C40 Cities Inside Out
| Published date | 01 November 2019 |
| Date | 01 November 2019 |
| Author | Mehrnaz Ghojeh,Michele Acuto |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12760 |
C40 Cities Inside Out
Michele Acuto
University of Melbourne
Mehrnaz Ghojeh
C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group
Abstract
C40, and city networks more in general, need to be seen ’inside out’too. In response to Davidson, Gleeson and Coenen, we
argue that it is imperative to acknowledge more explicitly how networks like C40, or international urban policy programmes
more generally, are situated within a broader political economy of ‘global urban governance’. We detail that this means
unpacking the often convenient use of popular names like ‘C40’and ‘Arup’to remember that these entities are complex
organisational arrangements with internal (within their own organisation) as much as transversal (across them and other simi-
lar organisations) politics and, not least, often highly mobile people shaping the ways they act and react internationally.
The C40 Climate Leadership Group has repeatedly cap-
tured business interest, media reporting and public limelight
when it comes to putting cities on the stage, quite literally,
on major environmental challenges. The essay by Davidson,
Coenen and Gleeson captures this zeitgeist and arrives in a
very timely manner as C40 prepares for its 2019 Mayors
Summit and fifteenth anniversary in 2020.
In the spirit of offering a ‘friendly rejoinder and a modest
amendment’to Davidson et al., as suggested by Gordon
and Johnson in this special section, we offer an ‘inside out’
view of what C40 represents in the current landscape of glo-
bal policy and a concur that an updated stock take of
C40’s work is much needed. This means, acknowledging
more explicitly how networks like C40, or international
urban policy programmes more generally, are situated
within a broader political economy of ‘global urban gover-
nance’(Acuto, 2018a). It also means unpacking the often
convenient use of popular names like ‘C40’and ‘Arup’to
remember that these entities are complex organisational
arrangements with internal (within their own organisation)
as much as transversal (across them and other similar organ-
isations) politics and, not least, often highly mobile people
shaping the ways they act and react internationally.
City networks like C40 are also not static and finite; rather,
they tend to benefit from having an agile platform of
management and operation, helping them navigate through
the complex governance and technical landscape of cities
and global policy. Centrally, it is key to preface this by high-
lighting how C40’s organisation and operations have chan-
ged substantially over the past 14 years. This has not just
been a growth in funding and membership. It has moved,
for example, from what was until fairly recently mainly peer-
peer match-making activities to increasingly direct technical
assistance (i.e. through the Danish and British government
grants).
Some more nuance as to the ‘international’that C40 oper-
ates in is needed. For instance, whilst often grouped
together as in the case of ‘theme I’in Davidson et al., net-
works like UCLG, ICLEI and C40 display significant differ-
ences. ICLEI and UCLG rely much more explicitly than C40
on a variety of committees and assemblies for their gover-
nance and are perhaps more representative of the average
city network ‘out there’in terms of budget, operations,
membership size and overall set up than C40 might be. For
instance, UCLG, purportedly the largest organisation of sub-
national governments in the world, with over 240,000 mem-
bers, involves a complex organisational structure of regional
chapters and specific‘sections’like Metropolis –a network
in itself with 139 members. Equally, environmentally focused
networks are but 29 per cent of a broader populace where
there might be more than 300 networks in operation (Acuto,
2016). We must strive not to generalise, but rather contextu-
alise, the lessons of C40 in a world where the likes of health,
A response to ‘A Decade of C40: Research Insights and
Agendas for City Networks’,
Kathryn Davidson, Lars Coenen, Brendan Gleeson*
*Davidson, K., Coenen, L., and Gleeson, B. (2019), ‘A Decade of C40:
Research Insights and Agendas for City Networks’, Global Policy, 10
(4), 697–708.
Global Policy (2019) 10:4 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12760 ©2019 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 10 . Issue 4 . November 2019 709
Special Section Article
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