Do decision-maker diversity, trust, and policy entrepreneurship matter when steering transformative urban climate governance?

Under threat from increasingly frequent and intense climate hazards, local communities are seeking to transform into more climate-ready and resilient spaces. To achieve this aim, they must have the capacity to govern challenging transformative processes. Here, the relationship between patterned interactions among people involved in governance and transformative capacity are assessed. These interactions form the networked micro-decision context (NMDC). The paper leverages a unique dataset on climate resiliency in 401 U.S. cities to test whether the composition of the NMDC and the quality of interactions among its members affect a city's transformative governance capacity. Survey results are nuanced with 22 interviews with NMDC members in three climate-vulnerable cities. The results indicate that NMDCs with high disciplinary diversity, trusting relationships, and a policy entrepreneur exhibited higher levels of transformative governance capacity. The findings emphasize the importance of public administration in enabling ambitious environmental policy and promoting local climate readiness.