[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Welcome to the second episode of the University of Oxford Cop 29 podcast series on sustainable cities.
My name is Doctor Catherine Maxwell, and today I'll be speaking with Professor Michael Acuto Poole,
vice chancellor of global engagement at the University of Bristol.
We'll be discussing how cities are developing partnerships to accelerate towards their next year targets.
Welcome to the podcast, Michael. Thank you for joining us today. A pleasure.
Let's jump in then. At Cop 29 this year.
There's been a significant focus on national government's climate targets.
However, there's also an increasing emphasis on implementing climate action at the city scale.
So this has been seen it Cop 29 and also other UN conferences such as the recent World Urban Forum.
So with this in mind,
how has this year's Cope and other UN climate conferences really started to recognise the increasing role of cities within climate negotiations?
Yeah. Good question. It's been a few cops, uh, for cities to set to say the least.
Um, so I think it's a, it's a good point in a, in a, in a trajectory of many, many things.
And I think you're perfectly right there. It's cop plus many, many other things.
So if you're a city or if you're in that city of city diplomacy space or city network, uh,
a multilateral organisation like the world Bank or others that work with cities, you've got a pretty busy year almost every year at this point,
I think cop specifically this year up until now, we've seen lots of mayors, lots of city networks, really engaged,
really part of conversations, uh, tons of side events, uh, tons of advocacy, tons of, uh, of reporting on it.
So if anything, it's very clear that cities are there in not just the machinery of Cop, but the broader multilateral world of climate action.
Um, the advantages being that this, like the previous Cop, now even has a dedicated day for this kind of conversation.
And I think I'm happy that we can dwell a bit more on to that. But it's an interesting part of being formally part of this.
But I'd say it's pretty hard to imagine a cop now without mayors and city advocates on the stage.
Mhm. And with this sort of increasing rule over the past few years,
how have these sort of negotiations and engaging in these negotiations influenced how
cities collaborate with multiple different stakeholders and partners on climate action?
Yeah I think. A couple of things to unpack there, potentially.
On the one hand, my international low self reminded self that these are not a party per se to the negotiation itself.
At the end of the day, many of these contexts, we're still talking about international processing programs.
Um, so practically, even when we speak with diplomats,
that we have to remind ourselves that that there are national diplomats that are once engaged in the negotiation itself.
So I think something important and my alluding to other cops is I have had flashes
this morning thinking through the cop in you is the of the Copenhagen cop.
Uh, quite a while back, and my memory was always okay.
Our city is always outside of the tent.
And as a reference that there was a beach of a tent at that point of city action outside of Copenhagen's main negotiation.
And I think cities are now in the tent. Insofar as there is a recognition, there is a day.
There are many national diplomats that work with and through cities.
Um, and there are many bodies, um, international bodies that had to embrace cities.
There are many elements of these international bodies within the UN, for instance, where cities can fit in.
The interesting thing is, do cities have a say in the negotiation per se, which they don't,
but they have an important role in the lobbying and the pushing and the shifting of those negotiations.
And that I think the last for me is the importantly in there is we always focus a lot on mayors,
and there's lots to be said about mayors and the city leaders.
But if we think of city leaders a bit more broadly, there's many of the city leadership that is coming from all over the place.
Uh, major philanthropies, as I said, multilateral organisations, uh, coalitions of cities.
So you have many realities that might not be there.
May you or that you see on stage, but they are powerful urban actors.
So I think the qualifier for me is we've seen a more and more mature and more and more present and more and more successful urban conversation.
And I'd say we can still say oftentimes is more successful than the national conversation.
Um, by quite some degree. Okay.
And that's really interesting because as these international climate negotiations move towards a discussions around, uh,
climate action implementation and financing climate action, how does that then impact the types of partnerships that cities are currently developing?
And do you think this is going to encourage cities to sort of think outside the box and partner
with stakeholders and organisations that they wouldn't normally or traditionally engage with?
I think controversially, I would say the cities have been thinking outside of that box for quite some time now.
And in many ways, the genesis of things that you would know very well, like the genesis of C40 being a C20,
as in a G20 of cities back, uh, back quite a few decades for a couple of decades now,
at this point in the decade, uh, you know, sort of reminds you that cities had to think outside of the box because the national box wasn't delivering.
So I'm actually thinking it in reverse that there's many more actors internationally that are thinking outside of the box,
going in with cities to deliver what they have to deliver to get to a plausible at least two degrees context and to really make change happen.
Because practically then you see the wealth of evidence.
Now that it's available, it's communicated through groups like Kigali and C40, where cities have delivered to the action.
You have tens of thousands of actions and hundreds of reports that showed the level of action on the ground by cities in.
So in many ways, cities become one of the interesting implementers of the sort of global ambition.
Uh, and I think structurally that's quite interesting in the sense that then they become more fundamental actors
and fundamental pieces of the puzzle to connect different things like philanthropic investment to business,
uh, commitments on the ground, to planning and housing issues, to, uh, leadership and political positions.
Uh, the city is a microcosm of action, becomes a very interesting connector to think outside of a box,
because at the end of the day, we're making still reasonably glacial steps forward into the fight against climate change.
And if cities have been kind, just thinking outside the box for, you know, quite a number of years already.
How can cities effectively kind of foster cross-sector collaboration in terms to meet their very ambitious, you know,
climate mitigation and resilience and commitments like,
does this require a bit more of a concerted effort from cities to resource that type of engagement?
It does it in many ways the, the, the evaluation of the success, I would argue,
of things like of city networks, the points that, first of all, coalition really delivers.
And so the, the mode of collaborative urban governance, that's very academic as a term,
but KPIs getting together with peers and doing stuff across borders,
it has been proven by research to deliver the ambition and, uh, and the activity on the ground.
So the more you collaborate, the more likely you are to deliver at scale on climate change.
So clearly the the edifice that is being constructed and this skeleton that has
been constructed internationally for city diplomacy by KPIs is delivering.
The downside of that is that cities are on the frontline of financial austerity and and limits.
And the reality there is that properties a need for sizeable national investment in cities.
So I think thinking through this year's Cop. But one of the positives of last year's Cop was the signing of champ as a coalition for multi-level
action that recognises the need for countries to work with things like CTS and and finally,
us getting to a stage where a country say, saying we can't deliver this without CTS.
This year, there's been a recommitment to it with the obviously a backhoe, uh,
badge on top of it as a statement and continuing the other the, the ambition of champ.
Um, but we still struggle in the, I guess oftentimes the national buy in and the national plug in for CTS.
And we still have a reality where we need very sizeable investment.
So I guess one one fact is, uh, for instance, mayors from seaport OECD's called for an 800 billion investment, uh, in cities by 2030.
So the reality is we need really sizeable multilateral and national investment in cities.
And that still isn't happening at the scale we need it. And do you think that.
So people listening to the podcast might think, okay, you know,
cities are putting resources behind this engagement, whether that's through networks such as C40 or Ilkley,
because that can help mobilise resources and build a lot of momentum in kind of representing the cities or voice in these types of negotiations,
even if there's not a formal process to always capture that contribution.
I'm wondering if people will question the real benefits, though, of this kind of cross-sectoral collaboration.
I mean, you touched upon there that, you know,
there's a sizeable investment that's required within cities to really deliver on their climate ambitions, many of which are hugely ambitious.
Um, but what are the kind of other benefits of this in terms of either city to city collaboration or collaborating with the private sector?
You know, could you maybe list a couple of those in terms of from your experience of working with cities?
Yeah, I think the the one advantage of this is cop being the finance cop, whether it really delivers on that or not.
Is that a cop itself got on the same page of something that I would argue it's been a good
few cops that the cities and cities and climate advocacy coalitions have been arguing for.
So real serious financial instruments to deliver at that scale.
Uh, I recall one piece of work that we had done jointly with C40 for the Paris Agreement was to prove,
uh, as a project powers, uh, and the power of the cities had to deliver climate change.
And the argument was cities were putting their money where their mouth was.
And so they were investing in these things. Isn't just mayors talking, it's mayors doing,
but also that that that had gotten to a level where they really needed higher scale investment to be really inclusive.
And it is fundamentally still the issue, which is certain cities can do this, um,
but they need their countries to bring along the variety of cities and urban realities that we have.
Um, and also that it isn't just about getting out there.
It's about, uh, networking with each other to, um, exchange policy experiences that work in one place, um, and could work in another one.
So you don't always have to start from scratch. Um, very practically procure, um, joint procurement, pool procurement, joint, uh, investments.
So putting resources together, it's easier to invest in a number of cities that it is in a single one to see scale of change.
And then practically also to create a sort of better coalition that that has a voice of cities in the international context,
because the international context for a long time just hasn't had that voice of cities in it.
So I think something quite powerful there is that as cops were sort of happening on one side, we had the G20 happening on the other side,
and the finance ministers, uh, and the finance conversation really buying into the power of cities.
There is an urban 20 attached to the group of 20 that put together really sensible, powerful communique and the G20 listening and engaging with it,
that the multilateral agencies like the world Bank and other large banks, uh,
have recognised the need and the complications of lending directly to cities, not just to states.
So there's a lot of interesting experimentation there.
But it isn't just the mayors out there doing kind of pays and, and, and and it's not a branding exercise.
It's a financing. Uh, it's uh, it policy solutions kind of exercise, but it's hard.
It's very hard from a mayoral perspective to explain that to your citizens that
have so many other priorities and concerns that it is really a return of that,
uh, two level game between your local politics and, uh, the international politics.
Uh, and many, many, many years would tell you really horror stories, to be honest,
um, about sort of how much you get into the fire land for getting out there.
And that actually just touches upon my next point,
because we look at the flip side of that in terms of some of the challenges, which you've kind of touched upon a bit, um,
around climate action implementation, when, you know,
cities are coming together and when there's an opportunity to invest in multiple cities at once to get the scale of change that,
that you're kind of looking for when cities are collaborating either with each other to around investment or around
knowledge sharing or sharing ideas and different types of policies that either are effective or not quite as effective,
you know, this same. There can always be a risk, I suppose, of working with a stakeholder.
And that can be across any sector,
either with vested interests or maybe that has an influence that might not always align with with a city's own climate vision and and target.
So how do cities manage that and is that even possible?
Working with a variety of different stakeholders, all with their different priorities and preferences.
Yeah, without naming names and pointing to specific examples.
I think if you hit that nail in the head and it partly that's that's why I'm sort of referencing the idea of CT diplomacy.
So the idea that a CT can do international relations,
because most cities are an organised political entity and most cities have representatives out there.
The interesting thing, and I'm thinking through sort of through the work that we've done with the City Diplomacy survey since 2017,
where we're looking at cities internationally and trying to figure out what can a city do this?
Is this even the job of a city, or is it the job of a city? I guess in the English speaking world, the rates, uh, roads and rubbish, right?
That's that's all that they have to do as a city.
And the argument has always been doing international relations is and external relations is fundamental to the life of a city,
because the city is nothing but an aggregation of things that come together.
And cities were born to be places of coming together.
So you have to manage that coming together. And the reason why I say you hit the nail on the head is, yes, but most people and most cities,
most people that work in cities and most cities don't really have structures for this because we've progressively created cities,
less city states and more cities. You don't have many diplomats, right?
So you don't really have many people trained to spot those sort of things.
Um, trained to spot foreign interference and influence, uh, trained in international negotiation.
Um, Promesa was clear when we took around copper in the in the simple dance of who gets a badge and it goes into which room.
And fundamentally it's a state. Diplomats can get into certain rooms and cities can't.
Uh, so structurally so. Expanding the international relations capacity of cities is not a vanity project or a side bit.
Its 1 or 1. 21st Century Municipal statecraft.
It's been at the fundamentals of how we should be managing cities.
