Introduction
Political ideologies come in and out of fashion; such is the way of history. Municipalism – the century-old movement promoting democratic political organisation at the level of local communities, autonomously from the nation-state – is one that recently experienced a revival of sorts. From the ‘fearless cities’ of Spain to the communalist project of Rojava or the municipalisation strategies in Naples, Barcelona, Zagreb, Berlin, Valparaíso, Recoleta, and elsewhere, a ‘new municipalism’ has been identified, and increasingly theorised, by urban studies scholars.Footnote 1 Over the same period, a ‘municipal movement’ has gained traction in international relations and global governance. In 2008, Mónica Salomón and Javier Sánchez had already observed that ‘global municipalism’ was making progress within the United Nations (UN) system; today, UCLG – the world’s organisation of United Cities and Local Governments – proclaims that ‘municipalism is the driving force’ that can help the UN ‘renew the multilateral system and ensure the next generation of multilateralism’.Footnote 2 In global governance, then, it seems that municipalism is back – and, if UCLG is to be believed, it is also the future.
At first glance, recent developments support this claim. There is no denying that over the last two decades, cities’ activism in global governance has grown markedly.Footnote 3 Even more notable is the fact that leading international organisations have, at least to an extent, welcomed this activism and opened up new ways to include cities and local governments in global governance – from the creation of a Global Taskforce of Cities and Local Governments in 2013 to the establishment, in 2023, of a new Advisory Group on Local and Regional Governments directly within the UN General Secretariat to help prepare the Summit of the Future.Footnote 4 All in all, UCLG’s claim that municipalism is now a ‘driving force’ in global governance appears vindicated.
Nevertheless, the qualification of ‘municipalism’ raises questions. At its core, municipalism is a movement that promotes municipalities as the appropriate ‘basic cell structure’ of politics – harkening back to 19th-century debates around the First International and the Paris Commune, and, ultimately, defending an alternative form of political ordering to nation-states.Footnote 5 If that is the case, then the welcoming of municipalism in the state-based international system is more than a little surprising. Complicating this question further is the fact that not all ‘city activists’ – those promoting a role for cities as autonomous political actors in global governance – define themselves as ‘municipalists’. In fact, recent scholarly debates have attempted to draw a line between this movement and municipalism.Footnote 6 Such an approach is, however, dismissive of the explicitly municipalist claims made by UCLG (and at least partly echoed in the changing attitudes of UN officials towards cities and local governments). It obscures the nuances that exist within the forms of multilateral city activism described above, from transnational city networking to the inclusion of city representatives in key global governance spaces like the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Climate Change, the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD), or the High-Level Political Forum (HLPF). Finally, another question it leaves out is that of the possible transformation of global governance brought about as a result of municipalist intervention.
Taking stock of these debates, this article asks to what extent something like a ‘global municipalism’, understood as a coherent political project or normative outlook aligned with municipalist orientations and ambitions, can be said to exist in contemporary global governance. More importantly, it asks: does the ‘rise of the city’ as a global political actor advance the municipalist project, despite the fact that it takes place in, and ostensibly follows the rules of, the state-led system? To tackle this question, I follow an approach inspired by Magdalena Bexell, Jonas Tallberg and Andreas Uhlin’s call to ‘combin[e] normative political theory and positive empirical research’ to assess the potential of transnational actors – here, cities – to contribute positively to global governance, and help clarify the conditions under which they can do so.Footnote 7 Taking seriously UCLG’s claim that municipalism is the ‘driving force’ at work in these developments, as well as the multifaceted nature and long history of municipalism, I use a historical-analytical lens to assess the extent to which this ‘new global municipalism’ aligns with the core conceptual, political, and methodological tenets that have historically defined the municipalist project.
To do so, the article proceeds in three steps. Firstly, I situate the municipalist claims of UCLG by unpacking the notion of the ‘rise of the city’ and its main arguments in the context of global governance, with a focus on the UN. I then mobilise a historical perspective to analyse ‘municipalism’ conceptually, situating it in its broader history as well as in the more recent scholarly literature. I identify three main municipalist orientations: an institutional dimension focused on achieving formal recognition, a normative dimension focused on establishing global norms, and a technical dimension focused on policymaking and facilitating intercity cooperation. The remainder of the article then examines the progress of municipalist ideas in global governance alongside each of these dimensions, to critically evaluate whether the most recent developments described in the literature as the ‘rise of the city’ align with municipalist principles. The article’s contribution is threefold. Firstly, it proposes an account of the ‘rise of the city’ not just as an empirical development, but as a discursive project that carries political claims. Secondly, by bridging international relations literature with municipalist research in other fields, it strengthens our analytical grasp of municipalism as a still-relevant contemporary political category, and highlights in particular its relevance for the international dimension of city activism – a relatively understudied field in the new municipalism literature. Finally, the article deepens our understanding of the role of cities and local governments in contemporary global governance, contributes to the analysis of international actorness in this contemporary context, and pinpoints the usefulness of a municipalist lens by assessing both its relevance and its significance for global governance. In doing so, it is my hope that this article can provide a first assessment of the ‘rise of the city’ as it relates to the broader history of municipalism, thus contributing to a better understanding of the political transformation that it may, or may not, be creating in global governance – as well as outlining a productive line of inquiry to assess future developments.
Situating the puzzle: the ‘rise of the city’ in global governance
By unpacking the gradual ‘rise of the city’ in global governance, this section clarifies the empirical starting point for the article, situates its contribution in the city diplomacy and wider international relations literature, and outlines the key claims made by cities and their advocates with respect to global governance. By global governance, I mean the various institutions, rules and structures designed to enable the exercise of authority across borders in the absence of an overarching global authority; in this article the proxy for global governance is the UN, that is, the leading international organisation set up for that purpose.Footnote 8
The emerging body of literature that developed over the last two decades on the topic of the ‘rise of the city’ as a political actor in international relations and global governance has done so in response to a dual phenomenon. On the one hand, it aimed to address a now well-documented empirical trend: that of cities becoming increasingly active and visible in global governance spaces – organising in transnational city networks, engaging directly with international organisations, participating in global governance conferences, or adopting global norms at the local level.Footnote 9 As a result, cities have become an increasingly important transnational actor in global governance in general, and a real effort has taken place to integrate them in the implementation, but also the definition of global agendas. This followed recommendations from Secretary-General António Guterres’ Common Agenda, which called for the integration of cities in global governance forums and discussions generally – not just those that explicitly centred urban questions.Footnote 10 In answer to these developments, scholars have explored the political aspects of global citiesFootnote 11; considered the transformations of the international system that city activism could createFootnote 12; studied the impact of cities on global governance in several issue areas, particularly environmental governanceFootnote 13 and, more recently, global migration governance.Footnote 14 They note that although the participation of cities in the negotiation of global governance agreements remains informal and is generally advisory, their experiences and insights increasingly inform and influence debates and decisions on policy recommendations.Footnote 15 In parallel, however, investigations into the organisation of global city leadership and the functioning of transnational city networks have problematised such claims by questioning the appropriateness of the notion of ‘cities’ as a unified global subject – highlighting, on the one hand, the problematic dominance of ‘first-world’ city governments in the make-up of the most influential city networks and the general discourse about city leadership on the world stage,Footnote 16 and shedding light, on the other hand, on the pivotal role of private money in the funding of city networks and its potential to undermine democratic agenda-setting to instead steer those networks towards specific agendas.Footnote 17 While the growing visibility and activity of cities in global governance spaces is consensual, the notion of ‘the city’ (itself an ambiguous term, obscuring internal dynamics around so-called ‘city’ agency) as an autonomous political actor with the ability to meaningfully transform global governance is therefore called into question.
