Towards Glocal Leadership: Taking up the Challenge of New Local Governance in Europe?

In recent years local leaders have become simultaneously intensely local, in fostering partnerships with local players, and intensely global, in going abroad to get resources, be they political, cognitive, or financial, to implement large urban projects; they have become ‘glocal’ leaders. At the same time, local stakeholders such as metropolitan or regional authorities, chambers of commerce, firms, or civil society organizations have pursued their own international objectives independently. Not all cities have therefore developed such a thing as a strategy. Nor have they all played the same hand in the international game. From this, two questions immediately arise: (i) why have some cities succeeded in carrying out an international strategy and others not? (ii) why have the successful ones chosen different paths? By focusing on local political leadership patterns in three European case studies, we argue that along with their institutional strengths the personal traits of the mayors are more than crucial to understanding why some cities have strategically played the international game and how they have played it. But this does not tell the whole story. One needs to make a detour via place-specific governance patterns, and more precisely the key local stakeholders to be convinced, persuaded, or cajoled, to properly assess the urban international strategies. With these major findings, we conclude that the ‘new international city era’ phenomenon tends to personalize local power.