In this guest post, Mads Leth Jakobsen, Helle Ørsted Nielsen, Oluf Gøtzsche-Astrup, and Daniel Skov Gregersen discuss the research from their recently published article in Environmental Politics: Internal climate leadership in municipal organizations. How paradoxical and transformational leadership of higher-level management shape climate leadership of lower-level managers.
Cities play a key role in climate governance, which makes the internal leadership of city organizations important. Existing research has focused on the way cities interact with outside actors, like companies and civil society, and provide leadership for other cities and public organizations. Less attention has been paid to the side of leadership internal to the city organisation. Our new article “Internal climate leadership in municipal organizations” published in Environmental Politics explores this theme.
A key challenge in climate leadership is how higher level management can help lower level managers include climate goals into their own leader practice. As most cities handle many responsibilities, climate goals across the organization must be integrated into the leadership of lower level managers. For many managers, climate goals are an additional task rather than part of their core responsibilities. Managers working with environmental, technical, and building issues are typically the only ones who have climate goals as part of their core task. This makes climate leadership a real dilemma for front line managers in other organizational areas, where they must balance core tasks with climate goals.
Paradoxical leadership is leadership where leaders seek to help followers like lower-level managers make sense of dilemmas in their work. We argue that paradoxical leadership is likely to be important for climate leadership. Moreover, in policy areas where climate goals are less central, it should be more important than classical transformational leadership focused on developing, communicating and sustaining visions of climate goals. Therefore, in our article we compare paradoxical leadership with transformational leadership.
We examine this idea by surveying employees in the city of Aarhus (Denmark’s second largest city and home to 365,000 inhabitants and 22,000 municipal employees). Danish municipalities are multi-purpose organizations with considerable policy-making powers and broad implementation responsibilities. Although municipalities are not assigned a formal role in the implementation of Denmark’s climate law, all 98 Danish municipalities have adopted climate plans that aim to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 or sooner.
Aarhus is a climate policy frontrunner, setting a goal in 2008 to become climate neutral by 2030. The city has reaffirmed and refined this goal in subsequent strategies and action plans, most recently in 2024. This strategy covers core climate policy portfolios such as energy, mobility and urban development. But it also aims to integrate climate objectives into portfolios that do not have climate and environment as their core task, including education, health and social services. We therefore use a distinction between areas with high climate fit (environment, technique and planning) and low climate fit (e.g., welfare services) to examine the relationship between higher level managers’ use of paradoxical and visionary leadership and the inclusion of climate goals in the leadership of lower level managers across policy areas.
Our main finding is that paradoxical leadership is stronger and more positively related to including climate goals in the leadership of lower level managers than visionary leadership. This relationship is especially pronounced in areas with low climate fit, such as welfare and administration. The results suggest that leadership plays an important role, amongst other factors, for internal city governance, and that especially the meaning-making of paradoxical leadership is relevant for climate leadership in cities.
These findings have practical implications for managers in city organisations seeking to integrate climate goals across areas. First, our results indicate that senior managers should focus on creating meaning when dilemmas and contradictions arise between lower level managers’ different goals. Second, our results suggest that this approach might have a larger potential in areas where climate goals are less central, such as welfare, health and administration. Third, and finally, our results indicate the importance of understanding internal leadership for ensuring the implementation of ambitious climate plans in city organizations.
Bios: Mads Leth Jakobsen is deputy center director of King Frederik Center for Public Leadership and associate professor at the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University. His recent research focuses on leadership and governance of climate change and other complex societal challenges.
Helle Ørsted Nielsen is a senior researcher in the departments of Environmental Science and Political Science at Aarhus University. Her research focuses on implementation of climate and environmental policies and on the role of municipalities in climate governance.
Oluf Gøtzsche-Astrup is associate professor at the Department of Psychology and Behavioural Sciences at Aarhus University. His research focuses on leadership, climate change, and the psychology of social movements.
Daniel Skov Gregersen is a project manager and an analyst at King Frederik Center for Public Leadership at the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University. His research focuses on motivation, organizational development, leadership and climate change.
