Seattle's political history has been characterized by climate change discourses and related urban sustainability concerns for many years now (City of Seattle, 1994, 2009; Lee & Painter, 2015). Since the early 1990s, Seattle's civic leaders have explicitly considered climate mitigation strategies (Bassett & Shandas, 2010; Brunner, 1991). The municipal government today employs public officials who focus on how global climate change is affecting (and will affect) the resiliency of infrastructure systems, the built environment, urban form, transportation choices, and many other critical policy arenas. In addition, the city of Seattle participates in local, national, and global climate action networks. These include the King County– Cities Climate Collaboration (KC4), the Mayors Climate Protection Agreement (MCPA), C40 Cities, the Global Covenant of Mayors, and Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance. Trans-local networks such as these help to shape a multitude of local relationships with nonprofits, key foundations, and industry associations as well as state and federal authorities.

Based on the analysis of municipal archives, online published documents, and public studies—notably the city's climate action and ancillary plans (City of Seattle, 2006b, 2013b, 2016a, 2017)—along with a range of local and nonlocal newspaper accounts over the past 30 years, the discussion here explores urban climate action as a challenge important to the management of Seattle in the spatial context of the wider city-region.

Challenges are socially constructed, as Michael Callon (1984) initially argued, through “problematization.” This is the first step in building what he called actor networks for the eventual “mobilization” of new realities, including the transformational project of post-carbon cities that can meet the demands of global ecological change.