The urban link : why global cities matter for global governance
Date
2011
Authors
Acuto, Michele
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This thesis is about the importance of global cities for world politics. While there is a growing body of literature concerned with explaining the transformation of the international order, almost no theorization has taken into account the key metropolises of our time as elements of these revolutions. I seek to overcome this gap by demonstrating how global cities have a pervasive agency in contemporary global governance. They, I argue, are influential both in an 'actively passive' sense, recasting the geographies of local politics (their actant dimension) as well as in the more active ways of diplomacy and transnational networking (their actor dimension). Looking at global cities brings about three fundamental advantages on traditional IR paradigms. First, it facilitates a structurationist turn in IR towards more nuanced analyses of world politics. Second, it widens the horizon of the discipline through a multiscalar image of global governance. Third, it underscores how global cities have a strategic positioning when it comes to core contemporary challenges such as climate change. In order to illustrate this theoretical and practical influence, I rely on a structurationist framework (applied via actor-network theory) to identify global cities' agency in terms of their capacity to produce political structures that impact the geography of global governance. My empirical analysis is respectively dedicated to deconstructing their twin actant/actor dimensions, which I then reassemble in the conclusions. I begin by discussing the politics in global cities, looking at the 'glocal' policymaking processes of strategic urban planning (SUP) in London and Sydney. Then, focusing on the politics of global cities as actors, I analyze the Climate Leadership Group (C40) as a transnational network for metropolises such as London and Sydney to partake in global environmental governance. Overall, I argue, the production of global city-driven policy structures impacts global governance in that it charts new political geographies for collective and multiscalar action. Global cities, I demonstrate, can (and do) exercise a substantial influence in these realms. Yet, this agency remains centred on some key neoliberal continuities which global cities do not deny, if not uphold, therefore posing pivotal challenges that remind us not to take the geopolitical role of cities for granted. It is thus up to international scholars to engage in the analysis of these dynamics, while allowing for these metropolises to broaden the critical potential and multiscalar reach of the discipline. Global cities will certainly not wait.
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Thesis (PhD)
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