https://doi.org/10.1038/s44168-025-00266-x	Article

Article

npj | climate action
https://doi.org/10.1038/s44168-025-00266-x
Accelerating climate action in unfavourable local contexts: the role of policy entrepreneurship
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Alfie Gaffney ^1,2
Local authorities are increasingly expected to lead on net-zero delivery, irrespective of their capacity to do so. Existing literature has favoured descriptive accounts of local authorities governing large, well- resourced cities over analysis of those operating in more unfavourable contexts. Consequently, the extent to which most local authorities can act, let alone lead, on climate change, and how policy entrepreneurs can exert agency in such settings, remains understudied. This paper addresses these gaps, examining how Blackpool Council, UK – a least-likely crucial case of climate action in unfavourable contexts – produced a relatively high-quality climate action plan. Analysis of policy documents and elite/expert interviews reveals the crucial role of collective local policy entrepreneurship. The motives and strategies pursued by a group of policy actors significantly accelerated climate action in an innovative, timely, and effective way. Finally, the paper calls for more research into similarly ambitious policy entrepreneurship within other puzzlingly (un)favourable contexts.

How do ambitious climate policies take shape in local authorities operating in relatively unfavourable, resource-constrained contexts?
Existing studies have made important contributions for both academics (in identifying the structural drivers of local climate ambition) and policymakers (in providing practical recommendations) based on descriptive accounts of large, highly connected, and well-resourced cities. However, the question of how agency can spur climate ambition in unfavourable local contexts has been understudied. This ‘frontrunner paradox’ pushes structurally disadvantaged local authorities ‘off-the-map’^3,4. Moreover, the role of agency in shaping local climate ambition is at present surprisingly underexplored, especially in unfavourable local contexts. In the existing literature, specific actors - such as local politicians - are often presented as passive recipients of landmark scientific reports rather than objects of indepth study^5. Others have described climate politics as bedevilled by an ‘agentic deadlock’ with ‘structural root causes’^6.

School of Environmental Sciences & Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, Norwich Business Park, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. ^2Centre for

Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST), School of Environmental Sciences, Norwich Business Park, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.

