Data is a critical tool in difficult decision-making arenas such as climate change policymaking. However, the use of such data still tends to be viewed as a data scientist’s tool without much scope for interorganisational governance setting of the private and public sectors. To address this problem, this study develops an organisational boundary spanning framework for data governance strategies which is then used as an axial coding scheme for a Latent Dirichlet Allocation model based on text from 7510 climate policies in 209 cities in OECD countries. The results reveal the kinds of data governance tools that are associated with four different strategies. Performance management is shown to be the dominant strategy. Cities also engage in evidence building and coproduction initiatives but do relatively little with citizens and companies in areas such as citizen science and third-party disclosure policies.