National sovereignty across city networks: Singapore and the diplomacy of a global city-state

Abstract

Even though the expanding relevance of city diplomacy has unsettled the traditional state-centered conceptualization of international politics, the growing transnational dynamism of city governments is still embedded in, and structurally constrained by, a state-centric international polity. We exemplify this through consideration of Singapore’s exceptionalism as a city-state, and what this means for its capacity for global self-promotion as an urban policy model. When the city-state selectively decides to engage among ‘peer cities’ in city-based institutional venues like city networks, it does so within a hierarchical logic dominated by the political authority and decision-making powers that derive from its capacity for and interest in entertaining relations with other sovereign nation-states. Through a counterfactual logic, Singapore’s outstanding transnational urban position reveals the current constraints of city diplomacy, as other merely city-level governments are compelled to join forces transnationally within a logic framed in terms of (lack of) access to state-centric institutional venues and resources. For the overwhelming majority of city governments, in contrast to Singapore, city networks are obligatory passage points to bypass traditional policy scales. Extending a theoretical bridge between the bodies of literature on urban policy mobilities and city networks, the article excavates Singapore’s ‘privileged’ position to deepen our understanding of the relationship between the city and the state. In doing so, we situate and provide a corrective to overstated narratives of the international rise of cities in the larger contemporary picture of global governance.

Keywords

City city networks Singapore state urban policy mobilities

Introduction

At the intersection of globalization and urbanization, from the final decades of the 20th century cities started to play an expanding role in the international field. Drawing upon a longstanding tradition of inter-urban connections, city diplomacy has emerged as the expanding practice of relations among city government officials as well as between these and nation-states, and non-governmental and corporate actors (Kosovac et al., 2021). Within the field of city diplomacy, both scholars and practitioners agree on the increasing relevance of city networks both in terms of visibility and transformative impact (Kihlgren Grandi, 2020). These governance structures are formally established organizations that have city governments, or other subnational governments, as their main members. Offering a heterogenous spectrum of (often overlapping) outputs to their members, city networks attend to two overarching objectives: (i) fostering policy learning and collaboration around common problems; and (ii) representing their members’ interests in order to influence nation-states and multilateral institutions (Happaerts et al., 2010).¹

A central factor within the rise of city diplomacy is the simultaneously confrontational and collaborative relationships that city governments from across the world maintain with their respective national states. As Peter J Taylor (2013) vividly summarizes, the city and the state are like tango dancers, weaving relationships of antagonism and support. The variegated empirical landscape of city diplomacy has unsettled the traditional state-centered conceptualization of international politics. For over a decade, strands of academic and popular literature claiming the rise of the city in the global urban age have signaled a fundamental shift in the power relationship between the city and the nation-state. While the statement of the former mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel (2020), that “mayors are now running the world” may have been intentionally hyperbolic, it also diagnoses a wider tendency to vaunt and even inflate the actual structural power of city governments and particularly their leaders in the international field. More importantly for our concerns, this discourse has, in turn, underestimated the continued dominance of the national state as the locus of political agency. In this article we respond to the recent scholarly call to critically examine the emergence of the city as a global political actor (e.g., Oosterlynck et al., 2019) by illustrating how the growing dynamism of city governments beyond their national borders is structurally constrained by the state-centric international polity in which it is (still) embedded. More specifically, we present the city-state of Singapore as a foil for the relatively constrained diplomatic possibilities that face most other cities (i.e., that are not city-states).

Commonly understood to be placed near the top of world/global cities hierarchies, Singapore invests significant institutional resources to promote itself regionally and globally as an urban policy model. The circulation of urban policy models is a fundamental component of city diplomacy and is conveyed institutionally by the growing dynamism of international and transnational city networks. We place a spotlight on the exceptional constitution of Singapore, as both a UN member state and the quintessential instantiation of what in urban scholarship is defined as a ‘global city’. Counterfactually, this serves to illuminate how the overwhelming majority of city governments active beyond their national borders cannot rely on the same degree of access to institutional venues and resources. More specifically, we unearth Singapore’s ‘privileged position’ in the promotion of its urban policy model through city networks as heuristics to deepen our understanding of the relationship between the city and the national state. In doing so, we are better able to situate the international rise of cities in the larger contemporary picture of global governance including with regard to the role of city networks.

In theoretical terms, building on the scholarly work of Elisabetta Mocca (2018), the article extends a bridge along the linkage between the bodies of literature on urban policy mobilities (e.g., Robin and Nkula-Wenz, 2021) and city networks (e.g., Lee and Koski, 2015). We thus understand city networks as the primary institutional infrastructure of city diplomacy and as instantiations of what Eugene McCann has termed ‘informational infrastructures’. The latter refers to “individuals, institutions, organizations, and technologies that interpret, frame, package, and represent information about best policy practices [and] successful cities” (McCann, 2011: 114).

