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Cities are increasingly seen as essential components of the global response to climate change: setting targets, taking action, and rendering themselves accountable to global audiences for their efforts. Why cities are making themselves globally accountable in the absence of compulsion or obligation, and what it means for cities to operate simultaneously as global and locally accountable actors, constitute important puzzles for scholars of global climate politics. In this article I set out the basic parameters of this phenomenon, and offer a conceptual framework with which to parse the politics of accountability in networked urban climate governance. I apply this framework to identify three distinct forms of accountability present in the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group: an external politics of recognition; a network politics of ordering, and; an internal politics of translation. The article explores each for their distinct political processes, orientation, and power dynamics, and offers some propositions with respect to how they interact, and what it means both locally and globally when cities make themselves globally accountable.

There is substantial evidence that the global governance of climate change must pass through cities. While formal networks offer cities a means of generating effects that extend beyond their own borders, it remains unclear as to whether such networks can address collective action barriers and implementation gaps. City-networks, after all, are limited in their efforts to govern and must rely on information, service provision, and soft forms of coercion if they are to steer their members past these considerable challenges. This article contributes to extant efforts to assess their ability to do so by addressing two gaps in the literature. First, the article focuses on the Partners for Climate Protection (PCP), a city-network that has received little attention to date. Second, through analysis of two Canadian cities (Toronto and Winnipeg), the article provides an empirical illustration of the limitations of network authority and influence, and offers some thoughts on what this means for networked urban climate governance in Canada and beyond.