Importantly, however, the relevance and topicality of cities in global governance is also the result of a discourse shaped by practitioners and public advocates, who have gradually put forward the idea of a ‘rise of the city’ as a political actor on the global stage. Among the most vocal of these advocates are two well-known figures of US politics: Political Scientist Benjamin Barber, who published in 2013 an influential book in which he called for a transfer of power from nation-states to cities, and proposed the idea of a Global Parliament of Mayors; and notorious billionaire and three-term mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, who used his enormous financial and institutional power to create a series of initiatives that support his vision of what he termed the ‘city century’.Footnote 18 These interventions have been instrumental in the emergence of a new strand of public debate, journalism, and research concerned with elucidating, but also elaborating, a role for cities in global 21st-century politics, through global programmes, forums, and research centres dedicated to global cities, city leadership, and cities in the 21st century.Footnote 19 Gradually, a body of literature that includes think tank reports, official communications from international organisations, privately funded initiatives, journalism, and scholarship has thus coalesced.Footnote 20 Such interventions not only maintain that cities play an increasingly important role in global politics; many of them also posit that the ‘rise of the city’ offers a potentially fruitful way to resolve some of the main issues plaguing politics in the 21st century, including by providing avenues for effective policy implementation at the global level, but also by bestowing a degree of political legitimacy on global governance outcomes endorsed by local governments. In other words, by proclaiming the ‘triumph of the city’Footnote 21 or ‘the metropolitan revolution’,Footnote 22 they are part and parcel of the global discourse that supports the ‘rise of the city’. This narrative is also mobilised by transnational city networks working on a variety of issues, from climate change to health policy, gender equality, or migration policy. I term this type of intervention ‘city activism’, a notion that accounts for the advocacy element of these initiatives, summarises the explicit agenda at work (to push cities forward as global political actors), but also reflects the normative ambiguity of this movement. Indeed, the transversal focus on ‘the city as political actor’ does not translate into a specific, well-identified political commitment; rather, it functions like a thematic ‘umbrella’ that brings together an array of actors with very varied agendas, who share a broad commitment to the idea of city recognition in global governance, but do not present clear propositions regarding what this recognition should look like. As further developed in the next section, it is therefore important to distinguish the methodological approach of city activism from the politico-normative commitments of municipalism.
The question that animates this article is whether this political agenda, and the empirical developments that have taken place in the last two decades regarding the role of cities in global governance, can be said to advance the municipalist project – and if so, to what extent. This question is particularly important to consider given that many interventions that announce or call for ‘the triumph of the city’, understood here as the recognition of the city as the ‘basic cell structure’ of economic, social, and political life, like to refer to a longer, in fact millennial history spanning the Ancient Greek city-states, Renaissance Italy, the Hanseatic League and the altogether urban origins of ‘civilisation’ and progress.Footnote 23 City activists rightfully point out that the nation-state is a fairly modern invention, and that civilisations have existed where cities, not states, were the core element of socio-political organisation. Such arguments directly echo the municipalist proposal, as it became articulated in 19th-century socialist thought and institutionalised through the 20th-century municipalist movement, which carries with it a profound critique of state-based institutions as well as a project of alternative political ordering. At the same time, the lack of explicitly municipalist claims in many of the discourses articulating the ‘rise of the city’ – reflected in a lack of engagement with municipalism in the ‘rise of the city’ and city diplomacy scholarship – raises questions. To understand this discrepancy and locate the criteria which can help discern municipalist orientations in global governance, the next section mobilises analytical resources from urban studies, political theory, and history.
Recovering the municipalist project: a historical-analytical account
The central proposal of this article is to rehabilitate the category of ‘municipalism’ as an analytical category that can help evaluate the political implications of the ‘rise of the city’ in global governance. Like most political ideas, ‘municipalism’ designates a variety of projects and ambitions that have taken various faces over time, and it therefore requires further analytical elucidation. In this section, I mobilise a historical-analytical lens to draw out the key characteristics that have defined the municipalist project for over a century, including its most recent iteration in what scholars have called ‘new municipalism’. It is important to note here that the renewed engagement with municipalism in urban studies and political geography, which has provided extremely helpful contributions both to the theory and practice of municipalism over the past seven years, has engaged only minimally with the global developments described in the previous section as the ‘rise of the city’. In fact, new municipalism scholars have presented good reasons for the ‘rise of the city’ not to be considered an authentic new municipalist project, particularly pointing out the ‘technocratic’ and ‘solution-oriented’ framework of many of these endeavours, as well as their connections to philanthropies and nonprofits closely linked to global business. In their view, these elements demarcate the ‘rise of the city’ initiatives from a more ‘radical’ – and, in truth, more genuine – version of municipalism.Footnote 24 However, the dismissal of the ‘rise of the city’ as a merely ‘misguided’ form of municipalism prevents us from accounting for the ways in which city activism also carries municipalist goals and norms into global governance – and the ways in which municipalist ideas implicitly support their success. In this section, I will attempt to disentangle further the criteria that justify the denomination of municipalism. This detour via history, political theory, and urban studies enables me to more precisely qualify municipalism (particularly as it differs from communalism), pinpoint the conditions on which contemporary developments involving cities as political actors in global governance can be said to be municipalist, and lay the analytical foundation for describing in greater detail the connections between the municipalist project and the ideas and practices of the ‘rise of the city’ in global governance.
