Between local innovation and global impact: cities, networks, and the governance of climate change

Abstract

Global climate governance conducted in settings such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Major Economies Forum, and Group of Twenty (G20) has proven incapable, to date, of generating an effective response. Greenhouse gas emissions have steadily increased since the issue was added to the global agenda in the early 1990s and prospects appear slim for a single, all-encompassing international legal agreement. Outside the formal regime, however, there are signs of dynamism as non-nation state actors engage in a variety of climate governance experiments. Cities, and city-networks such as the C40 Climate Leadership Group, represent important sources of innovation in the broader system of global climate governance: they challenge prevailing norms regarding who should govern climate change, and how coordinated governance responses can be generated. This paper presents a brief history of the C40, and assesses, drawing on ideas from network theory, some of the opportunities and limitations of networked climate governance. Recognizing that cities, and city-networks, exist within a broader multi-level governance context, the paper concludes with some thoughts related to updating Canadian federal climate policy in order to leverage and enable innovative city-network governance initiatives, address gaps in current federal climate policy, and link climate change to other, pressing issues, on the urban agenda.

Keywords:

• global environmental governance
• cities and climate change
• city-networks
• climate change
• multi-level governance

Notes

1. The C40 is embedded in a broader universe of city-driven governance initiatives. These include the North American Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN), the ICLEI Cities for Climate Protection regional and international networks, Metropolis, the European Union Covenant of Mayors, and a host of others (for a good, albeit somewhat dated, overview, see Keiner and Kim 2007).

2. The focus of this article is squarely on cities engaged in climate governance, but insights could surely be extended to broader efforts at environmental and sustainability governance undertaken by cities and city-networks. There is much less evidence of explicit inter-city/city-network efforts at global governance in other issue areas. For possible exceptions see Acuto 2013b.

3. Bulkeley also links this second “wave” of municipal engagement in climate governance with a geographic extension beyond the western cities that were early pioneers, and a shift by city-networks to engage private sector actors directly in governance initiatives.

4. The global CCP network is constituted by a set of nationally and regionally organized CCP networks – national networks in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, Mexico, India, Europe, Asia, Latin America – loosely coordinated/organized by ICLEI.

5. Indeed this is an interesting question for empirical evaluation, although there are considerable methodological barriers to such a comparative analysis.

6. For a full list of C40 cities, see Appendix A.

7. These include workshops on Transportation & Congestion (London 2007), Airports (Los Angeles 2008), Adaptation (Tokyo 2008), Carbon Finance (Basel 2009, 2011), Waste (London 2010), Urban Efficiency (Berlin 2010), Delta Cities (Rotterdam 2010), Low-Carbon Cities (Hong Kong 2010) and Sustainable Development (Melbourne 2012).

8. There have been three Chairs to date: Greater London Authority (GLA) Mayor Livingstone (2005–2008), Toronto Mayor David Miller (2008–2010) and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (2010–present). The C40 will select a new Chair in 2013 to replace Mayor Bloomberg once his term as Mayor of New York City terminates in late 2013.

9. Prior to this, the operational capacity of the C40 was provided and funded almost entirely by the CCI, with the exception of the resources allocated to network activities by the Chair city. The current financial arrangement consists of matching funding provided by Bloomberg Philanthropies and CCI, providing the C40 with a budget of roughly $12M USD/year.

10. This suggests that networks like the C40 go beyond the “club goods” approach that typifies international standards organizations such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), since they aim to confer benefits of networking on any and all cities interested in learning from C40 actions. Cf. Prakash and Potoski (2006).

11. Allen goes on to note, importantly, that power “with” can easily bleed over into power “over” such that networks can create conditions (internal standards, for example) whereby other members may have little real alternative course of action. See also Grewal (2003) on network power, and Barnett and Duval (2005) for an analytic perspective on power that opens up space to explore how structural or constitutive power “to” can (re)create asymmetric relationships between actors.

12. In an edited volume on network analysis and IR, Kahler (2009) identifies two distinct types of networks in world politics: networks as actors, and networks as structures. The latter offers some interesting opportunities to reconsider emergent patterns resulting from inter-state relations, but my focus is on the former in the sense that I am interested in networks such as the C40 that have been explicitly created and in which participation is conscious and intentional.

13. More cynically, cities may also participate as a means of rhetorical-only commitment that serves to bolster the public face of the city without leading to implementation of actual policies; however, the work of Risse et al. (1999) is a useful counterpoint in that it highlights the ways that rhetorical commitment can, under certain conditions, entrap local politicians and induce them to develop deeds that match up to their words.

14. Cities such as Seattle or Los Angeles, which own their power utilities, are exceptions.

15. See Chaloux (2013) for a discussion of the emergence of trans-border multilevel governance arrangements with respect to the management of shared freshwater resources in the Great Lakes region.

16. These include, for example, the Municipalities table in the National Climate Change Process, the commitment to transfer of a portion of the federal gas tax to cities originally made by the Martin government in 2005 and made permanent by the Harper government in 2008, and federal provision of seed funding for the Municipal Green Fund in 2005.

17. Vancouver, along with Oslo, Washington, DC, and Venice, was admitted to the C40 as an observer city in early December 2012.

18. These include the Urban Sustainability Directors Network, Metropolis and ICLEI.