Paradiplomacy within the globalization debate: the tendencies of subnational governments’ engagements in transnational citytwinning between 2010 and 2014

Abstract

The idea that nation-states are the only significant actors in the international arena has been challenged as new transnational actors, that is, subnational governments (e.g. governors and mayors), have increasingly exercised paradiplomatic activities all over the world. Most academic literature on city twinning (sister cities), a paradiplomatic activity, utilizes the concept of globalization, albeit without an analytical model robust enough, to explain the worldwide practice of such activity. Thus, through an exploratory approach, this research aims to answer the following question: what explains subnational governments’ tendencies of engaging in transnational city twinning between 2010 and 2014? To achieve that objective, this monograph utilizes the five points of contention of the globalization debate (i.e. conceptualization, causes, periodization, impacts and trajectory) that are debated among the sceptics’, hyperglobalizers’ and transformationalists’ schools, and content analysis methodology to analyze sister cities (city twinning), as a paradiplomatic activity, that established or renewed sister city agreements during the period between 2010 and 2014, and city-twinning surveys. The results are evidence that both paradiplomacy, as a general phenomenon, and city twinning (sister cities), as a paradiplomatic activity, should be understood as concepts of multiple dimensions and causes, having new aspects and characteristics when compared to their pre-Cold War activities, locally and globally generating different types of impacts, and having a homogeneous and linear trajectory between 2010 and 2014 on newly established sister city agreements and an uncertain future trajectory on its renewal or continuity in case of permanent agreements. Therefore, the results that were obtained through the analysis of the surveys and sister city agreements are evidence that the tendencies of engaging in transnational city twinning between 2010 and 2014, in different continents, are explained by the forces of contemporary globalization, in its transformationalist approach, upon the external activities of subnational governments.