City Networks in East Asia:A New Dimension to Regional Politics Mary Alice Haddad (bio) T.J. Pempel's new book, A Region of Regimes: Prosperity and Plunder in the Asia-Pacific, offers an expansive overview of regional politics in East Asia that credits the region's extraordinary economic growth and (relative) political stability over the past 70 years to the variations of developmental regimes. In his telling, the political parties in charge matter less than the country's type of political "regime" when determining the overall success of its political economy.1 Of particular interest are the ways that the different domestic regimes interact with one another, creating a kind of regional system that, while not nearly as formal or institutionalized as the European Union, nonetheless has contributed to the region's overall economic prosperity even in the context of considerable security tension and uncertainty. The main players in the story Pempel tells about the region are national ministries and big business, when discussing domestic politics, and national governments and regional institutions, when discussing regional politics. Civil society actors, whether they are grassroots neighborhood groups, nonprofit organizations, or global NGOs, are bit players. Labor unions receive occasional mention, generally in the context of compromises made with businesses and political parties. Subnational governments are not included. In this brief review essay, I would like to highlight the increasingly large role that these excluded actors are playing in East Asia's regional politics. In doing so, I am not suggesting that subnational governments and NGOs play a more important role than national ministries and big business, nor am I arguing that they constitute an alternative version of regional regimes. Rather, city networks and civil society collaborators crosscut the regional dynamics identified by Pempel. Especially important from my perspective, these networks connect cities located in countries with different regime types, thereby allowing patterns of good governance and successful [End Page 190] policymaking to spread to cities located in ersatz regimes and China. Furthermore, individual East Asian cities and the networks to which they belong are increasingly exerting global influence. Thus, transnational city networks both complicate and expand the view of regional politics provided by A Region of Regimes. I will offer three brief examples from the areas of environment, health, and international peace to illustrate the diverse types of city networks shaping East Asia and the world. The first example is the KitaQ Composting Network. In 2001 the city of Surabaya, Indonesia (with a population of 3 million people), faced a solid waste crisis when local resistance forced the closure of one of the city's largest landfill sites.2 To address this problem, Surabaya worked with its Japanese sister city, Kitakyushu, to investigate its municipal solid waste challenges and develop a solution. The Japan-based Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) coordinated with Japanese scientists, Surabaya city officials, and Pusdakota (a local women's organization in Surabaya) to develop a household composting system that was fast, clean, and efficient. They also designed a collection-and-distribution scheme using a system of neighborhood advocates that would engage individual households while both reducing the demand for municipally collected solid waste and contributing to neighborhood beautification.3 In 2007, they rolled out their first pilot demonstration project, working with 10 and then 90 households in Surabaya to distribute special composting baskets and train community members in how to use them. In the first five years of the program, Surabaya reduced its municipal solid waste by 30%, created 75 new jobs for low-income residents, and increased green space in the city by 10%.4 IGES then worked to disseminate Surabaya's success to other municipalities abroad, hosting a series of workshops that brought municipal leaders from Southeast Asia together to explain how the system worked.5 By 2011, 15 cities in Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia had formed the KitaQ Composting Network.6 By 2018, more than 30 cities, [End Page 191] including 11 in Latin America and 6 in Africa, had established community composting systems based on Surabaya's.7 My second example highlights Seoul's leadership around Covid-19, which shows how East Asia's cities are not just operating at the grassroots...
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Mar 10, 2022
Kyohei Marume + 12
Open Access