As scholars of municipalism well know, history teaches us that the municipalist idea – that cities might constitute a more appropriate form of political authority than nation-states – goes back at least a hundred years. From a theoretical perspective, the municipalist hypothesis takes its roots in debates that animated socialist and anarchist political thought in the second half of the 19th century, when the question of the appropriate form of political organisation was vigorously discussed in left-leaning intellectual circles.Footnote 25 The idea was originally articulated around the concept of the ‘commune’, defined as the most local form of urban government – with the Paris Commune of 1871 a turning point in this debate.Footnote 26 For the likes of Marx, Kropotkin or Bakunin, the Paris Commune represented a practical experiment in city-based politics emancipated from the nation-state – and one which, despite having been relentlessly crushed by the assembled forces of the French government, harboured a hope for a radically different way of organising life and doing politics.Footnote 27 The episode largely contributed to shaping the debate over the legitimate form of political authority and alternative forms of political ordering to the nation-state.Footnote 28 A particularly salient defence of what would come to be known as communalism was offered by Peter Kropotkin, who, in the wake of the debates that followed, proposed that the commune (i.e., the local urban government) should be the right political unit to reorganise economic and social relations. He argued for an a-hierarchical, horizontal, and egalitarian system, following the model of a federation of free units (rather than integrating units into one another). For Kropotkin, communalism did not mean returning to the closed-off, walled medieval city; rather, it meant choosing as the central unit of politics a place that understands itself as fundamentally connected, economically and culturally, both to the rest of the nation and to the rest of the world.Footnote 29 Thus emerged the idea that the local scale of the municipality, commune, or city provided avenues for social, economic, and political emancipation that national politics could not accommodate.
Conversely, in the same period, socialists and anarchists were also concerned with the broad question of how to build social, economic, and political forms that would accommodate the transformations of modern society – a salient dimension of which was urbanisation. Therefore, as urbanisation became a defining feature of modern life, it made sense that the ‘social question’ came to be seen by some as an ‘urban question’, whose solution might best be sought through city-level government rather than national administrations. This was a salient debate at the turn of the century, particularly at the Fifth Congress of the Socialist International Organisation, which would come to be known as the Second International.Footnote 30 Such ideas, highlighting the specifically urban dimension of the social question and the role of municipalities as a potent scale for political action, were key to the creation, in 1913, of the first international organisation of cities – the UIV, Union Internationale des Villes (International Union of Cities), which in 1928 would become the International Union of Local Authorities (IULA). According to political scientist Renaud Payre and historian Pierre-Yves Saunier, the UIV-IULA’s project sought nothing less than ‘a peaceful ordering of the world around the urban, considered as the knot, the symbol and the terrain of the “social question”’; the scholars go as far as to say it could be assimilated to a ‘municipalist International’.Footnote 31 This reading emphasises the alternative political project contained within municipalism, whereby the municipality is promoted against the nation-state as the central political form: from this perspective, the municipalism of the UIV-IULA was indeed a project of alternative political ordering – organised around the urban community, or rather, communities, rather than around national identity.
Historians of municipalism have, however, shown that the UIV-IULA was not an entirely faithful heir to the original ideas of communalism. In practice, the organisation’s main activity was to support the exchange of practices and methods of municipal government, aiming to promote intercommunal cooperation on a transnational scale. Although it was committed to norms like democracy, solidarity between peoples, and political participation, the organisation also had a very pragmatic aim, whereby it intended to collectively build knowledge in order to solve the technical and administrative problems posed by the rapid development of cities. Oscar Gaspari, one of the most recognised specialists of the European municipalist movement in the 20th century, suggested that this dual ambition reflected a two-faced project – harbouring both a ‘politico-utopian’ dimension, focused on democracy, solidarity and participation, and a ‘techno-scientific’ one, promoting knowledge-sharing and scientific development.Footnote 32 Importantly, the position of the UIV-IULA with respect to the state had significantly softened compared to the harsh critiques of late 19th-century communalist thought. Far from the full-blown rejection of state-based politics and, as its corollary, the defence of the commune as the alternative basic unit for socio-economic and political organisation, Gaspari describes the municipalism of the UIV-IULA as follows:
the idea of a municipality, or network of municipalities, as active cells in a territorially based welfare state; municipal self-government, not opposed to national government but taking over some of its tasks in a process of decentralisation.Footnote 33
Such a toned-down position, where municipalities are active and important political cells but, ultimately, little more than allies or even subsidiaries of the national government, marks a clear difference from the revolutionary communalism which had developed after 1871. It in part reflects the evolution of the socialist movement, of which these early municipalists were members, and also bears the influence of new practical instantiations of municipalism itself during the four decades that separated the Paris Commune from the UIV’s creation. By 1913, socialist municipalities had existed for years in several European countries; European socialists had indeed adopted an electoral strategy with a strong municipal component, whereby they aimed to seize control of municipalities and ‘use them as experimental laboratories for the design of a future society’.Footnote 34 Mirroring wider debates about socialist strategy torn between revolutionary and reformist approaches, municipalism also split in two: on the one hand, the goal remained of a ‘social revolution’ at municipal level, akin to the experience of the Paris Commune; on the other hand, a ‘gradualist practice’ emerged, according to which the municipality could be seen ‘as a lever for social evolution’ on the way to a fully socialist society.Footnote 35 This more reformist approach made use of existing local political institutions to grow the socialist movement and use the tools of municipal power to try and meet the needs of the urban proletariat.
In their efforts on the latter, however, socialists in European municipalities would soon face technical barriers. A lack of appropriate resources and skills hindered their ability to take effective action and enact desired change. This sustained the development of another side of municipalism: one that focused on building the knowledge, tools and expertise necessary to effectively transform localities through municipal action. This quest for knowledge sharing and technical development is, in fact, where Dogliani locates the impetus for the first inter-municipal networks established at the turn of the century. As Gaspari also noted, this was very much an ambition of the UIV from its creation: its founders understood the new organisation as a way to ‘seek solutions to the great problems of the modern urban and industrialised society’.Footnote 36 This project – building a set of scientific and technocratic tools geared to the specificities of municipal government – thus encouraged transnational cooperation between cities that understood themselves as equals.
