| الملخص: | Cities are increasingly being recognised as important actors in climate governance and as change agents in the transition towards sustainable and just societies. Thus, this paper explores the role that city governments and the civil servants embedded within them can play in orienting society in a more sustainable and just direction. It presents findings from ethnographic research in Sweden on the City of Gothenburg’s environment and climate work, consisting of a meeting ethnography and an interview study pursued between 2021–2025. The paper illustrates how civil servants working with the implementation of the strategies in the municipality’s Environment and Climate Programme navigate certain norms, ideas and institutional practices within the organisation that tend to construe certain issues as ‘political’, while others are seen as ‘apolitical’. With the help of a theoretical lens based on feminist posthumanism and institutionalism, it makes visible underlying logics and provides a discussion on why this may be so. The analysis reveals that due to organisational path dependency based on ecomodernist and binary logics – in which legitimacy tends to be claimed through promoting technical, economistic and managerial issues – it is difficult for civil servants within the City of Gothenburg to incorporate ‘social’ and ‘justice’ issues into their work since such concepts then are deemed as ‘less appropriate’. There seems to be an overarching concern among the civil servants that incorporating such ‘fuzzy’ concepts would risk their work being seen as less ‘objective’, more ‘normative’, and thus political, with the risk of losing legitimacy. Such perceptions are problematic as they may hinder the work towards effective and just climate transformations. The paper concludes with a discussion and suggestions for further research about how civil servants can potentially navigate and overcome this knowledge hierarchy, and thus begin to disrupt such institutional path dependencies and incorporate knowledges otherwise.
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