Our latest article in #Cities Journal has just been published: "The #legitimacy of #CityNetworks in international multi-stakeholder governance." The starting puzzle: bodies like United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), C40 Cities, ICLEI, or Council of European Municipalities and Regions (CEMR) coordinate policy across hundreds or thousands of municipalities, but they have no international legal personality. Their principals are cities, not states. So where does their legitimacy actually come from? We present a process-based #LegitimacyFramework around five elements: legality, accountability, legitimate membership, and effectiveness plus moral authority. The first four are tested against two original datasets: organisational features of 102 city networks, and board/leadership profiles for over 1,000 individuals across 36 networks. A few things the data show: → Legal form diversified sharply after Rio/Agenda 21 (1992). Pre-1992 city networks are mostly NGO-style associations; post-1992 ones spread across intergovernmental networks, consortia, foundations, and hybrid platforms. → Despite that diversity, governance converges on a shared template: general assembly, board/steering committee, secretariat. These are present in over half of all networks. → Procedural institutionalisation (statutes, financial disclosure, audits, sanctions, rotation rules) is strongest in older, larger, full-template networks: a "legitimacy package" rather than isolated safeguards. → Representation is uneven: boards are geographically broad, but headquarters and presidencies concentrate in Europe, and presidents are more likely than ordinary board members to be male and to have held prior political office. → On the CDP emissions data, C40 and GCoM member cities show lower per-capita emissions than non-members. Though we are careful to flag this as associational, not causal. The bigger picture: city networks are not miniature #InternationalOrganisations (IOs) or ordinary #NGOs. They are a distinct form of public-subnational authority, legitimated less by treaty status and more by legal anchoring, delegated organs, transparency, and performance-oriented coordination. Written with my LSE Cities collaborators from University of Genoa and Heidelberg University: ALESSIO SARDO, Gianluca Cerruti, and Arnulfo Daniel Mateos Durán. Open access with link below. #UrbanGovernance #CityNetworks #CityDiplomacy #GlobalGovernance #Legitimacy https://lnkd.in/dwVQygj2
Thanks for sharing Philipp Rode . What an interesting research!! I totally agree that the key is how to institutionalise (defining and measuring it) city networks as platforms for cities beyond their member states.
This is really fascinating research. We are more than a regular NGO as our members are policymakers in their own right, and yet, we don’t have a seat at the table in the official intergovernmental agenda. In some cases we are treated as observers like other environmental NGOs.