Though fairly ‘broad strokes’, this quick history suffices to show that municipalism, understood as a political idea and project that centres the local authority as the basic unit of politics, harbours several concomitant and, in truth, potentially antagonistic orientations. In particular, a key divide separates the politico-utopian idea of social revolution aiming to bring about an entirely new way of organising social and political life at the communal level, inspired from the Paris Commune, from a more reformist, electorally compliant, and institutionalised municipalism that works with the tools of the state system, as in the socialist municipalism of the early 20th century. These two approaches have nevertheless historically been close and are still sometimes meshed together in contemporary discourses around municipalism. As Dogliani notes, the vocabulary of municipalism generally tends to be rather unstable, due also to the fact that different terms evoke different layers of meanings in different languages. Following Paula Cossart and Pierre Sauvêtre, I suggest clearly demarcating these two orientations – broadly speaking, the revolutionary and the reformist one – by using two separate terms: ‘communalism’ and ‘municipalism’. While Cossart and Sauvêtre highlight a primarily economic distinction between these two concepts, opposing a logic of ‘the common’ to a logic of ‘municipal sovereignty’, I take the relationship to state-based politics to be another defining difference.Footnote 37 I thus use ‘communalism’ to designate the more radical and revolutionary project – ultimately opposed to state-based politics and aiming to replace the state-based system by another, communalist political paradigm – and reserve the term ‘municipalism’ for movements that, though often critical of statehood, are ultimately willing to work within the existing state-based system and accommodate its institutions. Both have contemporary manifestations, such as Rojava’s ‘democratic confederalism’ inspired by Murray Bookchin’s communalist ideas.Footnote 38 On the other end of the spectrum, new municipalism scholars have documented how municipalities, in Spain and elsewhere, sought to make use of local political institutions to enact political and socio-economic change within their localities.Footnote 39 Undoubtedly, there is some commonality between these movements: they share common aspirations – to local democracy, decentralisation, political participation, and solidarity between peoples – and scholars have argued that the revolutionary horizon remains present in some recent municipalist endeavours, particularly through the notion of ‘prefigurative politics’.Footnote 40
For this article, then, municipalism designates a movement that centres the most local level of government (often the municipality) as a key, if not central, level of action for organising political and socio-economic life with at least some autonomy from the nation-state. Though critical, it is ultimately conciliatory with state-based politics and can therefore engage with, and within, the institutions of the dominant state-based system. It does not englobe the ‘autonomist municipalism’ described by Matthew Thompson, which is better described as communalism.Footnote 41 Neither is it limited to a substantive focus area or set of policies (as in ‘care’ or ‘platform’ municipalism), or to a specific political agenda such as the one outlined within the ‘radical municipalist hypothesis’.Footnote 42 Municipalism is, instead, characterised by constitutive elements that can be classified into three categories: institutional, normative, and technical commitments. Firstly, there is a political and institutional commitment to the municipal scale as a relevant, appropriate, and potent scale of political action, and corollary demands for municipal autonomy, municipal sovereignty, or municipalisation of politics and policymaking. Secondly, municipalists consistently demonstrate a normative commitment to four principles: decentralisation, local democracy, political participation, and solidarity between peoples. Finally, municipalism is committed to technical cooperation, exchanges and networking between municipal authorities that understand themselves as equals; an important part of this transnational cooperation centres on developing knowledge, tools, and expertise that can support municipal action. This ambition, which Oscar Gaspari termed ‘techno-scientific’, was present from the creation of the UIV and continued to be upheld throughout the 20th century by its successor, the IULA, as well as other organisations like the Council of European Municipalities and Regions and United Towns Organization (UTO).
Having thus refined the definition of ‘municipalism’ and its defining components – institutional commitment to municipal autonomy; normative commitment to decentralisation, local democracy, as well as to political participation and solidarity between peoples; technical commitment to horizontal cooperation, peer-sharing, and knowledge development – the remainder of the article now turns to reviewing the ‘rise of the city’ in global governance from each of these perspectives, to assess to what extent it can be said to advance, or hamper, the municipalist project.
Municipalism in (contemporary) global governance
This section traces the three municipalist orientations – institutional, normative, and technical – within major UN global agendas, in order to assess whether, and to what extent, the growing engagement of the UN with cities over the past four decades has advanced municipalism in each of its components. Specifically, it analyses the global agendas to identify evidence of formal institutional recognition of cities and municipalist organisations as autonomous global actors; of formal normative adoption of municipalist principles, such as decentralisation and local democracy; and of technical cooperation of international organisations with cities and municipalities on issues or programmes related to these global agendas. Although I acknowledge that contemporary global governance initiatives involving cities are found in other settings too (such as the World Bank or the World Health Organisation), I focus here on the UN as the leading international organisation aiming to build a global governance architecture, and particularly on the global agendas relating to sustainable development, which has been the driving concept behind that effort for several decades. Six agendas are analysed: Agenda 21, the Millennium Declaration, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the New Urban Agenda, the Global Compact on Migration, and the Pact for the Future (summarised in Table 1). Where relevant, I also drew on additional documentation to assess discrepancies or alignment with municipalist commitments not just in the text, but also in the negotiation, adoption, and implementation processes surrounding the UN frameworks under review. This additional documentation comprises additional UN documents, such as reports of the secretary-general or ministerial declarations; official UN communications, such as statements by the secretary-general or UN press releases; and official documentation from city networks as well as individual cities. All are publicly available online and cited in full in the footnotes.
List of UN agendas analysed.
Table 1 Long description
Columns are Short title, Year, and UN document reference for six UN agendas. Agenda 21, described as the outcome of the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio, also called Earth Summit, is dated 1992 and has no UN document reference listed. United Nations Millennium Declaration is dated 2000 with reference A RES 55 2. Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, described as the outcome of the UN Summit for the Adoption of the Post 2015 Development Agenda, is dated 2015 with reference A RES 70 1. New Urban Agenda, described as the outcome of the Habitat III Conference in Quito, is dated 2016 with reference A RES 71 256. Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, described as the outcome of the Intergovernmental Conference in Marrakech, is dated 2018 with reference A RES 73 195. Pact for the Future, described as the outcome of the UN Summit of the Future, is dated 2024 with reference A RES 79 1.
Three questions were asked in relation to each UN framework: (1) Is there any formal institutional recognition of cities or municipalist organisations as autonomous actors in this global agenda or in the process surrounding it? (2) Does this global agenda or the process surrounding it contain any formal inclusion of municipalist norms, such as decentralisation or local democracy? and (3) Does this global agenda provide for technical cooperation opportunities between cities and municipalist organisations, either among themselves or with international organisations, in the service of the agenda; or does it translate into programmes and other initiatives that do so? The analysis involved three steps. Firstly, a full analysis of the UN frameworks was conducted to identify any instances relevant to the research questions. This analysis considered both explicit mentions and significant absences, such as the absence of reference to cities, local governments, or municipalist principles in paragraphs where such references might have been expected. Secondly, the UN frameworks were systematically combed a second time for mentions of the key words ‘cities’, ‘city’, ‘local’, and ‘urban’ in order to verify that no relevant instances had been left out. Thirdly, the identified instances were systematically reviewed, analysed against each of the three key municipalist orientations, and, where relevant, coded ‘positive’, ‘negative’, ‘ambivalent’, ‘weak’, ‘vague’, or ‘indirect’. The analysis was conducted entirely by the author without the aid of any AI tool or automated processing software. Its results, including the justification for the coding, are presented in the Appendix in the form of an Excel file.
The section is organised into three parts. The first part reviews how the achievements of city activism in global governance compare to municipalist orientations from an institutional perspective, focusing on the question of the institutional recognition of municipal governments as autonomous political actors in global governance frameworks and processes. The second part evaluates their normative achievements in light of the key normative commitments of municipalism, particularly decentralisation, local democracy, and the principle of subsidiarity. Finally, the third part examines the technical side of municipalism and its prominence in the more recent ‘rise of the city’ developments.