The remainder of the article is organized as follows. The next section provides a summary of the confrontational and collaborative ties with the nation-state that fuel the rising international role of city governments and their participation in city networks. The third section sketches out the inherently urban-centered nation-building process of Singapore in order to introduce the construction of Singapore as an urban policy model for a foreign audience of policy-makers. The fourth section examines the involvement of Singapore in city networks, noting its selective interest in these formal networking organizations. The fifth section broadens the analysis by examining the institutional venues that the city-state harnesses along its international and transnational ventures to promote its urban policy model through the mobilization of the Centre for Liveable Cities (CLC), a key institutional entry point for both bilateral and networking engagements. We conclude by considering what Singapore reveals about city networks as both obligatory passage points for the transnational engagements of cities and their limitations in what remains a state-centric international polity.

The relationship between the city and the state in times of city diplomacy

It is important to examine the rise of cities on the international stage at the end of the 20th century in terms of the evolving relationship between the city government and the nation-state. The widespread diffusion of competitive place-based strategies to attract capital and attention diagnoses economic motives that underlie the growing dynamism of city governments beyond their national borders. Simultaneously, the promotion of a decentralization agenda as a policy convergence trend attaining global reach during the second half of the 20th century (albeit with significant variability within and across regions) has reshaped the scope and operations of city governments (Wollmann, 2020).

At the same time, boosted by the increasing capacity of communication and working collaboration facilitated by technology, globalization has accelerated the exchange of public policy knowledge. Aware of the value of sharing knowledge among peers facing similar challenges, city governments across the world have increasingly connected to learn from each other in several fields of urban policy. Some cities have further pooled resources in a clear attempt to tackle contemporary transboundary challenges that national governments fail to address, in some cases through coordinated action (e.g., climate change) (Acuto et al., 2017). City governments have engaged in collaborative endeavors leveraging the ascendancy of networked organizational configurations as key forms of institutionalization in global governance and the rise of non-state actors complementing state-based actors in the governance of transnational affairs (Martinez, 2022). With over 300 scattered across the world, city networks can be nationally-based, international in the sense that they are sanctioned by UN state-based agencies, or transnational as they cut across and transcend traditional nation-state configurations (Acuto and Leffel, 2021).

Against the backdrop of the growing international presence of the city, some local governments have confrontational relations with national governments. Individually but even more importantly collectively, by harnessing the amplifying power of global and regional city networks, such local governments bypass traditional scales and establish relationships with global actors in seeking to overcome restraining central-local relations and to obtain a higher degree of independence from the nation-state in political, administrative, and fiscal terms (Herrschel and Newman, 2017). In addition to conventional internal channels of communication and advocacy between the local and national levels of government, local governments seek to gain political attention from their national counterparts by forging alliances with international and transnational platforms. These include city networks that can help to convey and intensify pressure on the national state.

Yet the emergence of city diplomacy can also be an expression of the collaborative relationship between the city and the state. Local governments may be supported politically or economically by national governments in their transnational efforts and may well be strategic elements within larger inter-state dynamics. The retreat of the national state at the end of the 20th century, the demographic and economic centrality of cities in the current ‘urban age’ (Martinez et al., 2021), and the increasing relevance of hybrid state and non-state configurations in the architecture of global governance have led the national state to renovate its interest in local politics and craft renewed strategies to pursue state-based objectives (John, 2001). Domestic calls for decentralization and advocacy efforts in intergovernmental fora for a higher recognition of the role of cities in the implementation of global policy agendas are both complemented and sustained by structural as well as informal relationships that local governments maintain with national governments. To the extent that such collaborative relationships are sustained within the cross-scalar state apparatus, they are out of reach for most non-governmental actors.

The simultaneously confrontational and collaborative relationships between the city and the state underlying the growing dynamism of cities in the global arena reproduce the ambivalent constitution of city governments at the local and international levels. Across many countries, city governments constitute both the local level of the state apparatus and the local democratic self-rule of the urban public sphere (Nijman, 2016). Internationally, in Rosenau’s (1990) terms, cities have the potential to exploit their constitution as ‘sovereignty-bound’ and ‘sovereignty-free’ actors in different ways. On the one hand, cities are governmental actors sharing state sovereignty, possessing political and technical legitimacy as constituency representatives and public administrators, and accessing material and institutional resources; on the other hand, their foreign action is not entirely limited by state obligations, as they enjoy the flexibility to harness synergies with different institutional actors, and deploy non-state configurations such as transnational advocacy networks to convert their ideas and expertise into sources of legitimation to influence power relations (Salomón and Sánchez Cano, 2008). While in overall terms national constitutions do not confer on city governments legal personality to conduct foreign affairs (Cartier, 2021), evidence shows that, through different degrees of engagement and across varied geographies, city governments are increasingly active internationally as a consequence of the very impact of globalization on their day-to-day local policy-making duties (Amiri and Sevin, 2020). Whereas cities are governmental actors that do not face the conflicts traditionally related to sovereign state-centric strategic interests, international law prevents them from being members of intergovernmental organizations and signing ‘hard power’ legally binding treaties in the way that national governments do (Smith, 2019).

The expanding practice of city diplomacy allows us to grasp the shifting and multifaceted relationship between the city and the state, between the growing transnational dynamism of the former and the endurance of the latter as the dominant political actor in international relations. In light of their ambivalent constitution as sovereignty-free and sovereignty-bound actors, city governments can mobilize their political agency internationally and transnationally, by adopting either reactive or proactive positionings vis-à-vis the nation-state (these characterizations are often empirically simultaneous, but are here held apart for analytical clarity). In the first case, city governments are mobilized by their nation-states for state-based international ends; in the second case, city governments act beyond their national borders independently from their national state.

