City Diplomacy for a renovated Air Quality policymaking across Europe.

Urban areas account for 50% of the world’s population and Europe is one of the most urbanized continents in the world (Sawe, 2018). With cities being the epicenter of worldwide globalization processes and international decision-making, they also became home to some of the major contemporary economic and societal issues, among which the environmental crisis. Air pollution, in particular, poses some serious threats to the health of urban citizens, being responsible for more than 400,000 premature deaths in Europe each year (Schaefer, Kieslinger, and Fabian, 2020). Despite this, European countries still perform variously, as well as cities belonging to the same country. These results are affected by different factors, among which natural parameters, such as geographical positioning, but also by the robust or poor mitigation and adaptation strategies implemented. This paper investigates to what extent proper policymaking can improve the performance of cities and, as a consequence, countries, in terms of AQ. It reflects on whether shared problems in the practice of pollution containment or, on the other hand, replicable successful strategies exist. The research, therefore, aims at understanding the conditions for either one or the other scenario and ultimately identifying practices among the city diplomatic activities to replicate across different environments, which could best support cities in the strive to reduce air pollution. The research question (RQ) around which the paper will build its reasonings and hypotheses is formulated as follows: How can city diplomacy contribute to tackling air pollution across European countries? By investigating the relations between city diplomacy and air quality, the paper fills two literature gaps. Firstly, by associating city diplomacy and air quality, the research selects a specific environmental issue as potentially representative of other climate concerns, rather than applying city diplomacy to the broad concept of ‘greening’ and environmental protection. Research studies often focus on the general concepts of global warming and greenhouse gases (GHGs), which have indirect links to the sanitary status of individuals, while AQ is directly relatable to the health conditions of humans (Manisalidis et al., 2020) and therefore useful in drafting local policies. Nevertheless, this choice does not prevent the conclusion drafted by the analysis from being applied to other environmentally-specific issues. This is particularly relevant if it is considered that air pollution and climate change are scientifically deemed to be inextricably linked in terms of emission sources, climate characteristics, chemistry, and mitigation measures (Kumar, 2021). Secondly, by conducting semi-structured interviews with city officials, this research investigates the prerequisites for cities to become diplomatically successful and overcome a specific climate-related issue, rather than on the potential of city diplomacy itself. In particular, this research categorizes cities’ prerequisites under three dimensions or hypotheses, mentioned as potentially impactful in the existing literature but not yet investigated: the connective role of cities between top-down and bottom-up AQ solutions, the network dimension, where bilateral and multilateral relations, allow cities to draft improved AQ mitigation measures, and the financial, where direct investments from multilateral banks and international private funds to cities can improve AQ diplomatic activities.