Institutional municipalism
In the context of global governance, the institutional aspirations of municipalist organisations are organised around the demand for formal, institutional recognition of cities and local governments as autonomous actors or ‘global governors’ in their own right.Footnote 43 In the six agendas reviewed for this article, 21 entries relate to institutional recognition for cities and local governments. The key milestones are the creation of the Local Governments and Municipal Authorities (LGMA) constituency in Agenda 21, alongside eight other ‘major groups’ that were to be involved in the implementation of the agendaFootnote 44; the acknowledgment of the World Assembly of Cities and Local Authorities in the New Urban Agenda (§169), which had been first established as part of the Second Conference of the United Nations on Human Settlements (Habitat II); and the demand that the secretary-general provide recommendations on ‘how engagement with local and regional authorities could advance the 2030 Agenda, particularly the localization of the Sustainable Development Goals’ in the Pact for the Future (action 55e).
Historically, the demand focused on securing institutional representation within the global governance system, starting in the 1970s–1980s.Footnote 45 Despite limited resources and explicit opposition from some of the UN’s Member States, major steps were achieved in the 1990s with the creation of the LGMA major group and the World Assembly of Cities and Local Authorities, the result of coordinated advocacy by the major municipalist organisations of global reach at the time – the IULA, UTO, Metropolis, and Summit.Footnote 46 Their efforts were rewarded: in 2000, the UN agency in charge of urbanisation and housing, UN-Habitat, created an Advisory Committee of Local Authorities (UNACLA) as an advisory body to its Executive Director, thus establishing permanent institutional representation for local authorities within the UN system.Footnote 47 The address given two years later to the UN General Assembly by then-Mayor of Barcelona and UNACLA’s first chairman, Joan Clos, was a strong symbolic statement that cities and local governments now had a voice of their own in the highest forums of global governance.Footnote 48
Nevertheless, this recognition of local governments in UN frameworks remained limited, both in scope – mostly confined to issues around urbanisation, housing, and local development, notably because the World Assembly and UNACLA were linked exclusively to the mandate of UN-Habitat – and in capacity – importantly, all of the new bodies created had a purely consultative role and were excluded from the actual negotiation process.Footnote 49 A major reason for this is their assimilation to non-governmental actors, as evidenced by the parallelism between local governments and the other social groups represented by the major group system. However, the growing activism of cities and local governments in relation to the UN’s climate and development agendas continued to fuel a debate around the role that they could play in global policy debates and implementation. In 2004, the IULA and the UTO decided to merge into a new organisation: UCLG, which was intended to offer a “common house’ for the global project of municipalismFootnote 50 and whose stated purpose was to strengthen its ‘partnership with the United Nations and the global community’ to make cities and local governments ‘a pillar of the international system’.Footnote 51 That same year, a report on the relations between the UN and civil society (known, after its lead author, as the ‘Cardoso report’) noted that cities and local governments had already demonstrated their ability to conduct coordinated actions that effectively contributed to global policy debates, citing the Kyoto Protocol as one example. It underlined that local governments ‘are not non-governmental’ actors, but holders of a general political mandate concerning all issues that affect the lives of their constituents. It therefore suggested that the UN ‘regard UCLG as an advisory body’, not only on issues of urban development but also ‘on governance matters’ broadly understood.Footnote 52 Additionally, it recommended the creation of an ‘Elected Representatives Liaison Unit’ that would include representatives from local governments.Footnote 53
The Cardoso report’s recommendations were not taken up; instead, informal participation became the norm for cities and local governments’ involvement in global agendas. In 2013, when the time came to update the UN’s global agenda, UCLG and other representatives of cities and local governments were associated with the discussions through the creation of a Global Taskforce of Cities and Local Governments, managed by UCLG.Footnote 54 Although contributions by cities and their organisations had influenced global agendas in the past, it was the first time that cities and local governments were directly included in the consultation process through a dedicated structure. This process was therefore heralded by UCLG as a landmark moment. However, the Global Taskforce remains a relatively informal mechanism without a team or budget of its own, which is facilitated by UCLG on a voluntary basis.Footnote 55 While it can provide ‘contributions’ and ‘recommendations’, there is no formal obligation to consider or even acknowledge its inputs in official global governance processes. It is indeed absent from Agenda 2030, and the New Urban Agenda only acknowledges it in its foreword (§5, §8) rather than in the agenda itself. Like the major group, then, it remains an exclusively consultative, poorly resourced mechanism with no formal role in the definition of the agendas. Then-Secretary General of UCLG, Josep Roig, summarised these limitations well:
We recognize the apparent contradiction that the New Urban Agenda will ultimately be defined and adopted by UN Member States, rather than by the cities and territories that must actually put it in place. (…) We (…) accept this contradiction in the hope that Member States will take this opportunity to ensure that it will be the last time that an agenda for territories is shaped without the direct involvement of local leaders at the negotiation table.Footnote 56
There is a strong municipalist agenda being pursued by UCLG and its allies in this area, with an unambiguous and consistent demand for autonomous institutional status for cities and local governments within UN processes. There has also been a growing recognition that local governments are part of the process needed to achieve global goals – as mentioned in Agenda 21, Agenda 2030, and the New Urban Agenda. Despite this, institutional modes of engagement in global governance processes remained limited to stakeholder participation. Importantly, despite their political mandate, cities and local governments are treated no differently than other non-governmental actors, such as civil society organisations, social groups, or private business. This is the case in the Major Groups system, but also in ad hoc mechanisms such as the GFMD Mayors Mechanism, established in 2018 within the GFMD, which has similar mechanisms in place for civil society, private business and youth.Footnote 57 Until very recently, even initiatives aimed at modernising the multilateral system did not include recommendations concerning formal institutional recognition for cities and local governments. For instance, after a failed attempt supported by Turkey in 2011,Footnote 58 UCLG’s long-standing demand to obtain observer status at the General Assembly was not discussed in Guterres’ Common Agenda, despite the latter’s stated interest in enhancing the participation of cities and local governments at the UN.Footnote 59 This did not prevent UCLG and its allies from seizing every available opportunity, even when it went against the provisions of the Agenda. Exemplary of this are the Voluntary Local Reviews (VLR), through which individual cities and local governments submit reviews of their progress against the Sustainable Development Goals. First initiated in 2018, the VLRs gradually gained the support of the UN: UN-DESA stores the documents, cities are allowed to organise side events at the HLPF, and UN-Habitat now actively supports the process. Such initiatives supported the vision of local governments as ‘partners’ for implementation, which is a consistent talking point from UN representatives.Footnote 60 But in practice, their role continued to be confined to that of an informal ‘contributor’ as the UN’s modes of engagement with them remained limited to informal, voluntary, and consultative processes. Far from UCLG’s aspiration to ‘a seat at the global table’ – that is, formal and direct participation in global governance negotiations, and the ability to partake in decision-makingFootnote 61 – cities and local governments have, so far, gained only a place in the room: the ability to access the spaces where these debates take place and the opportunity to voice their concerns, ideas, and suggestions – without being part of the actual decision-making. In the face of this, UCLG’s strategy has been to enter the room regardless of formal recognition, in the hopes that this would create opportunities for cities to influence the outcomes of global negotiations. This strategy has had some success: cities are now included in some major global governance processes, such as the HLPF, the VLR, the review of the New Urban Agenda, the GFMD Mayors Mechanism, or the Forum of Mayors on Urban Development, Housing and Land Development. Even in the absence of a formal ‘seat at the table’, then, being ‘in the room’ certainly reinforces cities’ influence by providing opportunities for direct conversations with policymakers on issues that matter to them. However, this also means that input is limited to ‘constructive’ proposals, that is, contributions that enhance or enrich the proposed agendas; contrary to Member States, cities and local governments do not have the power to meaningfully oppose any such proposal, or to shape the agenda from the outset. In practice, the participation of cities is therefore limited to forms of advisory participation in processes that they did not themselves shape.
