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Global climate governance conducted in settings such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Major Economies Forum, and Group of Twenty (G20) has proven incapable, to date, of generating an effective response. Greenhouse gas emissions have steadily increased since the issue was added to the global agenda in the early 1990s and prospects appear slim for a single, all-encompassing international legal agreement. Outside the formal regime, however, there are signs of dynamism as non-nation state actors engage in a variety of climate governance experiments. Cities, and city-networks such as the C40 Climate Leadership Group, represent important sources of innovation in the broader system of global climate governance: they challenge prevailing norms regarding who should govern climate change, and how coordinated governance responses can be generated. This paper presents a brief history of the C40, and assesses, drawing on ideas from network theory, some of the opportunities and limitations of networked climate governance. Recognizing that cities, and city-networks, exist within a broader multi-level governance context, the paper concludes with some thoughts related to updating Canadian federal climate policy in order to leverage and enable innovative city-network governance initiatives, address gaps in current federal climate policy, and link climate change to other, pressing issues, on the urban agenda.
David J. Gordon (Sun,) studied this question.