Global policies for development : creative cities as UNESCO intermediaries and orchestration-initiators

• Autor(a) principal: Julijana Nicha Andrade
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFMG
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/45377
• topic: Orchestration; UNESCO Creative Cities Network; Multi-level governance; Inter-organizational relations

The thesis studies the change in the policy-making processes on multi-level governance, where International Organizations are becoming key policy actors alongside the nation-state. International organizations (IOs), such as the United Nations (UN), are formulating and implementing global public policies at the nation-state level through local municipalities. Using soft governance models, the UN orchestrates the behaviour of the nation-state via the city as its intermediary. The city, in return, gains ideational and material assistance, which agency is reinforced as a result of that. As a normative institution, the UN has historically shaped the global policies for development and governance via the 2015 Millennium Development Goals and the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. Currently, due to the rapid urbanization and the urgent need for sustainable solutions, the global trend of development has increasingly focused on urban and rural development. The rise of the new knowledge-based economy which relies on culture, creativity and innovation has presented to be a solution for urban problems. The diffusion of this model occurs on transnational spaces via transnational actors who are learning and teaching about best practices which shape specific places as well as regional, national, and global geographies. For that reason, an increasing number of cities, regardless of the city-size and national organization, are adopting this model of development at a fast pace. The most prominent network of creative cities is the UNESCO Creative Cities Network (UCCN) through which the UN is implementing the Sustainable Development Goals. Membership is acquired on voluntary bases by local municipalities, in which case, the city which is already an intermediary act as an initiation of Orchestration. For those reasons, the research seeks to answer: How are cities, as intermediary actors, implementing the 2030 Sustainable Development agenda via UNESCO Creative Cities Network on a national level? In other words, how cities, once becoming part of the UCCN influence - and even steer - the behaviour of the central state? The question is addressed by studying the level of policy transfer on a municipal level in the three different institutional contexts: Curitiba, Brazil; Dublin, Ireland and Idanha-a-Nova, Portugal. Through membership at the UCCN, cities challenge the current beliefs that municipalities cannot act internationally due to sovereignty and the expectation that lower-level governments are not supposed to act inter- or transnationally by bypassing the national government. However, the research shows that, cities do engage in cultural paradiplomacy and do transfer global public policies on local levels leading to global convergence of national cultural public policies with the current trends on innovation.