The Globalisation of Urban Governance

Helmut Philipp Aust, Anél du Plessis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351049245
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

The adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the UN General Assembly in 2015 represents the latest attempt by the international community to live up to the challenges of a planet that is out of control. Sustainable Development Goal 11 envisages inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable cities around the world by the year 2030. This globally agreed vision is part of a trend in international policy toward good urban governance, and now awaits implementation. Fourteen original contributions collectively examine how this global vision has been developed on a conceptual level, how it plays out in various areas of (global) urban governance and how it is implemented in varying local contexts. The overarching hypothesis presented herein is that SDG 11 proves that local governance is recognised as an autonomous yet interrelated part of the global pursuit of sustainable development. The volume analyses three core questions: How have the normative ideals set forth in SDG 11 been developed? What are the meanings of the four sub-goals of SDG 11 and how do these relate to each other? What does SDG 11 imply for urban law and governance in the domestic context and how are local processes of urban governance internationalised?

The Globalisation of Urban Governance makes an important scholarly contribution by linking the narrative on globalisation of good urban governance in various social sciences with legal discourse. It considers global governance and connects the existing debate about cities and their place in global governance with some of the most pertinent questions that lawyers face today.

Part 1

1 Introduction

The Globalisation of Urban Governance – Legal Perspectives on Sustainable Development Goal 11

Helmut Philipp Aust and Anél du Plessis

Sustainable Development Goal 11 and the Changing Dynamics of Urban Governance

The adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the UN General Assembly in 2015 represents the latest attempt by the international community to live up to the challenges of a planet on which population growth is out of control (French and Kotzé 2018). The steadily growing world population has to live and prosper within the limitations of the resources that our planet can generate. Climate change is a particularly pressing issue which is set to change the way people live dramatically in the next couple of generations. There is also the constant trend of urbanisation. More and more people live in cities and other urban areas such as towns and suburbs marked by the density of human structures such as houses, commercial buildings, road and railway infrastructure and the construction necessary for basic service delivery. This has led many to proclaim that we are living in an “urban age”, while others are sceptical of the underlying statistics and normative projects (Brenner and Schmidt 2014). Be that as it may, it is not disputed that the current rate of urbanisation poses challenges with respect to environmental protection, the living conditions and the safety of city dwellers in informal settlements, the co-habitation of diverse communities in multilingual and multicultural spaces, the resilience of the earth system, and a host of other issues. At the same time, cities are increasingly being viewed as important stakeholders in the provision and maintenance of global public goods (Bulkeley and Betsill 2005, p. 44; Sassen 2013, p. 243; du Plessis 2017, pp. 242–244). Cities are now important partners in the concerted management and the promotion of the sustainable use of the global natural commons. Cities have formed cross-border associations that pride themselves on doing more than their respective nation states (their national governments) to mitigate and adapt to climate change (Aust 2015). Cities and urban areas are simultaneously part of the problems characteristic of the “urban age” and of the solutions to such problems.

This dual character of cities finds expression in SDG 11. The urban goal aspires to “make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” (UN General Assembly 2015). The goal is disambiguated in a number of sub-targets which address inter alia issues such as safe and affordable housing, slum upgrading, access to transport systems, participatory urban planning, the protection of world cultural and natural heritage, responding to natural disasters, reducing the adverse environmental impact of cities, and providing access to safe, inclusive and accessible green public spaces. Indicators specific to these targets are expected to be the yardsticks with which to assess whether and to what extent UN member states are on track to fulfil their pledges.

SDG 11 is noteworthy in several respects. First, it is the only actor-specific goal among the SDGs, which otherwise focus on concrete questions such as the reduction of poverty (Goal 1), the achievement of gender equality (Goal 5) or the combatting of climate change (Goal 13). Goal 11 stands out insofar as it addresses a particular level of governance. Secondly, it states an internationally agreed vision for good urban governance. Thirdly, SDG 11 bridges global and local levels of governance. While the SDGs were adopted by UN member states and are also directed at states for their implementation, SDG 11 emphasises that many local issues have a cascading effect as they escalate beyond mere local concern (Aust and du Plessis 2018).

