The main hypothesis is that ICLEI is a highly strategic cognitive construction to offer an audience a set of discursive and technical tools to address and reframe their local environmental problems as part of global environmental change. Doing so they would promote a reframing of global environmental change as the result of local actions, and, as a consequence, they 'localize' the solution to the collective action problem. It leads to three sub-hypotheses: (a) ICLEI, as a normative movement, is engaged in a long process of meaning construction for its members that allows common values to be defined, discourses to be elaborated: the collective action frame to be set; (b) ICLEI, as a technical organization, is engaged in a process of capacity-building, and expertise production and distribution; (c) these two processes would lead to the reframing of local governments' role from a problem to one part of a polycentric solution to global environmental change. To test these hypotheses, analytical tools from the social movement organization literature will be mobilized and are presented in Part I. The two subsequent parts (Part II and III) will be condensing the proper argumentation, the story of ICLEI.