The Role of Cities Networks in Climate Change Governance
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Ko, Yi-Lu
Abstract
After Climate Change being recognized as an important issue, the normative system of global governance has also been changed. The traditional way of global governance through treaties or negotiation between countries cannot effectively solve problems of climate change, which are transcending national borders and having a lot of scientific uncertainties. To tackle these issues, there are more and more multi-layered actors to participate climate change governance and re-shape the global regulatory system. Along with the development of new global regulatory system, municipal governments become critical roles in the climate actions. Even though cities and local governments have no binding obligations to reduce greenhouse gases in the international treaties, many urban actors and cities actively took climate action like reducing greenhouse gases emissions and adopting adaptation measures to face global warming crisis, even forming cooperative networks between cities. These networks help to build the institutional capacity of municipalities to act on climate change and was described as a self-organizing and decentralizing structures. The cities networks gradually became new global governance tools in climate change, in addition to traditional hierarchical forms of regulation or control. This thesis discusses why cities networks were established and how they regulate cities in the context of climate change. Through reviewing different cities networks and analyzing their characteristics, the author also tries to connect the result of observation with the study of global administrate law to discuss the role of cities networks in global climate regulatory regime. The author argues that, cities networks have few different functions to help cities dealing with climate change issue. Cities networks provide information exchange platforms to build the capacity of cities, and help cities to gain access to the funding programmes. They also represent city interests to lobby and influence national or international governments. They use soft regulations and give cities advices. After reviewing how cities networks engage in climate change, this thesis tries to build two regulation models of cities networks, and use the approach of global administrative law to analyze these models. The author argues that, if we want to empower cities networks more on climate change regime, the accountability of the cities networks needs to be improved.
Subjects
Climate Change
Cities networks
Municipal networks
Global administrative law
Type
thesis
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