Subsistence over symbolism: the role of transnational municipal networks on cities’ climate policy innovation and adoption

Abstract

Urban areas account for the majority of global greenhouse gas emissions, and increasingly, it is city governments that are adopting and implementing climate mitigation policies. Many municipal governments have joined two different global city networks that aim to promote climate policy development at the urban scale, and there is qualitative evidence that such networks play an important role in motivating cities to adopt climate policies and helping them to implement them. Our study objective is to test this proposition quantitatively, making use of a global database on cities’ environmental policy adoption, and also taking into account a large number of other factors that could play a role in climate policy adoption. Controlling for these other factors, we find that network membership does make a significant difference in the number of different measures that city governments adopt. We also find that there are significant differences between the two different networks, suggesting that the nature of the services that such networks offer their members can play an important role. Our findings lead to the provision of a set of global mitigation strategies: First of all, joining the city networks can lead to a generation of global strategies which can result into climate mitigation benefits. However, cities are required to select the network which provides proper tailor made policies. Second, in the absence of concrete international commitments at the local level, city networks lay the ground for global governance and enable cities to adopt policies independently and proactively. Third, consideration of co-benefits of climate policies can optimize the development of global strategies.

Managing policy‐making in the local climate governance landscape: The role of network administrative organizations and member cities

“…Typically, in studies of TMNs, cities are considered the only relevant actors (see Lee and Van de Meene 2012; Bansard et al 2017; Rashidi and Patt 2017). However, in the meta‐network two sets of actors are relevant: cities and each TMN's NAO.…”

“…They thus have both the capacity and motivation to join multiple TMNs and do so as a resource‐ and reputation‐seeking behaviour aimed at fuelling continued economic growth. Rashidi and Patt (2017) find that membership in two TMNs significantly raises the likelihood that a focal municipality will adopt a climate change policy when compared to membership in only one or no TMNs. They conclude that multiple membership raises a city's commitment to climate policy by widening its access to services and resources.…”

“…In what is often a noisy idea‐environment, NAOs select particular priorities, approaches and actions to promote amongst their members, for example by providing guidance on how to measure and report emissions (Ewing‐Thiel and Manarolla 2011). A key objective is to facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration between cities (Rashidi and Patt 2017), which in turn stimulates innovation. NAOs work to capacitate local governments to achieve sustainability targets by providing knowledge, resources and incentives conducive to effective policy‐making (Betsill and Bulkeley 2007; Krause 2012a; Lee 2013).…”

“…Scholars have examined TMNs for their impact on cities' policy initiatives (Sharp et al 2011; Krause 2012a; Rashidi and Patt 2017). However, the reverse—cities' potential influence on overall TMN priorities—has received little attention.…”

Covenant of Mayors: Local Energy Generation, Methodology, Policies and Good Practice Examples

“…Their performance and identity are increasingly scrutinized in terms of global impact and exploited in the scientific literature [2]. This includes factors influencing the cities' participation in the networks and multilevel governance models that include observed [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] drivers influencing the emissions and target setting [13][14][15][16], tools and strategies for the redaction of the climate action plans [17][18][19][20][21][22] and benchmarking methods [23][24][25][26]. The factors further involve the assessments of the global contribution of local climate mitigation actions [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34].…”