Sustainability From Below

As this year's world-wide attention for the negotiations in Copenhagen can bear witness, what might be called a "climate change agenda" has now rapidly crept to the forefront of world politics. Prompted by an increasing international interest in green themes, mostly headed to the center stage of international relations by the more and more pro-active role of transnational advocacy groups as well as by a growth in the media and even entertainment industry attentions, this agenda now lingers in much contemporary diplomacy. The concerns and debates around environmental issues that now inform much of the priorities of the key international forums have progressively become the everyday lingo of global governance, and the latest G20 summit is no exception. While much of the discussion of the Group remains focused on finance issues and the post-GFC recovery, some environmental concerns are deemed to make an appearance in-between growth and developmental considerations, whether in the more classic 'Commitments' or the 'New Agenda' side of the ministerial talks in Seoul.

Yet, as the G20 might aptly demonstrate, this mounting centrality of climate change unveils a broader problem international politics has only just recently come to grasp with: the sustainability challenge. Climate is only part of a question of endurance that calls for a pairing of environmental and developmental policies to ensure the survival of the species. In this view curbing global warming represents only a step in a multifaceted agenda targeted towards ensuring that the legacy of the present generations is one future one will be able to tell. How can we support the current exploding demographic rates, or how can we best manage the declining natural resource pools?

This, in an age of pervasive urbanization where the city represents a quotidian experience for most of the world's population, means that most of these dilemmas bring us to the unavoidable realization that global governance solutions will necessarily need to 'go though' the urban scale to make a significant impact on the faith of humanity.

In this sense, the cities occupy a very peculiar and certainly pivotal place in contemporary global governance. To begin with, global issues are increasingly paralleled, intertwined, if not originated in urban issues-to the extent that the urban has nowadays become an almost ever-present factor in public policy. Moreover, cities are gradually demonstrating how they hold strategic governance potential in most of these security, developmental and environmental concerns, and how they do not solely represent partners but agenda-setters in their own right.

Metropolises are increasingly less "policy-takers" (as Claus Schultze put it in the case of the European Union) subjugated to the pecking order of the state, as they become more and more "policy-makers" capable of being key stakeholders in various arenas of participatory governance beyond the nation-state. As the development of transnational city-based coalitions such as the ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability, the Climate Leadership Group or the Sister Cities International coalition can testify, cities are more and more present in international policymaking processes and major sources of lobby on international institutions. This is of course not just a feature of Westerns metropolises only, as testified by the World Mayors and Local Governments Climate Protection Agreement signed in 2007 and now gathering more than one hundred metropolises worldwide. Urban settlement have to date set up environmental cooperation forms that, in structure and competences, might match state-based institutions, thus making it hard to deny the capacity of local government representatives in undertaking foreign policy activities.

However, what remains largely unscrutinized is the issue of "sustainability" per se. Few are those who would these days criticize the need for sustainable solutions, yet few are also those who look into what is being made 'sustainable' and for whom. This is hardly a new concern, as the 1990s calls by urbanists Peter Marcuse and Mike Davis testify, but it has thus far failed to echo down the corridors of the highest spheres of global governance.

The internationalization of cities into the broader spheres of global governance is in fact not just a result of a cosmopolitan drive for the common good: along with the philosophical tenets for the growing presence of key globalizing metropolises in environmental politics, we need to take into considerations the more pragmatic and economically determinist reasons that drive most of this transnational move of City Halls at large. Hence while much of the pressing questions of sustainability are often implicitly subsumed, in an antipodean logic, under the debate on climate change (rather than vice-versa), the necessary critical inquiry into the basis and underlying rationales of sustainability itself is lost in such erroneous translation.

This is all the more problematic because the internationalization of many metropolises is not a socially-neutral process free from wicked consequences. The forces of globalization, coupled with the seductive attraction of urbanization and the centralization of advanced producer services in particular cities, are in this sense redefining the textures of the world's central metropolises in a move towards novel spatial orders that, while not always consistent or affirmed in every city, are certainly producing complex patterns of spatial division. Although today's globalizing metropolises are, as René Descartes put it, an "inventory of the possible" that open up the spaces of the global to many thanks to their transnational interconnectedness, they also constitute a controversial context of social polarization and growing inequality.

The unequal socio-spatial restructuring of 21st century metropolises described by much of the contemporary urban research from David Harvey, to Saskia Sassen and Manuel Castells are not just a product of exogenous forces and purely accidental social dynamics. As this literature tells us, today's post-industrial settlements are seeing a substantial amount of conscious splintering, which is also mutually-reinforcing as cities copy each others' 'best practice' models. Inequality can in fact be the result, if not the goal, of deliberate socio-spatial strategies. Sustainability initiatives are then often prompted by the need for these metropolises to compete in attracting capital, tourism and culture and thus, for instance, progressively driven by the lure of a sprawling genus of city rankings.

The 'marketization' of city public policy and the commodification of environmental restructuration at the urban level, in this sense, only prompt further polarization and splintering and, in particular, does little to improve the oft-unequal status quo of the contemporary global system. So while on the international politics scale cities contribute to raise awareness and promote new green agendas, at the crucial everyday street level of urban policy the contradictions of the neoliberal system that leads to a call for novel governance solutions at a broader scale are perpetrated with more and more dangerous "politics via markets"-to borrow Ronnie Lipschutz's expression.

This is not to say, however, that a focus on sustainability is the wrong way. On the contrary, there is much to gain from the 'glocalization' of environmental initiatives at scales below and above the state, and there is certainly much to be praised when it comes to today's metropolitan innovative potential. Indeed, as many of the cross-national networks of localities are showing us, urban public policy can demonstrate flexibility and a governance capability that challenge the effectiveness of the machinations of traditional global governance alignments. Nevertheless, the environmental (if not, more broadly, the political) role of cities should not go unscrutinized. To put it simply, we should not take cities for granted. 'Cities' are, after all, nothing but those inherently political systems that organize the urban conditions of much of humanity in manageable collective entities and, as such, they are continually in the making. Problematizing the bases, directions and long-term social consequences of sustainability initiatives, and thus taking into account issues of political participation to policy-formation mechanisms, is an imperative for practitioners and analysts at all governance levels. We should guarantee, as Australian philosopher Clive Hamilton puts it, the "democratization of survivability" at all levels, not solely the global but chiefly the everyday scale of urban affairs. Indeed, the world's key metropolises have a pivotal role in the global governance of the environment. Our challenge, however, is not assume their active participation without verification-but to ensure the social viability of their sustainable evolution.