Urban Climate Action Beyond Templates: A Majority World Manifesto

This panel session will present a manifesto for the study and practice of climate action in Majority World cities. Drawing on a collaboration between scholars and practitioners around the forthcoming Special Issue Adaptation and Resilience in Cities of the Majority World: Advancing Equity and Justice in Practice (Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy, April 2026), we move beyond reductive North–South paradigms towards a more expansive understanding of how urban climate action is represented, practised, and imagined. In doing so, we engage critically with the colonial and epistemic legacies embedded in dominant urban climate frameworks, foregrounding Indigenous and locally situated knowledge systems.

The manifesto calls for the instruments of climate action - financing mechanisms, indicators, benchmarks and planning templates - to foreground distributive justice, democratic accountability, and situated knowledge. The session will examine how these principles can inform the redesign of urban finance criteria, resilience metrics and participatory planning processes.