Aligning Climate Governance with Urban Water Management: Insights from Transnational City Networks

Jale Tosun,Lucas Leopold

doi:10.3390/w11040701

Abstract

A growing number of cities in different world regions are forming transnational networks in order to mitigate and adapt to climate change. In this study, we are interested in the nexus between climate change and urban water management. How do transnational city networks for climate action perceive urban water management? What kind of activities do they adopt for improving urban water management? How effective are these in practice? This study maps 17 transnational city networks that primarily work on climate governance, assesses whether they formally embrace urban water management as a field of activity, and analyzes the extent to which they influence local climate action regarding water-related issues. Our descriptive analysis reveals that the great majority of transnational city networks has embraced goals related to urban water management, mostly framed from the perspective of adaptation to climate change. However, our in-depth analysis of two frontrunner cities in Germany shows that membership in ICLEI (Local Governments for Sustainability) has only limited influence on the initiation and implementation of water-related policy measures.

Highlights

Climate change represents one of the fundamental global challenges of modern society and requires swift and coordinated action [1]
We examine the nexus between climate change and urban water management, which is acknowledged by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted in 2015 [21]
As put forth by this expectation, we were able to show that the majority of networks was active in two or more fields related to urban water management, which we found plausible since water problems related to climate change were unlikely to be limited to one aspect only (e.g., [55])

Summary

Introduction

Climate change represents one of the fundamental global challenges of modern society and requires swift and coordinated action [1]. The Paris Agreement adopted in 2015, which builds on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), represents the most recent commitment of all nations to undertake ambitious efforts to combat climate change and to adapt to its effects. Another feature of the Paris Agreement is its recognition that climate protection requires state actors (most importantly national governments) and subnational and non-state actors to take action, which corresponds to the analytical concept of polycentrism [2,3,4]. The growing body of research on polycentric climate governance ascribes cities and transnational city networks an important role in climate governance [9,10]; this does not mean that international and national policy-making bodies can be regarded as superfluous or unimportant [11]

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion