City Leadership and the Challenge of City Diplomacy

While most people tend to think of governance at the state level, a new area of governance is developing, which includes and engages cities and their leaders. City diplomacy is increasing in importance and the number of networks between cities on both the sub- and international levels is also increasing.

These city networks cover a range of policy issues, from the environment, poverty, energy and peace to culture, and, more broadly, local governance. In addition to producing regular reports, cities also work together on joint policies. An example of this would be Sao Paolo, Paris and Tokyo’s collaboration on sustainable transport to align their cities’ cycling policies

Many cities have recognized the importance of city networks and have established offices in their local government in charge of working with other cities to achieve common goals. However, while networking between cities may bring about improvements, networking within the city is something that in many cases still needs work and should be addressed in a more systematic way.

Cities tend to come up with different plans to address sustainability, safety or smart city priorities. However, similar approaches could work in many cities. Hence, working together, while also engaging academic expertise of academics and private companies (for example working with insurance companies on disaster risk reduction) could help solve the problems cities face today and in the future. These collaborations within and across cities also open up opportunities for political and policy experiments. To ensure that the available expertise is used, some cities have instated offices for diverse fields, such as chief digital officer, chief business advisor, but also chief diplomats and chief scientist.

We are in a pivotal time for city government and successful collaboration between cities and between the local and national levels of government is essential to building a livable and prosperous future.