PhD Defence Gerard Martinez Görbig | Closing the planning-implementation gap | Mapping interactions within and between climate actions and their contexts

Closing the planning-implementation gap | Mapping interactions within and between climate actions and their contexts

Gerard Martinez Görbig is a PhD student in Scientific Departments. (Co)Promotors are prof.dr. R.V. Sliuzas and dr.rer.nat. D. Reckien and dr. J. Flacke from the faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente. 

As climate-related extreme events intensify across European cities, municipalities increasingly develop mitigation and adaptation plans. However, many planned actions are never implemented. This dissertation investigates this planning-implementation gap by examining how the characteristics of climate actions, local contexts, and justice-related consequences interact to shape implementation.

First, the dissertation develops a standardised framework and database for distinguishing between measures, which directly address climate objectives, and instruments, which enable their implementation. This framework is applied to actions reported by European municipalities from the Global Covenant of Mayors. The findings show that detailed actions are more frequently implemented, that community-oriented approaches outperform predominantly technocratic approaches, and that actions addressing multiple administrative and spatial scales have higher implementation rates.

Second, the dissertation analyses the factors underlying the implementation of adaptation across different settlement types. It demonstrates how social inequality, education, climate awareness, institutional quality, public trust, financial capacity, transboundary collaboration, and stakeholder involvement affect implementation odds and timelines.

Third, it examines how the social side effects of mitigation measures affect vulnerable groups and influence subsequent climate action. It develops a multidimensional framework for assessing household energy poverty risks and investigates citizens’ experiences with energy-sector measures in Barcelona and Vienna. The results show that direct impacts can generate broader effects on trust, inequality, education, and climate awareness; conditions that are themselves crucial for future implementation.

This dissertation defines implementation as a dynamic process rather than the final step of planning. Climate action depends not only on technical design and available resources, but also on local contexts and justice-related issues. By combining European-scale analyses with focused case studies, the research provides transferable frameworks, empirical evidence, and reproducible methods to can help closing the planning-implementation gap.