On a mission towards just climate policies: assessing the integration of climate justice in four Dutch cities in the EU Cities Mission

The EU Mission on Climate-neutral and Smart Cities aims to enable 100 European cities to become climate-neutral by 2030. However, climate change has the potential to intersect with, exacerbate, and create new patterns of urban injustices, making climate justice a key concern in urban climate governance. Nevertheless, research on the integration of climate justice into urban mitigation strategies and the EU Cities Mission remains limited. This study contributes to the limited literature on climate justice in the EU Cities Mission context by assessing how and to what extent climate justice is integrated into the climate strategies of the Dutch Mission Cities of Groningen, and The Hague, and to which extent the EU Cities Mission supports this integration. By developing and applying a Climate Justice Integration Index to the climate strategies of the four cities and interviewing relevant stakeholders, this study found that the Dutch Mission Cities score higher on procedural and distributional justice than recognition justice, although paying more attention to recognition justice could help strengthen the accessibility and inclusivity of support instruments and participation processes. Moreover, the cities face a major barrier related to defining climate justice, which highlights the importance of establishing localised, shared definitions of climate justice as a foundation for just climate strategies. Finally, the EU Cities Mission documents analysed in this study only superficially engage with the three justice dimensions, and the city officials were largely unaware of the resources provided by the EU Cities Mission, highlighting the need to ensure that the financial and knowledge resources of the EU Cities Mission are known across municipal departments.