Cities and the multilevel governance of global climate change

We explore how the Cities for Climate Protection (CCP) program, a network that is simultaneously global and local, state and nonstate, could be conceptualized as part of global environmental governance. We suggest that traditional approaches to international relations-regime theory and transnational networks-offer limited conceptual space for analyzing such networks. These approaches obscure how the governance of global climate change takes place through processes and institutions operating at and between a variety of scales and involving a range of actors with different levels and forms of authority. We contend that it is only by taking a multilevel perspective that we can fully capture the social, political, and economic processes that shape global environmental governance.