city networks membership dataset

A snapshot of city network membership and environmental collaboration between local governments

This dataset represents the most comprehensive available accounting of city government memberships, as of late-2017, in city networks, covering 84 networks and 10,343 cities in 208 countries. This accounts specifically for the number of concurrent memberships, as of late-2017, per city government across all (84) observed TMNs collectively (Column F, “TMN”), and a subset of the number of concurrent memberships specifically within the 31 environmentally-focused TMNs observed (Column G, “ETMN”). The networks represented in each category are listed in Table 1 in the readme file, along with geographic visualizations of the relative number of city concurrent memberships (Figure 1) and network ties formed by network secretariat-member city connections (Figure 2). Data from the TMN column is analyzed in Acuto and Leffel (2020)[1] which describes the full global landscape of memberships, and data from the ETMN column is analyzed in Leffel (2022) [2] which shows an association between urban greenhouse gas emissions reductions and concurrent ETMN memberships. See below for full citations.

Refer to the dataset's ReadMe file for more information on the content, method and application

References

[1] Acuto, Michele, and Benjamin Leffel. 2021. “Understanding the Global Ecosystem of City Networks.” Urban Studies 58 (9). 1758–74. doi:10.1177/0042098020929261.

[2] Leffel, Benjamin. 2022. “Toward Global Urban Climate Mitigation: Linking National and Polycentric Systems of Environmental Change.” Sociology of Development 8 (1): 111–37. doi:https://doi.org/10.1525/sod.2021.0018.