Written by Lilybell Evergreen, Bhuvana Sekar, and Alan MacKenzie 

As cities across Europe pursue climate neutrality as part of the EU Cities Mission, their efforts to innovate, collaborate, and learn are being organised in very different ways. But what do these efforts have in common that other cities can learn from and replicate? 

Each of the Mission’s 112 cities has its own story – its own structures, goals, challenges, and opportunities – but another view of this diversity is offered by looking at the people closest to the cities and how they work with others to implement the actions set out in Climate City Contracts (CCCs). 

Innovating and finding solutions to complex challenges requires diverse skills and methods, which should favour collaboration and a multi-disciplinary approach to assemble knowledge from different places.  

Cities need “process designers – people who can coordinate and have capacity to develop a strategy,” says Gabriella Doci, a researcher from NetZeroCities’ partner TNO. 

Step forward city ‘transition teams’ where, in NetZeroCities, the project managing the Mission Platform, they are one form of this overall approach. 

What are transition teams? 

Transition teams are “intermediaries,” says Doci, whose primary task is to facilitate and coordinate the city’s transition.

As dedicated groups they help to orchestrate and drive the collective effort toward climate neutrality at the city level. They don’t do everything themselves, and indeed, they can’t – citizens, businesses, community organisations, governing authorities, experts and more will all need to be involved to make systemic changes. 

“Everybody has to be on board,” says Doci, not as a slogan or metaphor “but in a literal sense.” All parties will have to contribute to development, implementation and finance, and the transition team is the intermediary force that coordinates those players. 

The exact form of the team – its members and responsibilities – will vary by city, but “if you set up a team, it must have a mandate,” says Doci. The team should empower stakeholders to develop projects while directing them towards the goals of the Mission, avoiding duplication and ensuring all areas of decarbonisation – energy, mobility, etc. – are covered. This is aided by the CCC, which can guide aspirations and translate them into concrete projects. 

Transition teams therefore sit at the heart of the coalition they orchestrate, closely connected to the city government and with the tools to understand the diverse local ecosystem of actors.

Key abilities of a transition team include:

  • Engagement: Actors from many sectors must be aligned by the team to multiply efforts, develop projects, and break down silos.

  • Leadership and facilitation: Sustaining momentum as activities grow and scale while ensuring stakeholders remain focused on the goal.

  • Strategic planning: Aligning stakeholders around the goals set by the CCC to make them concrete and actionable.

  • Innovation mindset: The team act as coordinators but must also share and encourage the innovative ethos required from stakeholders to develop and deliver projects.

Why are transition teams valuable?

Well-orchestrated collaboration is essential to address challenges that go beyond the remit, knowledge, resources, or ability of a single actor. A transition team serves as the backbone of a city’s climate action strategy, ensuring that commitments to sustainability are translated into concrete, coordinated action, and support collaboration in different ways:

  • Bridging sectoral divides – By bringing together stakeholders who might otherwise work in isolation, they ensure that climate action becomes everyone’s responsibility, not just the climate or environmental department’s concern.

  • Creating accountability – With clear governance structures, transition teams help ensure that climate commitments translate into measurable actions and results. This is key as the commitments and action plans within CCCs are now being put into action.

  • Fostering innovation – By connecting diverse perspectives, transition teams can identify novel solutions that might be missed in more siloed approaches.

  • Ensuring continuity – Climate action is an issue and effort that persists beyond political cycles. Transition teams are one element that can help sustain and embed work into the city’s long-term institutional framework.

  • Enabling systemic change – Rather than addressing individual symptoms, transition teams can tackle the root causes of emissions through gathering actors and knowledge for coordinated, multi-lever approaches.

Transition teams in action

The exact organisational form of a transition team will vary city by city and the local context should indicate which model is best. To help guide cities to develop their own approach, there are several examples of what it could look like. These should be seen as examples, not the only way it can be formed.

1. Mission groups

A mission group is a collaborative governance structure based around a specific mission, i.e. a challenge such as reaching climate neutrality by 2030. It involves the city government, industry, academia, and sometimes national government departments.

