The Swallows Flapping Bogotá: Beginning of the Green Transnational State. Networks of Cities and Transnational Citizenship. Study Period: 2013-2016

Abstract

International relations are traditionally thought as a dynamic led by national governments, but population growth in cities has changed this behavior. As the World Bank (2019) estimates, urban areas will concentrate 80% of the population by 2045, which is why they have become more impor- tant in terms of global policy indicators, as there are currently local governments that must plan and implement as national governments traditionally do. The environmental characteristics of local terri- tories are equally a sign of contrast, even between cities of a same country, which is the reason why the actions of a local government must be reflected outside geographical boundaries and innovate outside the limits of the national political structure.

This research opens the door to two issues that do not belong to the main guidelines of international relations: on the one hand the cities diplomacy, which is visible in city networks dynamics, and on the other hand, the ways how environmental risk means a solution.

Both of them under the action carried out by Bogotá’s city government during 2013-2016, who due the particularities of the territory developed the environmental action in an unique way that became the city in a relevant actor that builded the global environmental governance, a micro actor that changed the performance of the macrostructure due the south-south and triangular cooperation, the above constituted as a legacy that is maintained to the present in the development of network cooperation.