NETWORKED CITIES’ RESPONSES TO GLOBAL PROBLEMS: A TYPOLOGY

Today’s global challenges like poverty reduction, climate change and disarmament transcend national borders. The scale and impact of these problems not only trouble national governments, but also directly affect populations at the local level, especially those in urban settings. Seeing that over half of today’s population resides in cities, this research aims at examining concerted attempts of cities and local governments in resolving global challenges in major issue- domains. Conceptualizing city-to-city co-operations in a networked format, the project focuses on providing a typology of an exploding number of city-networks that emerged in recent years. By displaying regular patterns of network characteristics, the project seeks to systematically comprehend the potentials and limits of engaging cities into global governance effort in complement to, or in absence of, existing state-centric governance instruments.