Empowering Mission Cities to Deliver Climate Action - Bringing It All Together! As we come to the end of our Transition Team Support Programme we would like to provide here a short recap on the key themes and insights we have gathered so far during the 4 thematic webinars that were organised between September and November 2025.
1. Collaboration & Governance: In our first session, we explored how effective governance models play a crucial role in the success of transitions, highlighting the importance of networked governance, where Transition Teams function as enablers coordinated action across different sectors and stakeholders. Umeä presented their decentralized governance model, which operates as multiple transition teams across different organisations, and their stakeholder training programme 'Leading the Transition Together,' to equip Boundary Spanners to lead innovation and the transition across different spaces and sectors.
2. Mandate & Power to Act: This session explored Transition Teams’ mandate, where support for the mandate can be drawn from, and how to build, strengthen, and embed it institutionally. We discussed the importance of both formal and informal, hard and soft forms of power, and how these can be reinforced. Lund shared their experience using portfolio mapping to translate climate goals into actionable projects, assign responsibilities, and foster shared ownership of the mandate. Their experience emphasized the need for long-term commitment, embedding climate action into the city’s budget and operations.
3. Skills & Competencies: this third session focused on the importance of relational skills in successfully translating climate strategies into action, highlighting how effective collaboration, trust-building, and stakeholder engagement are just as essential as technical expertise in a complex governance landscape. Mannheim shared their experience on building the capacity of their teams through continuous training and development in key skills. They emphasized the importance of a diverse skill-set, including technical, communication, cooperative, and psychological skills, which are crucial for addressing the complexity of climate action.
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Prototyping approach to Transition Team: the fourth and last webinar placed cities’ real experiences at the centre of the discussion. Milan, Nantes, and Vilnius each presented their local stories and how they are navigating the challenges explored in the previous sessions — governance, mandate, and competencies — and how these play out in their daily work.
Milan described its journey from developing the Climate City Contract to experimenting with an innovative “molecular strategy,” a model that tests decarbonisation scenarios at neighbourhood scale while strengthening cooperation between municipal departments and stakeholders.
Nantes presented the internal dynamics of its Transition Team, highlighting the importance to secure legitimacy across a large municipal administration and to build a shared culture of climate leadership among staff and elected representatives.
Vilnius shared how it is laying the foundations for an ecosystem that can sustain climate action over time, starting with a Sustainability Managers’ Club to reinforce interdepartmental collaboration and moving towards the creation of a Climate Hub that would support CCC implementation, funding acquisition, and community engagement. Together, these stories illustrated the value of learning by doing and showed how cities are translating principles of governance, mandate, and skills into tangible structures, processes, and relationships on the ground.