Overcoming gridlock: do city networks provide an improved institutional context for transnational cooperation on climate mitigation?

Local governments are increasingly taking up their role in combating global warming. From a governance perspective, one of the most prominent ways local governments do so is by cooperating in international city networks. These networks are often hailed as a promising alternative to the alleged gridlock of more traditional forms of interstate cooperation, with states seemingly no longer able to overcome divergent self-interests and achieve the ambitious cooperation needed to address pressing policy problems such as climate change. However, it remains unclear if and exactly how local governments succeed in avoiding or escaping this gridlock, making a conceptual and empirical analysis of the global governance capacities of city networks much needed. To this end, the concept of gridlock is broken down into its main causes, providing a framework for analyzing if and how transnational cooperation in city networks runs into the same problems. In this paper, we focus on the institutional characteristics and organization of both the individual climate city networks and the overall landscape of these networks, and use this to assess if and how this provides an improved institutional context for transnational cooperation. In doing so, we examine how city networks deal with growing multipolarity, as this increases the number of relevant actors and therefore raises transaction costs and risks complicating coordination. Furthermore, we assess how the prevalence of non-binding targets and agreements reinforces or hampers the engagement of local governments, compared with the often preferred binding agreements in interstate cooperation. Speaking to the widely emphasized institutional fragmentation in interstate cooperation, we also analyze if and how fragmentation is an issue in climate city networks, whether and how this leads to competition for resources and members, and what is being done to tackle these issues. Our research draws on in-depth interviews with network employees and municipal policymakers that are active within six city networks, differentiating between networks in terms of thematic and geographical focus and the use of mandatory member commitments, and between member cities in terms of size, national-political contexts, and economic position. In line with the deductive nature of this research, we analyze the data through a qualitative directed content analysis approach. Our findings clarify how city networks are able (or not) to escape some of the most important institutional problems in traditional interstate cooperation, and help understanding if and how intercity cooperation provides a viable alternative for alleged interstate gridlock.