The exceptionality of Singapore as both a global city and nation-state makes it an insightful case study precisely because it does not involve any contraposition between reactive and proactive positioning of city governments vis-à-vis the nation-state. Careful examination of Singapore’s outstanding dynamism beyond its borders helps to identify the specific constraints that the overwhelming majority of inter- and trans-nationally active city governments face in terms of (lack of) access to institutional venues. The very absence of reactive/proactive dynamics in the Singapore case thus helps to reveal how the working of city diplomacy is inflected by the complex relationship between the city and the state.

Constructing Singapore as an urban nation and exporting its model

Singapore unexpectedly became a nation-state in 1965 when it gained from Malaysia an independence for which it had not fought (Lee, 2008). As soon as it was created, the small island state immediately conceived its spatial hinterland beyond the national and even the immediate regional scale. With an ethnic Chinese-dominated population, and surrounded by countries with predominantly Malay Muslim populations, the island republic’s leadership felt compelled to quickly extend its gaze beyond its neighboring countries in Southeast Asia. Devoid of natural resources, Singapore was also immediately obliged to open up to the world economy in order to survive.

The narrative of survival in economic and security terms accompanied the foundation of independent Singapore in the 1960s, and has continued to form part of a comprehensive process of nation building coalesced around the prospect of economic development. Ranked as the world’s most competitive economy in 2020 (International Institute for Management Development [IMD], 2020), the achievement of Singapore in terms of economic growth is undisputed globally. Economic success is also central to the national narrative, as emblematically captured by the first Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, in the title of one volume of his memoirs, ‘From Third World to First’ (Lee, 2000). Even though the prospects of material wellbeing have been complemented by multiple nation-building efforts geared towards forging a common identity for the country, economic development has played an overriding role in terms of policy priorities.

As a quintessential developmental state, the material prosperity achieved by Singapore is closely tied up with the establishment of a strong government, which is simultaneously national and urban. With an executive cabinet comprising 19 ministers at the helm, Singapore relies on a one-tier highly integrated government that ensures a degree of cross-department policy coherence towards strategic objectives that is not conceivable in states with multiple levels of government (Clark and Moonen, 2017). At the same time, it has a degree of decision-making power on policy areas with critical impact in cities such as education reform, economic development, labor market, immigration governance, and technological innovation that is out of reach for the vast majority of city governments across the world. The complete overlapping of the national and urban/local scale, as Olds and Yeung (2004) noted, allows the government to ensure a micro-level management of the entire, fully urbanized territorial unit. This is the defining characteristic of Singapore as a developmental city-state.²

The unexpected journey from a recently created small island post-colonial state into one of the world’s most competitive economies has laid the foundations for the crafting of a narrative revolving around the construction of Singapore as a model. The comprehensive process of nation building and the construction of Singapore as a model for foreign audiences are two sides of the same coin. Because of the entirely urbanized nature of the national territorial unit, the internal construction of Singapore as a nation and the external projection of Singapore as a model draw upon and address key dimensions of governance that are inherently urban. Official recognition of the potential this affords began in the early 1970s when the first Minister of Foreign Affairs, S. Rajaratnam, described the fundamental aspiration of Singapore as becoming a ‘global city’ (Acharya, 2008). Apart from articulating Singapore’s exceptionalism as a city-state, therefore, the Singapore government foresaw the role of selected control and command nodes of the world economy two decades before scholars began to examine “global cities” (Sassen, 1991).

Building on its successes as an urbanized nation-state, Singapore presents itself as a model for foreign audiences by exploiting and assembling its policy knowledge on urban governance and planning. The examples are multifold. Singapore has long projected itself as a model of large-scale public housing and universal home ownership thanks to its ability to accommodate around 85% of its resident population in public housing flats (Ho, 2021). It is investing significant resources in building its reputation in the domain of smart city technologies and sustainable urban solutions (Miao and Phelps, 2019). It is branding itself globally by leveraging its expertise on tackling water scarcity and innovation in the urban water sector (Joo and Heng, 2017). It seeks to be a leading example in the creation of natural urban systems in dense cities, as captured by the discursive shift from a ‘garden city’ to a ‘city in a garden’ (Newman et al., 2017). And it has promoted its specific experience in the design of urban public spaces, conceptualizing this as a distinctive contribution to the wider global discourse on public space and the spatial interaction between people and the state (Hee, 2017).

Whereas at the beginning of its post-independence journey Singapore consciously looked beyond its national borders in search of investments and knowledge, as time passed, its own reputation has traveled far beyond the shores of its 733 square kilometers of land. While potentially global in scope, the geography of the projection of Singapore as a model is uneven and is situated at the crossroads of two different, but potentially intersecting, dynamics of demand and supply within the fast-paced domain of policy learning. First, for numerous city governments in the global South, Singapore offers a source of inspiration about the possibility of controlling urban development in the face of mounting challenges such as growing informal sector activity and financial constraints (Shatkin, 2014). Second, within the trajectories charted by Asian post-colonial states, Singapore attests to the possibility of adapting and limiting the fundamental norms and institutions of Western liberal democracy (Vasil, 2020). Not surprisingly, thanks also to historical cultural and ethnic ties, China has been among the most enthusiastic and prominent emulators of the Singaporean model during its own urbanization process (e.g., Zhang, 2012).

