The German Energy Transition and climate change in urban development. Between discursive goals and actual practices

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Climate change and the energy transition are currently among the major challenges for cities and affect nearly all communal spheres of activity. While superficially in many political statements there seems to a lot of approval of the necessity for adaptations and transformations, practical implementation advances very differently in individual cities. The proposed project picks up on this tension between political discourse on climate conscious and energy efficient urban planning on the one hand and its implementation in actual local practices on the other. Following a political-geographic perspective, the research centers on the question, why the implementation of climate and energy related targets progresses so differently and by which power-knowledge-relations this can be explained. Drawing on theories of discourse and governmentality, two cities are analyzed, in which norms of energy and climate politics have found their way into political actions to very different degrees. Firstly Münster, which has received several awards for its ecological and climate politics, secondly Dresden, which does not participate in certification programs and ecological awards and has so far shown little palpable actions to implement energy and climate related targets. In the analysis, practices of local protagonists are conceptualized as the effects of systems of knowledge which are constituted on and between different scales as well as technologies of government (in the Foucauldian sense). Methodically both corpus analytical methods of institutionally produced texts as well as qualitative approaches which capture the rationalities and problem perceptions of local actors are applied. With this focus and empirical approach the project contributes to answering the question, how political contents travel, how they are locally adopted and transformed and why political targets are implemented very differently in local contexts. With its empirical focus on discursive-textual processes on the one hand and concrete political and planning practices on the other, the project considers in particular the tension between talking/writing about things and actual decisions and material transformations.