This introductory section reviews existing literature on the factors shaping local climate action, developing an empirical and theoretical approach to examine how, why and to what effect the agency of local climate policy actors can influence the creation of surprisingly high-quality climate policy outputs within unfavourable contexts. This focus is crucial, not least because deprivation is commonly portrayed as inimical to climate action due to pressures to divert resources towards other policy issues, such as social services^1. Indeed, resource-constrained local authorities are often subject to the most severe funding cuts, which can compound existing capacity constraints (e.g., by diminishing their ability to fund climate policy officers^7 or meaningfully access and participate in international climate networks^8) and have broader cross-policy implications (e.g., by exacerbating health inequalities^9).
Conversely, large cities with strong regional economies are more likely to demonstrate cognitive pioneership – namely, a propensity to (re)define interests and develop innovative ideas – than local authorities with a smaller proportion of highly educated individuals^10. Large cities are often presented as bastions of innovation and experimentation^11, leaving the experimental capacity of the rest – more resource-constrained local authorities – uncertain. The presence of higher education institutions can enable policy actors to leverage expertise across science-policy interfaces to ratchet up local climate ambition^12. Meanwhile, local authorities with a highly educated, leftleaning electorate often prioritise climate action due to reputational concerns associated with climate inaction^13.
Local climate ambitions are not shaped by economic factors in isolation. National political systems and central-local government relations can also shape the favourability of local policy contexts. Centrally imposed decarbonisation strategies can enshrine a select few – often large and exindustrial – local authorities as testbeds for decarbonisation technologies, leaving the vast majority of other local authorities ‘untapped^14. Devolution deals can spread a ‘begging bowl culture’ which grants some local authorities privileged positions from which to start their net zero journeys, but leaves the rest – often smaller, more resource-constrained local authorities – to contend with limited lobbying powers, networking capacities, and funding in the absence of any such agreement.
Offering a definitive verdict on the extent to which politics determines local climate ambition is difficult, however. Some scholars have noted significant partisan divergence over how best to deliver net zero^15, while others have examined how politics can mediate the influence of structural factors. For example, politicised central-local grant flow mechanisms can privilege local authorities aligned with the incumbent national-level political administration, accruing ‘electoral ill-gotten gains’ whereby parties that receive larger intra-government transfers often perform better at the ballot box^16. In short, existing literature exhibits a lack of consensus: party politics has a seemingly context-specific influence on local climate ambitions.
Other (arguably) less important drivers of local climate ambition which commonly vary across policy contexts include: (1) ambitious neighbouring local authorities, which can raise local climate ambition through policy diffusion^17; (2) extreme weather events, which can rupture a tendency to perceive climate change as spatially and temporally distant^18; (3) local carbon-intensive veto players, which can lobby against climate action or become focal points for national-level decarbonisation efforts^19.
By comparison, few academic accounts have shed light on the role of agency within local authorities operating in unfavourable policy contexts^20. Wurzel et al.^10 examine how structurally disadvantaged maritime port cities can pioneer climate action despite decadal industrial decline. Haupt and Kern^21 explore how policy actors within resource-constrained cities leveraged their agency to obtain external funding and raise local climate ambition.
These pioneering – yet isolated – studies contribute to a more nuanced understanding of how fiscal, institutional, and collaborative capacities determine climate ambition in unfavourable contexts. This paper advances this burgeoning field by further advocating for a shift from standardised to context-specific explanations of local climate ambition and placing the broad truisms underpinning existing literatures under scrutiny^22.
This paper specifically examines the role of agency in accelerating climate ambitions within an exploratory case of study of climate action in Blackpool, a small, densely populated town – 141,100 people as of 2019 – on the north-west coast of England^23 operating in an unfavourable policy context (for an interactive map of Blackpool Council’s location and local authority jurisdiction, see ref. 24).
In many respects, Blackpool is an archetypal unfavourable or ‘left- behind place’^25. High socio-economic deprivation, low spending power, declining industrial and tourist industries, a limited local Green party, and a higher education cold spot diminish the likelihood of Blackpool prioritising climate action.
Yet, despite this unfavourable context, Blackpool Borough Council – the single-tier unitary authority with sole responsibility for local public service delivery outside of central Government – exhibits high climate ambition. The council placed in the top 30% of 128 single-tier local authorities in Climate Emergency UK’s 2021 Climate Plan Scorecards^26, scoring 61% for its Climate Emergency Action Plan (Document #1).
It is therefore an ‘unlikely climate pioneer’ – namely, a local authority that, despite an unfavourable local context, exhibits high climate ambition^20.
This case is particularly notable as it unfolds in a broader national context where local government is increasingly positioned as a key actor and delivery partner for UK climate policy. At least one third of UK emissions are dependent on sectors ‘directly shaped or influenced by local authority practice, policy or partnerships’^27. However, the understanding of the capacity of the vast majority of these local authorities to deliver net zero is low.
The UK has even been described as a paradoxical climate leader^28. The 2008 Climate Change Act signified the first nation to enshrine carbon emission reduction in law. However, national-level commitment to climate ambition has waxed and waned, epitomised by the Conservative administration’s derogation of it as ‘green crap’ and subsequent glorification of net zero as the cornerstone of economic growth strategies^15 (for more detail on the UK local government and climate policy landscape, see the “Methods” section).
Cognisant of this wider policy context, through analysis of elite/expert interview data and policy documents, this paper seeks to understand the extent to which the agency of local policy actors and/or institutions contributed to Blackpool’s ‘unlikely pioneership’.
Theoretically, this paper puts forth an understanding of policy entrepreneurship as: a (distributed) pattern of agency through which actors promote new ideas and policy innovation as they seek to navigate a specific policy context and bring about policy change^29,30. It comprises an impermanent set of behaviours which can be assumed to a greater or lesser degree by different actors. This mitigates against conceptual overstretching by shifting away from a personalised, atomistic understanding of agency, towards a broader, integrated approach. It also challenges a tendency within the existing literature to position lonely, heroic individuals who seek out opportunities to implement a priori envisioned solutions as policy entrepreneurs. While there may very well be cases where individuals have a truly ‘singular influence’, this is not always the case^29. ‘Lone wolf’ explanations might apply in favourable contexts, but it is expected that they have less resonance in unfavourable contexts where policy entrepreneurship can be more readily realised ‘through the complementary actions of a collection of actors’^29.
In so doing, this contribution responds to Capano and Galanti’s call for greater definitional precision by empirically distinguishing policy entrepreneurs (who change policy processes by promoting innovation) from leaders (who manage policy processes through steering), brokers (who stabilise the policy process through intermediation), and experts (who produce and disseminate knowledge, evidence, and expertise to inform the policy process)^29.
Since the introduction of the policy entrepreneurship concept by Kingdon^31 and its further elaboration within diverse policymaking contexts in terms of what policy entrepreneurs do and their associated effectiveness – or adeptness at generating and disseminating ideas via lobbying, collaboration or networking activities^32 – climate policy scholars have begun to explore why and how policy entrepreneurs influence climate ambitions, often divorced from the specifics of Kingdon’s framework.
Various examples of entrepreneurship populate existing literature on climate action – albeit at different governance scales – including but by no means limited to the UK Climate Change Committee^33, UK Parliament Environmental Audit Committee^34, Friends of the Earth^35, and local authorities^36. Literature has also begun to examine the policy entrepreneurship of public bureaucrats with official mandates to strategise, coordinate, and/or develop climate policy^37. Nonetheless, studies of policy entrepreneurship by council officers – and less visible actors more generally - remain rare, and their role(s) remain imprecisely characterised.
