Transnational Municipal Networks in Climate Politics: From Global Governance to Global Politics

Abstract

In a multilevel and multicentric governance arena, pathways and mechanisms of influence are several and non-state capacities for technical leadership and norm entrepreneurship prove more significant than is the case within a strictly multilateral framework. Among actors with such capacities are municipalities, which multiply their influence through horizontal and vertical relationships. Transnational municipal networks present opportunities for both intermunicipal dialogue and the pooling of global influence, highlighting the presence and influence of the city in the world. This paper examines the collective response of some cities to climate change, exploring the place of cities in global environmental politics through analysis of two transnational municipal networks: the International Council of Local Environmental Initiatives' Cities for Climate Protection and the International Solar Cities Initiative. The article addresses the following questions: How might municipal efforts toward a climate-stable future be significant to the larger issue of ecological justice in global environmental politics? Might cities be able to redefine the rules of the game and take a stand on ‘inefficient’ norms? After briefly accounting for the relationship between cities and the world, the article characterizes technical leadership as a legitimizing force of and in global environmental governance and norm entrepreneurship as a potential source of contestation and subversion in global environmental politics. The paper describes what cities are globalizing, in terms of pollution, environmental degradation, and risk, and in terms of management and politics. Finally, the article explores the possibility that emerging horizontal and vertical relationships, intermunicipal relationships, and relationships between cities or networks of cities and other scales of governance potentiate legitimizing roles for cities in climate governance and subversive roles in climate politics.

A Chinese version of this article's abstract is available online at: www.informaworld.com/rglo

En un ámbito de gobierno multinivel y multicéntrico, son varias las trayectorias y los mecanismos de influencia y las capacidades no estatales para el liderazgo y la norma empresarial resultan ser más significativas que en el caso de un marco estrictamente multilateral. Entre los actores de tales capacidades se encuentran los municipios, los cuales multiplican su influencia a través de relaciones horizontales y verticales. Las redes municipales trasnacionales presentan oportunidades al diálogo intermunicipal y al fondo común de influencia global, destacando la presencia e influencia de la ciudad en el mundo. Este artículo examina la respuesta colectiva de algunas ciudades al cambio del clima, analizando el lugar que le corresponde a las ciudades dentro de la política global del medio ambiente, a través del análisis de dos redes municipales trasnacionales: El Consejo Internacional de Ciudades con Iniciativas Locales para la Protección del Clima y la Iniciativa Solar de Ciudades Internacionales. El artículo aborda las siguientes cuestiones: ¿De qué manera los esfuerzos del poder municipal con miras hacia un futuro de estabilidad del clima, pueden ser significativos con relación a la cuestión más amplia de justicia ecológica dentro de la política global del medio ambiente? ¿Tendrían las ciudades la capacidad de redefinir las reglas del juego y adoptar una postura firme ante las normas ‘ineficaces’? Después de explicar brevemente la relación entre las ciudades y el mundo, el artículo caracteriza al liderazgo técnico como una fuerza legitimizadora dentro de la autoridad global del medio ambiente y la norma empresarial, y como fuente potencial de protesta y subversión en la política global del medio ambiente. El documento describe qué ciudades se están globalizando, en términos de contaminación, degradación del medio ambiente y el riesgo y en términos de administración y política. Finalmente, el artículo analiza la posibilidad de que las relaciones horizontales y verticales, intermunicipales y entre ciudades o redes de ciudades y otras escalas de gobierno incipientes, aumentan el efecto de legitimar las funciones a las ciudades dentro del clima gubernamental y las funciones subversivas dentro del clima político.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Michele Betsill, Roy Joseph, Barry Rabe, Ashley Woodiwiss, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Special thanks are due to Hillary Waters, whose hard work in literature review and editing has made this a better article, and to Project Teacher, a program of Wheaton College, which provided a Mentor-Guided Scholarship Stipend to facilitate Hillary's work.

Notes

A Chinese version of this article's abstract is available online at: www.informaworld.com/rglo

Cardinal Arns, of Sao Paulo, defined ‘subvert’ as ‘to turn a situation round and look at it from the other side, the side of people who have to die so that the system can go on’ (Rahnema, 1997).

At the 2006 Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Joshua Sapotichne, Bryan Jones and Michelle Wolfe presented a paper titled, ‘Is Urban Politics a Black Hole? Analyzing the Boundaries Between Political Science and Urban Politics’ (Sapotichne et al., 2006, 2007), in which they argued that nothing crosses ‘the event horizon’ of a now-stale urban politics sub-field. It almost goes without saying that this caused quite the stir at the moment. It also generated a panel in response at the 2007 meeting. As discussant Judith Martin noted, the panel was characterized by two papers that accepted the terms of the argument (that is, that accepted the assumptions and external logic of the paper, but took issue with its internal logic) as described by Sapotichne et al., and two papers that rejected the terms of the argument (while largely ceding its internal logic). These last two papers explicitly or implicitly recognized a significant literature, within and without the urban politics subfield, advancing a more vertically integrated, multiscale, and globally aware urban politics (Boudreau, 2007; Sidney, 2007). It is this literature, as well as literature on norms in global environmental governance, within which this paper hopes to be situated.

