Local Leadership and Global Goals: How City Sustainability Networks are Changing Progressive Policymaking Emma French, Supraja Sudharsan and Jennifer Clark Series: Progressive Mayors and Urban Social Movements While national governments often struggle to address global climate change, cities are in a better position to innovate, especially through peer networks that publicly value sustainability. However, challenges remain, notably in translating intention into action and building internal capacity. Here, we show how mayors have influenced policymaking in four southeastern US cities. The global nature of environmental crises has historically led to phrases like “think globally, act locally,” emphasizing the need to acknowledge the broad impacts of human development. As national governments struggle to implement policies to address global climate change, cities are becoming the practical centers of policy innovation for sustainability. The stark contrast between national and city leadership is particularly evident in the United States, where hundreds of city mayors have signed climate pledges even as the US federal government plans to withdraw from one of the most proactive international treaties to date. More recent evidence of the policy gap between cities and the nation-state is the commitment made by over 50 mayors in the US 1 to transition their jurisdictions to 100% renewable energy. In 2015, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg referenced this growing emphasis on cities when he said municipalities are “poised to play a leading role in addressing the challenges of the 21 st century.” 2 Although cities like New York, Paris and London have taken the rhetorical lead in the city-scale response to climate change and associated sustainability, resilience, and energy-efficiency plans and policies, many cities have responded to the climate-change challenge with less international fanfare. In this essay, we highlight how mayors have influenced sustainability policymaking in four cities in the southeastern US: Atlanta, Houston, Orlando, and New Orleans. Through in-depth key-informant interviews, we researched the role of mayors in claiming and publicly valuing sustainability, seeking and securing external support, and institutionalizing sustainability—all of which impact policymaking. One way cities are demonstrating their commitment to sustainability is by joining high-profile regional, national, and transnational networks. These networks are initiated by public, private, and philanthropic organizations, and facilitate the design, adoption, and implementation of sustainable energy, water, transportation, and land-use policies at the city scale (Mocca 2017), thereby contributing to (oft-insufficient) public-sector efforts to address some of the wicked problems of the 21 st century. Our case studies were selected from the pool of cities that are part of the City Energy 1 See: www.sierraclub.org/ready-for-100/commitments . 2 See: www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2015-08-18/city-century . 1