Um, the positives are that there are many cities out there that have gotten this, uh,
and they have really amazing international teams because it isn't just the mayor getting up there.
Um, the positives is that there is data. There's more data about this.
So you can disentangle all these actors, all these things happening and so on.
Um, the positives is that there's a generation of CT profession and municipal professionals that now take things like C40 and,
and networks as a default. So they're used to it. They're used to relying on their embassies when they go abroad.
It's a classic thing that that we always test.
Do you know you can call your embassy because you're part of a country, but there's still a lot of work to do and in reverse.
And I guess I'm happy to get into that. But in reverse, countries that are still not used to their cities being out there.
So countries themselves, there's a handful of countries that have offices in their foreign ministry that that deal with cities.
You just we continuously imagine cities as road trains and rubbish based in a single place.
And actually just picking up on that, the, you know, the interesting dynamic then between local and national governments,
as you know, cities do become a little bit more, uh, prominent or invisible in some of these, uh, UN conferences such as Cop.
And do you think that these sort of partnerships and the sort of visibility and do you
think that's kind of changing the role of cities within climate change negotiations?
As I mentioned before, they don't we're aware that they don't have a formal way to fit into that process.
But do you think the increased visibility is really strengthening cities or the urban sort of position on the global stage?
It is. It certainly has gotten quite a good side of what we could call sort of symbolic power,
uh, of of bringing the city and symbolic powers and just, just being on stage.
It is being able to identify the role of something in a mass of similar things as the.
It would be odd, I think, these days to organise something like cop without those coalitions on, on the ground.
So for instance, calls during this cop to either ditch the cop format or change it radically.
I would expect it to really need an even greater sort of system for cities to feed in, to buy in, to engage, to respond, and so on.
One of the important things is that we've brought in a section of it that engages with ministers that have to do with this.
But there are still many countries where there isn't even a minister that deals with this sort of issues, right?
And an obvious interlocutor to see these. And I guess my reference to the handful was also, there's almost no camp.
Very few countries that have something that I'm going to say.
For those of you listening in 2024.
Uh, the United States have with the special representative in the State Department for Subnational Diplomacy,
for an office where Ambassador Nina Keegan sort of manages the relationship between the foreign ministry entities.
Something like that is so critical today, and so few countries actually have something like that,
that we often sort of focus very much on the negotiation piece of cop, and not on the fact that the countries themselves need to change and meet up.
KD diplomacy is a piece of what their countries do.
And do you think that?
Well, how do you see whether the role of cities playing out in in future cops, you know, as they're becoming more kind of centre stage.
But the UN model is more geared to national government engagement.
But do you think that this could change over time?
I've been a half full class kind of person.
Up until now, I sort of deep in the back of my mind on the basis of sort of evidence on this,
uh, hundreds and hundreds of city networks, uh, thousands of conferences.
You can go to an urban conference every day, uh, hundreds of philanthropic investments with millions,
in fact, sort of hundreds of millions of investment.
On the one hand, we're at the heyday of city diplomacy.
On the other hand, we're confronting quite, uh, nationalist, inward focussed backlash in geopolitics in many countries,
and even in context where the leadership is perhaps a little bit more progressive,
or at least left leaning, there's still quite a sort of looking backwards and inwards.
The question is, is, is, is this point in time in the 2020s, peak city diplomacy.
And we got as far as we could go because then we would have to admit capacity for a city to actually speak in the multilateral sector.
Um, we would have to admit capacity for a city.
That's the question. With the multilateral banks capacity of a city to receive money directly, not mediated through a counter or third party.
We would have to admit that the voice of a city, in many cases, not always, in many cases a sort of a good quarter of cities,
are citizens and not nationals, that the mayors and leaders of these cities are appointed by migrants.
They come from another country as well. So we would have to admit some pretty fundamental shifts in the share of international relations.
Right? Sovereignty, territoriality. Citizenships.
Uh, I like to think that that's likely because of the level of change that cities have created.
But I recognise we're facing quite a serious backlash. I think we need to take it very seriously because it is.
