Climate Change, Governance, and Risk Perceptions in Urban Contexts

This dissertation provides a foundation for understanding who decides and proceed local climate change policymaking, how race and ethnicity, class, and political ideology inform climate beliefs, the role of personal exposure to heat-related illnesses in climate change beliefs, and finally differences in perceptions of local extreme heat and global manifestations of climate change. The first focus examines urban climate governance, the influence of state policy, and stakeholders’ climate agenda-setting in a state-centric urban governance structure. A new conceptual model is developed to explore climate governance in Istanbul, a Turkish megacity, under a unitary system of government, in a transcontinental country straddling Europe (in candidate status with the European Union) and Asia. The qualitative analyses show that swings in political leadership, the divergence between the existing laws and newly adopted urban climate agenda, and conflicting priorities between policy entrepreneurs generate barriers to long-run and tangible climate change actions in Istanbul. The second focus unveils the influence of personal heat exposure and sociodemographic characteristics affecting climate change perceptions in a large American city facing substantial climate change impacts, Phoenix, Arizona. Using the 2011 Phoenix Metropolitan Area Social Survey, a two-level logistic model examines what factors influence a belief that “global warming and climate change are already occurring.” The integrated econometric model of climate beliefs and justice shows that climate change and global warming are positively associated with non-white race and non-Latinx ethnicity, high levels of education, personal experience with heat-related illnesses, and liberal beliefs. The last focus of this dissertation explores how threats of extreme local weather conditions and global climate change are perceived differently by individuals depending on their vulnerability and adaptive capacity to the changing climate. Using the 2017 Phoenix Social Survey, the individual-level regression models demonstrate that greenspace and tight-knit communities, aspects of adaptive capacity, serve as protective elements reducing the perception of climate risk. Factors such as ethnic identity and connection to place are more closely associated with local versus global risks. In contrast, political ideology and personal experiences moderate perception of both local and global risks.