In sum, Singapore has become an inspirational model of urban transformation (Chua, 2011), despite the fact that many aspects deriving from its degree of decision-making power and historical developmental trajectory as a city-state are unique and defy straightforward replication. The decision to construct Singapore as a model derives from the trajectory of the recently created nation-state, the eminent urban nature of the substance of its governance, its geographical location, and its propensity to gaze – even before the advent of the current global urban age – far beyond its national boundaries. Yet in parallel to its construction, the model must be circulated across space and scale, in order to be seen and taken up as a viable antecedent (Pow, 2014).³ We now turn to unpack how the international dynamism of Singapore unfurls, that is, to which institutional venues the city-state resorts in order to promote itself as an urban policy model across the world. The next section surveys the engagement of the city-state in global and regional city networks, flagging its ability to be more selective in investing resources in collaborative networking endeavors than other urban governments.

Joining city networks (selectively)

City networks provide platforms for ‘governance by diffusion’, with learning unfolding among members of transnational and international networks, ultimately promoting the adoption of specific local actions to the detriment of others (Hakelberg, 2014). City networks are thus powerful informational infrastructures which members use to showcase their expertise in specific urban policy areas among a variegated geography of transfer agents (McCann, 2011). In a globalized context where cities increasingly learn from the experiences of peer cities facing similar challenges, informational infrastructures are key operative frameworks put in place in order to ‘broker between demand and offer’ in what would otherwise be a vast planetary landscape of seemingly indistinguishable public policy experiences (Martinez, 2023b). This is all the more relevant since city networks and partnering international organizations have become the main referent for urban policy knowledge exchange for city governments in many countries of the global South, where the bulk of global urbanization is taking place (Tomlinson and Harrison, 2018).

If Singapore was (just) a city, in order to promote its urban policy model worldwide, it would likely play a substantive active role in multiple city networks, in ways similar to other global cities interested in extending their governmental reach. Yet the actual involvement of Singapore in these formal networking organizations is clearly divided into two subsets of city networks.

In the first subset, we find city networks that by constitution are open to membership applications by any city government (within specific membership criteria). Singapore is not a formal member of any of them. For example, Singapore is not a member of ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI), a global network committed to sustainable urban development active in more than 120 countries. Singapore is also not a member of United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), which is the largest global organization of cities and subnational governments with members representing 70% of the world’s population, nor of Metropolis, a global network of metropolitan areas, gathering global cities such as Berlin, Mexico City, and Seoul as members. The same pattern can be identified at the regional level. Singapore is neither a full member of CityNet, a network of urban stakeholders focused on capacity building and city-to-city cooperation for sustainable development in Asia Pacific, nor of the corresponding regional chapters of UCLG and ICLEI (i.e., UCLG Asia Pacific section [UCLG ASPAC], ICLEI Southeast Asia secretariat [ICLEI SEAS]), which count Bangkok, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur among their members.

It might be assumed that Singapore, as a nation-state, simply cannot be a member of a networking organization composed of subnational governments, but this is not the case. All the city networks in this first subset have additional membership or partnership categories that formally allow non-city governments to join. For instance, a Singaporean governmental organization could formally join UCLG ASPAC as an ‘associate member’, a category that is “open to entities which, though not themselves local government organizations, are strongly concerned with or involved in local government matters” (UCLG ASPAC, 2014: 5). Similarly, CityNet has a specific ‘associate member’ category for national level organizations. This means that the lack of formal engagement by Singapore is not due to the eligibility requirements of this first subset of city networks.

Quite the opposite, these city networks are eager to engage formally with the city-state. It is rather Singapore that has not prioritized becoming a formal member, hence foregoing the opportunity to harness the amplifying power of these informational infrastructures and to circulate its urban policy model across peer cities. For instance, the relationship between Metropolis and the CLC of Singapore has not evolved beyond the one of institutional partners, in contrast to other city governments such as Barcelona and Guangzhou, who are making active use of the city network to rise within the membership as knowledge hubs in issues of urban governance. Furthermore, there is an underlying criterion of selectivity here. The last editions of the Metropolis World Congress have offered free registration, hence facilitating access to the formal and informal exchanges revolving around policy learning that form the core of the city network’s congresses. In contrast, the general registration fee of the main global urban forum organized by Singapore, the World Cities Summit (WCS), is over US$1800,⁴ which thus constitutes an initial entry barrier for many city governments from developing countries.

