City networks: Breaking gridlocks or forging (new) lock-ins?

International Affairs

Volumn 92, Issue 5, 2016, Pages 1147-1166

  Acuto, Michele ^a   Rayner, Steve ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

^b UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84985905967     PISSN: 00205850     EISSN: 14682346     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2346.12700     Document Type: Article

References (69)

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2. Gordon McGranahan and David Satterthwaite, Urbanisation concepts and trends, working paper (London: International Institute for Environment and Development, 2014).
3. Simon Curtis, ed., The power of cities in international relations (London: Routledge, 2014).
4. Data were gathered and coded between November 2014 and November 2015 by the City Leadership Initiative team at University College London.
5. Rogier vanderPluijm and Jan Melissen, City diplomacy: the expanding role of cities in international politics (Clingendael: Netherlands Institute of International Relations, 2007)
6. Michele Acuto, ‘World politics by other means? London, city diplomacy and the Olympics’, Hague Journal of Diplomacy 8: 3-4, 2013, pp. 287-311.
7. P. B. Wood, ‘Urban citizenship’, in H. A. van der Heijden, ed., Handbook of political citizenship and social movements (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2014), pp. 133-53
8. Engin F. Isin, Democracy, citizenship and the global city (London: Routledge, 2013).
9. While the ramifications for the status of citizenship and sovereignty are indisputably interesting, the principal focus of this article is more specifically on the networking activity of city diplomacy. For more on the complex context of representation and citizens in cities, see the legal work of Yishai Blank on the local/urban dimension of citizenship: Yishai Blank, ‘Spheres of citizenship’, Theoretical Inquiries in Law 8: 2, 2007, pp. 411-52.
10. Thomas Hale, David Held and Kevin Young, Gridlock: why global cooperation is failing when we need it most (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 306.
11. Hale et al., Gridlock, p. 3.
12. The City Leadership Initiative (CLI) is a project of University College London in partnership with the World Bank and UN-Habitat, also involving collaborations with other major ‘gridlock’ actors such as the World Health Organization and the C40. See: http://www.cityleadership.net. (Unless otherwise noted at point of citation, all URLs cited in this article were accessible on 1 July 2016.)
13. Harriet Bulkeley and Michele Merrill Betsill, Cities and climate change (London: Routledge, 2005)
14. Evelyne deLeeuw, ‘Global and local (glocal) health: the WHO healthy cities programme’, Global Change and Human Health 2: 1, 2001, pp. 34-45.
15. Here we have slightly amended the classic definition of transnational networks by Keck and Sikkink as ‘forms of organization characterized by voluntary, reciprocal, and horizontal patterns of communication and exchange’: see Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond borders: advocacy networks in international politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 8. This latter definition might, in fact, be challenged by several of the trends highlighted in the study, which point for instance at the internal hierarchies of networks (vs ‘horizontal’ cooperation) or at mandatory participation (vs voluntary cooperation) in certain networks. We identify cities as ‘main’ members not to exclude networks that also include some (but not a predominant) representation of other local actors like NGOs and regional governments.
16. Robert Beauregard and Anne Haila, ‘The unavoidable continuity of the city’, in P. Marcuse and R. van Kempen, eds, Globalising cities (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 22-37.
17. Hale et al., Gridlock, pp. 276-7.
18. Smaller geographically defined subnational networks are a minority, but the caveat should be made that many of them are either informal groupings or institutionally nearly invisible to the non-indigenous eye. The survey accounts for this category through a geographical criterion by including in it only region-specific networks (at substate level, e.g. the Italian regione or Brazilian prefeitura), not small membership networks of cities dispersed nationally, like the Core Cities network in the UK, which are identified as ‘national’.
19. Michele Acuto, ‘City diplomacy’, in Costas Costantinou, Paul Sharp and Pauline Kerr, eds, The Sage handbook of diplomacy (London: Sage, 2016).
20. Michele Acuto, ‘The new climate leaders?’, Review of International Studies 39: 4, 2013, pp. 835-57.
21. These calculations, even as a preliminary overview, require some caution, given the existence of some widemembership networks that might skew the actual shape of the landscape. Mathematically the 170 networks average 338 members each, but this figure might not be representative of most networks. There is also the difficulty of acquiring precise membership data.
22. These percentages reflect the primary aims of each network as identified in its core statement of intent (whether through a charter, website, press release or main document). We omit here what might be an interesting but possibly distracting discussion of specialization of network focus in favour of a central emphasis in this article on the wider landscape.
23. De Leeuw, ‘Global and local (glocal) health’.
24. Chris vanHemert. ‘A case study in city diplomacy’, in Arne Musch, Chris van der Valk, Alexandra Sizoo and Kian Tajbakhsh, City diplomacy: the role of local governments in conflict prevention, peace-building, post-conflict reconstruction. (The Hague: VNG International), 2008, p. 188.
25. C40 and ARUP, Climate Action in Megacities 3.0 (CAM 3.0) (London: C40 and ARUP, Dec. 2015). CLI has been directly involved in the production of this report, which is available at http://cam3.c40.org.
