Unpacking the Politics of C40: ‘Critical Friendship’ for a Second Decade
| Author | Emilia Smeds |
| Date | 01 November 2019 |
| Published date | 01 November 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12757 |
Unpacking the Politics of C40: ‘Critical
Friendship’for a Second Decade
Emilia Smeds
University College London
Thanks to pioneering work, urban climate governance is a
firmly established cross-disciplinary field of study, with
research having focused on both its networked form (Acuto,
2013; Betsill and Bulkeley, 2004; Hoffmann, 2011) and ‘on-
the-ground’experiments (Bulkeley et al., 2015; Cast
an Broto
and Bulkeley, 2013). This editorial Introduction to a Special
Issue on the C40 network and an excellent recent contribu-
tion by some of the same authors (Davidson et al., 2019)
offer a comprehensive stock-take of a decade of C40 activi-
ties and scholarship. In response, I offer some reflections on
the three thought-provoking themes that the authors pro-
pose future research should focus on.
The opening question discussed by the authors is ‘Who
has power and influence to shape the direction and coordi-
nating capacity of city networks?’. Such a research agenda
on political economy can only be applauded, given that C40
has emerged as a powerful player shaping urban climate
governance globally. Questions of intra-network dynamics
appear especially important to understanding the kind of cli-
mate action generated by C40-networked urban climate gov-
ernance, and whether this holds sufficiently transformative
potential (Davidson and Gleeson, 2018; Smeds and Acuto,
2018). Some comments on this are offered by the authors in
the final section of this Introduction. Inspired by this, I would
argue for attention to three aspects: the politics of leader-
ship, the politics of membership, and donor politics. Consid-
ering C40, the network’s prominent leaders quickly spring to
mind. It would be interesting to see some discussion of the
changing positioning and activities of C40 over time: from
having been established in 2005 by socialist London Mayor
Ken Livingstone, to growing under NYC Mayor Michael
Bloomberg as the guru of entrepreneurial urban governance
and incumbent President of the C40 Board, and taking on
new priorities under Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo (and now Los
Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti) as C40 Chairs. Investigating the
politics of leadership would involve answering questions
such as: in what ways have the activities and strategies of
C40 changed under different leaders? What is the power bal-
ance between C40 leadership and member cities represented
by the Steering Committee? Second, C40 derives its credibil-
ity from a unique membership body, representing 94 cities
globally. The network was originally founded with 18
‘megacity’members, defined by population or global city sta-
tus as ranked by GDP output.
1
Although membership criteria
were revised in 2012 to allow for non-qualifying ‘innovator
cities’and ‘observer cities’to join, 76 megacities remain at
the core of C40 and enjoy sole access to the C40 Steering
Committee and Board (C40, 2012). Here, ‘unpacking’C40
could focus on understanding what power different cities
yield within the network, by virtue of their membership or
perceived global ‘rank’. The donor politics of C40 also appear
very pertinent to examine in light of the Rockefeller Founda-
tion’s April 2019 announcement that it is to end funding for
its 100 Resilient Cities program (Flavelle, 2019). C40’s major
donors are Bloomberg Philanthropies, Children’s Investment
Fund Foundation and Realdania, with financial support from
a range of other national government, private sector and
philanthropic organisations (C40, 2019a). Is the financial sus-
tainability of C40 fragile, or is C40 ‘too big to fail’? What
influence do these donors exert on C40 priorities and activi-
ties? More empirical research is needed on all these politico-
economic questions.
Much of existing research on C40 has focused on knowl-
edge production and sharing, with this Introduction provid-
ing a valuable review of this literature. The authors’
conceptualisation of C40 as engaged in ‘knowledge creation
and distribution through a hybrid form of Darwinian ... and
generative experimentation”(p. 9) nicely captures the net-
work’s‘curation’of ‘best practices’through both specific
sub-networks and programmes and iterative city-to-city
learning in relation to specific urban infrastructures. How-
ever, the argument that this amounts to C40 ‘orchestrating’
experimentation would benefit from more analytical preci-
sion, in line with Gordon and Johnson’s (2017) distinction
between ‘orchestrators’,‘intermediaries’and ‘targets’.
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
©2019 The Authors. Global Policy published by Durham University and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Global Policy (2019) 10:4 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12757
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use,
distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Global Policy Volume 10 . Issue 4 . November 2019
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