In contrast, in the second subset of city networks, we notice that Singapore is a member of two formal organizations. First, Singapore accepted an invitation to join C40 Cities (C40), a global network of nearly 100 cities that seek to halve their collective emissions by 2030. Acknowledging the track record of the global city in conjoining environmental sustainability and economic growth, Singapore signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in 2012, joining the network as an ‘observer city’, but without becoming a party to the communiqués issued by the organization. Second, Singapore is both a host and member of Resilient Cities Network (R-Cities). This is the leading global network in urban resilience with nearly 100 member cities and currently supported, among others, by funding partners such as Singapore’s Economic Development Board (EDB), Rockefeller Foundation, and Visa. In the 2010s, Singapore joined the forerunner organization of R-Cities, the 100 Resilient Cities (100RC), which was not an open membership organization but rather selected its members through a call for membership that received over 1000 applications (Nielsen and Papin, 2021).

In this sense, both C40 and 100RC actively chose to invite Singapore as their member. In turn, Singapore has chosen these two city networks by actively seeking formal engagement, in contrast with the first subset of city networks which Singapore has decided not to join formally, despite their openness to non-city governments. Interestingly, what clearly distinguishes this second subset of city networks is the centrality of the intersection of public and private interests within the funding and functioning of these organizations. C40 has three core strategic funders – Bloomberg Philanthropies, Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, and Realdania – and the participation of cities is not contingent upon the payment of a membership fee but on mandatory criteria in terms of local climate action. R-Cities was born after the sudden shutdown in 2019 of 100RC, which had been pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation through an investment of over US$160 million since 2013. These formal organizations are instantiations of “privately led networks” that are particularly influential in shaping urban governance and connecting cities with solution providers in the private sector (Fernández De Losada, 2019: 22). In comparison with its forerunner organization, R-Cities has a clearer bottom-up city-led approach and aims to ensure financial self-sustainability. However, close collaboration with the private sector remains a strategic element in the operational reality of this city network. This is demonstrated, for instance, by a collaboration agreement with Arup, a multinational consultancy firm specialized in professional services related to the built environment.⁵ Arup and R-Cities are co-located in Arup’s Singapore office.

From this survey, we can infer that Singapore has a selective interest in city networks, engaging as a member in formal networking organizations underpinned by broadly neoliberal forms of political economy that emphasize the convergence of public and private interests, and where corporate and philanthropic actors increase their influence on urban governance (Leal and Paterson, 2023; Madénian and Van Neste, 2023). The degree of selectiveness of the city-state in terms of global city networks engagement is similar to that of a very limited ‘club’ at or near the top of the global cities hierarchy such as London, New York, and Tokyo. To sum up, both subsets of city networks are open to the possibility of counting Singapore as a formal member of their organizations, yet the same cannot be said in the opposite direction. Additionally, the experience of Singapore provides evidence that, as a whole, the institutional infrastructure underlying city diplomacy is malleable and open to pragmatic synergies. Even if primarily conceived to have city governments as members, city networks have a substantive interest in including a city-sized and fully ‘urban’ nation-state within their membership.

Yet, as we will turn to in the next section, an equally revealing insight derives from tracing the institutional entry points through which Singapore liaises with these transnational networking structures in their everyday exchanges. This will help to elucidate how the promotion of Singapore as an urban policy model translates within the institutional venues underpinning city diplomacy. In overall terms, global city networks such as C40, ICLEI, Metropolis, R-Cities, and UCLG rely for their everyday operations on specific ‘landing offices’ within their members’ administrations, which are often (although not exclusively) mayors’ cabinets, international relations and cooperation divisions, or environment and resilience departments. While the exchanges with city networks clearly often percolate to other functional areas of any given governmental organigram, the landing offices are fundamental contact points that act as initial intermediary nodes between the city network and the member, between the global/regional and local scales. The landing office for much of the operational exchange that Singapore entertains with city networks is in itself a local organization feeding into a global informational infrastructure: the CLC. By examining the engagement of the CLC with city networks, the next section unveils how Singapore’s transnational dynamism is boosted by, and at the same time constitutive of, the logic and prerogatives of the nation-state.

Circulating urban policy knowledge through city networks

Established in 2008, the CLC aims to position Singapore as a hub for urban policy expertise in the international arena. By documenting the national urban development trajectory and extracting learning lessons from it, the CLC produces and circulates policy knowledge across a wide spectrum of urban stakeholders beyond its national borders. This, in turn, further contributes to consolidating CLC as a practitioner-oriented global knowledge center on urban governance. While the publication of 37 “Urban Systems Studies” constitutes the core knowledge products that construct Singapore as an urban policy model, the relational task of diffusing this policy expertise is as important as the creation of knowledge (CLC, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020).

The CLC provides a fundamental interface between the local ecosystem of urban stakeholders and the wider world. On the one side, it supports, connects, and opens up economic opportunities for a plethora of Singapore governmental institutions such as the Housing & Development Board, the national water agency PUB, or the state-owned JTC Corporation that focuses on industrial infrastructure development. On the other side, the center is remarkably active beyond its national borders across different scales by partnering with local, national, and international governmental actors.

At the level of city-to-city cooperation, CLC has, for instance, joined forces with the city of Seoul in order to distill learning lessons from each city’s experience when coping with common challenges such as building age-friendly cities, fostering community engagement in urban planning, and promoting a mobility paradigm shift. The close partnership between the CLC and the Seoul Institute - a think tank established by the Seoul Metropolitan Government acting, like the CLC, as a local organization feeding into a global informational infrastructure - is the instantiation of the competitive-collaborative logic that drives the international action of cities (Martinez, 2023b).⁶ This further confirms that, as a global city, Singapore has closer ties with ostensibly distant cities than with many of those located spatially in its immediate region (i.e., Southeast Asia). Similarly, the CLC has partnered with the cities of Shanghai and Rotterdam in order to circulate their experience in affordable housing provision and water governance in the context of climate resilience, respectively.

