An urban take on sustainable development policies and corresponding positioning strategies

Cities have emerged as policy actors of global relevance in sustainable development, and their strengthened position challenges the primacy of national states in this area. To account for this shift and for potential emerging contestations between cities and national states, we propose a framework to understand national-urban relations in sustainable development policy-making. Based on a selection of twelve case study vignettes from European cities, we identify and discuss four ideal types of urban sustainable development policy, which are classified depending on their congruence with the national policy agenda and the scale of the issue at hand. Building on this typology, we reflect on positioning strategies that cities can develop to support, promote or defend these policies. We argue that accounting for these different positioning strategies is important for understanding how cities seek to put specifically urban takes of sustainable development on global agendas.

Stefan Wittwer, Katrin Hofer, David Kaufmann