ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the growing ambitions of urban actors to set norms and standards in global climate governance. It elaborates on the politics of policy transfer among cities through global city networks. As collective actors organized in global city networks, cities can gain agency and institutional validation by partnering with national governments and international organizations in global environmental governance. The chapter discusses the implications of the rising influence of city networks like C40 in multi-scalar governance for the place of the urban in the new cartography of global climate governance. To assist municipal governments with their 'greening' ambitions C40 provides a number of Regional Directors and Programme Experts. The agency of global cities and the powers of mayors to act independently from and sometimes even against the state and its official diplomatic track in international politics, has been crystallized in the C40 slogan Nations talk, cities act.