The creation in 2023 of the Advisory Group on Local and Regional Governments, with a one-year mandate to develop contributions that would inform the UN’s Pact for the Future, marked an explicit effort to include the perspectives of cities and local governments in the elaboration of another global agenda. That same year, a Forum of Mayors was also formalised as a subsidiary body on the Committee on Urban Development, Housing and Land Management of the UN Economic Commission for Europe.Footnote 62 However, these initiatives remained on the side of voluntary contributions focused mainly on implementation: the Advisory Group’s main output were recommendations to ‘strengthen local and regional governments’ engagement in UN intergovernmental processes’ and ‘contributions towards implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the New Urban Agenda’, focusing once again on contributions to implementation rather than inclusion in decision-making.Footnote 63 The secretary-general’s recent recommendation that Member States consider establishing an annual hearing of local and regional governments at the General Assembly, granting observer status to representatives of local governments, and extending the role of existing mechanisms including UNACLA and the Forum of Mayors marks an important step towards real institutional recognition, with its call for ‘a bold shift to a formal, permanent and differentiated role for local and regional governments in United Nations intergovernmental processes’. However, even these recommendations are anchored in the recognition of local governments’ ‘critical role’ in the implementation of the global agendas and oriented towards contributions and cooperation, rather than participation in agenda-setting, negotiation, and policymaking. The long-standing observation of the literature on transnational actors, which holds that while transnational actors can be successful in the agenda-setting phase of global governance, they are systematically excluded from the decision-making phase,Footnote 64 thus once again appears verified.
Normative municipalism
Alongside the demand for institutional recognition, municipalism is defined by a set of normative commitments; even outside of formal recognition, then, it may be the case that the municipalist movement may advance and embed municipalist norms such as decentralisation, local democracy, solidarity between peoples, and political participation within global governance. This normative endeavour partakes in a broader process of institutionalisation of the municipalist movement in the sense given to it by social constructivists, which includes not only formal institutions, but also ideas and norms that become widely shared by a given community to define appropriate standards of behaviour.Footnote 65 Though integral to municipalism, the ideas of transnational solidarity and political participation are not specifically municipalist; other global actors also promote these norms, including civil society organisations and human rights activists. For this reason, this section focuses especially on the advancement of decentralisation and local democracy as global municipalist norms – including also, where relevant, mentions of local autonomy, local self-government, and subsidiarity.
In the six agendas reviewed for this article, 26 entries are relevant for assessing the normative progress of municipalism in global agendas. Of these, 12 are negative, indicating a lack of reference to municipalist principles where they could be expected. The most positive entries relate to the principle of decentralisation or, in some cases, ‘delegation of authority’, not as general principles as much as in relation to specific global goals that require decentralised action to be achieved. Local democracy is not mentioned as a principle in any of the six agendas. This lack of normative commitment cannot, however, be attributed to a lack of existing normative ground to build on. Efforts to get decentralisation and local democracy adopted as global norms by the UN go back at least three decades, with the main effort led at the end of the 1990s by the World Association of Cities and Local Authorities Coordination (WACLAC), who worked with UN-Habitat to develop a World Charter of Local Self-Government. Building on the momentum generated by the 1996 Habitat-II conference and the recognition of cities and local governments as the ‘closest partners’ of central governments for the implementation of Agenda 21 and the Habitat agenda, the ambition was expressed as follows by the director-general of UN-Habitat (at the time, the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements) and WACLAC’s Chairman of the Expert Group on the World Charter:
[Our] aim is nothing less than to draw up an internationally agreed, adaptable framework for the practice of local democracy (…) The ultimate aim is the promulgation of the Charter by the United Nations General Assembly on the occasion of the Special Session in that year which will be dedicated to reviewing the implementation of the Habitat Agenda.Footnote 66
The proposed World Charter built on the successful model of the European Charter of Self-Government, adopted in 1988 by the Council of Europe.Footnote 67 Key elements of the draft text included embedding the principle of local self-government in legal and constitutional frameworks (Article 2); asserting the principle of subsidiarity, which holds that ‘public responsibilities shall generally be exercised by those authorities which are closest to the citizen’ (Article 4); ensuring and protecting the autonomy of local authorities (Articles 4–6, and 8), including in terms of financing and resourcing (Article 9); affirming the principle of citizen participation in local self-government (Article 10); and asserting local authorities’ right to association, including at international level (Articles 11 and 12). These principles are fully aligned with the normative commitments of municipalism as outlined above. Despite important preliminary work, a clear commitment from both WACLAC and UN-Habitat, and the support of the G77 and European countries, the proposal faced strong resistance from the United States of America and China. The latter, in particular, raised issues pertaining to the European character of the principles outlined in the charter, which were deemed incompatible with the Chinese constitutional and administrative system; China also argued that such principles would hinder development in developing countries, which required a strong central government.Footnote 68 There were two points of general agreement: an agreement on ‘the fundamental issues of decentralisation’, and the recognition of the ‘fundamental role’ of local authorities in the implementation of the goals set out in the Habitat agenda adopted five years before in Istanbul. Nevertheless, the worry from Member States that ‘the draft World Charter would undermine their own state structures’ was ultimately insurmountable.Footnote 69
The World Charter for Local Self-Government was never adopted by the UN. Instead, in the years following its unsuccessful discussion, several individual UN agencies took steps towards recognising and embedding the principles of decentralisation and local government in their normative frameworks, most prominently with the ‘International Guidelines on Decentralization and Strengthening of Local Authorities’ and the ‘International Guidelines on Access to Basic Services for All’ jointly adopted in April 2007 by the Governing Council of UN-Habitat.Footnote 70 As expressed in this text, however, the UN’s commitment to decentralisation appears primarily instrumental: it is intended ‘to further enable and empower local authorities to improve urban governance in attaining the human settlements–related Millennium Development Goals’ (§1). Municipalist principles are not seen as self-standing norms, but rather as instruments towards the achievement of global goals, specifically as they relate to UN-Habitat’s mandate. This position is shared by other UN organisations: for example, the UNDP similarly maintains that ‘decentralising democratic governance to subnational levels can accelerate and deepen improvements in access to basic services by the poor’.Footnote 71
Regardless of the rapporteurs’ assertion, back in 2001, that ‘the subject of a World Charter indisputably remains on the agenda’, the topic has in fact not been discussed again at the UN since then.Footnote 72 More than twenty years later, not only have global municipalist advocates not yet proven able to put the idea back on the table, but they have also not achieved a clear normative commitment to municipalist principles from the UN; the most recent global agendas do not even formally reference the principles of decentralisation, local democracy, local autonomy, or even the principle of subsidiarity. The Agenda for Sustainable Development, for example, does not contain any direct reference to local authorities in Goal 16, which notably concerns the building of ‘effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels’Footnote 73; nor does it consider the role of local governments in Goal 11, despite the fact that ‘mak[ing] cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’ explicitly requires cities and human settlements to ‘adopt and implement integrated policies and plans’ towards this goal.Footnote 74 Only the New Urban Agenda reaffirms a commitment to decentralisation and subsidiarity as norms that should govern policymaking in the fields of urban policy (§89), the right to adequate housing (§105), waste disposal (§122), and financing for sustainable urban development (§130).Footnote 75 In other words, normative commitment to municipalist principles at the UN remains strictly confined to UN-Habitat and the areas covered by its mandate. The recent recommendations by the secretary-general to consider steps to formally institutionalise, make permanent, and grant distinct recognition to the UN’s engagement with cities and local governments do not mention municipalist principles either. Decentralisation, subsidiarity, local democracy, or local autonomy are therefore far from being recognised as global norms in UN-led global governance.
