A New Relationship?

Early 2005, a brief news clip in the International Herald Tribune caught my eye. It reported on the announcement by Seattle Mayor Greg Nichols that he would implement the Kyoto norm in Seattle despite the U.S. Senate's rejection of the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. Nichols initiated the “U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement” and today 1,060 mayors have signed on. At the time, André Nollkaemper and I were working on the volume New Perspectives on the Divide Between National and International Law, which focused on judges and courts as the conduits of international law into the national legal orders. In the concluding chapter, “Beyond the Divide,” we referred to this initiative as a “form of deformalisation” of international law.Footnote ¹ Anne-Marie Slaughter's A New World Order (2005) built on the concept of “disaggregation of the State” and analyzed global governance as a complex global web of “government networks,” yet these transnational intercity government networks were unmentioned. At the time, it reflected the state-of-the-art of international law (scholarship): local governments were simply invisible to the international lawyer. International law was a state affair. On the “internationalization” of the city (of which the aforementioned “transnationalization” is part), the only available scholarship was that of pioneering scholar Yishai Blank,Footnote ² and the article by his supervisor at Harvard, Gerald E. Frug, together with David J. Barron, published in 2006.Footnote ³

Initially, I wondered whether this development was indeed—in the words of this panel—a form of “federalism strikes back”: a failing Washington D.C. made individual states and local governments step up. Nichols's action stood however not on its own, it was part of a global phenomenon: around the world, mayors and local governments, individually and jointly in national and transnational city networks, engaged directly with international law and global policy. The “Cities for CEDAW” is another case in point.Footnote ⁴ While the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), cities took up its implementation while not being formally bound to do so. San Francisco, for example, inserted CEDAW verbatim in an ordinanceFootnote ⁵ and designated the Commission on the Status of Women to implement and monitor CEDAW locally. There are more examples of cities engaging with international or regional human rights law. The Human Rights Cities Network aims to promote the development of human rights in Europe and beyond.Footnote ⁶ The Child-Friendly City Network aims to promote the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child at the local level. Obviously, there are the sanctuary cities in Canada, the UK, and the United States, which ground their migration policies on international human rights and migration law. There is the world organization United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), there are global city networks such as the C40 on Climate Change, the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) on sustainable development, and regional networks such as Eurocities, Asian Network of Major Cities 21, the Union of Baltic Cities, and the African Clean Cities Platform to share knowledge and promote the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on waste management in Africa, with the aim of African countries realizing clean and healthy cities. Around the globe, cities organize themselves in transnational networks, which in turn often go on to engage with international conventions and/or global policy goals to ground their urban policies and legislation.

Four Global Trends Behind the Internationalization of the City

Initially, the global scale of this phenomenon could be explained by three global trends reinforcing each other: urbanization, globalization, and decentralization. In the past decades, urbanization has steadily increased: “In 2018, an estimated 55.3 per cent of the world's population lived in urban settlements. By 2030, urban areas are projected to house 60 per cent of people globally and one in every three people will live in cities with at least half a million inhabitants.”Footnote ⁷ The world's cities are growing both in size and number. There is a strong relationship between urbanization and globalization. As former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan stated: “The central challenge of the 21st century will be how to make both globalization and urbanization work for all the world's people, instead of benefiting only a few.”Footnote ⁸ The 2015 Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG11)— “[m]aking cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”—and the 2016 New Urban Agenda (NUA) are presented as a global agenda of the international community to take on this challenge. A third factor is the global tendency to decentralize tasks and resources from the central to the local, municipal level. Cities themselves also drive these decentralization efforts, arguing that moving authority and resources to a level of government closest to the people is favorable from democracy, legitimacy, and efficiency perspectives. Local governments reach out to the international level to actively seek more autonomy and decision-making power. There, cities—mostly through UCLG—lobby, for example at the EU, the African Union, and the UN, for the adoption of policy to strengthen their level of government. In the UN context, the Advisory Group on Decentralisation of UN Habitat—in which, for example, UCLG has a seat—developed “Guidelines on Decentralisation and the Strengthening of Local Authorities [as] a key instrument to promote good governance at all levels and to strengthen local authorities.”Footnote ⁹ Urban and global governance are increasingly intertwined.Footnote ¹⁰ Lately, these three global trends have come to be reinforced by a fourth trend accelerating the internationalization of the city as a whole: the hyperconnectivity-revolution.

International Law as an Instrument of Cities, Locally and Globally

Already, I gave examples of how cities, individually and jointly, engage with and implement—voluntarily and possibly in deviation from national policies—international law and global policy (goals) within their urban borders. Cities’ commitment to the implementation of the Paris Agreement (2016), the SDG11, and the NUA are cases in point. International law then is an instrument to shape local policy decisions and to craft legislation.

