The Climate Change Act (2008) places a legally binding requirement on the UK Government to set targets and report on progress on climate change emission reductions.The transport sector contributes one-third of total UK emissions and is the most difficult sector in which to cut emissions. The research project examines whether and how governance structures make a difference to policy effectiveness (design and delivery) and accountability within the field of carbon emissions management and the transport sector.The research is theoretically-informed and considers the extent to which Multi-Level Governance can be used to understand the complex interplay of policies in carbon management for transport across six spatial levels and the many non-governmental public bodies and private sector delivery agencies involved. The research takes a comparative case study design looking at the development of policies in Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh which provides variation in governance structures across the UK and within both the English and Scottish contexts. Interviews will provide the first tranche of data with a further set of discursive events involving stakeholder groups and the general public being used to piece together the accounts of the different actors and to determine what implications there are for effective policy design. Further details are available at http://www.transportcarbon.org/ The UK’s carbon management framework is acknowledged to have a “complex interplay of reserved and devolved responsibilities” (DEFRA, 2008, p. 12). This complexity is illustrated by the introduction of the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009 and the different competencies which the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish governments have for transport (MacKinnon, Shaw, & Docherty, 2008). Our methodological approach was therefore to select two case study areas in England and two in Scotland to allow exploration of the extent to which the different institutional structures and governance arrangements that exist within England and Scotland at a national and sub-national level might explain differences in levels of carbon reduction ambition and policy progress. The four case study areas selected were Leeds and Manchester City Regions in England and Edinburgh and Glasgow City Regions in Scotland. All four are major city regions and both pairs of national case studies are relatively close neighbours connected by major motorway and rail routes within one to two hours journey time. Fifty one semi structured interviews, involving 59 people, were conducted between Autumn 2011 and Autumn 2012. Four interviews were held at a European level, twelve at an England/UK level, ten at a Scottish national level with the remaining 25 at a local level across the four case study sites. In total three politicians were interviewed, nineteen government officials, seven public bodies or partnerships with entirely public sector boards, thirteen NGOs with interests across business and environment and the remaining nine with private sector transport providers. This represents an appropriate coverage of actor types at different scales given the structure of the case studies.