Explaining why cities participate in global environmental governance: a comparison of Montréal, Bonn, and Cape Town
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis focuses on the motivations for cities to participate in global environmental diplomacy. It starts from the premise that cities have no obligation to pursue an international environmental agenda. Nevertheless, some do play leadership roles and demonstrate the importance and capacity of cities in the fight against climate change and environmental degradation. As cities' impacts on the environment are increasing, it is essential to understand how to steer them towards ambitious environmental actions. Drawing on constructivist theories of international relations, this thesis takes an abductive approach and argues that cities are motivated to participate in environmental diplomacy primarily by international recognition of their actions. By highlighting their capacity to tackle climate change, cities seek to showcase themselves but also to promote the role of cities more generally as legitimate actors in international politics. In service of this argument, I utilize comparative case studies of three cities: Montréal, Bonn, and Cape Town. This case selection maximizes diversity and addresses gaps in the extant urban diplomacy literature around mid-sized cities and cities in the Global South. I draw on data from official documents, city press releases, and four interviews with city officials. The results demonstrate that international recognition is an effective tool with which International Organizations can coordinate cities toward ambitious environmental action
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".