These features of SDG 11 are analysed in this book. The contributions to this volume focus on aspects of the globalisation of good urban governance from a legal perspective. The book also includes contributions from other disciplines, notably political science, which makes it possible to analyse the legal nature of urban governance while being sensitive to the political context(s) in which the globalisation of urban governance takes place.

Urban governance was traditionally a remit of the state, and was confined mainly to domestic law, policy and regulations. International law used to be disinterested in the internal workings of the state (Aust 2017). Almost all international law commitments were aimed at securing certain end-results. The ways and means by which a state managed to arrive at such results were considered to be immaterial. This applied a fortiori also to the internal organisation of states, including the institutions of local government.

These certainties are no longer beyond question. The adoption of SDG 11 typically calls for a nuanced and differentiated assessment of why and how questions of urban governance are becoming global. Why is it that cities have entered the global governance arena in a fashion that seems to bypass sovereignty at times, and how is our conception of the boundaries of city governance changing? At the outset, it should be made clear that we do not understand the globalisation of urban governance to mean that every urban governance issue has become of direct global concern. Neither is the local, as a governed and governing space, disappearing. Nor is the importance of the state as a central organising category of our contemporary global world diminishing. And not every aspect of the globalisation of urban governance has legal relevance or implications.

At the same time, however, we can see how global forces have local impact and how international institutions such as the United Nations (UN) are taking a keen interest in how local governance is organised. This is happening by way of programme-based initiatives and other operations within different UN structures, for example. Other international organisations such as the World Bank and the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) also increasingly help to shape urban governance (International Organisation for Standardisation 2014). Transnational coalitions and other informal associations between cities and other actors contribute to the internationalisation of local matters. And cities and their local authorities find themselves at the receiving end of this trend. More and more often, they are required to take international normative expectations into account when they plan and make decisions. Their cooperation with institutions such as the UN or the World Bank and their participation in global climate change networks such as the C40 – Climate Leadership Group or ICLEI show, however, that they are not just “at the receiving end” – cities and local governments are also actively participating in the globalisation of local matters. Several of these developments have legally relevant implications which command of scholars to rethink established legal relationships (Blank 2006; Nijman 2011).

This is an essential point for the premise and shared understanding of the contributions to this volume. The overarching hypothesis is that SDG 11 demonstrates how local governance is recognised as an autonomous yet interrelated part of the global pursuit of sustainable development. This is a consequence of what is and what ought to be happening in and among the cities of the world. Still, none of the contributors to this volume aims to oversell the current importance of cities and their institutions. City structures inevitably operate in global, regional and national contexts which determine the leeway and scope for manoeuvre in their governance operations. No city nor its government function as an island. When we thus speak of the globalisation of urban governance, the real world picture comprises a fragmented matrix of institutional arrangements, political regimes and sources of governing power that transcend real and virtual administrative boundaries. This is owed not least to the enormous differences between the cities and local governments of the world (also see Le Galès 2002, p. 183; Curtis 2016, pp. 30–35). The distinctions stem from the size, resources, spatial formation, social make-up and institutional organisation of cities as well as from their constitutional status and authority within different states, some of them being situated in what is colloquially called the ‘Global South’ as opposed to the so-called ‘Global North’ (more explanation on these categories Roy 2014, p. 15). Some cities and their local authorities are situated in strong multilevel federal government systems and democratic structures, while others are part of unitary states with far less governance autonomy. These conceptual metaphors and comparisons may be misleading in their binary simplicity, yet they are useful to show at a very basic level how different the conditions are in which cities operate.

