Competition through Interurban Policy Making: Bidding to Host Megaevents as Entrepreneurial Networking

Abstract

Recent scholarship on policy mobility, globally active municipal governments, and transnational city-to-city policy making suggest a new dynamic in entrepreneurial cities: entrepreneurialism based not only on place competition, but also based on practices of interurban networking. This paper argues that cross-city initiatives to share planning expertise can function both as policy-making networks and as markets for policy knowledge, as urban governance stakeholders strategically leverage intercity initiatives for sharing urban planning knowledge. Bidding to host sporting ‘megaevents’ highlights these networked entrepreneurial strategies. A comparative study of bids to host the Olympic Games over a twenty-year period shows that policy-making knowledge (templates, models, and best practices) shared between cities is both necessary for competing to host events, and represents ‘policy commodities’ that planning coalitions can use as part of their entrepreneurial portfolios. While much commentary on interurban policy making focuses on how policy practices are received by cities or mobilized by international businesses or policy makers, this paper signals to a multidirectional entrepreneurial strategy: although megaevents federations and sponsors developed megaevents knowledge networks to leverage urban planning for profit, many local development coalitions have incorporated these same networks into their competitive strategies.