It is a maybe it's not a do or die moment. It's certainly a do or die moment in climate, but it is a critical juncture.
Otherwise we might just get stuck into this mode access.
But. Yeah, there's a lot of, uh, broader geopolitical challenges which are going to have quite a substantial impact, I think, going forward.
And although, you know, the role of citizens is increasing somewhat in terms of the global kind of climate change is staged in negotiations.
Do you think this is going to impact the how cities can have a or rather,
the impact that cities can have on global climate negotiations in terms of their broader influence?
I mean, you'd have been doing it getting more involved for the past few years, certainly.
But, you know, with these current changes,
how do you envisage that it's going to impact the ability for cities to influence these sort of negotiations and broader discussions?
It will impact if we don't have a sustained investment by countries in in the value of cities.
I think that's what's in that's what's in champ itself, that if there is in the sustained commitment,
especially to cities in the global South and medium and small sized cities, uh, uh, mega cities that that represent the majority of a country,
if there isn't a sustained commitment to engagement of that, the risk is that the current financial,
environmental, uh, resilience challenge will eventually push cities to have to choose.
Many cities have become more pragmatic on how many of these things they can do at any one time,
on their own resources, or that we will continue to have to rely.
And it's great that we do in many cases, but we will have to rely on philanthropic or private investments to make this happen,
because we don't have the level of systemic investment in cities.
Uh, and that's concerning because that then comes, uh, you know, 98% of philanthropic donation or investments in, in development are earmarked.
So they come with, uh, uh, we come with agendas.
Uh, the private sector has to remain viable financially.
So I guess the point is that that creates still some important dependencies and some inequalities in the system.
And I think for me that's a critical one, because if we don't invest in this, uh, the inequalities that will continue and might become starker,
uh, inequalities in the form of a climate crisis, uh, major urban health issues, uh, uh, really pressing resilience challenges.
So cities is really the frontline in many, many cases here.
Um, and. As a, um, national governments develop their own ambitious climate plans.
How are cities then? How can they best support national government to deliver on their own climate commitments,
especially if there is, um, instability in terms of climate finance and accessing that climate finance,
particularly for, you know, cities in the global South that are more vulnerable to the changing impacts of climate change.
Yeah, I think that on that front, you first of all have the interesting movement to better structure internally central local relationships.
So having capacity for the engagement of cities in the creation of national plans.
Uh, there is the. A growing reality in the OECD has done really great work on this.
The growing reality of national urban plans and national urban policies is a positive movement,
because you have countries recognising the need to work with urban issues and the two things talking to each other.
There is it good enough, but not as well structured variety of sort of central local relation systems.
Um, but many times it's splintered, for instance, uh, or it doesn't really have a specific ministry to deal with and so on.
So there's a little bit of organising and there is a little bit of, uh, uh, capacity to be recognised nationally.
I think that the, the interesting thing for me is where then there's an additional step on that,
which is embedding cities into national planning, embedding the voice of cities.
Um, because the big shift the, the piece of work um, on the UN frameworks, which is quite well, uh, matching the national,
national frameworks and national policies,
the recognition of cities is since 1972 to today has grown across all kinds of areas, across all kinds of domains.
And that where the recognition has grown the most is in recognising cities as actors.
And there's a big difference between saying city,
a city or an urban thing is a place where something happens and a city is an actor that can do something.
Um, so the importance of recognising nationally cities as key actors is critical.
Um, but the times the cities are going one way politically and countries are going the opposite way.
Yeah. And I think we're going to probably see more of that next year. Not naming names.
Well, thank you so much, uh, Professor Kito, for your time and for your insights, not only on cop 29,
but on the kind of broader opportunities and complexities of city collaboration.
It's been great to discuss that with you. So thank you. Thanks, Catherine, a pleasure.
Thank you for listening. And our next episode, we'll be speaking with Councillor Susan Aitken, leader of Glasgow City Council,
on the role that climate finance can play, enabling cities to reach their climate targets.