What lies beneath: understanding the invisible aspects of municipal climate change governance

•Significant learning and decision-making for adaptation occur within shadow spaces.•Local governments rely considerably on shadow systems to introduce and sustain new ideas.•The intermingling of informal and canonical systems influence organisational ability to translate adaptive capacity into action.

Municipal or local government climate governance has attracted much research attention with a proliferation of literature investigating institutional enablers and barriers to climate action. This paper addresses a gap in this literature through considering critically the role of informal/shadow systems and spaces; the significant inner social workings that constitute what we call the ‘invisible aspects’ of municipal institutions for learning and decision-making processes. Insights are based on a critical and open reflection of the city of Durban's experience in developing their Municipal Climate Protection Programme (MCPP). We argue that beyond formal institutional requirements or policy, local governments rely considerably on shadow systems and informal spaces of information and knowledge exchange across their operations to introduce and sustain new ideas. This dependence is rarely acknowledged explicitly, however, in research, policy or practice and requires much deeper consideration.