Our cities in a changing climate: Why the Dutch local elections matter more than you think

On 18 March, voters across 340 Dutch municipalities will decide who actually governs the frontline of the climate transition, from heating homes without gas to adapting neighbourhoods to extreme weather, and who gets to participate in democracy at all.  

Cities are stepping up.

National governments have made ambitious climate commitments. Delivering on them is another matter. The United States has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement for the second time. Elsewhere, implementation lags behind ambition, and multilateral institutions struggle to enforce their own declarations.

Yet at the local level, something different is happening. At COP30, the annual UN climate summit held in Belém last November, 77 countries and the European Union joined the CHAMP coalition, a partnership to formalise cooperation between national and local governments on climate action. According to the latest synthesis report by the UNFCCC, the UN body that oversees international climate agreements, 80% of newly submitted national climate plans now reference subnational actors.

But local governments are not just signing pledges. They are adapting communities to flooding and heat stress, redesigning public spaces to improve resilience and biodiversity, and building the energy systems to replace fossil fuels. The energy transition is the most concrete example.

Taking back control

Of all the climate-related responsibilities landing on municipal desks, the shift away from natural gas is arguably the most expensive and politically charged. And it is happening against the backdrop of decades of privatisation.

EU directives in the late 1990s pushed member states to open electricity and gas markets to competition. The Netherlands went further and faster than most: the entire market was liberalised in the early 2000s, and four publicly owned energy companies were sold to foreign multinationals. The last to go was Eneco, owned by 44 Dutch municipalities, which was sold to a Japanese consortium in 2020 for €4.1 billion. The promise was a more efficient, competitive market. Dutch households now pay among the highest gas prices in Europe, driven in part by energy taxes, while the profits from supplying that energy flow to overseas shareholders rather than being reinvested in local communities.

Now that trend is slowly reversing. The Transnational Institute and University of Glasgow have documented over 1,400 cases in 58 countries of cities bringing services back under public ownership or creating new public enterprises. Whether it is French cities reclaiming their water networks, German municipalities buying back their energy grids, or towns taking over waste management, the drivers are the same. Local governments are realising that to fix spiralling costs, ensure democratic accountability, and actually meet their climate targets, they need to be back in the driver’s seat.

The Netherlands is in the middle of its own version of this “remunicipalisation”. In January, the City Council of Maastricht voted to invest €29.7 million in a heating and cooling network for roughly 1,100 homes, using residual heat from a tile factory and treated wastewater – a process I have been studying as part of my doctoral research. The city is preparing to establish its own publicly owned heating company. This is a deliberate reversal: Maastricht’s energy utilities were divested around the year 2000 and eventually absorbed by RWE, the German energy giant. A quarter of a century later, the city is building its own public energy company.

It is part of a national pattern. Amsterdam, Nijmegen, and other Dutch municipalities are all developing public heating networks. And in December 2025, the Dutch Senate approved the Collective Heat Act, which mandates that all heating companies must be majority publicly owned. Local councils will designate heating zones and oversee the transition away from natural gas.

In other words, Dutch municipalities are taking back control. Whether they have the capacity and democratic culture to match is one of the questions at stake during these elections.

A more democratic democracy

There is a further reason why these elections matter, one that is easy to miss if you are not familiar with Dutch politics.

Dutch municipal elections are unusually inclusive. Citizens of any EU member state who are registered as residents can vote, with no minimum stay. Non-EU nationals can vote after five years of continuous legal residency. Compare this with Germany, where non-EU citizens cannot vote in any election. The legal basis traces back to the 1992 Treaty on European Union, signed in Maastricht, which, among other things, established the right of EU citizens to vote in local elections anywhere in the Union.

In a university city like Maastricht, with its large international population, the effect is not to be underestimated. An estimated 104,000 residents are eligible to vote in the 2026 municipal elections, compared with roughly 89,000 who could vote for the Dutch national parliament: around 15,000 additional voters, an expansion of about 17%. In a city council with 39 seats, where it took just over 1,100 votes to win a seat in the last election, this non-Dutch voting bloc theoretically holds enough power to swing 5 to 6 seats and reshape the local political landscape.

The question on the ballot

There is something odd about the fact that the most inclusive, most consequential tier of Dutch democracy is also the one with the lowest turnout. In the 2022 municipal elections, fewer than half of the eligible voters in Maastricht cast ballots. For the 2025 national Tweede Kamer elections, turnout was nearly 75%. The level of government that decides how your home is heated, how your street handles flooding, and in which fifteen thousand non-Dutch residents have voting rights attracts the least democratic attention.

It is easy to romanticise cities saving the world while nation-states dither.  

The reality is more complex: local autonomy is constrained by national budgets, and remunicipalisation can just as easily produce bureaucratic inertia as democratic renewal. But the frontline of the climate transition, how our streets adapt to extreme weather, who owns our energy, and who gets a voice in the process, is undeniably increasingly municipal. The tools to build a fairer, greener society are resting in our local elections. On 18 March, the question is simply whether we will bother to pick them up.  

Job Zomerplaag is a PhD Fellow; he studies the role of local governments in governing local climate and energy transitions. He is also a programme editor at Studio Europa, Maastricht University's centre of expertise for European Affairs. On 18 March, he hosts the official election night at Maastricht City Hall.

Disclaimer
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of UNU-MERIT, Maastricht University, or the United Nations University.