Can city-to-city cooperation facilitate sustainable development governance in the Global South? Lessons gleaned from seven North-South partnerships in Latin America

Abstract

The search for mechanisms that can bolster sustainable development governance is underway. Bilateral city-to-city partnerships (C2C) have been put forward as platform through which cities can strengthen sustainable development in urban landscapes. Here, we critically examine claims about the capacity of these international cooperative arrangements, originally designed and deployed as development aid delivery mechanisms, to promote sustainable development. Our systematic examination of the extant literature on bilateral North-South C2C in Latin America fails to provide sufficient evidence that C2C can deliver on its promise to promote robust governance, both generally and in the specific context of sustainable development. Instead, it seems that C2C is more likely to support than challenge entrenched practices which can weaken sustainable development governance. Identifying these tendencies is a first step in formulating strategies that may enhance C2Cs and other transnational partnerships aimed at improving urban sustainable development in the Global South.

What Can We Learn from Urban Crisis?

“…Yet this is often done without sufficient appreciation for grassroots or subaltern forms of action that may value alternative types of knowledge or, more concretely, center issues of participation, equity, and justice in urban resilience and sustainability practices [119]. Indeed, in assessing north-south knowledge transfer and city to city cooperation, Mayer and Long note that these initiatives were "more likely to support than challenge entrenched practices which can weaken sustainable development governance" [120] (p. 1). For instance, technocratic approaches that often drive urban sustainability and resilience agendas [121] are by and large beholden to prevailing 'best practice' governance logics and status quos that may themselves create conditions for crisis [122,123].…”

Canadian twinning in the Indo-Pacific: the agency of subnational actors in present relationships and future strategies

“…The Soviet Union, for example, used twinning to build unity within the Communist bloc (Scarboro, 2007;Applebaum, 2015;Kunakhovich, 2016), while twinning within Europe played a significant role in regional integration (Vion, 2002(Vion, , 2007Clarke, 2010;Falkenhain et al, 2012;Couperus and Vrhoci, 2019). In the Global South, twinning became a tool to support development, technical exchange, and economic growth, particularly through partnerships with localities in the Global North (Hewitt, 1999;Bontenbal, 2009;Clarke, 2012;Mayer and Long, 2021). While the end of the Cold War saw a resurgence in twinning as a tool for building mutual understanding and promoting global justice (Kavaloski, 1990;Foglesong, 2020), emerging neoliberal policy norms that prioritized private sector growth and devalued public investment in social goods also spurred a global shift toward twinning as a means for enhancing trade and investment (Clarke, 2009;Ryan and Mazzilli, 2021).…”