Greening the Global City. City Networks in Environmental Knowledge Production and Policy Transfer

Environmental governance becomes more and more embedded in a set of different scalar institutions simultaneously in which cities and metropolitan regions play major roles. City governments transverse different scales rather than merely act as subunits within a hierarchical state organization. At the center of this paper are two major global city networks that engage with environmental issues on a global scale ‑ C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group and ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability. They are working on developing innovative environmental and climate protection programs and policies and cities often serve in this process as the laboratories for pioneering technologies and policy programs. Knowledge production is thereby incorporated into governance practice that shape planning ideas, policy innovations, and “best practices”. This development has led to an institutionalization of knowledge/policy interfaces (Chilvers and Evans 2009) through policy networks at local, national, transnational and global scales.

To understand how policies and planning practices within the metropolis are entangled with global governance and economic development, it is necessary to look at the institutions, ideologies, and actors and the connections and inter-linkages they establish between different levels. The question is how environmental objectives are framed by institutionalized discourses on a global interurban scale, and how these frames of knowledge are in turn interrelated with local regimes of environmental governance? The study of the two city networks will thereby function as a lens through which global/local re-scaling processes relate to the production of urban environments. In tracing the actors, information, ideas and ideologies on different scales in a ‘global ethnography’ (Burawoy 2001) the channels of global flows that shape the landscape of intensified interurban relations become visible and concrete.