The municipal “boomerang pattern”

In the twenty-first century, cities are advancing to the forefront of national and global politics. Cities are taking on responsibilities of dealing with challenges typically associated with the nation-state or the global arena (e.g., climate change; immigration, human rights, health etc.), and seeing themselves as legitimate actors in their own right. Given this background, I ask how we conceptualize the relationship between cities’ actions in national and global politics? The proposed paper is situated at the intersection of political theory, global politics, and urban studies, and it studies the interrelations between two conceptually and empirically distinct research fields: 1. The growing political agency of cities in global politics – as cities have grown in size and economic importance, their appetite for political influence has pushed them to develop forms of diplomatic activity in order to represent their interests globally. Cities are now linked in transnational municipal networks (TMNs), enabling them to cooperate and promote policies relating to problems of collective action. 2. The growing political agency of cities in national politics – cities are manifesting growing aspirations towards more political autonomy. After all, cities are closer to their citizens, understand their needs better, and are more exposed to their dissatisfactions. At times, this encourages them to formulate a policy different from that of central government. Urban theory tends to deal separately with cities’ agency in the global arena and their agency vis-à-vis their nation-states, and a more profound understanding of the interrelations between these two aspects is lacking. Nation-states are now situated between two powerful territorial spheres, and therefore the communication and cooperation mechanism of all three spheres must be reconsidered. The paper aims to fill this lacuna by offering a conceptual framework that weighs the dynamics and behaviours of cities in relation to both the national and global arenas. To do so, it will use Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink’s model of the “boomerang pattern,” which initially referred to the way in which advocacy networks such as NGOs sought to promote initiatives which had been ignored domestically through a direct appeal to global channels to exert pressure from above, and below. Likewise, localities understand that to lead a change domestically, they might have to use the global arena. While cities differ from NGOs, the application of the model requires adjustments, which are examined in the paper. The analysis takes environmental and climate politics as an example of a salient political issue that preoccupies cities worldwide. Its motivation stems from the observations that nation-states fail to meet their climate and environmental pledges in global agreements; however, concurrently, there has been a notable rise in the influence of TMNs, which have demonstrated their ability to advance effective climate and environmental policies autonomously. Environmental TMNs, such as the C40, serve as a good example - although environmental and climate actions in urban settings can be taken as a proxy for similar behaviour of cities around other concerns. Finally, the paper will delve into the application of the conceptual framework in further research.