Cities and Global Governance: State Failure or a New Global Order?
| Published date | 01 June 2016 |
| Author | Simon Curtis |
| Date | 01 June 2016 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829816637233 |
| Subject Matter | Conference Articles |
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2016, Vol. 44(3) 455 –477
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829816637233
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1. Benjamin Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities (London:
Yale University Press, 2014).
Cities and Global Governance:
State Failure or a
New Global Order?
Simon Curtis
University of East Anglia, UK
Abstract
International society, so long the resolution to problems of collective political order, now appears to
be failing in its capacity to deal with transnational challenges such as climate change, global security and
financial instability. Indeed, the structure of international society itself has become a significant obstacle
to such pressing issues of global governance. One striking response has been the reemergence of
cities as important actors on the international stage. This article will show how these two issues
are intrinsically linked. Cities have taken on new governance roles in the gaps left by hamstrung
nation-states, and their contribution to an emerging global governance architecture will be a significant
feature of the international relations of the 21st century. But do the new governance activities of
cities represent a failure on the part of states, as some scholars have argued? Or are they a part of
an emerging form of global order, in which the relationship between states, cities and other actors is
being recalibrated? This article argues that the remarkable renaissance of cities in recent decades has
been a result of a shift in the structure of international society, and assesses the causal drivers of this
shift. It goes on to draw out some of the implications of the recalibration of the relationship between
the city and the state for how we understand the emerging form of global order.
Keywords
global cities, global order, global governance, international society
Introduction
The political theorist Benjamin Barber recently made an eye-catching call for a global
‘parliament of mayors’.1 His argument was that the failure of the state (and of the wider
society of states) to make successful inroads into serious transnational governance issues,
Corresponding author:
Simon Curtis, School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communications, University of East Anglia,
Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK.
Email: simoncurtis@mac.com
637233MIL0010.1177/0305829816637233MillenniumCurtis
research-article2016
Conference Article
456 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 44(3)
2. The City Leadership Initiative is a partnership between University College London, World
Bank and UN-Habitat, see http://cityleadership.net.
3. Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World, 302.
4. Here I use the term ‘global city’ to denote a historically specific form of city morphology that
is linked to globalisation. It should be noted that some scholars have argued that global cities,
or world cities, have always been a feature of historical international systems. While space
does not permit discussion of these debates, my usage of the term follows Sassen in that it
denotes the changes wrought to the urban fabric by the restructuring of the world economy
such as climate change, called forth a pressing need for alternative global governance
arrangements. At the same time he argued that states have become ever more distant
from their citizens, who are increasingly alienated by a widening democratic deficit. For
Barber it is in the renaissance of urban life that solutions to these dual crises of the
nation-state can be found. He wants to see new scale-jumping municipal democratic bod-
ies emerge, harnessing technological advances to join up local participation with novel
transnational urban assemblies. And, although calls for the establishment of a global
parliament of mayors may sound radical, Barber claims that it would be, in effect, merely
a formalisation of well-established political trends.
A networked form of city-led global governance is not, for Barber, a utopian blueprint,
but simply the identification and amplification of existing trajectories and concrete prac-
tices. The capacities for such governance roles already exist in the various global city
networks that have been constructed. Voluntary and informal co-operation already occur
across the many city networks that have been built – of which the C40 Climate Leadership
Group, Metropolis, the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI),
Mayors for Peace, Sister Cities International, United Cities and Local Government
(UCLG), or the European Forum for Urban Security (EFUS), are but the tip of a huge
iceberg. A project is currently underway at University College London to map and assess
the nature of contemporary city networks and their growing diplomatic connections.
Initial estimates suggest there may be over 200 such city networks, of various types.2
It is clear, then, that we already inhabit a ‘decentralized planet of networked cities,
provinces and regions [which] while obviously dominated by traditional nation-states …
encompasses a wide variety of sub-state and non-state actors, from multi-national corpo-
rations and global financial institutions to civic NGOs and global social movements’.3
These networks have grown in the spaces and gaps left by the state’s governance failures.
However, what is critical to note – and this is a point that Barber leaves unmade – is that
such transnational urban networks are not simply a challenge to the state. This is not a
zero-sum game, where the rise of cities necessarily means the decline of states. The rise
of the city should not be seen as a symptom of the exhaustion of the state as a political
form, but, rather, a facet of the adaptation of the state as it tries to cope with a changing
environment. In this sense, it is not the state that is failing, but a particular historical
iteration of the state – the nation-state – that is being reassembled into a new form. It is
not international society that is failing, but a historically specific form of international
society, which is now evolving in an attempt to transcend its limitations. And a new his-
torically distinctive form of the city – the Global City – has become a critical component
of the devolved governance strategy of leading liberal states at the contemporary con-
juncture. Such cities are, then, a facet of a historically specific form of world order.4
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