Cities and transnational city networks are constituted by international law and institutions, yet they in turn use international law and institutions, and global policy, to constitute themselves as a global actor. I have discussed this (self-)constitution extensively elsewhere through the prism of social constructivism.Footnote ¹¹ Cities construct themselves as global actors by mimicking foreign policy, international relations, and international law practices of states and international organizations. As one example, the language and organization of UCLG is modelled on the UN. Cities copy treaty making and/or use international law as a framework for intercity agreements.Footnote ¹²

A striking example of cities mobilizing international norms and policies is their lobby campaign for an urban SDG—as part of the 2030 Agenda (2015) —and the NUA. Together, SDG11 and the NUA push global urbanization into focus of the UN system and create space for municipal governments to claim a role within it. For a few years now there has been discussion on reforming UN Habitat and even the UN. It is no secret that member states are not eager to reform UN Habitat, let alone the UN. Some cities and city networks seem to take SDG11 and the NUA serious as an instrument of government, others engage more superficially. International organizations increasingly recognize local governments as relevant and necessary partners in the realization of human rights, good governance, democracy, social justice, and equality.Footnote ¹³ Collaboration potentially enhances their own efficacy and legitimacy. This may empower cities to claim a more central role within the UN system and other international organizations. The creation of a World Urban Forum, which is however of a technical, non-legislative nature, caters to this claim.

The coming month of May, the first UN Habitat Assembly will take place. It is the first yield of heated discussions on UN Habitat and UN reform, which I am sure will continue. To illustrate this use of SDG11 and the NUA as instruments to claim a role within the UN, the High-Level Political Forum of the summer of 2018, which dealt with SDG11, is relevant. There, city governments campaigned with the #listen2cities to include the urban perspective in the global policy agenda(s) and to claim their seat at the main table. UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohamed comments: “The driving force and creative energy of local and regional governments is instrumental to reframe how the world implements the Global Agenda.” She observed moreover UN Habitat reform to be the “litmus test” for UN Reform more generally. In short, cities and the UN may be reconstituting each other. The use of international law and global policy by cities as instruments of (legal) governance, locally and globally is a truly global phenomenon.

An Urban Pushback?

Finally, let me mention two ongoing collective research projects as well as a paper I am working on. The complexities of the growing engagement of cities with international law and the increasing interactions between international organizations and cities is stimulating new and exciting research. Helmut Aust and I initiated the International Law Association Study Group on “The Role of Cities in International Law” and a Research Handbook on International Law and Cities. While Helmut and I each initially shared a certain enthusiasm about the progressive nature of cities’ engagement with international law and global policy, we both have come to be concerned also about the (potentially) darker side of the rise of the city. Helmut rightly points to a tendency of idealization with his title “Shining Cities on the Hill.”Footnote ¹⁴ As Martha Davis points out, “[h]istory underscores that there is nothing inevitably progressive about city politics.”Footnote ¹⁵ In both projects we aim to analyze critically the changing relationship between cities and international law.

To end, let me point at what I would like to call an “Urban Pushback.” In this paper, I argue that cities (may) instrumentalize international (human rights) law and the global policy objectives of, for example, SDG11 to push back the local implications/consequences of global neoliberalism. To illustrate this preliminary claim, let us turn briefly to Amsterdam.

In recent years, the city of Amsterdam is changing rapidly due to the implications of the global economy. In particular, the real estate market is affected. This has not gone unnoticed by, among others, the International Monetary Fund. Our newspaper, Het Parool, sums it up with a headline: “IMF: Amsterdam Houses are Prey to [International] Investors.”Footnote ¹⁶ The IMF recognizes cities like Amsterdam, Berlin, Barcelona, London, and many others, also in the Global South, are reconstituted/reconfigured by the neoliberal global economy. Amsterdam is looking for adequate responses. Its government has sought transnational cooperation with other cities around an international human rights norm, the right to housing, as included in, inter alia, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to then address jointly the United Nations. This has resulted in the “Municipalist Declaration of Local Governments for the Right to Housing and the Right to the City.”Footnote ¹⁷ The “signatory cities”— notice the mimicking of treaty law (language)—participated in the aforementioned UN 2018 High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) to follow up on SDG11 in New York, where they presented the Declaration together as the “Cities for Housing” coalition.Footnote ¹⁸ It is of course intriguing who or what exactly is the addressee of this declaration. Het Parool reports: “Cities Ask the UN for Help to Protect Housing Market.”Footnote ¹⁹ Indeed, the cities turn to the UN with the presentation of the declaration at the HLPF. In it, local governments claim a central role in securing “equitable, inclusive, and just cities” and “actual access to ‘adequate housing.’” They “demand more legal and fiscal powers to regulate the real estate market in order to fight against speculation and guarantee the social function of the city.” I will not jump ahead of myself and the research I am currently doing, but this little story about Amsterdam merely aims to illustrate a much bigger, global development of cities that increasingly use international law as an instrument.