“Networked coalitions” as metropolitan governance: lessons from the emergence of Australia’s Committees for Cities and Regions

The continuous rescaling of metropolitan governance has been a prominent feature of the neoliberal state. Metropolitan coalitions are one variant of governance in which disparate actors are brought together around a common agenda or platform. Drawing upon the example of Australia’s Committees for Cities and Regions (CCRs), this article applies urban governance theory to better understand the effectiveness of networked metropolitan governance coalitions. We find that such coalitions derive political legitimacy from the externalities produced by their network relations, which we theorize as a three-dimensional nexus of vertical (between levels of government), horizontal (between local actors), and diagonal (with CCR counterparts) components. Although the CCR model is distinctive to Australia and New Zealand, it reflects similar networked and multiscalar processes at work elsewhere, serving as a template for political landscapes in which in-built legacy political arrangements largely preclude metropolitan-scale issues from being addressed.