Municipal partnerships for local development in the Global South? Understanding connections and context from a translocal perspective

This paper discusses translocal linkages by focusing on municipal partnerships. Through municipal international cooperation, local governments in the Global North are involved in improving municipal performance and enhancing municipal-led local development in the Global South. Local governments in the South increasingly consider their formal international relations with partner cities of strategic value to meet some of their capacity and resource needs and eventually to foster local development. The paper seeks to explore what such formalised municipal partnerships mean for local development opportunities. It particularly aims to identify a number of factors that can be regarded as strengths and weaknesses of translocal linkages in a municipal development context. Based on a comparative analysis of some specific translocal/transmunicipal partnerships, five key determinants are presented: institutional capacity, politics and vested interest, alignment with national development priorities, funding and mechanisms to facilitate knowledge exchange. The paper concludes with a discussion of the extent to which municipal international cooperation can be understood as an extra-local driver of development and how new translocal dependencies are created