From There to Here and Beyond: A Friendly Rejoinder to Davidson et al.
| Author | Craig Johnson,David Gordon |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12756 |
| Published date | 01 November 2019 |
| Date | 01 November 2019 |
From There to Here and Beyond: A Friendly
Rejoinder to Davidson et al.
David Gordon
University of California at Santa Cruz
Craig Johnson
University of Guelph
Davidson et al. provide an insightful synthesis of existing
research on city-networks like the C40 and offer a com-
pelling vision of a comprehensive research agenda moving
forward. We heartily concur with their call to step back, take
a deep breath, and think carefully about how best to pro-
ceed. With that in mind, we offer this commentary as a
friendly rejoinder, and modest amendment, to their impor-
tant intervention. While we agree that much remains to be
known about the ways in which city-networks are now influ-
encing urban climate policy and governance, we argue that
future city-network research needs to prioritize and develop
an empirical strategy for documenting and understanding
the changing nature of power operating in, through, and by
city-networks like the C40 (Johnson, 2018).
The point of departure for our commentary is that volun-
tary city-networks like the C40 are inevitably organized
around a fundamental tension between what Lena Partzsch
(2017) refers to as relations of ‘power over’and ‘power with’.
As the scholarship on city-networks has rather convincingly
demonstrated, coordination in voluntary transnational city-
networks like C40 requires some centripetal force in order
to achieve coordination and collective effects, especially at
the scale and scope envisioned. If cities within city-networks
like C40 do indeed ‘act’while nations talk, then it is essen-
tial to acknowledge that this has, historically, manifest in
action by a handful of ambitious cities alongside the inabil-
ity or unwillingness of most others to translate nominal
commitments into concrete, never mind coordinated, effort.
Put simply, the notion that cities act doesn’t necessarily
translate into cities acting together. Some additional force is
needed to overcome the barriers to coordination and the
temptation to free-ride. Yet, the traditional tools of coercion,
compulsion, and command are not available within these
initiatives. Cities have to believe, in other words, that they
gain a measure of power ‘with’one another if they are to
conform to expectations and standards around which the
network is organized. This leads us to place a heavy empha-
sis on questions of authority and legitimacy in city-networks
like the C40. Why do cities decide to ‘listen’to the C40, con-
form to group expectations, and work with one another
when this comes at a cost? How can the benefits of power
‘with’within the city-network be balanced against the costs
associated with allowing others a measure of power ‘over’
traditional domains of city governance?
Our sense is that this tension cuts across all three planks
of the research agenda set out by Davidson et al. In the sec-
tions that follow, we outline some suggestions as to how
this might shift, in subtle but meaningful ways, the direction
and focus of ongoing efforts to better understand, assess,
and organize the C40 in particular as well as the broader
domain of global urban climate governance (Gordon, 2018).
Political economy: increasing attention is now being paid
to the political and financial connections that are being
forged between city-networks like the C40 and the private
sector, including large multinationals such as ARUP and Sie-
mens and philanthropic organizations, such as the Bloom-
berg and the Rockefeller Foundations. This has generated
questions regarding who has the power to establish shared
expectations, objectives, and ideas related to the urban gov-
ernance of climate change. As Davidson et al. generously
acknowledge, we have suggested elsewhere deploying the
lens of ‘orchestration’and have raised the need to better
understand who is orchestrating and whether such efforts
are ultimately directed towards laying the foundations for
capital accumulation and investment at the urban scale
(Gordon and Johnson, 2017). However, apart from a small
number of studies (e.g. Bouteligier, 2015; Gordon, Forthcom-
ing; Gordon and Acuto, 2015), systematic research into the
ways in which and conditions under which city-networks are
able to forge new ties with finance and investment capital
remains thin. This leaves open a number of pressing ques-
tions. How exactly does membership in the C40 affect
access to capital in the form of loans, favourable bond
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: 10.1111/1758-5899.12756 ©2019 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 10 . Issue 4 . November 2019 715
Special Section Article
To continue reading
Request your trial