While the 2019 proliferation of local authority climate emergency declarations – which marked a notable uptick in local climate ambition in England – has also been attributed to the collective entrepreneurship of climate protestors^38, the extent to which (and how) policy entrepreneurship – as a (distributed) pattern of agency – shapes whether local authorities maintain, accelerate, or even renege on their net zero commitments through the creation of climate action plans remains unclear.
To address this gap in the literature, a theoretical approach encompassing motives, strategies and effects is employed to examine the extent to which (and how) policy entrepreneurship determines local climate ambition. It elucidates how council officers contribute to a pattern of agency and their collaborations with policy leaders, experts, and brokers in doing so.
When examining why they act, existing research commonly depicts policy entrepreneurs as perennially alert and intrinsically driven, with predetermined motives centred around pet issues, irrespective of the local context. They, for example, proactively decide to become an entrepreneur to advance their career. However, a growing literature provides important nuance, differentiating between proactive (a quest for opportunities) and reactive (in response to a sense of urgency, necessity, or the demands of others) motives^39. In short, motives are (often) complex and interlocking, informed by a mixture of personal inclinations and the local policy context. This paper defines motives as: any stated reason for local climate action – endogenous or exogenous – mentioned by, or on behalf of, a policy actor, institution, or organisation.
Existing studies often overlook how context influences policy entrepreneurs’ ability to affect change^39. This paper defines strategies as: the actions, or suites of actions, operationalised by individual or collective policy actors to promote new ideas and policy innovation as they seek to navigate a specific policy context and influence local climate ambition. When successful, strategies are causal mechanisms that link policy actors and/or institutions to the timely presence and subsequent quality of a climate policy output. While their specific manifestation varies, strategies encompass: framing problems and ideas; developing policy solutions; building coalitions; and seeking opportunities and attention^29.
Entrepreneurial effects can operate expansively across the climate action planning process, from early agenda-setting to policy implementation. Effects can reflect the successful pursual of innovation promotion to intentionally influence the timely presence and subsequent quality of a climate action plan as an important policy output. Effects can also go beyond an agent’s ‘anticipated capacity’, namely: what they originally set out to achieve, to affect changes to wider climate norms, behaviour, and/or governance^40. Finally, effects can vary in their direction (whether they positively or negatively influence local climate ambition) and nature of change (whether they are incremental or transformational).
Empirically, drawing on documentary analysis and elite/expert interviews (see the “Methods” section for details), this paper examines the above theoretical framework to reveal the crucial role of collective local policy entrepreneurship in unfavourable contexts. It uncovers how the motives and strategies pursued by a composite group of policy actors significantly influenced the acceleration of climate action despite high levels of socioeconomic deprivation and limited spending power. In short, the findings respond to a notable policy challenge: how, despite repeated calls from policymakers for all local authorities to lead on the delivery of net zero^41, surprisingly little is known about the capacity of smaller, highly deprived, and resource-constrained local authorities to act on climate change^42.
Having sketched out the main aims and of objectives, the remainder of this paper proceeds as follows: the next section presents the results, applying the motives, strategies, and effects framework to determine the presence/ absence of policy entrepreneurship in Blackpool and any associated causal mechanism(s) which influenced the creation of a high-quality climate policy output, namely Blackpool’s Climate Emergency Action Plan (Document #1). The following section concludes with suggestions for practitioners and future research. Finally, the rationale for case selection and the methodological approach used to distinguish policy entrepreneurship are presented in detail.
Results
This section probes the theoretical approach introduced in the previous section, based on evidence collected through elite/expert interviews with local politicians and policymakers (see Fig. 1). Drawing on Capano and Galanti’s conception of policy entrepreneurship^29, the analysis unravels patterns of agency through which policy actors in the decision-making arena of Blackpool produced a high-quality climate action plan. It begins by explicating evidence on the reasons why policy actors and institutions sought to accelerate local climate ambitions within an unfavourable context, namely their entrepreneurial motives.
Motives
Interviewees expressed a mixture of exogenous (extrinsic) and endogenous (intrinsic and context-specific) motivations for local climate action. Expertise gathered through higher education, research, and exposure to climate change-related impacts outside of – not within – Blackpool were commonly cited as important exogenous motivators. However, interviewees also acknowledged how factors specific to Blackpool were also prominent, with many highlighting how place identity shaped decarbonisation efforts. For example, a desire to regenerate the town through post-industrial placemaking – conscious of its external image as a declining seaside resort – was a recurrent theme across interviews.
Inter-party consensus among local politicians on the need for local climate action was another important endogenous factor. Political leadership came ‘early’ and ‘from the top’ (Interview #2), epitomised by a councillor-led climate emergency declaration in 2019 (Document #3; #4). This coincided with a desire to capitalise on ownership of a suite of public assets, including multiple modes of public transport, housing companies, iconic tourist attractions, and a disused (and ‘economically unviable’) provincial airport (Interview #6, see, e.g., ref. 43).
Climate ambition was accelerated by several passionate council officers motivated by a desire to go above and beyond their job specifications and a broader belief that climate action was the right thing to do. Many acknowledged a sincere commitment to make a difference, with one officer emphasising the importance of political leadership to maintaining momentum for local climate action: ‘if the members lose interest in it ［…］ the push falls apart.’ (Interviewee #2). In short, council officers weren’t solely motivated by delegated responsibility and political support; an intrinsic desire to make a difference was also crucial.
Respondents also repeatedly noted a desire to operationalise and embed climate justice as a normative imperative within Blackpool’s Climate Emergency Action Plan. This was supported by an approach which framed local climate action as an economic opportunity through which wider societal issues – including energy costs – could be tackled. In short, the articulation of local climate ambition was interwoven with place identity:
‘It seems counterintuitive: why are poor people ［…］ arsed about any of this? ［…］ Part of it is to do with ［…］ climate injustice ［…］ being seen, described, and understood as a core part of the condition of injustice and disadvantage in those spaces ［…］ it’s become a more important public policy concern and question ［…］ beyond merely an economic status thing to something that’s about culture ［…, it’s］ different from it being spurred by the fact that ［…］ we’ve had loads of floods recently ［…］ there’s something about the politics of the place ［…］ that’s been a key way that we can explain why ［…］ this has become a big issue.’ (Interview #6).
The evidence so far reveals a mix of exogenous and endogenous motivations for accelerating local climate actions (see Table 1), challenging assumptions that policy entrepreneurship is solely driven by a steadfast desire to implement policy solutions envisioned a priori in favour of a more nuanced, place-based understanding^39.
These motives coalesced to contextualise a collective goal of leading by example within Blackpool’s Climate Emergency Action Plan (Document #1), encapsulated by how despite competing policy priorities there was an institutional desire: ‘to set an example and say this can be done, and then ［…］ maybe other people might do the same.’ (Interview #2; see also Document #23).
The next section will explore how these motives informed the operationalisation of entrepreneurial strategies via a pattern of agency to affect change.
Strategies
When reflecting on how they – or others – went about influencing the creation of Blackpool’s Climate Emergency Action Plan, interviewees evoked Capano and Galanti’s four ‘prevalent activities’ – or entrepreneurial strategies - through which policy actors seek to navigate a specific policy context and bring about policy change, thereby distinguishing themselves from leaders, brokers, and/or experts^29. These strategies encompass: framing problems and ideas; developing policy solutions; building coalitions; and seeking opportunities and attention^29. Importantly, analysis reveals how these strategies were tailored to the local context to create a high-quality climate policy output. The following section examines these archetypal strategies with reference to elite/expert interview data.

