This presentation will probably stand out from the rest of presenations within the session as it uses transnational municipal networks as a unit of analysis rather than any type of a territorial entity. Transnational municipal networks are coalitions of cities which are the most global, vocal and efficient form of city diplomacy in the early 21st century.
With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic the agency of transnational municipal networks, fuelled with cities’ adherence to pragmatic problem-solving, has become ever more apparent. As over 95% of reported COVID-19 cases took place in urban areas (Acuto et al. 2020), cities became both the first habitats needing to deal with the global pandemic and front-liners in “crisis response, recovery and rebuilding” (UN 2020, 15). Indeed, while traditional diplomacy was “mostly unable to supersede national interests to find global solutions” (Pipa & Bouchet 2020, 600), local governments were fast to share best practices with each other and successfully leverage their international ties and networks to develop a collective policy perspective to the COVID-19 crisis.
City diplomacy has evolved with a specific focus on environmental agendas (Kern & Bulkeley 2009; Van der Heijden 2018). It is not surprising that many transnational municipal networks embedded sustainability and resilience into their COVID-19 responses and post-pandemic recovery measures, acknowledging the still-growing climate emergency.
In the presentation I will try answering the following questions: What initiatives and actions of transnational municipal networks connected COVID-19 response measures to climate change action? When did they emerge, who proposed and supported them? How have transnational municipal networks explained the connection between COVID-19 response measures and climate change action?
Keywords: city diplomacy|pandemic response|climate change action|transnational municipal networks
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