Vol. 17 No. 2 (2026)
Special Issue: SI_TGEO

Students’ Perceptions of Stakeholders and Opinions on Democratic Negotiation in Urban Climate-Change Decision-Making

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Marine Simon
Institute for Geography Education, University of Cologne, Germany
Bio
Alexandra Budke
Institute for Geography Education, University of Cologne, Germany
Bio
Figure 1. European students’ perceptions on stakeholders responsible for climate measures at the city level. Positive responses are positioned on the left, while negative responses are positioned on the right, with neutral responses occupying the central area. Percentages in bold are used to calculate the sum of positive responses on the left-hand side and the sum of negative responses on the right-hand side. For each item, the precise number of valid responses is specified. Own elaboration.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.48088/ejg.m.sim.17.2.169.188
Categories

Published 2026-04-29

Keywords

  • climate change education,
  • student perceptions,
  • education for sustainable development,
  • local democratic competence,
  • participatory competence,
  • political geography education
    • ...More
    Less

How to Cite

Simon, Marine, and Alexandra Budke. 2026. “Students’ Perceptions of Stakeholders and Opinions on Democratic Negotiation in Urban Climate-Change Decision-Making”. European Journal of Geography 17 (2):S.169-S.188. https://doi.org/10.48088/ejg.m.sim.17.2.169.188.

Copyright (c) 2026 Marine Simon, Alexandra Budke

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Received 2025-12-09
Accepted 2026-04-26
Published 2026-04-29

Abstract

European cities are central arenas of climate mitigation and adaptation, yet local climate policy-making is shaped by complex multilevel governance involving diverse stakeholders. However, a gap remains between this complexity and public perceptions of who is responsible for addressing climate change. At the same time, democratic dissatisfaction among younger generations is growing towards national politics, raising questions about how they perceive local climate decision-making. Geography education, which integrates political and democratic competences, requires empirical insights into students’ perceptions and opinions to strengthen their skills in understanding stakeholder roles, governance processes and local negotiations over climate policies. This study addresses these gaps through a survey of 307 students aged 14–20 from France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. The analysis examines students’ perceptions of local political actors and stakeholders responsible for climate action, as well as their views on decision-making procedures at the city level via sets of Likert scales and items. Frequency distribution analysis and correlation calculations allow to show that students identify a variety of local stakeholders as important but tend to not consider their own role as decisive. Students mostly support democratic decision-making processes, although being interested in climate change and being a female student are correlated with more democratic positions. However, governance processes seem to not be really well known among students. This study, thus, offers exploratory insights that can inform geography education aimed at fostering informed, participatory engagement with urban climate governance.

Highlights:

  • Students’ perceptions of stakeholders responsible for local climate policy are multilateral.
  • Students’ opinions on local processes of decision-taking are mostly democratic.
  • Female students and students interested in climate change supported more democratic opinions.
  • Students seem to have difficulties understanding local climate governance.
  • Geography education needs to address deficits in local climate governance in an empowering manner
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