Technical municipalism
While formal institutional and normative recognition remained, for the most part, circumscribed to UN-Habitat and to topics directly relating to urban policy, or to advisory positions akin to those granted to other, non-governmental actors, the strand of municipalism that favours technical cooperation was much better received and integrated within global governance agendas and processes. In the six agendas reviewed for this article, no less than 93 entries mention forms of technical cooperation either between international organisations and cities and local governments, or between local governments themselves in relation to global agendas and goals. This success of technical municipalism is linked to the impressive development of transnational city networks, which experienced a new ‘golden age’ from the mid-2000s onwards. Michele Acuto and colleagues estimated that there were, as of 2020, at least 300 international city networks in operation; of all the city networks in operation in 2017, 30% had been created since the year 2001, representing an average of more than four new networks per year – of which 41% were international city networks.Footnote 76 Defined as ‘institutionalized governance structures facilitating city-to-city and city-to-other actors cooperation’ across national borders, these networks are the direct heirs of the ‘technoscientific’ municipalist tradition of cooperation, peer-sharing, and knowledge development embodied especially by the UIV-IULA in the 20th century.Footnote 77 Over the same period, international activities also increased significantly in cities themselves: in a study conducted in 2020, Anna Kosovac and colleagues indicate that out of a panel of 47 cities, 70% had developed international strategies and 87% had equipped themselves with a dedicated office for international affairs.Footnote 78 Such strategies increasingly involve direct engagement of cities with international law and global governance, most notably the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals. They have, in turn, been welcomed by the UN: beyond UCLG and its ‘common house of municipalism’, transnational city networks focused specifically on climate issues, like the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (hereafter called ‘C40’), the Global Covenant of Mayors for Energy and Climate Change, and International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) – Local Governments for Sustainability, have been standing participants to the annual UN-led COPs on Climate Change for several yearsFootnote 79; similarly, the Mayors Migration Council has played a leadership role in the activities of the GFMD since 2018.Footnote 80
This corresponds to a rise of what I termed ‘technical municipalism’: that is, the continuation of a municipalist movement aiming to enable cooperation between local governments and build relevant knowledge, tools, and expertise in order to support effective local policymaking on the issues faced by cities and local governments. As already discussed, this is not in itself a new practice: transnational city networking became an established practice in the 1980s, primarily in Europe, where the institutional and normative context was favourable,Footnote 81 and while major generalist networks like Metropolis and Eurocities were established in that period, issue-based networks affiliated to international organisations also appeared – examples include the WHO European Healthy Cities network (1988) or the ICLEI, sponsored by the United Nations Environment Programme (1990). Regional networks also emerged outside of Europe, such as MedCities (1991), the Latin American Federation of Cities, Municipalities and Local Government Associations (1981), Mercociudades (1995), or CityNet (1987).Footnote 82 These networks served both as a diplomatic structure and as a development tool: they worked not only to cultivate peaceful relationships across national borders and strengthen transnational ties but also to share knowledge, best practices, and support technical cooperation – in line with the technoscientific orientation of municipalism. Global governance organisations like the UN and the World Bank often supported them on the premise that they would be helpful tools for (sustainable) urban development; to this day, UN interest in cities and local governments is primarily policy-focused – one example is the UNDP-led Joint Migration and Development Initiative, which, as recounted by a senior officer involved in the project, has since 2008 sought to work with cities and local authorities to facilitate action on migration and development in the framework of global agreements.Footnote 83 In this sense, technical municipalism has long been aligned with global governance’s technocratic focus on finding policy ‘solutions’ to global ‘problems’: this alignment in approaches was especially solidified with the establishment of the UN’s approach to ‘sustainable development’ in the late 1980s, which has been the driving concept of global governance endeavours since then.
