Panel Paper:
Overcoming the Dilemma of Collective Climate Action: The Logic, Role, and Practice of Transnational Urban Networks in Global Climate Governance
Thursday, July 23, 2020
Webinar Room 3 (Online Zoom Webinar)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
Global climate governance, as a typical supply of international public goods, is non-exclusive and non-competitive. It is difficult to prevent the occurrence of free-riding in its governance process. Compared with the sluggish progress in climate negotiations at the international level, transnational urban networks can overcome the "collective action dilemma" in global climate politics with a more flexible, self-organizing action. This paper introduces the analysis framework of "autonomous governance" in Public Economics to explore the role of transnational city networks in the supply of international climate public goods, and analyzes its action logic in climate governance, that is, the transnational city network mainly adopts two powers: Multi-center governance model (low empowerment, high inclusiveness, easy privatization of public products, network leverage) and social capital networking (high social capital, network knowledge community, internal benchmark governance), achieving effective incentives, credible commitments, and mutual supervision within the network in the absence of external coercive force. Also, it promotes the continuous expansion of network cooperation alliances and provide new impetus for the continuous supply of climate public goods. Finally, this paper uses the City Climate Protection Network (CCP) as an example to conduct a case study. It surveys 129 CCP member cities and 111 non-member cities in the United States. The results show that the performance of CCP member cities in climate governance is obviously better than non-member cities. The conclusion confirms the effectiveness of the multinational city governance and its possibility of becoming an indispensable horizontal network governance dimension in global climate governance.
