Cities and the Multilevel Governance of Global Climate Change

We explore how the Cities for Climate Protection (CCP) program, a network that is simultaneously global and local, state and nonstate, could be conceptualized as part of global environmental governance. We suggest that traditional approaches to international relations—regime theory and transnational networks—offer limited conceptual space for analyzing such networks. These approaches obscure how the governance of global climate change takes place through processes and institutions operating at and between a variety of scales and involving a range of actors with different levels and forms of authority. We contend that it is only by taking a multilevel perspective that we can fully capture the social, political, and economic processes that shape global environmental governance.