“We Are the State”: Subnational Governments' Quest for a Distinct Status in Global Environmental Governance

The Paris Agreement of 2015 ushered in a new era of polycentricity and hybrid multilateralism, creating fresh opportunities for mayors, governors, and city network representatives to assert local and subnational governments’ status as emerging global actors. Notably, the constituency of subnational governments within the UN system has endeavored to develop its agency within and across the interconnected fields of climate, biodiversity, and SDG governance by employing a unique set of “hybrid” diplomatic practices. They have achieved this by emulating many strategies and behaviors of other “non-state” observer constituencies at the UN, while also striving to distinguish themselves from civil society and business actors by gradually gaining recognition of their distinct status as “state” actors from UN institutions and sovereign governments.

The present research builds on sociological theories of sovereignty and practice theory in International Political Sociology to analyze and theorize the nature of subnational actorness and its implications for the evolution of world order in this era of ideological polarization, politicization of global governance, and crises of multilateralism. Empirically, it relies on interviews, ethnographic observation, and discourse analysis to examine how the constituency of local governments promotes new practices of “multilevel governance” and “multilevel diplomacy” within multilateral diplomatic spaces such as UN conferences (e.g., climate and biodiversity COPs). It argues that the constituency navigates between promoting “best” governance practices in an apparently apolitical manner and advocating for a politically radical redefinition of the boundaries between “high” and “low” politics, functional governance fields, domestic policy realms, and transnational and global governance spaces. In doing so, the constituency simultaneously defers to and disrupts the existing inter-national political order by redrawing local to global relations in a manner that can either reinforce or disrupt the nation-state's political "voice" and international subjectivity.