Cities are one of the biggest centers of greenhouse gas emissions leading to climate changes, and also a suitable place to respond to these changes in the form of mitigation and adaptation approaches. The rapid growth of population and economic activities in Iran's cities, along with the ever-increasing demand for energy, has led to the rapid growth of greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, analyzing the governance approaches to reducing climate change in cities is the main purpose of this research, in the following; the legal requirements of the mentioned approaches in Iranian cities are examined. The research is descriptive-analytical and its method is based on content analysis of documents. First, the field of study and key words extracted from the theoretical foundations of the research were determined for searching in the system of laws and regulations of the parliament. To determine the legal requirements, four general policies and seven laws that are directly related to the discussion of climate change (from 2000 to 2020) have been subjected to content analysis. After compression and classification of 38 legal articles/clauses, 25 and 13 articles/clauses are related to national and city scale, respectively. The comparison of policies and laws with governance approaches shows that most of legal documents are placed in the category of regulation, enabling and providing. In addition, these legal documents have a technocratic, elitist and state-oriented perspective.