Jan. 2022: 61% in
CEUK Climate
Plan Scorecards

Oct. 2023: 21% in CEUK Climate
Action
Scorecards

Climate Change & Environment
Scrutiny Committee established to
scrutinise local climate policy
implementation

| ^N_C^ov_li^.m^2a^0_t^2e^1 ^:	Jun. 2022: Carbon

Jun. 2019: Member-led	^Jan-Feb. ^2021:
Blackpool Climate	^Blackpool	^Climate
Emergency Declaration	^Assembly ^& ^Youth
Climate Assembly

Emergency Action _Em^Tr_i^u_s^s_si^t_o^B_n^a_s^s_R^el_e^in_p^e_ort C^Po^lau^nn c^ai^pl ^pE^rx^oe^vc^eu^dti^bv^ye ^2019-20 ^published

2019	2020	2021 | 2022	2023	2024

Jul. 2022: Local
Government
Chronicle award
received, praises
Blackpool as a
‘plucky underdog’
Tourism, Economy and Communities Scrutiny Committee scrutinise local climate
policy & development of Climate Emergency Action Plan
Fig. 1 | Timeline of climate action planning in Blackpool, informed by analysis of policy documents and elite/expert interview data. This timeline is inexhaustive. It provides a summary of events noted as particularly important to accelerating local climate ambitions during elite/expert interviews.

