Call for papers! Dr. Tamara Krawchenko editing special edition

October 01, 2026

Climate action is increasingly being advanced by cities and regions; Indigenous governments and communities; civil-society organizations; firms and investors; courts; universities; public utilities; and transnational networks. These actors can create important openings for innovation, learning, locally responsive action, and new forms of collaboration. But they can also raise difficult questions about democratic accountability, legitimacy, equity, coordination, and whether voluntary or alternative arrangements risk substituting for necessary public leadership.

Dr. Tamara Krawchenko, Associate Professor in the School of Public Administration and Associate Director of UVic’s Institute for Integrated Energy Systems is guest editing a special issue of Frontiers in Sustainability with Dr. Erika Wolters, Oregon State University.  The Frontiers in Climate Research Topic, “Climate action beyond government leadership: Workarounds, Alternative Authorities, and the Politics of Governing in an Era of State Retrenchment,” asks a timely question: What happens when governments do not lead—or do not lead consistently—on climate change?

The Research Topic invites scholarship on how mitigation, adaptation, resilience, just transition, and climate accountability are organized and contested where government action is weak, fragmented, absent, resistant, or in retreat. It is especially interested in work that assesses the conditions under which alternative forms of authority generate durable and equitable outcomes—and when they instead displace responsibility, reproduce inequalities, or normalize governmental abdication.

Contributions are welcome across a wide range of themes, including:

• Climate action by cities, regions, provinces, states, and local governments amid national inaction or policy reversal.
• Indigenous-led, community-led, cooperative, and place-based climate action.
• Community energy, energy democracy, local ownership, and distributed infrastructure.
• Transnational municipal and regional networks, policy learning, and climate-policy diffusion.
• Civil-society mobilization, advocacy coalitions, youth activism, and knowledge networks.
• Climate litigation, rights-based strategies, accountability mechanisms, and public-interest governance.
• Private governance, corporate commitments, investor action, disclosure, supply chains, and voluntary standards.
• Climate finance and philanthropy in contexts of public underinvestment.
• Adaptation, resilience, just transition, and climate justice in under-resourced or fragmented governance settings.
• Climate obstruction, delay, backlash, and strategies for countering retrenchment.
• Questions of participation, transparency, representation, authority, and the distribution of climate benefits and burdens.

The call welcomes empirical, theoretical, comparative, methodological, historical, ethnographic, participatory, Indigenous, decolonial, qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods, network-based, geospatial, and systematic-review contributions. The submission deadline is April 5, 2027.