Questions of power, authority, and urban transformation.

Selected publications and contributions

Gordon (2020), Cities on the World Stage: The Politics of Global Urban Climate Governance. Drawing on the C40 Cities network, the book develops a theory of global urban governance fields to explain how shared norms, collective identity, recognition, and power relations can sustain coordination among cities participating voluntarily in global climate governance.

Gordon and Ljungkvist (2022), “Theorizing the Globally Engaged City in World Politics,” European Journal of International Relations. The article shifts attention from cities' global functions to their politically constructed global identities, emphasizing recognition, differentiation from nation-states, and the discursive processes that make cities legible as world-political actors.

Gordon and Johnson (2017), “The Orchestration of Global Urban Climate Governance: Conducting Power in the Post-Paris Climate Regime,” Environmental Politics. The article examines how intermediaries seek to steer and coordinate urban climate action through orchestration, foregrounding who exercises influence, through which mechanisms, and toward whose political objectives.

Selected publication and contribution

Gordon (2016), “The Politics of Accountability in Networked Urban Climate Governance,” Global Environmental Politics 16(2): 82–100. Using the C40 network, this article distinguishes three intertwined politics of accountability: external recognition, ordering within the network, and the translation of global expectations into local political settings. It provides a conceptual foundation for understanding tensions between cities' global and local accountability claims.

Selected publication and contribution

Leffel, Gordon, and Lee (2025), “Explaining Policy Teaching versus Learning in Environmental Transnational Municipal Networks: The Case of the Kitakyushu Initiative,” Journal of Urban Affairs. By examining how participating cities teach, learn, and adapt environmental policies through a transnational municipal initiative, the article challenges one-directional accounts of policy transfer and highlights the active role of Global South municipalities in reshaping circulating knowledge.

Selected publication and contribution

Gordon and McLaughlin (2026), “Cities and Climate Change,” in De Gruyter Handbook of Cities, Infrastructure and International Relations. This chapter connects urban climate action to the material and institutional infrastructures through which cities participate in international politics, providing a point of departure for analyzing the politics of existing and anticipated urban systems.