Table 1 | Typology of entrepreneurial motives in Blackpool
Type of motive
Generic	Higher education/research experience
Experience of climate impacts
Passion and making a difference
Place attachment/identity
Place-based climate action
Leading by example
Blackpool-specific	Post-industrial place-making
Climate (in)justice
Inter-party consensus and political will
Public ownership of disused/carbon-intensive assets
Co-benefits: opportunity for economic growth
Framing problems and ideas
Framing involves rhetorical persuasion, namely making policy ideas (more or less) robust by repackaging existing terms or inventing entirely new ones to frame policy solutions in innovative ways. Effective framing necessitates expertise, time, and/or resources to challenge pre-existing policy agendas and advocate for – or ‘soften up’ - new ideas across diverse stakeholders. Actors can operationalise their ideational agency – namely, an ability to manipulate ‘knowledge and information…to influence the policy design process’^44, which comprises cognitive (technical aspects of an issue) and normative (underlying values) dimensions - to capitalise on polysemy and ideational ambiguity to (re-)articulate ideas in their favour^45. Rhetorical persuasion is particularly effective when it frames a proposed policy solution as inevitable, emphasising the positive valence and emotional intensities underpinning proposed solutions^46.
Framing local climate action as a ‘climate justice’ issue was foundational to maintaining climate action following Blackpool’s climate emergency declaration. Council officers – at various levels of seniority – leveraged their ideational agency to construct the meaning of local climate action. Officers substantiated councillor-led calls to treat local climate action ‘like an emergency’ (Interview #5) by framing climate action as a justice issue to ‘snare’ public interest and embed climate policy implementation within the ‘agenda for tackling inequality’ as opposed to an economic cost (Interview #6; Document #23; see, e.g., ref. 47). This echoes existing literature on the value of emphasising the ‘co-benefits’ of net zero policy^48.
Ideational agency was also crucial to re-framing climate action as an economic opportunity, or ‘new area of business’ (Interview #6), to ensure widespread buy-in across all policy directorates within the council. Interviewees underscored the importance of framing to pacify climate whata- boutism: ‘our emissions per capita are a hell of a lot lower than most other places ［…］ there’s that ［…］ argument ［…］ is it our problem to solve? And we ［…］ translated that into: if Blackpool can make a difference ［…］ that’s ［…］ a marker for other places that are clearly emitting beyond what is reasonable.’ (Interview #5).
This problem framing was disseminated and further developed through dialogue with local residents during Blackpool’s Climate Assembly and Youth Climate Assembly. These events – which were instigated by council officers with a desire to avoid ‘tokenistic’ public consultation – were pivotal to legitimising climate action as a climate justice issue with a diversity of stakeholders and elongating temporal horizons within the council. In responding to the importance of a ‘fair and just transition’ to participants of the Blackpool Climate Assembly, council officers described how they framed local climate action in response to thorny issues of responsibility: ‘we’re not just this ［…］ tiny unitary authority on the Fylde Coast that’s ［…］ got to tick all these boxes ［…］ it’s actually about doing something meaningful for the rest of the town ［…］ we have got a really unique demographic being one of the most deprived ［local authorities in England］.’ (Interview #4).
To this end, actors demonstrated the validity and effectiveness of ‘different ways of knowing’ local climate action through an explicit focus on co-benefits^48. Council officers framed climate policy as a ‘new’ policy agenda, adopting a ‘big bang’ approach to ‘get everybody moving and thinking’ and provide various entry points for people to buy into climate action (Interview #5). This finding lends credence to the notion that while the capacity to – for example - exercise rhetorical persuasion is often most abundant amongst individual actors with substantive epis- temic authority (e.g., policy elites), it can also be effectively exercised by actor collectives with comparatively less ideational power. The effectiveness of this approach was underscored by the direct inclusion of 31 recommendations from the Climate Assemblies within Blackpool’s Climate Emergency Action Plan, alongside a clear emphasis on the cobenefits of climate action and climate justice as key, overarching themes.
To summarise, local climate action was collaboratively framed by council officers – in collaboration with local politicians, experts, and citizens – as a climate justice issue and route to economic growth. In short, the fit between ideational agency (problem framing) and structural factors (the local socio-economic context) mattered.
Developing innovative policy solutions
Actors can pursue policy change by recombining and/or repackaging policies and problems to develop innovative solutions. This often involves ‘developing policy contents with stakeholders and verifying policy solutions with experts’ whilst also amassing evidence to demonstrate the practical and political viability of a proposed policy solution^29. Knowledge and expertise are particularly useful in translating ideas into feasible projects, adapting to politicised contexts, and building effective teams to support the implementation of innovation solutions.
While existing literature often presents climate action planning as ‘a matter for bigger and wealthier cities’^49, council officers identified a plan as an appropriate and feasible next step post-declaration, advocating for the solution across decision-making forums despite capacity constraints. A plan was positioned as a suitable location for an ambitious vision to be articulated, epitomised by the adoption ofa net zero by 2030 target, exceeding the national-level 2050 target. Crucially, this approach was bolstered by crossparty support for the acceleration of climate action and enlisting external experts to deliver key activities (e.g., the Carbon Trust to undertake a ‘gap analysis’ and provide ‘technical upskilling’, Interview #1; Document #26).
An ability to identify and leverage pots of funding (e.g., for Carbon Literacy Training; Document #20, and an internal Climate Action Fund; Document #25) was also central to this approach, with one interviewee describing how: ‘a feature of our entrepreneurial approach is when ［…］ it has a business case, we are unafraid to ［…］ invest ［in local climate action］. Many councils won’t do that, ［but］ we do ［…］ we’re prepared to take appropriate risk to deliver ［…］ in quite innovative ways’ (Interview #6).
Interestingly, despite suggesting that the planning process was (largely) not reliant on ‘inter-authority collaboration’ (Interview #6), interviews did note the importance of translating and adapting policy instruments successfully implemented in other policy contexts or operationalising lessons learned from the Local Governance Association Corporate Peer Challenge (Document #18) to overcome internal capacity constraints (Interview #5). Nonetheless, one respondent noted that they still felt like ‘a poor relation’ when collaborating with other, more well-resourced local authorities (Interview #4) – which might complicate the delivery of climate ambitions articulated in the plan.
