Zouden burgemeesters de wereld beter besturen? Een onderzoek naar hoe stedelijke beleidsnetwerken kunnen ontsnappen aan de interstatelijke impasse op vlak van klimaatmitigatie

Local governments are increasingly joining forces around specific policy challenges in transnational, institutionalized partnerships. In these organisations - commonly referred to as city networks or transnational municipal networks - they exchange knowledge and information, pursue joint policy objectives, or collectively represent their interests to higher levels of government. Cooperation within these networks is regarded and studied in both policy and academic circles as a potential alternative to interstate cooperation. It is often emphasised that national governments appear hardly - and increasingly less - capable of addressing global policy challenges, such as climate change, migration or poverty, in a coordinated manner. Local governments, by contrast, are assumed to cooperate more pragmatically in their transnational networks. They are believed to be less guided by ideological, party-political or economic motives and self-interest, and to be closer to their citizens. This would enable them to overcome the problems of interstate cooperation. However, it remains insufficiently clear whether, and how, local governments actually succeed where states fail. The aim of this doctoral dissertation is therefore to compare interstate and intercity cooperation in a structured, empirical way, moving beyond more essayistic claims about the nature of (cooperation between) local governments. The research focuses on climate mitigation as a policy domain, one of the main areas of activity for city networks. This study leans on the concept of "gridlock" and the corresponding body of literature. This concept captures how national governments appear increasingly unable to tackle global policy problems in a coordinated way. Based on the literature, three groups of causes for this interstate impasse are identified: institutional causes, factors related to (un)equal cooperation within multilateral institutions, and conflicting preferences and interests that make consensus impossible. Three consecutive chapters examine whether, and how, intercity cooperation within city networks overcomes these three groups of causes of the interstate impasse. A qualitative research design is used: the findings are based on 37 semi-structured interviews with staff members of six climate-focused city networks and of local governments participating in these networks. These interviews are analysed using a directed content analysis approach. The three empirical chapters are complemented by a more theoretical chapter on the economic-geographical processes behind, and the possible political and economic effects of, city networks. This provides a broader theoretical framework to an empirically narrowly focused study. Throughout the dissertation, both significant limitations and opportunities emerge for city networks for each group of interstate cooperation problems. On the one hand, they appear to replicate some of these problems: for example, there is a certain degree of institutional fragmentation, access to networks is highly stratified, and the necessary coordination of network efforts seems to be lacking. On the other hand, they partly overcome some cooperation problems: the institutionalized power inequalities of interstate cooperation are absent, and non-binding emission reduction targets help avoid thorny distributional debates and conflicts. Based on these advantages and disadvantages of cooperation within city networks, the conclusion sounds that these partnerships are not a panacea for transnational cooperation: despite the opportunities they provide, they do not structurally overcome the problems of interstate cooperation.