Members of these groups commit some of their time (in combination with other roles) and are supported by a core mission team from within the city government.

In this model, the city government-based transition team brings legitimacy, existing funding, access to municipal resources and services, brand recognition for stakeholder engagement, and the ability to incorporate multi-level governance while building on previous climate initiatives.

However, as transition teams require both a high-level mandate and hands-on capacity to succeed, challenges and risks include time constraints among team members, institutional rigidity in collaborative approaches, and difficulty accessing technical analytical support.

2. External organisation or spin-out

A ‘third party’ organisation can be responsible for orchestrating the local transition to climate neutrality. In this model, the orchestration role is neither in the city government nor in any of the other local actors but in a new dedicated organisation with strong connection to these other actors. Team members are full time employees of this organisation. Some additional team members may be drawn out of the coalition of actors, on a permanent basis, or on secondment, but a permanent and autonomous team always remains.

This model has the potential to garner: greater trust through neutrality; higher buy-in from diverse stakeholders who co-fund the coalition; and flexibility to organise its work and incorporate relevant expertise as needed. However, this model may struggle with political legitimacy due to its external nature and requires ongoing effort to maintain strong relationships with local authorities. Funding challenges are also possible without direct municipal support.

3. Networked partnership

The transition team can be the result of a network partnership created with willing local actors. No independent organisation is created in this model, but a team emerges from a network of core actors that each make a few individuals available for the orchestration of the coalition.
This model distributes leadership and combines complementary resources and capabilities across members, builds broad societal mandate through extensive networks that can influence political ambition, and invests in relationship-building that creates foundations for trust and systemic action. However, partnership approaches: require significant time investment for alignment and sense-making; demand resources to build trustful collaborative relationships; and may face resilience challenges without long-term funding and sustained engagement from city government and partner organisations.

Spotlighting: insights of transition teams

As a Mission City with a long experience of climate action, Lund in Sweden offers here a critical insight into the development of transitions teams and, in particular, how this development is an ongoing one.

While the city writes a report on its work within the NetZeroCities Pilot City programme, it is using the opportunity to reflect on what changes it needs to make to accelerate its progress to climate neutrality.

“I’ve been working on and off the climate mission since around 2019-2020, around that time, and our idea in the beginning was to have an innovation team that could help kickstart the transition, the different parts of the municipality and external actors, but that’s been changing a lot over the years,” says Tommy Bengtsson, the manager of Lund’s Pilot City project. “One of the problems is that I think we have been working so long with the climate transition and been very successful with it, so my view is that it’s difficult to get decision makers and also colleagues to realise that there’s something different that’s needed.”

This perspective reveals that whatever the shape of the transition team, the same composition and operation that brought success will not be the solution to the city’s problems or ambition forever. In other words, even for cities making progress, it cannot be business as usual.

“I think the realisation exists in some places, in some people and officers. Our mayor is very clear that we need to work with the rest of the society now, and a lot of our colleagues in different administrations in the city are very clear that they need to do something different because they have done what they can in their own organisation.”

The task for Lund now is to renew and refresh its approach again. While its decades-long experience has provided a foundation for it to become a Mission City, colleagues may “have to challenge themselves to work completely differently,” says Bengtsson.

“It’s not their internal focus on internal groups or reporting – it’s more that you have to work more externally.”

Even with all its experience, the need for this bottom-up change in Lund is an important lesson for new transition teams: new methods – even if successful – will become old methods. The need for renewal itself will be a persistent and common factor.

If you are a Mission City and interested in building your own Transition Team or evolving your current set up, you can read more in the Transition Team Playbook and get in touch with your city advisor.

The path to climate neutrality requires transformative change across all sectors of urban life. Transition teams serve as the catalyst and coordinator of this ambitious journey within the city, turning ambitious climate commitments and plans into tangible, coordinated action. By learning from the diverse models emerging across Europe, cities can design transition teams that fit their local context while driving systemic change toward a climate-neutral future.