In sum, council officers – supported by local politicians, consultants, and experts – capably identified a climate action plan as a suitable policy solution, formulating a way forward that was (relatively) familiar within an institution (a local authority) that is often depicted as prone to pathdependency within existing literatures. Council officers demonstrated a specific capacity to innovate by securing pots of funding, innovatively developing – and where appropriate – taking best practice solutions from other policy contexts to overcome internal capacity constraints. Innovation was epitomised by the implementation of a ‘Climate First’ decision-making model, whereby to receive approval, council strategies/initiatives must demonstrate capability to contribute to net zero delivery.
Building coalitions
Coalition-building – forming alliances between diverse actors to garner support for/against local climate action - often depends on trust-building, effective networking, and an ability to determine an appropriate level of collaboration whilst avoiding unnecessary complexity. Any such judgement is (at least partially) determined by the particularities of the local context.
In Blackpool, coalition-building was skilfully operationalised to circumvent capacity constraints, with emphasis placed on regular scrutiny committee meetings with cross-party representation, establishing a Climate Emergency Steering Group (including local politicians, executive-level officers, and representatives of council-owned but disused assets), and recruiting ambitious recent graduates to form a climate policy team. While public/private sector pay disparities often limited the retention of junior officers, these activities were nonetheless important to help translate climate action across policy areas, dismantle institutional siloes, and establish partnerships with likeminded civil society actors, or ‘critical friends’ (Interviews #2, #7)^50. One interview described how they were ‘always thinking about ［how］ everything ［…］ fits in together ［…］ I have conversations with the library service, with the arts service, and I don’t ［…］ think that a lot of climate teams would do that.’ (Interview #5).
This pattern of agency underpinned the initiation of external partnerships to pursue innovation. Various relationships were established and nurtured with – for example - the Carbon Trust (to develop a carbon baseline, Document #26), TPXimpact (to convene Blackpool’s Climate Assembly, Document #14), and other local authorities in Lancashire (to pool resources and jointly commission reports, Document #29; #30).
This approach was central to sustaining support for local climate action in Blackpool despite capacity and resource constraints; underpinned by a fundamental belief that the presence of an imperfect plan was preferable to the absence of a plan and signified a substantive political achievement^51. In short, coalition-building had a demonstrable influence on the quality of Blackpool’s Climate Emergency Action Plan, underscored by the identification of key delivery partners and commitment to establish a Climate Action Partnership (Document #7).
Seeking opportunities and attention
Innovation promotion can also involve seeking out opportunities and attention from a range of actors – whether internal or external to a local authority – and strategically recognising, creating, or manipulating decisionmaking arenas across policy contexts and/or governance scales. To this end, actors might collaboratively shift between – or even create – decisionmaking venues and utilise focusing events and/or windows of opportunity to affect policy change. This strategy often relies on social acuity, political acumen, and access to relevant decision-makers and resources.
In Blackpool, officers with a climate policy remit recognised that ‘for most people the action plan ［…］ was the first real significant interaction with ［climate change］ in a workplace situation‘ and an opportunity to introduce local climate action ‘as a public policy concern’ (Interview #6). In response, officers worked across decision-making venues to ensure climate change was consistently included as an agenda item across council committees spanning different policy areas previously considered to be distinct from climate change (Interview #2). They also noted the importance of strategically utilising different decision-making arenas to ensure the input of a diversity of perspectives into the planning process (Interview #3).
The ability of council officers – at varying levels of seniority – to identify, and capitalise on, windows of opportunity was central to maintaining climate ambition, epitomised by one council officer’s reflection on an idealistic desire to: ‘go full tilt and do on street charging ［…, install］ solar panel［s］ on every roof’ while acknowledging that climate action is ‘far from a lot of people’s imagination’ due to structural constraints, and that there was ‘a bit of an ‘Overton Window’ ［…］ really: what is achievable at this moment in time with what I’ve got in this context?’ (Interview #5).
Cross-party support for climate action was reflected in the relative lack of opposition actors (e.g., rival politicians with carbon-intensive vested interests) leveraging climate intermediaries (e.g., local journalists) to promote counter-narratives in a confrontational manner. While representatives of the local Green party did employ some outsider-lobbying strategies to advocate for more radical policy interventions (Interview #9), a lack of electoral success stymied their influence. Instead, local politicians set a collaborative, consensual tone through transparent engagement with external actors to ratchet up local climate ambitions (Interview #8).
The preceding evidence illustrates a composite group of climate officers who enlisted the support of climate leaders and experts and adopted a range of innovative strategies to ensure the timely and effective presence of a high- quality climate policy output in an unfavourable context. Nonetheless, some policy actors questioned their ability to have a clearly identifiable, ‘singular influence’ on local climate ambitions^29. This links to the final element of the theoretical framework: entrepreneurial effects.
Effects
When reflecting on their individual agency, interviewees often downplayed their own impact but were happy to praise others. One senior council officer suggested that that they had been ‘helpful’ but not ‘transformational’ (Interview #6), acknowledging that they played a role in legitimising local climate planning, but that their success was contingent on the activities of less senior council officers, cross-party political support, and the contributions of external organisations with specific expertise. Meanwhile, a midlevel council officer acknowledged that while it was ‘very difficult’ to objectively distinguish their influence, if they hadn’t been involved, certain policy outcomes likely ‘wouldn’t have happened yet’, pots of funding for policy solution might not have been secured (with the majority of actions in the Climate Emergency Plan being fully costed, Document #1), and external relationships might not have been nurtured so assiduously (Interview #5). Similarly, they acknowledged that they had repeatedly gone ‘above and beyond what was expected’ of them, and in some instances even exhibited ‘bloody mindedness’ to affect policy change despite resource and capacity constraints (Interview #5).