26. In principle, this reasoning could be extended to the archetypes of modern city networking to demonstrate that, just like city diplomacy, city networks were in place long before the advent of the Westphalian system.
27. Stuart Murray, Paul Sharp, Geoffrey Wiseman, David Criekemans and Jan Melissen, ‘The present and future of diplomacy and diplomatic studies’, International Studies Review 13: 4, 2011, pp. 709-28.
28. As a proportion of the existent networks by year of birth. Not represented here, and of certain analytical and policy importance, is the issue of ‘birth and death’ of city networks and the reasons behind the emergence and decline of these city diplomacy initiatives.
29. Kristine Kern and Harriet Bulkeley, ‘Cities, Europeanization and multi-level governance: governing climate change through transnational municipal networks’, Journal of Common Market Studies 47: 2, 2009, pp. 309-32.
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37. Heike Schroeder, Sarah Burch and Steve Rayner, ‘Novel multisector networks and entrepreneurship in urban climate governance’, Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 31: 5, 2013, pp. 761-8.
38. Maximilian Mayer and Michele Acuto, ‘The global governance of large technical systems’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43: 2, 2015, pp. 660-83.
39. Gail Cooper, Air-conditioning America: engineers and the controlled environment, 1900-1960 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
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45. Mike Hodson and Simon Marvin, eds, Retrofitting cities: priorities, governance and experimentation (London: Earthscan, 2016).
46. Mikael Roman, ‘Governing from the middle: the C40 Cities Leadership Group’, Corporate Governance: The International Journal of Business in Society 10: 1, 2010, pp. 73-84.
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48. Hale et al., Gridlock, p. 35.
49. Roman, ‘Governing from the middle’
50. Acuto, ‘The new climate leaders?’.
51. Greg Clark, Emily Moir and Tim Moonen. See Greg Clark and Emily Moir, ‘The business of cities’, research essay for the UK government’s Foresight Future of Cities project (London: Government Office for Science, Oct. 2014), https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/future-of-cities-the-business-of-cities.
52. Given the need to delve deeper (via document analysis and even some qualitative interviews) to appreciate this dimension, this analysis is based on a representative subset of 60 of the 170 networks analysed, of which 30 instances were city-led (e.g. C40 Group), 15 NGO-led (e.g. UITP, the International Association of Public Transport) and 15 IGO-led (e.g. WHO Healthy Cities).
53. Steven F. Bernstein, The compromise of liberal environmentalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
54. It is perhaps not surprising that the large majority of ‘pluralized’ forms of city network governance are gener-ally focused on working on issues to do with democratic accountability and action to counter inequality. Curiously—and this is a point worthy of further investigation—this form of governance seems to be more common in Asia, south-east Asia in particular, than in the traditional ‘global North’ contexts of Europe and North America.
55. Mayer and Acuto, ‘The global governance of large technical systems’.
56. Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp. In search of new public domain (Rotterdam: NAI, 2001).
57. Harriet Bulkeley and Vanesa Castan Broto, ‘Government by experiment? Global cities and the governing of climate change’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38: 3, 2013, pp. 361-75.
58. Bulkeley and Castan Broto, ‘Government by experiment?, p. 361.
59. Taedong Lee, ‘Global cities and transnational climate change networks’, Global Environmental Politics 13: 1, 2013, pp. 108-27.
60. The same point is made in Bouteligier, ‘Inequality in new global governance arrangements’, p. 252.
61. Benjamin R. Barber, If mayors ruled the world: dysfunctional nations, rising cities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).
62. Thomas G. Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson, ‘Global governance to the rescue: saving international relations?’, Global Governance 20: 1, 2014, pp. 19-36.
63. Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, Miles Kahler and Alexander H. Montgomery, ‘Network analysis for international relations’, International Organization 63: 3, 2009, pp. 559-92. It is unfortunately beyond the scope of this preliminary overview to offer a more refined network analysis of city networks—a task of critical importance in deeper investigation of the dynamics of city diplomacy.
64. Philipp Pattberg and Oscar Widerberg, ‘Transnational multistakeholder partnerships for sustainable development: conditions for success’, Ambio 45: 1, 2016, pp. 42-51.
65. This emergent effect is discussed in Acuto, ‘The new climate leaders?’, and, more broadly, in Miles Kahler, ed., Networked politics: agency, power, and governance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).
66. Michele Acuto and Simon Curtis, ‘Assemblage thinking and international relations’, in Reassembling international theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 1-15.
67. Benoit Rihoux and Charles C. Ragin, Configurational comparative methods: qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and related techniques (London: Sage, 2009).
68. Carl Death, ‘Summit theatre: exemplary governmentality and environmental diplomacy in Johannesburg and Copenhagen’, Environmental Politics 20: 1, 2011, pp. 1-19.
69. Evelyne deLeeuw, Geoff Green, Agis Tsouros, Mariana Dyakova, Jill Farrington, Johan Faskunger and Marcus Grant, ‘Healthy Cities phase V evaluation: further synthesizing realism’, Health Promotion International 30: suppl. 1, 2015, pp. i118-i125.