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Transnational actors are critical for financing programs and generating awareness around climate change adaptation in cities. However, it is unclear whether transnational support actually enables more authority over adaptation actions and whether outcomes address wide-ranging development needs. In this article, I compare experiences from three cities in India—Surat, Indore, and Bhubaneswar—and link local political agency over adaptation with their supporting transnational funders. I find that adaptation governance involves powers of agency over directing bureaucratic practices, public finance, spatial strategies, and institutional culture. A city's ability to exert these powers then yields different patterns of adaptation. However, political agency is circumscribed by a combination of historical political economic constraints and emerging transnational resources that promote specific forms of political meaning and procedures. The presence of external support therefore paradoxically constrains the governance autonomy of cities. This opens up new opportunities for development dependency—that is, ones that mirror neoliberal critiques of foreign aid—within the global marketplace for climate finance.

In cities that are pursuing climate change adaptation actions, transnational actors are critical catalysts for financing programs, generating public awareness, and legitimizing the agenda. However, scholars of urban climate adaptation have yet to understand whether such external interventions have long-lasting effects on the sustainability and equity of urban governance processes, particularly when placed in context with competing development priorities across the global South. In this paper, I draw on experiences from three cities in India – Surat, Indore, and Bhubaneswar – to analyze the multilevel dynamics that link local adaptation actions with their supporting transnational networks and funders. Drawing on a comparative multi-scale case study methodology, I find that current capacity deficits in Indian cities indeed allow external actors to catalyze adaptation, but this relationship becomes more dialectical farther into the planning and implementation stages. The governance of climate adaptation in fact involves embedding adaptation into bureaucratic practices, financial processes, spatial plans, and institutional cultures. The interaction between these four pathways results in the coproduction of knowledge, co-creation of options, and inter- institutionalization of standards, practices, and behaviors. A particular actor's ability to exert authority over how interventions are framed, financed, bureaucratized, and built across the urban landscape then yields different patterns of adaptation. This finding therefore reasserts the role of urban political actors operating within the global climate governance regime and the marketplace for climate finance.

Perspectives from worldwide experts on how major cities across the globe are responding to the major environmental threats of our time, including global climate change Over half of the world's population now lives in cities, and this share is expected to increase in the coming decades. With growing urbanization, cities and their residents face substantial environmental challenges such as higher temperatures, droughts, wildfires, and increased flooding. In response to these pressing challenges, some cities have begun to develop local environmental regulations that supplement national and environmental laws. In so doing, cities have stepped into a role that has been historically dominated by higher levels of government.Global Sustainable Cities takes stock of the policies that have been implemented by cities around the world in recent years in several key areas: water, air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and climate adaptation. It examines the advantages—and potential drawbacks—of allowing cities to assume a significant role in environmental regulation, given the legal and political constraints in which cities operate.The contributors present a series of case studies of the actions that seven leading cities—Abu Dhabi, Beijing, Berlin, Delhi, London, New York, and Shanghai—are taking to improve their environments and adapt to climate change. The first volume of its kind, Global Sustainable Cities is a critical comparative assessment of the actions that major cities in the global North and South are taking to advance sustainability