Consequently, while policy officers shouldered varying degrees of responsibility, policy entrepreneurship could not be attributed to any one heroic, individual actor. Instead, a composite, ‘core group’ of climate policy actors assembled within the decision-making arena of Blackpool within ‘the teeth of austerity’ successfully pursued innovation promotion to create a high-quality climate policy output (Interview #6).
Interviewees noted how an actor collective operationalised an ‘holistic approach’ (Interview #2) to simultaneously frame the problems of the town in a new way (e.g., as a climate justice issue to legitimise climate action in the absence of any statutory obligation to deliver net zero^52), develop innovative policy solutions to further legitimise planning (e.g., advocating for the creation of a climate action plan as a feasible way forward within an institution prone to path-dependency), engaged in coalition-building to support change (e.g., by effectively orchestrating internal and external actors), and successfully pursued opportunities for financial resources and attention (e.g., by securing funding early on).
This collective pattern of agency demonstrably influenced the timely presence of a high-quality climate action plan. Blackpool’s Climate Assembly was repeatedly mentioned as an innovative solution tailored to the local policy context, with one interviewee noting: ‘you could argue ［…］ can we not just have an off-the-peg delivery model, because actually that will speed things up? ［…］ there are other organisations ［that］ did that, but ［…］ we ended up with a very “Blackpool” model that would work for us’ (Interview #5).
Notably, this collective pattern of agency also influenced longer-term normative changes, which helped institutionalise climate ambition:
‘It’s been a slow burn ［…］ we’ve ［…］ deliberately made choices ［…］ that will make other people think this is worthwhile ［…］ decarbonisation ［…］ is ［now］ a core part of our Economic Development Strategy ［…］ five years ago ［…］ people thought this was nothing to do with them, now ［…］ climate change has acquired legitimacy and purpose ［…］ independent of the core team and me ［…］ by other people thinking, that’s no longer a problem or an imposition, actually there’s something in this that will help with ［…］ wider social policy objectives or economic development objectives ［…］ that’s a sea change where we were in 2019 ［…］ part of ［w］hat’s been achieved ［is］ by deliberately doing things that disrupt ［…］ perception［s］.’ (Interview #6).
Interviewees (e.g., #4, #5) attributed this change to collectively nurturing an institutional culture of ‘innovation, collaboration, and purpose’^9 to enable ambitious – yet resource-constrained – actors to punch above their weight.
This pattern of agency was praised at the 2022 Local Government Chronicle awards, where judges applauded solutions designed ‘with affordability in mind’ and ‘the can-do spirit of the plucky underdog’ (Document #25).
Discussion and outlook
This paper has addressed an important gap in the existing literature, which spotlights descriptive accounts of likely pioneers – namely, large, well- resourced, and highly connected cities – by revealing how policy actors can operationalise a pattern of agency to accelerate climate ambitions within unfavourable contexts.
It makes a distinct contribution to literature which conceptualises policy entrepreneurship as a collective pattern of agency, challenging the tendency to reify individual policy actors as lone wolves that miraculously achieve policy change^29. Instead, it reveals how – buttressed by political leadership and expert input – place-based strategies operationalised by a composite group of policy actors with diverse motivations and deep knowledge of the local context are likely to be more effective than off-the- shelf solutions parachuted in from other contexts by a single, heroic actor.
In Blackpool, climate ambitions were accelerated by a collaborative, diverse coalition of actors with varied experience, resource, and ability to affect policy change. A group of council officers – underpinned by crossparty consensus on the urgency of climate action – catalysed climate action planning processes in a bid to translate an ‘emergency’ framing into postdeclaration activity. Council officers articulated a framing of climate action as a justice issue and route to economic growth, cognisant of high levels of socio-economic deprivation in the town and wider post-industrial aspirations. This framing legitimised planning across internal policy directorates and was further disseminated and developed through two Climate Assemblies. Meanwhile, officers continuously sought out opportunities to obtain funding and build coalitions to support the planning process, tackle capacity constraints, and ultimately ‘do more with less’. This approach also resulted in longer-term normative changes, namely the ‘mainstreaming’ of local climate action.
These findings underscore a need for more research on local climate policy entrepreneurship, and specifically the extent to which it: (1) can be cultivated; (2) shapes local climate ambitions across an even broader range of (un)favourable contexts; and (3) helps close the gap between ambitious climate rhetoric and policy action.
Firstly, research should examine the extent to which (and how) policy entrepreneurship can be systematically incentivised^53 to accelerate local climate ambitions, and whether this is even feasible within unfavourable contexts. While understudied, climate managers – actors with formal designated responsibility to act on climate change that can resemble policy entrepreneurs^54 – can create dedicated committees and divert budget streams to prioritise climate action. Formal training schemes for council officers have even institutionalised some of the theoretical tenets underpinning policy entrepreneurship explored in this paper, but their role in net zero implementation is less clear^55, and more could be done to encourage the adoption of entrepreneurial strategies attuned to local contexts. Meanwhile, net zero delivery might also be facilitated through, for example, the establishment of diverse knowledge sharing networks which pool best practice entrepreneurial strategies across local authorities with similar contexts^56. Future research should explore whether incentivising policy entrepreneurship helps or hinders local climate action.
Secondly, comparative research should examine why, how and to what effect policy entrepreneurship – as a collective pattern of agency focused on policy innovation – determines local climate ambitions across a range of (un)favourable contexts. For instance, future research could examine a broader range of cases to explore the extent to which policy actors within unlikely laggards (namely, local authorities with favourable contexts but low-quality climate policy outputs) exercise their agency to strategically delegitimise climate action to renege on net zero commitments. In short, more research is required to examine the generalisability of findings concerning the relative importance of policy entrepreneurship across the full
Table 2 | structural and political factors situating Blackpool as an unlikely pioneer
Blackpool Borough Council: an unlikely pioneer?
Spending power (2021) | Bottom 20%^a
Socio-economic deprivation (2019) | Top 10%^a
Political control (2021) | Labour minority^b
Climate action plan quality (2021) | Top 30%^a
^aPercentile scores are relative to other single-tier local authorities only.
^bBetween 2015 and 2019 Blackpool Council was under Labour majority control.

