The C40 Experience: From Technical Experiment to Political Inspiration
| Author | Emmanuelle Pinault |
| Published date | 01 November 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12765 |
| Date | 01 November 2019 |
The C40 Experience: From Technical
Experiment to Political Inspiration
Emmanuelle Pinault
C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group
A response to ‘A Decade of C40: Research Insights and
Agendas for City Networks’, by Kathryn Davidson,
Lars Coenen, Brendan Gleeson*
Abstract
In her response to the article ‘The C40 Experience: Global Network Insights From A Decade Of C40’, Emmanuelle Pinault dis-
cusses ‘the C40 experience’from an insider and practitioner’s perspective, showing the city network has been evolving from
technical experiment to increasing political inspiration.
In her article ‘The C40 Experience: Global Network Insights
From A Decade Of C40’,Kathryn Davidson analyses ‘the C40
experience’under three angles: political economies city net-
works, knowledge dynamics in city networks, and how city net-
works transform key urban institutions. My response discusses
this analysis from an insider and practitioner’s perspective.
The article enounces some fundamental truths such as ‘the
city-network should be understood as more than just a net-
work that connects its nodes’. Indeed, in terms of city network-
ing, the collective clearly overcomes the sum of the parts. This
is particularly true at the diplomatic level, where city networks
enable the collective voice of mayors to influence the intergov-
ernmental processes. Something no city individually, not even
the biggest ones, is able to achieve alone.
But it also brings its lot of controversial arguments. First, the
use of ‘Darwinian experimentation’to describe C40 generates
astonishment and indignation. This is certainly not the way
C40 staff and members would describe the C40 experience!
Additionally, the affirmation taken from Smeds and Acuto
that ‘although C40 has been actively engaging with interna-
tional agendas [...], C40 is still “not at the table”of multilat-
eral negotiations and national policymaking’. This point
needs to be nuanced in three ways. First, it has never been
an objective of C40 to gain a seat at the global table for
itself: it is a general and advocacy line of the urban con-
stituency as a whole, led by United Cities and Local Govern-
ments (UCLG) and the Global Task Force of Local and
Regional Governments. Second, differently from other peer
organizations, C40 is more interested in driving concrete
ambitious action at the local, national and global levels,
than obtaining a status. Third, the place of cities in
multilateral negotiations has greatly evolved in the last five
years, with the creation of the Action agenda in the
UNFCCC, the inclusion of ‘all levels of governments’in the
Paris Agreement, the recognition of the Word Assembly of
Local Leaders in the New Urban Agenda, the 2016 IPCC
decision of cities, all examples of the increasing urban influ-
ence on the intergovernmental processes. Cities are effec-
tively still not negotiating equally with Nations but, 1) it is
not necessarily an ultimate goal for them and 2) the pro-
gress made towards this goal should be mentioned.
Further quoting Smeds and Acuto, Davidson observes ‘an
emphasis on epistemic learning in socio-technical experiment
rather than political learning through governance experimenta-
tion’.Effectively, C40 political and diplomatic work is still lar-
gely unknown and undervalued compared to its technical
work. This, in my view, is due to three main causes, (1) at the
national level, governance structures and specific political cir-
cumstances that consciously impede mayors to fully express
themselves at political actors, (2) its translation at the global
level in the fact that when cities are accepted in global discus-
sions, it is still mainly as observers, implementers and local
technical resources, not yet as decision-makers or agenda-set-
ters and (3) the lack of interest or priorization of city diplo-
macy within the city-networks themselves, compared to more
technical, quantitative work, in big part due to the lack of
funding available for diplomatic activity.
Davidson’s analysis on ‘how city networks transform key
urban institutions’is also full of both interesting and contro-
versial affirmations.
First, the ‘call for city networks to be ‘critical imple-
menters’and ‘strategic partners’of the national government,
as opposed to autonomous actors pursuing emissions reduc-
tions on their own.’Because cities cannot achieve alone the
emission reductions needed to implement the Paris
*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.
©2019 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2019) 10:4 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12765
Global Policy Volume 10 . Issue 4 . November 2019
718
Special Section Article
To continue reading
Request your trial