In recent years, however, both urbanization and cities have emerged as significant themes in the discourse of globalization. Likewise, globalization has emerged as an important topic in the discourse of urban affairs. The importance of mutual influence in the global–local relationship is evidenced in interdisciplinary developments. ‘Global cities’ is now widely recognized as a subfield of urban studies and has achieved at least the status of a curiosity among scholars of globalization. And urban studies have ‘gone global’ as internationalists increasingly turn toward the sub-national as a significant scale in global governance while urbanists explore the impact of global developments on prospects for local governance. Academic departments now fill faculty positions with scholars whose primary research interest is in the role of cities, usually metropolises and megalopolises, in an increasingly global political economy. Michigan State University supports a new program in Global Urban Studies. And the University of California at Berkeley has recently founded a Center for Global Metropolitan Studies, complete with an undergraduate major and two interdisciplinary graduate groups. Evidently, the relationship between cities and globalization is a maturing theme in both urban and international affairs.

The internationalists' reengagement with the local is reflected, in part, by a growing literature on municipal foreign policy in areas such as nuclear disarmament, fair trade, and immigration (Hobbs, 1994; Hewitt, 1999; Kline, 1999; Earnest, 2007).

Here I have intentionally discriminated between normative preoccupation and technical prepossession. Per Jacques Ellul, possession is the tendency of monistic technique (1964, 1973).

‘On ne revolutionne pas en revolutionnant. On revolutionne en solutionnant’ (Le Corbusier, 1994).

While AOSIS membership is strongest among small island developing states, it includes members that are not states, not islands, not small, and not developing.

In this way, we might not be surprised to encounter suspicion of the municipal agenda in global politics, as municipalities and other governmental actors may induce a crisis of redundancy, in some measure, in civil society.

Bruno Latour would suggest that anthropogenic global climate change is representative of a specifically modern proliferation of ‘hybrids’ resulting from the ‘modern constitution’ and its separation of (1) subject from object, (2) nature from society, and (3) a transcendent God from reality (1993).

Intermunicipal relationships have sometimes been described as the second nature or external relations of cities (Harris & Ullman, 1945; Taylor, 2004). There is a rich literature on these relations (Camagni, 1993, 2001; Sassen, 2002). A premise of this paper is that cities have significant vertical external relations that are not intermunicipal and that both vertical and horizontal/intermunicipal external relations potentiate new roles in global governance.

Bulkeley and Betsill are exceptional in this regard, situating the cities they examine—all of which are members of ICLEI's Cities for Climate Protection program—in the context of non-state action in global governance. Their excellent analysis in this regard, however, is limited to the role of participant cities in one among many municipal climate policy networks.

Climate change may rightly be considered a meta-hazard.

For a position that emphasizes the relative vulnerability of rural populations without minimizing urban vulnerability, see Roberts and Parks (2007).

This is not to suggest that urban consumption was not previously global in character. Many regard colonialism as among the earliest forms of globalization, and it is certain that expanding urban populations and changing urban consumption drove European ships to continental hinterlands in search of goods and raw materials. Many scholars have noted the continuity of this relationship with the present. As Joan Martinez-Alier writes, ‘In this sense, Europe has never been so colonial as today. Gasoline stations on German motorways should have signs reading “Kolonialwaren”.’ (2006, p. 46).

Leigh Glover, Research Fellow at the Australasian Centre for the Governance and Management of Urban Transport, has been especially helpful to me in understanding this, noting unsustainable urban consumption of the past (citing Dukes, 2003) as well as the future (citing Flannery, 2002).

I use this word, despite its inelegance, in a nod to Latour (1993), who emphasizes its suitability to contemporary hybrids, networks, and collectives that defy modern dualisms. Pollution is certainly among these.

For a thoroughgoing treatment of the spatial fix, see Harvey (1996, 2000, 2001).

Of course, this argument falls short if extraction itself negatively impacts distant ecologies and communities.

Indirect risk, in the form of ‘blowback,’ however, might be significant. Cities might consider the ways in which their practices of externalizing risk marginalize parts of the global population through ecologically mediated social relations and potentiate future indirect risks.

While USCOM's CCP program is important, it is a translocal network with vertical significance, but without a transnational horizontal aspect. We will focus on two translocal networks with transnational horizontal aspects. Likewise, there are important transnational networks the membership of which is not municipal—the Western Regional Climate Action Initiative and the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, both of which are joined, or are likely to be joined, by several Canadian provinces, are examples.

Sapporo, Japan; Goteborg, Sweden; Beijing, PR of China; the Hague, the Netherlands; Minneapolis, US; Cape Town, South Africa; Adelaide, Australia; Oxford, UK; Santa Monica, US; Hangzhou, PR of China; Linz, Austria; Barcelona, Spain; Portland, Oregon; Qingdao, PR of China; Gelsenkirchen, Germany; Kaohsiung, Taiwan; Sol Plaatje, South Africa; Gwangju, South Korea; and Daegu, South Korea. Eight of these are also ICEI CCP participant cities.

While some ICLEI CCP member cities have set per capita targets, they have done so largely in order to permit emissions growth consistent with population growth and have not set those targets according to a sustainable level of global anthropogenic GHG emissions divided by global population.

It should be noted that even Kyoto's commitments are non-binding. That is, there are no formal enforcement mechanisms written into the Protocol.

This flexibility is evidenced by, among other phenomena, the election of Green Party mayors in Germany. While such candidates are yet unviable in the national level, Green Party candidates and their platforms prove more viable at the local level.