scale of more and less favourable local contexts. This is crucial to further diversify a literature which otherwise privileges analysis of elite, well- resourced, highly connected and highly successful local authorities, and can have important implications for how climate policy entrepreneurship can, for example, avoid inscribing democratic deficits^57.
Finally, while this paper has shed light on the role of policy entrepreneurship in creating an innovative climate policy output, the role of agency in operationalising that ambition – by implementing climate policy outputs – remains in the shadows. Some scholars suggest plans function as paper tigers, codifying ‘policies that were likely to happen anyway’^58, while others situate planning as a form of ‘performative decarbonisation’ and a necessary route to funding^59, and some have even lauded their potential as boundary objects capable of dismantling institutional siloes^50. A key avenue for future research lies in understanding whether the agency that helped produce an innovative climate plan can be sustained to ensure its implementation – or if agents encounter resistance that stymies the translation of ambition into action. Future research should look, therefore, beyond the plan creation process and towards the context-specific patterns of agency that might determine whether plans lead to meaningful emission reductions, attract subnational investment to overcome structural constraints, or provide anchor points to implement lasting governance innovations.
Methods
Case selection
This paper focuses on Blackpool, UK, a local authority operating in an unfavourable policy context that produced a high-quality climate action plan. English local government is commonly depicted as a singular, monolithic entity. This clouds the realities of implementing climate policy solutions and is often accompanied by nebulous policy slogans which wax and wane at the whims of national administrations, exemplified by the 2019 ‘levelling-up’ agenda^60.
The challenges of implementing net zero in the UK are ‘Kafkaesque’^61. Decades of phased incremental reform and the absence of formal devolved authority typify the English local climate governance landscape^62. This landscape is broadly characterised by single- and two-tier local authority structures (where decision-making authority is owned by one local authority or is split between tiers, respectively; for more detail, see refs. 63–65). In response to this landscape of differentiated responsibility, a bottom-up institutional landscape has mushroomed, encapsulated by the emergence of Climate Commissions^66. However, this landscape risks sub- optimal, ‘improvisatory and compensatory’^67 climate action due to its ‘fis- siparous complexity’^68.
Meanwhile, austerity has stretched and questioned the territorial boundaries of local government. Local authorities are required to do more with less over larger areas. The diminution of public service capacity has perpetuated ‘uneven geographies of climate urbanism’^5, disproportionately impacting structurally disadvantaged local authorities and perpetuating inequitable burden sharing in net zero commitments across the UK^69.
To this end, while subnational investment is commonly labelled insufficient, it is also inappropriate; a ‘competitive deal-making ethos’ privileges economic considerations over meaningful consideration of social and/or environmental justice, often re-inscribing regional inequalities by pitting ‘winners’ against ‘losers’^70.
Ultimately, the challenges faced by local government in implementing net zero mirror a series of interlocking ‘Westminster pathologies’: short- termism, reactivity, fragmentation, siloed working practices, incrementalism, and a top-down policymaking^71.
In response, Blackpool was purposefully selected as a particularly puzzling, least-likely crucial case study^72 location with high levels of socioeconomic deprivation and low spending power yet high climate ambition (see Table 2 for an overview, and Supplementary Table 1 for a breakdown of the plan quality score). Case selection was underpinned by a desire to examine the extent to which structure and agency influence local climate ambition within an unfavourable context, and the extent to which local policy actors and institutions resemble policy entrepreneurs who influence the creation of a high-quality climate policy output.
In summary, particularly innovative features of Blackpool’s Climate Emergency Action Plan include (but are by no means limited to): a council target of net zero by 2030 (compared to national-level 2050 target); integration of climate change into the core of council decision-making through a ‘Climate First’ model whereby all council strategies/initiatives must contribute to achieving net zero; a commitment to ‘lead by example’ by operationalising a climate justice framing and implementing a socio-economic duty to consider the impact of policy solutions on lower income groups and underscore co-benefits of local climate action despite high deprivation levels; deriving 31 actions directly from the Blackpool Climate Assembly; identification of funding sources for the majority of actions, jurisdictionwide partners for ‘shovel ready’ policy solutions, and commitments to create a Climate Action Fund and local Climate Action Partnership working across institutional boundaries; and coordination/integration with other local plans (e.g., Greater Lancashire Plan).
However, climate action plan quality provides a partial proxy of local climate ambition. The Climate Plan Scorecards dataset is cross-sectional, offering a static measure of local climate ambition, whereas plans are ‘living’ documents which undergo iterative revision. The limitations of climate plans as a proxy are further explored in the discussion and outlook section of this paper.
Meanwhile, this paper also depends on qualitative insights – namely researcher interpretation and local policy actors with substantive contextual expertise as ‘proxy identifiers’ - to distinguish policy entrepreneurship^73. This leaves room for bias. In response, future research could leverage the complementary insights of a mixed-methods approach by including policy entrepreneurship as an independent variable within cross-case regression analysis of the determinants of local climate ambition. Such a design would help specify the relative importance of the motives, strategies, and effects of policy entrepreneurs to local climate ambition, alongside other relevant contextual factors.
Qualitative process tracing analysis
Following case study selection, qualitative analysis combined insights from documentary analysis – of climate action plans, meeting minutes, press releases, and local news articles – and elite, semi-structured interviews to examine the policy actors and institutions involved in the creation of Blackpool’s Climate Emergency Action Plan (see Supplementary Table 2). This approach was underpinned by a definition of climate action plans as framework documents ‘through which the development, communication and implementation of local climate ambition is articulated’^74.
Documentary analysis was used to establish a timeline of events (see Fig. 1) informing the creation of Blackpool’s Climate Emergency Action Plan, identify potential interviewees, and specific items to be explored further during interviews.
More specifically, process tracing analysis – namely, the analysis of evidence on ‘processes, sequences, and conjuncture of events within a case’ to explore and/or develop theoretical expectations that might help explain the occurrence of high climate ambition in an unfavourable context^75 – was used to causally connect motives, strategies, and effects underpinning climate action planning processes in Blackpool. This approach examined whether causal mechanisms – namely systems ‘of interlocking parts that transmit causal forces from X to Y’^75 – linking local policy actors and institutions to a high-quality climate policy output exist, and if so, how these causal mechanisms operate within an unfavourable context.
Supplementary Table 3 details the nine elite interviews that were completed with a mixture of policy actors, including local politicians, council officers, journalists, academics, and consultants. When recruiting interviewees, the collation of a diversity of views from actors with varying levels of seniority either inside or outside of Blackpool Council was prioritised to mitigate against bias towards examples of high-profile actors engaging in policy entrepreneurship, given the importance of street-level policy entrepreneurship to the 2019 proliferation of climate emergency declarations^38.
Following the recruitment of a prominent local policy actor identified through documentary analysis, a snowball sampling technique was operationalised according to positional and reputational criteria^76. A chainreferral process – whereby interviewees shortlisted influential actors they perceived to play a particularly important role in the local climate action planning process – was initiated to recruit any further participants.
An interview schedule was used as a guide, rather than a strict format, for semi-structured interviews to facilitate conversation flow and the pursuit of follow-up questions. Participants were asked to reflect on why they engaged in local climate action planning, how they went about influencing the development of Blackpool’s Climate Emergency Action Plan, and how they reflected on their involvement in the planning process. More generally, interviewees were encouraged to reflect on local climate policy and planning before, during, and after the creation of the plan. Attention was also paid to any challenges and opportunities associated with net zero delivery.
Interview transcripts were systematically analysed, combining deductive and inductive coding to reflect on the entrepreneurial motives, strategies, and effects presented by interviewees. Particular attention was paid not only to how interviewees reflected on their own involvement in creating Blackpool’s Climate Emergency Action Plan, but also to their reflections on the activities of other policy actors and institutions locally, cognisant that local policy actors - or ‘proxy identifiers’ - with substantive contextual expertise can mitigate against bias arising through researcher identification of policy entrepreneurship^73. Meanwhile, interviewees may (un)intention- ally over-/underrepresent their role in proceedings. For example, council officers might downplay their role in political decision-making due to their impartial, apolitical role or suffer from memory lapses. In response, and in accordance with the theoretical framework, motives, strategies, and effects were operationalised as overarching a priori themes. More specific themes were developed during analysis based on commonalities and divergences in the ways actors reflected on their role in proceedings. These emergent themes included: climate justice, orchestration, strategic flexibility, and legitimacy. This approach facilitated critical reflection on the contextdependent nature of policy entrepreneurship.
Following coding, themes were triangulated with findings from documentary analysis to maximise the probative value of evidence collected, the strength of any causal inferences made, and the likelihood of reliably distinguishing policy entrepreneurship from other functions of agency.
Identifying policy entrepreneurship
Existing literature on policy entrepreneurship exhibits a surprising lack of consensus on how best to distinguish the presence and/or activity of policy entrepreneurship. It notes difficulties disentangling structure (socio-economic, demographic, and political factors) and agency (the motives, strategies, and effects operationalised by policy actors). Consequently, disentangling serendipitous policy change from the decisive actions of policy entrepreneurs can be challenging (see, e.g., ref. [77]). A range of elicitation strategies populate existing studies, oscillating between relying on an ‘I know it when I see it’ standard involving pragmatic judgements about when ‘enough is enough’ through to highly specified rubrics used to decisively distinguish ‘entrepreneurs from other advocates, experts, and political figures’^78.
A corresponding variety of data sources and methodological approaches – including surveying policy actors, polling policy experts, and combining elite interviews and documentary analysis – have been proposed to distinguish policy entrepreneurs. Arnold et al.^78 provide a cogent summary: ‘scholars find policy entrepreneurs by asking elites and experts to point them out, querying secondary sources, surveying possible entrepreneurs, and focussing on high-profile advocates’.
Determining an appropriate elicitation approach depends on what definition of policy entrepreneurship is adopted. Any definition should be underpinned by a high degree of ‘discriminating power’ to avoid ‘misgathering’ information^79. An operationalised definition of policy entrepreneurship as a specific pattern of action adopted by a policy actor to promote new ideas and policy innovation as they seek to navigate a specific policy context and achieve their objectives was adopted.
This definition is intentionally broad. It facilitates the precise identification of a range of motives, strategies, and effects that might wax and wane throughout climate action planning processes. It distinguishes policy actors from the strategies they employ to facilitate the identification of causal mechanisms and future cross-case comparative research.
Data availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author (A.G.). All relevant data are available from the author with the restriction that the anonymity of the interviewees must be guaranteed.
Received: 27 November 2024; Accepted: 6 June 2025;
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the interview participants who took time out of their busy schedules to speak to me. For helpful comments, I would also like to thank those who organised and/or attended the Würzburg writers’ workshop on Local Authorities on Their Way to Climate, the workshop organisers for financial support, and Andy Jordan, Pierre Bocquillon, and Lucas Geese. Finally, I would like to thank the School of Environmental Sciences (University of East Anglia) and the Leverhulme Trust-funded Critical Decade for Climate Change Doctoral Scholars programme for supporting this research.
Author contributions
A.G.: conceptualisation; investigation; methodology; formal analysis; writing – original draft preparation and editing; project management.
Competing interests
The author declares no competing interests.
Additional information
Supplementary information The online version contains supplementary material available at
https://doi.org/10.1038/s44168-025-00266-x.
Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to Alfie Gaffney.
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© The Author(s) 2025
e-mail: a.gaffney@uea.ac.uk

npj Climate Action | ( 2025)4 :66

npj ClimateAction| ( 2025) 4:66