Conference Agenda

In 2013, the Rockefeller Foundation created 100 Resilient Cities (100 RC), a transnational sustainability initiative that engaged cities all over the world and sought to change how cities think about and pursue resilience. In July 2019, the Rockefeller Foundation abruptly shut down the program. The emergence and subsequent termination of 100 RC afford a unique opportunity to observe the impact of a transnational municipal governance initiative after it stops actively functioning and examine the potential for a philanthropically driven initiative to generate transformation. This panel session shares early results from a major research project that is exploring the philanthropic influence on transnational municipal networks, the relationship between ‘urban resilience’ and the climate and justice/equity efforts that cities are undertaking, and the broader question of transformation through transnational urban action. Papers for the panel provide insights on the methodology and functioning of a collaborative, multi-institutional research team, initial findings on the research undertaken, and questions that will be driving the remainder of the project.

This paper provides an overview of the logistical, methodological, and theoretical aspects of the overall project. The project is grounded by two overarching research questions surrounding the impact of the 100 RC. First, how did the 100 RC network influence how member cities understood and pursued resilience? We are interested in understanding whether and how 100 RC-led resilience efforts connected to climate action and efforts around equity and justice at the urban scale. Second, how has the 100 RC impact been felt in the aftermath of initiative’s termination? Here we are especially interested in exploring whether and how member cities’ trajectories were fundamentally altered as well as the way that the 100 RC initiative influenced the ecosystem of transnational urban sustainability networks. The paper will discuss the development of these research questions as well as the methodological choices and challenges involved in pursuing them, especially how to measure post-initiative impact. This will provide a solid foundation and introduction to the project and the substantive findings discussed in the other papers on the panel. The paper will close with a reflection on ‘doing’ research in a multi-institutional setting with a project team that consists of professors, a post-doc, graduate students, and undergraduates, with an advisory board of practitioners. We will discuss how we’re trying to make this multi-level research team work in a way that provides benefits for all.

The agency of private philanthropies in global environmental governance is under-examined, though existing research findings points to their role as ‘field builders’. This entails bringing together ideas, policies, actors, networks, and organizations into a new governance arena focused on a particular issue. However, the concept of field-building contains a paradox: in creating a novel political and organizational space, emerging fields are in a sense a ‘legitimacy’ vacuum, not yet structured around particular relations or discourses. How, then, do philanthropies come to have the legitimacy to build new issue fields? In this paper, we examine the Rockefeller Foundation and its 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) initiative. By forging new networks of relations among cities, as well as between cites and a range of ‘partners’, and constructing a new conceptual language around urban resilience, these actors helped shape creation of the field of urban resilience. Through interviews and document analysis, we identify four key sources of perceived legitimacy through which the Rockefeller Foundation and 100RC were able to contribute to in field building: capital (output legitimacy), cognitive “fit” (cognitive legitimacy), partnerships (throughput and output legitimacy), and expertise (output legitimacy). Existing research emphasizes the importance of foundations’ financial self-sufficiency, arguing that it enables them to act with high degrees of autonomy, an almost ‘hyper-agency’ (Jung and Harrow 2015). However, the findings of our analysis contrast with these accounts. External actors were tapped for technical expertise (namely consultancies like Arup); norms of new public management were followed in crafting a strategic approach to resilience; associations with rational-legal authorities (World Bank) were forged, and cities with global reputations as pioneers were selected as grantees. Rather than displaying a hyperagency, the sources of legitimacy which the Rockefeller Foundation and 100RC drew on in building the field of resilience were highly relational. Analytically, the findings of this paper refine our understandings of philanthropic actors in global governance, highlighting how their agency can take on hybrid- rather than hyper- forms as they develop their legitimacy to build new fields of governance.

This paper explores whether and how the 100 RC initiative influenced the ways member cities understood and pursued resilience. It begins with an analysis of all urban resilience plans that the initiative mandated from cities as a criteria for membership. It then examines how this mandate was operationalized by assessing how 100 RC members expressed their understanding of resilience in in developed policy action plans. This large n analysis specifically focuses on variation across the network in how resilience policies were linked to climate action and equity and justice concerns. The analysis reveals distinct clusters of cities that shared similar approaches to resilience/climate/equity and we discuss the origin and ramification of this pattern, as well as propose possible explanations for the clustering. The paper then continues with a discussion of the initiative’s impact on the functioning of cities in relation to resilience. Through a discussion of case vignettes of individual cities, we analyze how 100 RC altered the trajectory of cities’ form and functions in the pursuit of resilience. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the 100 RC impact on its members for broader questions of sustainability governance through and within transnational urban networks.

This paper asks what happens when a transnational network ceases to function? Does the influence and impact of the network disappear or can we observe and trace the legacy of a transnational initiative after its demise? Under what conditions did the 100 RC mandate and resources ‘stick’ in cities? Did some aspects of the Initiative become institutionalized or catalyze change more than others? We explore these questions from two perspectives in this paper—member cities and the broader ecosystem of transnational urban sustainability networks. First, we analyze what happened in member cities after 100 RC shutdown and assess whether/how the practices and approaches prompted through network membership continued or changed. Analyzing case studies of individual cities, we will discuss patterns in how member cities responded to the end of the 100 RC initiative. Second, we analyze the legacy of 100 RC in the broader context. Through both a case study of the successor network to the 100 RC, The Resilient Cities Alliance, and analysis of how resilience thinking has evolved in the transnational urban sustainability sphere, we assess the impact that the 100 RC network had on the broader sustainability agenda. The paper concludes with a discussion of initiative ‘death’, measuring the legacy impact of transnational networks broadly, but also explaining whether the initiative ‘death’ had an unequal impacts on cities, both within and across cities in the Global North versus South, or between global climate leaders versus laggards.