Cities and Sub-national Governance: High Ambitions, Innovative Instruments and Polycentric Collaborations

In what follows, three related topics are addressed to better understand the role of cities as units of polycentric urban climate governance. First, cities often set higher climate governance ambitions than the nation states they are in. What explains this tendency of cities seeking to outperform and thus act independently of national governments? Second, cities are increasingly becoming sites and actors of experimentation with innovative governance instruments, including eco-financing and ‘urban laboratories’. What drives cities to experiment with innovative governance instruments in the first place? Third, cities have begun to break out of traditional top-down national-regional-local hierarchies and act in translocal networks (Acuto and Rayner, 2016). How do these networks seek to overcome regional and national barriers to climate governance, and what barriers do these networks raise themselves for cities in responding to climate change? Finally, whilst the literature on these three topics, and polycentric urban climate governance more broadly, has expanded rapidly since the early 2000s, it has a strong focus on a relatively small number of cities from the global North (Evans et al., 2016). This chapter therefore concludes with a reflection on how applicable it is for all cities in the world – including, crucially, those in the global South. It also identifies what further research is urgently required to understand and support the full potential that cities hold as actors in, and sites of, polycentric climate governance.