From 13 October to 3 November 2014, WIPCAD research fellow Kai Harbrich visited Washington D.C. and New York City to conduct interviews with staff and experts of the World Bank’s Carbon Finance Unit and UNDP’s Environment and Energy Group.
In his PhD project entitled “Cities as partners in global climate governance”, Kai focuses on the increasing and varying interactions between international organizations (IOs) and local government organizations (LGOs), which he seeks to analyze and explain by drawing on a resource-exchange theory approach to inter-organizational cooperation.
While in theory a number of factors may account for the observed differences in the extent and shape of IO-LGO collaborations, most of the respondents placed strong emphasis on the role of strategic resource considerations when describing their organization’s (dis-)engagement with particular LGOs and thus confirmed, at least on the part of IOs, the validity of the proposed resource exchange model. However, as these findings call for further investigation – particularly with regard to the exact alignment of different types of resources among partners – a second stay in Washington and New York is scheduled for October 2015.
Kai Harbrich