At the national level, the CLC has harnessed close state-based ties with China. This is demonstrated by involvement in and knowledge production around the China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park and China-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City urban development projects, as well as by partnerships for research, training programs, and visits with the ministerial-level National Development and Reform Commission and the Development Research Center of the State Council of China. The CLC has further collaborated with the Town and Country Planning Organisation of India through which nearly 100 senior federal and state urban officials of India have attended a capacity development program in Singapore since the strategic partnership signed by the respective prime ministers in 2015 (CLC and Town and Country Planning Organisation, 2018).⁷ The Chinese and Indian examples, both in terms of depth of engagement and capacity of outreach, are testimony to the capacity of the CLC. It is the fundamental institutional entry point for the circulation of Singapore as an urban policy model embedded in the political authority of the city-state.

While the circulation of urban policy knowledge across local governments is a common practice among global cities interested in engaging in transnational urban politics, these state-based ties are out of reach for the vast majority of city governments across the world. In other words, the ‘privileged partnership’ with the Chinese and Indian governments derives from Singapore’s (eminently urban) exercise of national sovereignty. This state-based privileged partnership is equally harnessed by other actors from the national ecosystem who are also active in the promotion of the city-state as an urban policy model. For instance, the Nanyang Technological University has trained more than 15,000 Chinese government officials through overseas training courses conducted in Mandarin Chinese and popularly known as ‘Mayors’ Class’ because of the number of mayors and senior-level officials attending (Wang, 2020). The training has then been included in institutional agreements signed by the foreign affairs ministries of China and Singapore.

Compared to other city governments promoting their urban policy model abroad, Singapore’s ‘privilege’ lies in the ability to deploy its foreign affairs minister (or even its prime minister) to ‘sanction’ such international programs. While city governments’ directorates of international relations can certainly sign institutional agreements of cooperation, in the prevailing state-centric international polity it is the foreign affairs minister or prime minister who typically exercises the prerogative of the nation-state concerning its unity and monopoly of representation in international relations (Cogan, 2021). The examples of urban-centered training and capacity development programs we have provided above allow Singapore to strengthen collaboration ties with heavyweight global actors such as the nation-states of China and India.

At the international level, the CLC has worked side by side with intergovernmental organizations. From 2017–2019 it hosted jointly with UN-Habitat, the UN agency in charge of cities, and, with the support of the national Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the capacity building International Leaders in Urban Governance Programme for nearly 120 African city leaders.⁸ The urban decision-makers and senior practitioners attending the learning sessions reportedly advanced their knowledge on sustainable urbanization in relation to the contribution of cities to relevant normative frameworks. Those include UN global agendas with a clear urban dimension (i.e., Sustainable Development Goal 11 and the New Urban Agenda), as well as the Singapore Liveability Framework, which is the CLC blueprint for urban governance (CLC and Civil Service College, 2014). Similarly, the CLC and the World Bank collaborated on learning workshops around the city-state’s development experience in the framework of the establishment of the World Bank-Singapore Urban Hub in 2009. While partnerships between city governments and intergovernmental organizations are noted to have been on the rise in the global governance arena (Cogan, 2021), Singapore’s level of access as a nation-state to institutional venues and agenda-setting capacity, in contrast to city governments, does not depend on engagement through city networks brokering between local and international actors (Martinez, 2023a). Rather, the city-state benefits from its national sovereignty: both in terms of depth of engagement and capacity of outreach, the CLC has direct access to state-based partnerships with national and intergovernmental organizations that are out of reach for similar institutional entry points in city governments. Furthermore, national sovereignty yields benefits at an even deeper level: through the CLC, Singapore harnesses the reputation emanating from its urban policy model, which would be unthinkable without the decision-making powers of the nation-state in policy areas such as education reform and economic restructuring.

As Calder (2016) has observed, the dual capacity to engage simultaneously with UN-based and nation-level institutional venues on the one hand and city networks on the other hand account for Singapore’s unique assertiveness in the international and transnational dimension of urban policy-making. The city-state’s collaborations with national and international as well as local governmental actors exceed the scope of partnerships of even the most dynamic global cities across the world. It is against the backdrop of such multi-scalar promotion of Singapore as an urban policy model enacted by the CLC that we can discern the instrumental understanding of city networks by the city-state. Members use the networking relationships accommodated by city networks as means to other ends (James and Verrest, 2015), in our case, the objective of promoting Singapore as model. According to this approach, membership in a city network is but one of a variety of different, complementary ways of harnessing the amplifying power of city networks as informational infrastructure. Being a formal member of a city network does not equate to being an active participant in the networking organization (Ward, 2019). In comparison with a larger, diverse subset of members, a global city-state has higher chances to gain centrality in a city network, even when it is not a formal member of it. The participation of Singapore in city-based institutional venues like city networks is part and parcel of a comprehensive hierarchical logic with the nation-state at the top – Singapore and its country partners – as both the source and target of institutional resources. The urban policy model thus constitutes a form of urban geopolitics as Singapore deploys its expertise as a diplomatic leverage for inter-state relationships (Bok, 2020).

