| Summary: | In recent years there has been a steady rise in the amount of cities engaing in collaborative transnational networking. Perceived as a valid response to the threats of globalisation and the internationalisation of the economy, cities have formulated partnerships that transcend the remit of their locality enabling them a new mobility. Predominantly focused at the European scale, individual cities are establishing transnational networks that aim to harness and aggregate isolated pockets of power into a powerful cohesive institutional identity that allow them a collective voice and a potential degree of influence within European governance structures. Using the TeleCities network as an empirical focus, this thesis aims to explore the spatial implications within this potential 'new geography of governance'. To do this theories of institutional ism, reflexivity and scale are used to construct an analytical framework that explores the implications and processes of transnational networking. This is then applied to a three way case study methodology that aims to examine the process and attributes of transnational networking from a multi-scalar perspective. In doing so, the thesis provides a theoretical and empirical contextualisation to the origins, functionality and relationality of a transnational network and its ability to link actors and processes at different spatial scales.
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