Following Tosun’s distinction between international, national, and subnational scales of intervention, this commentary presents the ABCs of governmental climate action challenges in Latin America. In relation to international climate action, Latin American organizations present numerous and diverse positions in international fora. This heterogeneity of positions affects the region’s bargaining power. At the national level, centralism, dominant, hierarchical political cultures, and weak federal systems have limited collaboration across government sectors and offices as well as citizen participation. Furthermore, localized climate action is constrained by political centralization together with administrative, technical, and financial limitations of local and regional governments. Altogether these elements represent the ABCs of challenges for climate action in Latin America. This perspective piece remarks a gap in the literature, highlighting the ways that publications regularly ignore a comparative and regional outlook. Accordingly, this text recommends that Latin American social researchers move beyond single case studies to carry out cross-national comparisons.