The clearest crystallization of Singapore’s investment in urban geopolitics is the WCS. Conceived as the CLC flagship knowledge platform and currently organized jointly with the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA),⁹ the WCS has since 2008 been a global urban forum for government officials and partners. The WCS is intended to complement major gatherings in the domain such as the UN-Habitat World Urban Forum or the city networks’ congresses. Yet the WCS relies on a logic of its own as it counts on the convening power of the city-state, its reputation as an urban policy model, and capacity for mobilization through both nation- and local-level institutional relations. With the edition in 2018 including over 1800 delegates and 128 participating cities, the summit further included the by-invitation-only WCS Mayors Forum and the Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize, and was held in conjunction with the Singapore International Water Week, CleanEnviro Summit Singapore, and Singapore International Transport Congress and Exhibition. With cities such as Bilbao, Kazan, Medellín, Surabaya, and Tokyo actively participating in the WCS, city networks, as institutional representatives of and networking conveners for these very members, also contributed to and built upon the Singaporean global urban gathering. Yet, as is the case for instance for 100RC, C40, CityNet, and ICLEI in the 2018 edition, city networks contributed as strategic partners and not as core organizers. The WCS is a creation whose overall direction remains firmly in the hands of the government of Singapore, attesting to its intertwined objectives of hosting a global urban forum aligned with Singapore’s urban policy expertise, while simultaneously promoting its national brand particularly among city governments’ political leaders, practitioners, and partners attending the event (Koh, 2017).

The promotion of Singapore’s urban policy expertise through city networks takes various other forms. Among them is the collaboration between the CLC, Metropolis, and Montréal for a project documenting the experience of five metropolises in the provision of affordable housing (CLC et al., 2019). Similarly, UCLG ASPAC and the CLC have co-organized, back to back with the 2018 WCS, the ASEAN Mayors Forum across different events held in connection with the city-state’s chairing of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) for 2018. Intriguingly, the district “mayors” of Singapore attended the event along with the participation of mayors and governors from cities such as Balanga, Catbalogan, and Jakarta. Yet, while the latter are (often) elected representatives of municipal, metropolitan, or even provincial governments, the former are national government representatives designated by a statutory board of the national government as local administrators of community services. Singapore does not have a mayor as the highest-ranking official of a local government simply because there is no local government system in the island’s republic. Yet Singapore actively engages in city networks and city leaders’ fora side by side with heads of local governments from other countries, thus confirming, once again, the malleable nature of the underlying institutional architecture of city diplomacy and Singapore’s selective role in it.

Lastly, it is worth noting that there is one instance where the CLC does not fulfil the front stage governmental role of promoting the city-state’s urban policy model in the international and transnational dynamism of Singapore through bilateral and networking initiatives. This is the case of C40, where the main landing office is the National Climate Change Secretariat, which is within the Prime Minister’s Office, and coordinates Singapore’s climate change action both domestically and internationally. In overall terms, it has long been noted that Singapore understands its engagement in policy learning through city networks as a member that is more interested in ‘teaching’ rather than ‘learning’ from peer members of the network (Lee and Van de Meene, 2012). Yet in the case of the city network C40, the city-state is clearly learning from (in addition to teaching) other global cities in policy domains such as energy efficiency and climate change resilience, hence the strategic decision to connect with the network through an institutional entry point that goes beyond the mission of a local organization feeding into a global informational infrastructure. As noted above, global cities are underpinned by the entrepreneurial driver of a city government seeking to boost the attractiveness and reputation of its urban fabric. Yet, even if it does not match with this characterization, Singapore can join formal networking organizations primarily conceived for city governments and benefit from the ‘club goods’ that such city networks offer exclusively to their members such as access to expertise and contacts (Tortola and Couperus, 2022).

In sum, within the overarching goal of promoting its urban policy expertise, Singapore prioritizes activities of city diplomacy that are often deployed outside the logic and limits offered by transnational city networks, understood as the preferred institutional configuration for much of the relational work that city governments carry out beyond their national borders. The deployment of the CLC as the main institutional entry point for global and regional city networks and the malleable, selective use of city networks sustain this point. Likewise, the centralized convening power of the WCS and the number of bilateral partnerships that not only the CLC but the wider governance system (going beyond the governmental-administrative apparatus) establish with subnational, national, and international governmental actors and their partners confirm Singapore’s privileged position.

Conclusion

We have shown how Singapore’s selective engagement with city networks, and other means of promoting itself globally as an urban policy model, amounts to modalities of transnational action that are not open to city governments. Through a counterfactual logic, Singapore’s outstanding dynamism beyond its borders helps to reveal the current constraints of city diplomacy. In contrast to Singapore’s ‘privileged position’, city governments, even those at or near the top of the global cities hierarchy, need to join forces transnationally within a logic framed in terms of (lack of) access to state-centric institutional venues and resources.

