Locating transnational city networks in multilevel governance

Transnational city networks (TCNs) are an expanding type of organization throughout the world—above all in Europe, where cities have been densely connected for several decades— and increasingly important players in a number of policy areas. More often than not, these networks link, directly or indirectly, to other levels and actors of governance, thus generating peculiar configurations of multilevel governance (MLG). This paper connects TCNs to the MLG conceptual framework by locating the former within an institutional space defined by the two types of MLG formulated by Hooghe and Marks, and reflecting on some of the implications of TCNs’ position in this space. In doing so, the paper achieves two objectives: first, it opens up the dominant MLG typology to accommodate intermediate and hybrid configurations of multilevel governance. Second, based on this reconceptualization, it provides an analytical basis on which to build in subsequent empirical work on city networks.