However, the literature has noted that the new networks created since the mid-2000s mark a new era of city networking: more global in scope, more specialised in focus, more reactive to timely events, and more intertwined with a range of other global actors than traditional municipalist or peer-sharing networks. City diplomacy scholars have thus highlighted a ‘generational shift’ in the governance and practices of city networks, raising important points about the new orientations of contemporary city networks and identifying new ‘hybrid’ forms of governance developed by these networks.Footnote 84 The new forms of governance of these networks and their interdependence – if not their dependency – with other global actors, including major funders, philanthropic actors, and even private business, mark a clear rupture with previous governance practices within municipalist networks. Building on an in-depth analysis of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities Initiative (100RC), Anne Bach Nielsen and Marielle Papin highlight the ways in which 100RC and other recent networks such as the C40 or the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance differ from older networks like ICLEI or Climate Alliance. Their study shows that while older networks follow a model of governance that can be described as ‘public, inclusive and self-governed’, newer networks ‘see a large influence of diverse private actors, are exclusive, and use both voluntary and constraining steering mechanisms’.Footnote 85
A case in point is the C40, which, in contrast with municipalist networks, does not have an associative structure and is entirely privately funded; funding comes with governance privileges, since Michael Bloomberg (the head of Bloomberg Philanthropies, C40’s strategic funder) has been President of the C40 Board since 2014. Another example is the Mayors Migration Council, which, ‘as a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropic Advisors (…) operates under RPA’s fiduciary, legal and governance oversight’.Footnote 86 Both networks have mayor-led leadership bodies, but these have only advisory or ‘steering’ roles, while the organisation’s governance and operational decisions are ultimately made by philanthropy-led governance bodies. Such structures indeed justify the critique formulated by new municipalism scholars, summarised as follows:
(…) the likes of C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities, the Global Covenant of Mayors and United Cities and Local Governments, all plugged into philanthrocapitalism and the global non-profit industrial complex (…) [constitute] the liberal-capitalist flipside to radical municipalist translocalism: likewise promoting inter-urban cooperation, knowledge sharing and solidarity, but within a merely ‘progressive’, accommodative, technocratic frame that fails to challenge the radical root of these problems.Footnote 87
While this assertion certainly holds true for the thematic, technocratic networks discussed above, UCLG occupies a somewhat different position, due not only to the absence of philanthropic funders in its governance but also, importantly for the argument of this article, to the explicitly municipalist claims it makes while demanding formal recognition for cities and local governments as self-standing global governance actors. Nevertheless, this shows that such networks go beyond the traditional municipalist effort to facilitate peer-sharing and knowledge exchanges – and this includes UCLG as well. They develop their own resources, often in close coordination with UN agencies, to ‘scale up’ what they identify as ‘best practice’ amongst cities all over the world through ‘knowledge hubs’, peer-sharing and expert training. The same logic is at work in the VLR process, whereby UN-Habitat works directly with city governments to help them assess their progress in implementing the Sustainable Development Goals.
In such endeavours, cities, local governments and their networks stay clear of broad claims to recognition or representation: they instead tend to understand themselves primarily as peer-sharing and expertise-building platforms, presented as helpful tools to develop more effective policies on specific global issues. This is in line with the approach outlined in Agenda 21 and especially the New Urban Agenda, which explicitly encourages city networking, peer-sharing, knowledge circulation, and the establishment of best practices as a way to ‘contribute to sustainable urban development, developing capacities and fostering exchanges of urban solutions and mutual learning’ (§146). The global agendas often highlight technical cooperation opportunities with cities and local governments in relation to specific policy goals, rather than as a principled approach; the New Urban Agenda thus calls for such cooperation in relation to housing, urban planning, and waste management, but not on all policy areas. Conversely, the advocacy of such networks is thus not primarily political, but policy-focused – and their legitimacy claim is grounded in the practical expertise of cities and the technical expertise of the network, rather than on political claims based on principles of decentralisation, local democracy, citizen participation, or even representativity and the political mandate of cities. As a result, this form of technical municipalism appears hyper-specialised and disjointed from the political orientation with which it historically went hand in hand.
Conclusion
This article has proposed an evaluation of the ‘rise of the city’ as a political actor in global governance, as it has been described and conceptualised by the international relations literature for over a decade, from the perspective of its transformative potential as an alternative political project to state-based politics, namely, municipalism. I have argued that such an assessment is important in light of the political claims made by advocates of the ‘rise of the city’ and the significance that such ideas have gained in the media, global governance discourse, and the scholarly literature. Drawing on political theory, history, and urban studies literature, I have then proposed a conceptualisation of municipalism which, taking stock of its historical development, distinguishes it from the more radical project of communalism and identifies three constitutive dimensions of the municipalist project: an institutional dimension, a normative dimension, and a technical dimension. Reviewing the progression of municipalist ideas within UN-led global governance in each of these dimensions has shown that the political orientation of municipalism – characterised by institutional and normative claims – faced a roadblock in the early 2000s, due to the opposition of some Member States who felt that municipalist ideas could endanger their own state structures and, ultimately, their sovereignty. The technical dimension of municipalism, however, continued to expand over that same period and, in fact, experienced remarkable growth since the mid-2000s, particularly through new, policy-focused transnational city networks. As it expanded, though, this ‘technical municipalism’ – increasingly coopted both by UN bodies and placed under the oversight of external philanthropic organisations – abandoned the political orientation that had historically gone hand-in-hand with the project of technical development and cooperation. The recent opening up, under the leadership of the secretary-general, of new options for formal institutional inclusion of cities and local governments in UN processes marks a meaningful shift in the UN’s approach: if adopted, it would enshrine the recognition of local governments as governmental actors in their own right, rather than including them in civil society. Nevertheless, it remains focused on enabling effective partnerships for the implementation of the global agendas and makes no mention of municipalist principles to be included in the UN’s normative architecture.
This finding warrants the new municipalist claims that the ‘rise of the city as a political actor’ – particularly in the field of global governance – constitutes a ‘misguided example of new municipalism’, but for slightly different reasons. Contrary to what Roth, Russell and Thompson affirm in their 2023 article, ‘radical municipalism’ is not the only form of municipalism that deserves the name – and ‘new municipalism’ is not reducible to its more ‘radical’ version. A municipalism reduced to its purely technical aspect indeed falls short of the normative requirements for a municipalist project – and scholars are right to point out the technocratic and post-political character of such endeavours. Nevertheless, this should not obscure the fact that a municipalist project does still exist in the space of global governance; in particular, municipalist advocacy still exists at the UN. It is embodied by UCLG, which places itself in the continuation of municipalists’ efforts to achieve formal institutional recognition of cities and local governments as well as the establishment of municipalist principles as global norms. The fact that UCLG also facilitates transnational intercity cooperation, maintains a knowledge hub, and cooperates with UN agencies as well as other, more technocratic city networks does not constitute an indictment against it: rather, it is in the full municipalist tradition, which has since its origins harboured a technoscientific orientation alongside its political ambition.
The central proposal of this article – rehabilitating the category of municipalism as a pertinent analytical category to shed light on the significance of contemporary engagements between cities and global governance – opens up a range of new questions. In particular, further research should examine in more detail the extent to which UCLG maintains, or, indeed, transforms, key municipalist advocacy points, especially in the context of the UN’s proposal to update multilateralism for the 21st century; how these strategies may evolve in the current context of a crisis of multilateralism over the past few years; and how technoscientific and increasingly technocratic orientations of city activism in global governance can create added difficulties for the political side of municipalist advocacy. One final question, perhaps related to this last point, relates to the uses (or non-uses) of the category of ‘municipalism’ by city activists themselves, as well as the city diplomacy literature. Their fairly surprising reluctance to mobilise municipalism either as an ideological reference or an analytical category may in itself be a sign of the technocratisation of the movement, unhelpfully obscuring the very real claims made by ‘rise of the city’ activists on behalf of cities and local governments.
Supplementary material
The supplementary material for this article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210526102253.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the editors and anonymous peer reviewers for useful comments and suggestions on the article. Thank you especially to Dr Miha Marčenko for his support and insight throughout the writing process.
Competing interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
