CITY DIPLOMACY BACK HOME: CENTRAL-LOCAL TENSIONS IN A TIME OF GLOBAL URBAN GOVERNANCE.

• Author: Pejic, Daniel

INTRODUCTION

Cities across the globe are increasing their international engagement through bilateral relationships; national, regional, and transnational city networks; and direct involvement in multilateral processes. In a recent survey of 47 global cities, we found that 86 percent had an office dedicated to international engagement, often led by a chief city diplomat. (1) The interplay of globalization and urban governance, foregrounded by rapid urbanization trends, have made it essential that city leadership take on increasingly international dimensions. (2) As the Mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees, put it recently, "When I was elected I did not come in with an intention to do lots of international work, [but] it has become increasingly apparent that you cannot deliver on a city level unless we are operating internationally." (3) This is now a common stance among mayors and municipal managers the world over, not just in major urban centers but also in mid-sized cities across the Global North and South. The centrality of cities to global challenges, and the push for city leaders to look and act beyond their jurisdictions in their everyday business, has again been demonstrated throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, we witnessed city leaders collaborate transnationally on response strategies and share crisis management information, often in ways that contrast favorably with sluggish national responses. (4)

This is no novelty. Over the past few decades, increasingly internationalist local governments seeking to expand their multilateral presence have found a counterpoint in nationalist central executives, which have been looking inward with a skeptical approach toward other countries. (5) This is a critical tension that needs far more explicit and analytically systematic attention. Addressing this tension is especially needed due to the progressive expansion of what we could call "global urban governance" (6) characterized by urban agendas and processes sprawling across several multilateral sectors, as well as what is now tagged as "city diplomacy" (7) This term entered the political science literature in the late 2000s in order to describe the international relations of local authorities, emerging from a linkage of practitioner interest (through city networks) and think tank research (from the Netherlands Clingendael Institute) as a background to the First World Conference on City Diplomacy in 2008. (8) In spite of the now popular deployment of the term around climate action or migration, the original 2000s emphasis of these theoretical and policy developments was instead on the role of local governments in key security areas like conflict prevention, peace-building and post-conflict reconstruction. (4)

Many actors in world politics embraced this expanded role for cities, but what about states? With the rise of populism and continuing clout of many national governments, tensions between central and local executives have surged to new heights on fraught policy issues like climate, migration, and pandemic response. Here we aim to begin addressing this gap by unpacking two recent examples of the evolving relationship between national and local governments, and the impact these have on city diplomacy and emerging regimes of global urban governance.

We begin with a call to revisit the well-established, albeit neglected, political scholarship on central-local relations, and do so from an explicitly diplomatic point of view. We then move to a comparison of the United States and Australia, two broadly analogous federal systems who in 2020 moved toward potentially divergent models of national governance of city diplomacy, and set them into a wider international context of shifting central-local relations. Such comparative analysis allows us to look beyond specific circumstances to identify common as much as divergent characteristics and potential emerging models of the national governance of city diplomacy. We use this "live" comparison of evolving central-local coordination as a launching point into tackling the above broader considerations. We argue for the need to consider central-local relations as critical components of city diplomacy and global urban governance processes. As city diplomacy evolves and systems of global urban governance become more institutionalized, it is natural that national governments will aim to maximize these diplomatic channels, while concurrently limiting the opportunities for foreign inference through subnational channels. While increasing national involvement in the realm of global urban governance has the potential to hinder city-led initiatives which are misaligned with broader national agenda, it also offers new opportunities for resourcing and expertise that could increase the relative importance and effectiveness of city diplomacy in overall foreign policy strategies.

REVISITING CENTRAL-LOCAL RELATIONS WITH A GLOBAL URBAN GOVERNANCE VIEW

Over the past three decades, the way in which local authorities operate has progressively moved from localized managerialism to a more networked and globalized form of urban governance. (10) This has cast the activity and external agency of cities into a multiscalar realm. City leaders now regularly interact, both formally and informally, with a host of agents and processes at the local, national, regional, and international levels. This evolving reality is further complicated by the emergence and proliferation of a variety of international urban actors like city networks, now numbering in the hundreds, trans-local urban coalitions of citizens and urban dwellers--not least the urban poor--as well as multinational business with explicitly "urban" interests and agendas.

Overt geopolitical motives, particularly those driven by national governments, rest uneasily with traditional narratives of city diplomacy To date, city diplomacy has been largely characterized as transnational collaboration to address global issues where states have struggled to reach agreement, such as climate change, migration, and resilience." Putting aside somewhat utopic notions of "mayors ruling the world," (12) one distinct advantage that city leaders do enjoy over their national counterparts is less investment in geopolitical rivalries and traditional alliance structures. As Henri-Paul Normandin, the former Director of International Affairs at the City of Montreal and a longstanding Canadian diplomat, recently noted, "as a general proposition I would say that when we work with cities and mayors... we tend to be more pragmatic than ideological." (13)

While there is certainly truth to this characterization, Normandin also notes that city diplomats must remain "conscious" of geopolitics, which still impact city diplomacy and regimes of global urban governance in many ways. (14) For example, the City of Taipei has developed bilateral relationships with over 50 cities and is an active member of major city networks such as United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), Citynet, and the Asia Pacific Cities Summit. Given Taiwan's limitations in engaging in multilateral systems, Taipei has used this international engagement to advance the interests of not only the city, but Taiwan more broadly. (15) While Taipei promotes holism between city and state, the Israeli government has made attempts to encourage tourism to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem through a strategy that produces a "brand" for the cities divorced from the negative international connotations of the Israeli state. (16) The relationship between national and global urban politics was also on display at the recent meeting of the Urban 20 (U20). Rather than having a secretariat, the hosting of the U20 has rotated between major global cities involved in the C40, UCLG, and ICLEI networks and based in the G20 host. In 2020, the G20 and U20 were scheduled to be held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, though both were convened virtually due to COVID-19. The event was held on the second anniversary of the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and the mayors of London, Los Angeles, Paris, and New York boycotted the final summit due to human rights concerns in the host nation. Through the rapid expansion of city diplomacy, we have seen the evolution of global urban politics in real time. However, emerging scholarly efforts to make sense of these structural changes in urban and global governance have to some degree lost sight of the more localized dynamics at play, in favor of internationalist narratives. For instance, while international attention for the 2021 U20 meeting at the Italian G20 Summit again put emphasis on the international role of cities, this event was at the same time underscored by local political issues between the host cities, Milan and Rome, and taking place in the context of a domestic Italian politics characterized by ongoing tensions and an unstable central executive.

Scholarship in urban studies, particularly geography and planning, as well as in a proactive "urban" fringe of international relations, has attempted to conceptualize the shift in the locus of urban agency and the expansion of urban issues in global governance. (17) This scholarship has explored, among other phenomena, the structural economic and historic factors leading to this evolution, the proliferation of city networking, broadening of city diplomacy, and the development of global urban governance across policy domains such as...