This book brings together a group of scholars from diverse geographical and disciplinary backgrounds. Most of the contributions are rooted in law and take an interest in the legal dimensions of urban governance. However, the volume does not adopt a unitary legal perspective. Instead, the analyses testify to the diversity within legal scholarship insofar as some contributions approach the urbanisation of local governance from an international law perspective, whereas others zoom in on the state level and the relevance of domestic administrative and local government law and practice. There is a robust streak of comparative analysis and understanding in most of the contributions, which adds texture and context to the issues under discussion. In addition, this book was conceived in the context of a joint German-South African research project on questions of urban governance. This explains a certain geographical emphasis among the contributors. However, a number of different voices from other jurisdictions also feature in this volume, which enhances our insights and findings on the globalisation of urban governance. The contributions set in political science create an important contextual backdrop for the legal analyses. In this sense, the volume also pays tribute to the strong interdisciplinary heritage of urban studies and wishes to make a contribution to that stream of scholarship.

Key Concepts and Methodological Issues

This volume embraces diversity in scholarly approach and research methodology. At the same time, the contributions are anchored in certain common assumptions. Unless indicated otherwise in the respective contributions themselves, the chapters in this book follow a shared terminology set forth in this introduction.

First of all, the “globalisation of urban governance” referred to in the title of the book is not meant to convey the idea that all contemporary questions of urban governance have become globalised. We understand urban governance to inclusively refer to the institutional design, operations (including planning and management), institutions, as well as the rules and principles binding on and generated by local governments. The reference to governance underscores that “traditional”, hierarchical forms of the exercise of state power (via formal government in the public sector context) are now supplemented by other governance actors and instrumentation (Holley 2010, pp. 128–131; Kotzé 2012). Public actors, for example, also work in conjunction with the private sector, be it in the form of “public-private partnerships” (PPPs) or other mechanisms. It is acknowledged that the “power” of non-governmental actors such as the media, NGOs, investors and donors, the education sector and industry is real and influential in shaping urban governance. The same goes for the different types of interaction between various legal subjects. In terms of governance instrumentation, command and control type governance is today supplemented by instrumentation such as incentives and disincentives, agreement-based instruments, as well as civil society-based instruments such as measures for community participation in decision-making processes. The term urban governance is thus broad enough to encapsulate a variety of techniques, instrumentation and approaches through which cities and other urban areas are today governed, administered and organised, and by means of which they themselves govern in increasingly diversified communities (Pierre and Peters 2012, pp. 82–83).

When we talk about cities and urban areas more generally, we are focusing on delineated local jurisdictions and the role of municipal governments. While cities are spaces with various dimensions and features, it is their immediate authorities (municipalities; local governments) as very specific public actors in which we are particularly interested. In this context, it is difficult to conceive of a specific definition of a city or “urban area”, as every legal and government system of the world differs in that regard. Many countries know some kind of constitutional protection of “self-government” or “self-administration” for local authorities. This is the case, for instance, with respect to Germany and South Africa (on Germany see Aust 2017, pp. 75–120; on South Africa, du Plessis 2012, pp. 367–372). In other jurisdictions, such as the United States and Australia, this is not the case, and the autonomy of the local level of government merely flows from the statutory enactments of the individual states (for a comparison Grant and Drew 2017, pp. 177–209). Still, most cities face common challenges and similar limitations that come with growing urbanisation, an unprecedented flow of people and goods, climate change, and their limited natural, financial and other resources. For this reason we consider it useful to discuss the globalisation of urban governance in comparative fashion, being constantly mindful of the risk attached to blindly transplanting findings from one case (one legal jurisdiction) to another (Legrand 1997).

It should be stressed, however, that this project adopts a comparative mind-set without necessarily being a comparative law project in the traditional sense. Accordingly, authors were not supplied with a uniform set of questions or benchmarks with which to unearth and evaluate similarities and differences between different jurisdictions, for example. Instead, almost all of the contributions to this volume embrace a form of contextualising comparative analysis with a focus on relative similarities and comparable phenomena. The comparative mind-set is used to determine and explain, for instance, how various legal systems respond to the occurrence of cultural diversity in today’s globalised urban areas, whether good financial governance is imperative at the local level, how the era of digital governance plays out locally, and how the World Bank’s direct entry into agreements with local governments is being accommodated in different jurisdictions.

The globalisation of urban governance presupposes some kind of standard for (local) go...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Index