It’s All in the Details: Comparing and Explaining Variation in the ‘Policy Specificity’ of Sub-City Climate Activities, 2019-2022

Tobin, Paul and Carter, Neil and Barritt, Joshua and Sanders, Anna and Jackson, James (2025). It’s All in the Details: Comparing and Explaining Variation in the ‘Policy Specificity’ of Sub-City Climate Activities, 2019-2022. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-858143

The science behind climate change has been established, and now the mitigation of climate change has become a political puzzle. We need to act quickly to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change, and so this project is designed to find and then share effective policy solutions that can be used across society.

Until very recently, attempted solutions for climate change were 'top down': for example, the United Nations organised annual conferences, and those countries responsible for producing the most greenhouse gases dominated these negotiations. However, this approach for dealing with climate change has failed to generate effective change quickly enough, and academics are looking for new governance solutions for this most pressing and significant of issues.

Data description (abstract)

Between late 2019 and early 2022, London boroughs developed CAPs that outlined how each borough sought to meet its climate targets; 25 boroughs aimed to be net zero or carbon neutral regarding their own estate and operations by 2030, while the others varied in their deadline years, from 2025 (Tower Hamlets) to 2040 (Havering). All these CAPs are publicly available.

The cross-London London Councils association published a spreadsheet collating each goal from every CAP divided across nine climate policy programmes developed by the boroughs (based on information as of 15th June 2022).

An additional policy area – ‘air quality’ – overlaps with climate policy but is distinct, and so we do not include air quality within our analysis; however, we coded these policies and include them within our supplementary file. Bexley (Conservative-led), Hackney, and Waltham Forest (both Labour-led) did not produce Climate Plans in time to be included in this analysis, resulting in a final dataset of 29 boroughs. We counted the number of policies for each programme and borough, thus obtaining the 'policy density' scores.

The final dataset contained 2,545 policies, of which 2,508 pertained to climate activities (37 were for air quality more broadly) and are subsequently analysed.

Data creators:

Creator Name	Affiliation	ORCID (as URL)
Tobin Paul	University of Manchester	https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3024-8213
Carter Neil	University of York
Barritt Joshua	University of Manchester
Sanders Anna	University of York
Jackson James	University of Manchester

Sponsors:

ESRC

Grant reference:

ES/S014500/1

Topic classification:

Natural environment
Politics

Keywords:

CLIMATE CHANGE, ENVIRONMENT POLICY, INNER CITIES, CLIMATE PROTECTION, ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT

Project title:

Polycentric pioneers? Explaining variations in governance models and their impacts on local climate change policy

Alternative title:

Coding of London boroughs' Climate Action Plans

Grant holders:

Paul Tobin

Project dates:

From	To
1 January 2020	29 September 2024

Date published:

10 Nov 2025 15:21

Last modified:

10 Nov 2025 15:22

Coverage and Methodology

Collection period:

Date from:	Date to:
1 September 2019	1 May 2022

Geographical area:

London

Country:

United Kingdom

Spatial unit:

Administrative > London Boroughs

Data collection method:

To analyse the specificity of the policies, we create a five-point coding scale. We allocate one point if a policy is a vague aspiration that is not actionable, such as improvements to the environment in general, but the imprecision of the activity means that it would be difficult to establish whether the pledge had been accomplished. From there, we give two points to those policies that are specific enough to be actionable (and therefore can be accomplished), but that lack detail in three key areas: scope, time period, and standards, as we explore below. We weight these different areas equally, but future studies wishing to give greater emphasis to particular priorities could weight them differently. Hence, we award one further point each if the activity provides specific details about the following three features:
• the ‘scope’ of the activity (how many/who are the units/factories/roads are affected by the activity; see Knill et al, 2012; Schaffrin et al., 2015);
• the time period for the policy to be achieved;
• and the exact standards to be met, such as a specific technology to be employed, a certain certification to be secured, or a percentage goal to be achieved (see Table 1).
Crucially, this scoring system means that any policy in any issue area can obtain any score, thus enabling comparison between diverse policy areas.

Observation unit:

Geographic unit

Kind of data:

Numeric, Text

Type of data:

Qualitative and mixed methods data

Resource language:

English

Access and Administration