From multilateralism to multi-stakeholder alliances: cities shift from rhetoric to politics on the international stage Agustí Fernández de Losada

For decades now, cities have been trying to open up a space in the structures of global and regional governance. Yet, beyond achieving growing recognition, their capacity for influencing traditional multilateralism is still more symbolic than effective and does not clearly result in improved answers and solutions offered to citizens. However, the alliances cities have been forging with other stakeholders in the international scene, running parallel to the structures of multilateral governance, are acquiring significant visibility while also showing considerable potential for mobilising resources and bringing about changes. Based on a twofold analysis, global and European, this article studies the extent to which the efforts of cities and their networks to join formal multilateralism have a limited track record, as well as the degree to which the commitment to creating multi-stakeholder alliances is more able to produce measurable results although it confronts major challenges in terms of legitimacy and accountability.

Global cities, world order and post-pandemic futures Simon Curtis

Although the long term impact of Covid-19 on the world’s cities cannot yet be known, what we can see is how the pandemic is interacting with existing trends and forces that are shaping both cities and the wider international system of which they are a part. Covid-19 will not transform cities permanently on its own. Instead, its short-term effects will interact with deep-lying structural transformative trends that are already playing themselves out in our cities. This article examines this intersection, and suggests the pandemic also represents an opportunity for different political actors to struggle to shape the future of cities.

The table wobbles: cities and a faltering multilateral order Ian Klaus

Over two years in 2015–2016, United Nations member states adopted four outcome documents that together amounted to a de facto international development agenda. Over the last four years, these agreements and the wider agenda they constitute have come under new pressure. Most notably, nationalist governments have targeted the agenda as a threat to sovereignty. Meanwhile, a number of non-governmental organisations, subnational governments and national governments have noted that the agenda is no longer sufficiently ambitious to address global challenges. Finally, the health, social and economic effects of COVID-19 have recently rendered many of the agenda’s most visible goals more difficult to achieve. Stakeholders have walked a narrow strategic line in the face of these pressures: affirming the agenda while subtly tweaking their policy practice and rhetoric around the agreements according to historic events.