When Mayors Go Global: International Strategies, Urban Governance and Leadership

Abstract

An enigma lies at the heart of this article. In December 2006, the mayor of Saint‐Étienne, Michel Thiollière, was elected as the fifth best mayor in the world by the internet site City Mayors. Yet no publicity was made locally around this award. Taking this anecdote as a starting point, this article deals with the motivations that can lead a city mayor to become involved in urban international relationships' policy (city twinning, participation in cities networks, study trips, etc.). On the one hand these activities provide resources for building up political legitimacy and for electoral control, and on the other they provide resources for policy solutions to urban problems in the public realm. Nevertheless, in a context of transformation of the process of legitimization of urban elected officials, the second kind of resources seems to be the most sought after in mayoral involvement in international activities.

Immigration, International Mobilization and Local Governance in Post-Industrial Cities: Turin and Saint-Etienne Compared

“…Local government scholars have emphasised the emergence of so called 'entrepreneurial mayors', embodying a new conception of local policy centred on economic development and strategic urban planning rather than on the management of public services (Harvey 1989). Studies have been carried out in different cities such as Lyon (Bardet and Jouve 1999), Saint-Etienne (Béal and Pinson 2014), Manchester (Quilley 1999;Pinson 2007), Baltimore (Ponzini and Rossi 2010), Barcelona (Marshall 1996), and Turin and Venice (Pinson 2002(Pinson , 2007. For Béal and Pinson (2014), entrepreneurial mayors build political legitimacy primarily through the mobilisation of resources and the structuring of coalitions of stakeholders for the realisation of urban projects, rather than through the mobilisation of their electoral constituency.…”

City Networks and the Multilevel Governance of Migration. Policy Discourses and Actions

“…In Europe, political scientists have linked the flourishing of CNs in the 1990s to the reform of the EC structural funds (1988)(1989)(1990)(1991)(1992)(1993) and the adoption of the Maastricht Treaty (1992), which had the explicit goal of establishing forms of direct collaboration between cities/regions and EU institutions (Hooghe and Marks, 2001). Following these footsteps, scholars working on different policy fields such as environmental policies (Gustavsson, Elander and Lundmark 2009;Keiner and Kim 2007;Kern and Bulkeley 2009), urban policy (Béal and Pinson 2014;Phelps, McNeill, and Parsons 2002;Payre 2010), innovation and ICT (Salskov-Iversen and Hansen 2006) and, more recently also migration (Penninx 2015;Caponio 2017;Scholten et al 2017), have emphasised the link between CNs and MLG. CNs, intended as organisations that gather together, on a voluntary basis, local authorities in order to pursue some kind of perceived collective interest or purpose, lack authoritative power, and therefore need to rely upon horizontal coordination and mutual cooperation to carry out and implement their initiatives.…”

A magyar önkormányzatok korlátai a helyi gazdaságfejlesztésben

“…Ha naivitásnak is tűnik, mégis jelzi a hatalmi változásokat a kérdésfeltevés, mi lenne, ha a polgármesterek kormányoznák a világot (Barber 2014; Curtis 2016). Az igazán sikeres városok és polgármesterek már jelenleg is részesei a befolyásos nemzetközi hálózatoknak, ezekben helyi céljaikat is jobban képesek érvényesíteni (Beal, Pinson 2014). A nemzetközi beágyazottság minden bizonnyal hatással van a helyi hatalmi viszonyokra, a többszintű kormányzási rendszerben ezért lassan értelmezhetetlenné válik a helyi hatalom földrajzi határa és szervezeti, szintbeli elhelyezkedése is.…”