Abstract
The chapter's main objective is to study the city's rising role as a driver for implementing the 2030 SDGs and UNESCO Creative Cities Network's part as UNESCO's mechanism to support cities in the effort. The results show that there is a changing nature of authority in the policy cycle on a more holistic level, where alongside the nation-state, international organizations and cities play a vital role in the problem definition, decision-making, agenda-setting, transfer, and implementation of policies. The increasing importance of cities internationally stretches the municipal policy cycle from the local to regional, national, and international levels. Orchestration complemented with an inter-organizational relations framework is used to study the case of Idanha-a-Nova UNESCO Creative City of Music. The case study shows that Idanha-a-Nova drove the implementation of the SDGs locally with the Portuguese state's support. However, because it lacked expertise and mechanisms of implementing the goals, it reached out to private consultancy and individual experts.
TopIntroduction
The local implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has proven to be the biggest challenge on the international level (Harris, 2020; Fischer, 2020). For the effective implementation of the Goals, local municipalities and actors need to be heavily involved in the process, one that was formulated and adopted on the UN level. So, how a decision that was taken on the international level can be actioned on the local level?
The public policy literature has taken a nation-state approach to the policy process, assuming that the nation-state is the only actor that can formulate and implement public policies (Reinicke, 1998; Baltodano, 1997; Lerner & Lasswell, 1951). The new governance model of development goes beyond the nation-state and adopts a non-hierarchical way of policymaking where the nation-state is not the only actor, as is the case with the Sustainable Development Goals. The decision was made on the international level, but the transfer and implementation are done on a municipal level. Hence, alongside the state, IOs and cities play an active role in the policy process (Bulkeley & Schroeder, 2011; Stone, 2008; Faria, 2018). These three-fold relations pave the way for new governance mechanisms, such as orchestration, that allow for steering state behavior through intermediary actors (Abbott et al., 2015).
In that context, the UN acts through its institutions in the UN System to promote, diffuse and implement the SDGs. Nation-states are still the central actors that approved and adopted the SDGs. However, as Kamau, Chasek, and O’Connor (2018) show, the negotiation process was not the simplest. The Goals’ implementation on a state level is more coordinative by providing the institutional mechanisms rather than executive (OECD, 2017). As the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals focus on endogenous development and stress the crucial role of culture towards achieving it, the UN agency for culture, UNESCO, has taken an active role in promoting the Goals. UNESCO then supports the Goals through various programs, but the most prominent one is the UNESCO Creative Cities Network (UCCN). The UCCN’s primary mission is to implement the Sustainable Development Agenda via policymaking and promotion of standardized policies by sharing best practices for urban development (UNESCO, 2019). The UNESCO Creative Cities Network is a platform where cities share best practices for cultural and urban policies and support each other functionally.
In the orchestration framework, cities act as intermediaries to UNESCO, which is their orchestrator, and cities steer the state’s behavior towards implementing policies supporting SDGs on a local level (Figure 1). Cities are becoming drivers of the SDGs’ implementation because they have UNESCO’s ideational support and the local governance mechanisms to act upon the SDGs. The orchestration framework is complemented with the literature on inter-organizational relations to dig deeper into the multilevel governance arrangements among UNESCO, the city, and the nation-state. The inter-organizational relations address relations on the international, national, individual, bureaucratic, and inter-institutional levels. Particular importance is given to the individual and inter-institutional levels as those where the interaction on different levels occurs. This framework explains how the city acts as an intermediary in implementing the SDGs locally without compromising the national policymaking process. The data gathering and analysis are done via document analysis, in-depth case study, and informative interviews with the key stakeholders when data from the document analysis was missing. The theoretical framework is applied to the city of Idanha-a-Nova in Portugal. After setting the theoretical framework and gathering the data, the information collected was put within the research framework.
Figure 1. Causal relationship: The city as an intervening mechanism to implement UN`s SDGs nationally
Key Terms in this Chapter
Orchestration: Coming from a constructivist perspective, the orchestration framework complements the Principle/Agent model. Orchestrators are entities that have ideational or material resources but lack enforcement capacities. For that reason, they operate via intermediaries who do have enforcement capacities for the end goal of steering or changing the behavior of a specific target.
Inter-Organizational Relations: The study of complex formal and/or informal interconnections between and among organizations involving various actors on multiple governance levels.
Global Public Policy: Multilevel global processes of flows and networks involving national, international and transnational actors.
UNESCO Creative Cities Network: UNESCO membership-based network of cities whose sustainable urban development is heavily dependant on a specific cultural area.