on political and value-based rationalities. Initial international references and ideas were adopted in an unstructured and selective manner, but proved enduring throughout the extensive planning process and were eventually consolidated into a coherent concept, effectively excluding alternative development paths. The vague notion of ‘world-class' functioned as a ‘magic concept’ that strengthened this narrative, rendering the project difficult to criticize. In conclusion, the paper emphasizes the importance of considering the temporal dimension of planning processes alongside the relational geographies of policy-mobility in megaproject analyses.

Spatial planning instruments are fundamental for the operation of spatial planning systems. In the ESPON COMPASS project over 250 spatial planning instruments at different policy levels in 32 European countries were identified. In this chapter we compare and review these planning instruments that are used to mediate competition over the use of land, to allocate rights of development, to regulate change and to promote preferred spatial and urban form. The comparative analysis highlights that there are various types of spatial planning instruments at different policy levels many of which have multiple characteristics, that is, they are expected to have multiple functions in relation to spatial development and territorial governance practices. However, there is a significant consistency in how planning systems are hierarchically structured around spatial planning instruments and how these systems are based on rational ideals. Furthermore, the results indicates that there is a clear direction towards more strategic forms of spatial planning, also among statuary planning instruments. In conclusion, our survey reveals that spatial planning instruments are expected to serve as multi-purpose tools that simultaneously provide strategic frameworks and regulate spatial development whilst they have become less visionary.