Overcoming the implementation gap: everyday barriers and enablers of urban climate governance

This article investigates the persistent implementation gap in urban climate governance through an ethnographic study of Los Angeles's municipal climate planners. While cities are increasingly cast as climate leaders, celebrated for their innovation and proximity to communities, their climate plans often remain symbolic and aspirational. Drawing on two years of participant observation and interviews inside Los Angeles City Hall, this article develops a typology of nine categorical barriers that obstruct implementation, spanning institutional, political, bureaucratic, epistemic, scalar, economic, infrastructural, social, and legal domains. These barriers are dynamic and compounding forces that emerge through specific institutional, political, and material configurations, often shifting roles across contexts and over time. The article illustrates how bureaucrats and planners navigate fragmented systems, shifting mandates, and regulatory constraints through informal coordination, relational labor, and ad hoc improvisation. In addition, the article identifies enabling conditions that temporarily stabilize action under constraint, often arising from fragile alignments of actors, mandates, resources, and informal practices. These enabling mechanisms emerge contingently and unevenly, often through fragile alignments of actors, tools, and opportunity. By shifting attention from plan design to everyday governance practice and implementation, this article contributes to critical debates on the limits of urban climate leadership, the politics of municipal capacity, and the infrastructural labor of implementation. The case of Los Angeles illustrates how implementation gaps are expressions of deeper structural tensions between climate ambition and municipal constraint.