Organising Uncertainty: Carbon Metrics, Auditability, and Municipal Sustainability Governance

Sammanfattning

Carbon accounting has become an important part of sustainability governance, as organisations are increasingly expected to report and justify their climate impacts. However, emissions figures are not neutral technical outputs. They are shaped by methodological choices, boundaries, assumptions, data infrastructures, and professional judgement. This is especially relevant for municipalities, where carbon metrics are used for internal follow-up, political decision-making, public reporting, and democratic accountability. This thesis examines how Malmö, Lund and Helsingborg make carbon metrics governable, auditable, and legitimate within municipal sustainability governance. The study is based on document analysis and semi-structured interviews, analysed through the lenses of auditability, Management Control Systems, and institutional legitimacy. The findings show that municipalities make carbon metrics usable by embedding them in responsibilities, reporting routines, standards, review practices, and professional judgement. However, carbon metrics can become credible and defensible without automatically leading to climate action, since municipalities often account for emissions they can only partly influence. Artificial Intelligence (AI) was not found to be institutionalised in the municipalities studied, but it appears to be an emerging issue that may intensify existing challenges around traceability, responsibility, and actionability. Overall, the thesis shows that municipal carbon accounting is less about producing perfect numbers and more about organising uncertainty so emissions data can be trusted, used, and publicly justified.