Photo: Screen-Shot-2016-09-25-at-12.02.57
Time to take city diplomacy seriously
25 September 2016
by Jonathan Andrews
By Michele Acuto, Director of the UCL City Leadership Initiative, and Steve Rayner, James Martin Professor of Science and Civilisation at Oxford University’s School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography*
Beyond what several have tagged as pure ‘pomp and circumstance’ of global summits for mayors lies a vast landscape of city diplomacy connecting cities across themes, boundaries and innovations.
The City Leadership Initiative’s study, perhaps the first non-topical and systematic assessment of the panorama of city networking globally, gathered a comprehensive database of 170 city networks from all over the world.
National, state-based organisations (such as the US Conference of Mayors) are still dominant, representing some 49 percent of city networks. Having said that, regional (such as EUROCITIES) and international networks (such as United Cities and Local Governments) are on the rise, now accounting respectively for 21 percent and 29 percent of the total. Despite the success of networks like C40 or ICLEI, environment is but a third of city diplomacy initiatives globally (29 percent), with themes like culture (11 percent), poverty (16 percent) and gender (8 percent) the next most important.
In an age of global governance fragmentation and non-state-centric discussions on world politics, cities still relate substantially to their national peers and central governments. In short, national politics still matter for cities.
The size of these organisations, as noted above, ranges from small selected pools of cities (as with the Cisco-sponsored City Protocol on smart cities) to larger international and regional networks, such as the Arab Town Organisation (22 countries) or the European Forum on Urban Security (250 European cities), to even wider national groups reaching up to 20,000 members nationally (as in the US or India). is variety is well institutionalised in urban policy. Over 58 percent of city networks are between 10 and 30 years old.
It is undeniable that a marked growth can be detected over the last two decades: about 60 of the 170 networks under consideration in this study were in place by 1985; this number had nearly doubled by the late 1990s (to around 120 by 1999), and appears to be growing still.
City networks push beyond local government politics into highly complex ‘hybrid’ (public–private) governance arrangements, and also into innovative modes of cooperation between cities as subnational actors. Our study has revealed that, while just over half (54.2 percent) of the networks are still single-tiered, that is, centred on a single secretariat leading the whole organisation, a substantial proportion (30 percent) operate in two-tiered (with sub-networks) or even pluralised (15.8 percent) forms of networked governance.
Besides, while city-led initiatives lay behind the majority (58 percent), NGO-led efforts, mostly prompted by the private sector, account for a considerable 19 percent of the total, only just behind efforts led by intergovernmental organisations such as UN agencies (23 percent). The sprawl of city networks highlights the centrality of private interests and actors in city diplomacy. This, inevitably, raises questions about private interests, but also about the sustainability of so many networked initiatives in a time of resource strapped local governments.
Yet data at hand tells us city diplomacy might be well worth the effort. There is a conspicuous ‘experimental’ activity of joint initiatives, for example to curb greenhouse gas emissions or encourage participatory planning.
And city networks are producing regular reports (in 45 percent of cases), joint pilots and policies (38 percent) and information exchanges (37 percent issuing newsletters, 9 percent publishing magazines or journals, and 24 percent maintaining blogs, social media accounts or online noticeboards). These link cities and spread information, so it would be profoundly misleading to represent them, and the broader enterprise of city diplomacy, as expressed solely through the conferences reported in news magazines and blogs.
* This is an edited version of the article that was originally published in the September issue of International Affairs, the journal of Chatham House.
