OWU Talk: Translocal Relations and Climate Change in East Asia: March 28

Guest Lecturer: Taedong Lee

Why do local governments become actively engaged in the issue of global climate change? How do global factors influence local governments’ choices, policies, and interactions? These questions are puzzling in that local governments have been regarded as public service providers in the domestic arena; and studies on cities and climate change have primarily focused on domestic drivers to explain local governments’ climate change policies. In this talk, I discuss translocal relations of cities that have made an international effort to collectively tackle climate change. Compared to state-centric terms, inter-national or trans-national relations, trans-local relations look at policies, politics, and interactions of local governments in the globalized world. Using the framework of translocal relations, I argue that the level of global cityness and local political attributes are primary driving factors for local governments’ engagement in global climate governance in Asia as well as around the world.

Taedong Lee is associate professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Yonsei University, Seoul. He received his Ph.D. at University of Washington, Seattle and was an assistant professor at the City University of Hong Kong from 2010 to 2013. His areas of research include global and sub-national environmental politics and policy, NGO politics, and social network analysis. Professor Lee recently published his book, Global Cities and Climate Change: Translocal Relations of Environmental Governance (Routledge, 2015). His articles have appeared in journals including Policy Sciences, Review of Policy Research, Journal of Cleaner Production, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, Policy Studies Journal, Energy Policy, and Global Environmental Politics.