Knowledge Management Across Multiple Levels

Article investigates current practices of climate action managers and envisions an effective, innovative multilevel knowledge system for municipal climate action

  • News 11.09.2020

Municipal climate action is an essential element to mitigate climate change. Over the past decades, cities around the world have turned into vibrant fields of action, interventions, and experimentation to encounter climate change. This proactive engagement is promising and leads to valuable knowledge creation in these cities. However, how this knowledge be managed to ensure that their progress turns into a steady transition towards sustainability and does not only represent short-term success? It is still unclear how new forms of multilevel urban governance should acquire, store, create, or disseminate knowledge.

Against this background, Manuel Bickel, Researcher in the Production and Consumption Systems Research Unit in the Sustainable Production and Consumption Division at the Wuppertal Institute, Dr. Dr. Guido Caniglia, Scientific Director of the Konrad Lorenz Institute, Dr. Annika Weiser, Researcher at the Faculty of Sustainability of the Leuphana University, as well as the professors Prof. Dr. Daniel Lang and Prof. Dr. Thomas Schomerus from the this faculty conducted interviews with 14 municipal climate action managers in the regional centers of Lower Saxony. In their article "Multilevel knowledge management for municipal climate action: Lessons from evaluating the operational situation of climate action managers in the German Federal State of Lower Saxony", they linked the findings with conceptual considerations from knowledge management.
The researchers suggest that policies for effective decision-making should be based on local knowledge, should promote multilevel exchange of explicit and tacit knowledge for implementation, and should enable open-ended learning processes that leverage local innovations for creating usable transformational knowledge.

The article "Multilevel knowledge management for municipal climate action: Lessons from evaluating the operational situation of climate action managers in the German Federal State of Lower Saxony" is published in the Journal of Cleaner Production (Volume 277). Since the 4 September 2020 it may be accessed free of charge for 50 days for non-commercial purposes via the following share link.


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