Between the two (not mutually exclusive) primary outputs offered by city networks to their members – political advocacy on the one side and technical cooperation and policy learning on the other – Singapore undoubtedly prioritizes the latter. If, unlike cities inserted in national government systems, Singapore does not utilize the city-based institutional venues offered by formal networking organizations for political advocacy vis-à-vis national governments and the state-based international architecture, it is because this subset of activities is consciously inscribed within the relationships that Singapore as a nation-state has with its equals and within intergovernmental fora. This applies, for instance, to Singapore’s substantive diplomatic role in the foundation and development of ASEAN as a regional state-based intergovernmental organization. By actively supporting ASEAN, Singapore is promoting a diplomatic culture and multipolar balance that is beneficial for the country in geopolitical terms, particularly with regard to tensions with neighboring Malaysia and Indonesia and legacies of the city-state’s independence in 1965 (Chong, 2010). Singapore’s decision to project itself as an urban policy model is part of a wider (state-based) strategy revolving around the merits of international institutions and economic interdependence.¹⁰ When the city-state selectively decides to engage among ‘peer cities’ in a city network such as C40 and harness the amplifying power of formal networking organizations, it does so within a hierarchical logic dominated by the political authority and decision-making powers that derive from its capacity to entertain relations with other sovereign nation-states. Even if primarily conceived to have city governments as members, city networks are aware of this hierarchical logic, hence their substantive interest in accommodating a global city-state such as Singapore in their networks through a pragmatic and malleable approach.

Singapore promotes its urban policy model as a form of urban geopolitics, seeking to construct and circulate its expertise in order to enhance its reputation and influence inter-state relationships, in addition to bolstering its commercial interests. As Barber (2013: 113) surmises, in a hypothetical world made up of city-states, sovereignty would compromise connectivity: “Singapore has tensions with Indonesia and Malaysia that Jakarta does not have with Kuala Lumpur”. The possibility of overriding the logic of contiguous state sovereignties through city networks allows Singapore to promote its urban policy model acting as if it were a city government sharing policy knowledge among peers. This, in turn, allows Singapore to influence the state-centric geopolitical relations in which the transnational dynamism of city governments is embedded.

Reprising the two primary outputs offered by city networks to their members, the city-state thus invests in its leading role as a policy learning model as a means for advocacy, aiming to enhance its political positioning worldwide and within the region. At first, it might then be argued that Singapore’s city diplomacy serves state-centric interests, in line with other cities that harness their double characterization as sovereignty-free and sovereignty-bound actors in the international field. Within this view, the article reveals the exceptional level of effectiveness and resources that a highly integrated one-tier government can allocate and ensure for the international positioning of the global city-state. Yet what we witness here is rather a fundamental qualitative difference since, in contrast to the overwhelming majority of city diplomacy practices, Singapore thinks like a nation-state and its ultimate target is other nation-states (see Magnusson, 2011).¹¹ In other words, Singapore’s political agency cannot be compared with even the most dynamic global cities. Although Singapore ranks ‘below’ London and New York in the world city network’s classification issued by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network ([GaWC], 2020), for instance, the international political authority and decision-making powers deriving from its national sovereignty in a state-centric international polity position Singapore in a different league from other global cities. Singapore has itself long been ranked near to the apex of the world cities hierarchy, but its access to institutional venues and resources correspond to a qualitatively different (and superior) club of international political actors.

The case of Singapore shows that more power still lies with nation-states than rhetoric of mayors ‘ruling the world’ might lead us to believe. The range of possibilities open to Singapore to be highly selective in investing resources in collaborative networking endeavors is a privilege not enjoyed by the vast majority of cities across the world. In contrast to the city-state of Singapore, active participation in city networks is an obligatory passage point for city governments seeking to harness their ambivalent constitution as sovereignty-free and sovereignty-bound actors in order to bypass traditional policy scales.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Ricardo Martinez

Notes

Ricardo Martinez is a Senior Research Fellow of the Global Cities Programme at CIDOB (Barcelona Centre for International Affairs). He is also an Associate at the Asia Research Institute (ARI) of the National University of Singapore (NUS). His research focuses on the international and transnational actions of cities: the localization of the global and European agendas on sustainability and development, policy mobilities and decentralized cooperation, and the contribution of city diplomacy to global climate governance. He has published on urban studies and International Relations’ academic journals such as Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Global Governance, Urban Geography, and Urban Studies. Previously a policy officer, Ricardo has over 10 years of professional experience in the global network United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), where his work focused on the linkage between international development and urban governance.

Tim Bunnell is Professor in the Department of Geography and Director of the Asia Research Institute (ARI) of the National University of Singapore (NUS). He is also leader of the ARI Asian Urbanisms cluster. The primary focus of his research is urbanization in Southeast Asia, examining both the transformation of cities in that region and urban connections with other parts of the world. Tim’s books include From World City to the World in One City: Liverpool through Malay Lives (Wiley, 2016) and Urban Asias: Essays on Futurity Past and Present (Jovis, 2018; co-edited with Daniel P.S. Goh), and he has also published in a wide range of journals in geography and urban studies. He is currently working on a collaborative project comparing Nusantara (the new Indonesian national capital city) with other ‘capitals of the future' in Southeast Asia.

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