Situating C40 in the Evolution of Networked Urban Climate Governance
| Published date | 01 November 2019 |
| Author | Lars Coenen,Kathryn Davidson,Brendan Gleeson |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12759 |
| Date | 01 November 2019 |
Situating C40 in the Evolution of Networked
Urban Climate Governance
Lars Coenen
University of Melbourne, and
Mohn Centre for Regional Development and Innovation, Western Norway University of
Applied Sciences
Kathryn Davidson and Brendan Gleeson
University of Melbourne
Abstract
The responses by Acuto, Frantzeskaki, Gordon & Johnson, Pinault and Smeds all draw attention to the need to situate C40
in a wider political and economic context. Global city networks such as C40 facilitate, orchestrate, test and diffuse critical
innovations for urban climate action through processes of experimentation. How these processes of on-the-ground experi-
mentation in networked cities relate to global climate action and governance remains however poorly understood. Further
research is needed to disclose and unpack the hidden politics, knowledge dynamics and institutional reconfigurations of
such experiments curtailed by seemingly inclusive but rather opaque concepts such as living labs, co-creation and co-pro-
duction.
We are grateful to our interlocutors for the considerate
and thought-provoking commentary provided on our paper.
It provides a lot of food for thought for researchers to
engage with the increasingly significant urban climate gov-
ernance orchestrated in and by city networks. It should not
come as a surprise that there are still many unresolved
questions and debates about the shifting configurations of
authority and legitimacy carved out by cities as players of
force in addressing the wicked challenge of climate change.
The responses by Acuto, Frantzeskaki, Gordon & Johnson,
Pinault and Smeds all draw attention to the fact that net-
worked urban climate governance indeed plays out in a
multi-level governance framing. City networks such as C40
give collective voice to cities in a global arena of climate
action. They can play a powerful role in helping with the
urgent task of adapting our urban habitats to fast moving
climate change and to assisting the wider cause of planetary
mitigation of dangerous carbon emissions.
Our respondents are right in asserting that C40 and its
member cities should not be viewed as operating in a
political and economic vacuum. Situating C40 in a wider
political space opens avenues of research that extend on
the one hand into a closer look at the intra-organisational
configurations and dynamics of city networks and, on the
other, into scrutinizing the relationships between C40 and
other governance arrangements encompassing climate and
urban policy. Acuto’s suggestion to adopt an inside-out
perspective offers a fruitful analytical and methodological
point of departure to trace, compare and evaluate ‘the
lived experiences’of individual cities across the globe that
shed light on the nuanced politics of C40 actions on the
ground. Smeds further substantiates this inquiry through
her proposition to study the politics of leadership, mem-
bership and donorship. Recent developments –which were
not known to the authors at the time of writing –within
the 100 Resilient Cities network demonstrate indeed the
Rejoinder to Commentaries by
Michele Acuto & Mehrnaz Ghojeh, Niki Frantzeskaki, David Gordon & Craig Johnson,
Emmanuelle Pinault and Emilia Smeds
A series of responses 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: 10.1111/1758-5899.12759 ©2019 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 10 . Issue 4 . November 2019 723
Special Section Article
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