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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Sustain. Cities

Sec. Climate Change and Cities

Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frsc.2025.1667409

This article is part of the Research TopicBarriers and Enablers to Effective Climate Governance in CitiesView all 5 articles

Expanding Scope: The role of legitimacy and legitimation in the adoption of consumption-based carbon accounting in European cities

Provisionally accepted
  • 1Universite de Montreal, Montreal, Canada
  • 2Universitat Internacional de Catalunya Institute for Multilingualism, Barcelona, Spain
  • 3University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

In the pursuit of carbon neutrality, cities are increasingly measuring their greenhouse gas emissions. Most cities focus on territorial emissions tied to production, excluding consumption-driven emissions outside city boundaries. This gap is critical, as Scope 3 emissions can represent as much as 80% of cities' carbon footprint. Addressing this limitation calls for urban consumption-based carbon accounting (CBCA). Yet, despite CBCA's relevance for climate action, it has struggled to gain political legitimacy within European cities. This raises the question: How can urban CBCA achieve political legitimacy? Based on semi-structured expert interviews with municipal practitioners in 17 European cities, we explore the barriers, enablers, and strategies used to enhance CBCA legitimacy. We develop a framework that describes the process of CBCA legitimation from exploration to political legitimacy. Results show that urban CBCA's legitimacy rests primarily on cognitive legitimacy. Throughout the legitimation process, data plays a crucial role. Initially, access to data and clear calculation methodologies contributes to comprehensibility by making urban CBCA seem plausible and predictable. However, once CBCA comprehensibility is achieved metrics become less important than acting in ways that align with the broader understanding of consumption-based emissions. Finally, as CBCA measures affect citizens more directly, metrics resurface as means to validate impacts of past policy decisions and thus reinforce CBCA's legitimacy. We discuss the various pitfalls and promising strategies to build political legitimacy for urban CBCA. This research contributes to the understanding of how urban CBCA legitimacy evolves over time. The legitimation framework developed can help inform policymakers in their endeavours to advance CBCA legitimation and institutionalization.

Keywords: Urban carbon accounting, Consumption-based emissions, Urban climategovernance, political legitimacy, Climate change mitigation

Received: 16 Jul 2025; Accepted: 30 Sep 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Hasan, Deshayes and Brown. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence:
Lisa Hasan, lisa.hasan@umontreal.ca
Eloise Deshayes, edeshayes@uic.es
Will Brown, wghb2@cam.ac.uk

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