Special issue article: Why does everyone think cities can save the planet?

Urban Studies
2020, Vol. 57(11) 2263–2281
Ó Urban Studies Journal Limited 2018
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development, global philanthropy DOI: 10.1177/0042098018798555
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and the rise of urban solutionism

Sergio Montero
Universidad de los Andes, Colombia

Abstract
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is marked by the consolidation of sustainability as
a key guiding principle and an emphasis on cities as a potential solution to global development
problems. However, in the absence of an agreement on how to implement sustainable develop-
ment in cities, a set of urban policy solutions and ‘best practices’ became the vehicles through
which the sustainable development agenda is spreading worldwide. This article shows that the
rapid circulation of Bogotá as a model of sustainable transport since the 2000s reflects an increas-
ing focus of the international development apparatus on urban policy solutions as an arena to
achieve global development impacts, what I call the ‘leveraging cities’ logic in this article. This logic
emerges at a particular historical conjuncture characterised by: (1) the rising power of global phi-
lanthropy to set development agendas; (2) the generalisation of solutionism as a strategy of action
among development and philanthropic organisations; and (3) the increasing attention on cities as
solutions for global development problems, particularly around sustainability and climate change.
By connecting urban policy mobilities debates with development studies this article seeks to
unpack the emergence, and the limits, of ‘leveraging cities’ as a proliferating global development
practice. These urban policy solutions are far from being a clear framework of action. Rather,
their circulation becomes a ‘quick fix’ to frame the problem of sustainable development given the
unwillingness of development and philanthropic organisations to intervene in the structural fac-
tors and multiple scales that produce environmental degradation and climate change.

Keywords
Bogotá, global philanthropy, sustainable urban development, sustainable urban transport, urban policy

Corresponding author:
Sergio Montero, Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios
sobre Desarrollo (Cider), Universidad de los Andes, Calle
18, No. 0-0 Este, Edficio PU, Bogotá 112111, Colombia.
Email: s.montero@uniandes.edu.co
2264 Urban Studies 57(11)

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Ⲵ⍱㹼ᡀѪҶṶᇊਟᤱ㔝ਁኅ䰞仈Ⲵ“ᘛ䙏䀓ߣᯩṸ”DŽ

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Received July 2017; accepted August 2018

Introduction sustainable urban transport. The occasion

We’ve been called a knowledge bank and I’ve
been referring to the Bank that we need to take
the next step and be the solutions bank.
(Jim Yong Kim, President of the
World Bank, 2013)1
The room was full. It was a cold January
morning in Washington, DC and only those
who arrived early enough to go through the
World Bank security system half an hour
before the event started were able to secure a
seat. The rest of us were placed in an adja-
cent room, where a giant screen broadcast
the event live. Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese,
Chinese, and English with multiple accents
mixed together in the background chatter.
On the stage, Jim Yong Kim, president of
the World Bank, and Michael Bloomberg,
president of Bloomberg Philanthropies and
mayor of the city of New York at the time,
were about to start a discussion about the
new hot topic in the world of development:
was Transforming Transportation 2013, a
two-day event co-organised by the World
Bank and EMBARQ, a sustainable trans-
port think tank established in 2001 by the
World Resources Institute thanks to a Shell
Foundation grant.
Transforming Transportation is a snap-
shot of the new landscape of international
development, and more specifically, of the
increasing importance of global philan-
thropy and cities in development circles.
Bicycle advocates in suits negotiating their
identity as experts and consultants; World
Bank portfolio managers and philanthro-
pists interested in finding cost-effective and
replicable urban transport solutions; mayors
from Africa, Latin America, and Asia look-
ing for development funding and transport
projects that can be implemented during
their short 3–4 year political terms; salesmen
for Volvo buses and Siemens trams; univer-
sity professors summarising the implications
of their research for sustainable
Montero
development; journalists looking for news-
worthy stories of cities, transport, and cli-
mate change . These are some of the
profiles that meet and collide at the World
Bank during the coffee breaks of
Transforming Transportation. But
Transforming Transportation also illustrates
the increasing emphasis on scaling up urban
policy solutions and ‘best practices’ as a
logic of intervention to attend to the most
pressing global development challenges of
our times. Indeed, when Rachel Kyte, vice
president of the World Bank Sustainable
Development Network, introduced the
meeting, she highlighted this very logic:
We want to discuss today how to make urban
transport systems more sustainable in every
sense of that word, [this being] one of the most
important development challenges for a rap-
idly urbanizing planet: which solutions in
urban transport exist, which are the ones that
can be scaled up, where do best practices exist,
how they can be replicated.
Bogotá’s bicycle programmes and the
Transmilenio Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) sys-
tem are, in this context, a favourite and well-
known case. For instance, when William
Cobbet, director of the Cities Alliance, is
asked what cities we should be learning
from, he refers to Bogotá and Medellı́n as
‘great cases to look at’ in the field of sustain-
able transport. Discussing the Bogotá model
in conferences around the world and sponsor-
ing study tours to Bogotá have been important
practices that international development orga-
nisations such as the World Bank and global
think tanks such as EMBARQ or the Institute
for Transportation and Development Policy
(ITDP) have used to create and nurture a glo-
bal epistemic community of sustainable trans-
port experts, including the ones meeting in
Transforming Transportation. For instance,
when Adriana Lobo, head of EMBARQ
Mexico at the time, introduced one of the
2265
panels, she said: ‘we have worked on this for
many, many years, so we have a little history
behind us, and we always talk about the story
of Bogotá and Curitiba’. This ‘we’ is used to
signal that those in the room are part of the
global community of sustainable urban trans-
port. For a long time, they were a minority in
development circles. In a field traditionally
dominated by US and European subway
and highway engineers discussing large infra-
structure projects and how to minimise trans-
port times from point A to point B, buses,
bicycles, and policies of cities of the Global
South were often anecdotes. The fact that the
president of the World Bank was sitting at
Transforming Transportation in 2013 was an
important achievement that confirmed the
emerging paradigm change in transportation
policy from modernisation to sustainability
ideals (Banister, 2008) but also the empower-
ment of another type of transportation experts:
ones that are less worried about speed maximi-
sation and quantitative models, and are instead
more knowledgeable about global greenhouse
gas emissions, policy solutions, and ‘best
practices’.
Although the circulation of policy models
between cities is not a new phenomenon
(Harris and Moore, 2013), certainly not in
the world of development and philanthropy
(Parmar, 2002) or in the discipline of urban
planning (Home, 1997), the speed at which
urban policies and planning ideas circulate
has increased enormously in the last decade
(Healey, 2013; McFarlane, 2011; Peck and
Theodore, 2015). The transnational traffic
of policy knowledge is particularly notice-
able in the case of urban sustainability and
climate change initiatives (Betsill and
Bulkeley, 2004) as cities are increasingly seen
not only as the cause of global environmen-
tal problems but also as potential solutions
(Graute, 2016; Wachsmuth et al., 2016).
Recent debates on urban studies have pro-
vided critical insights on how policy models
2266
and ‘best practices’ are produced, circulated
and contested (Healey, 2013; McCann and
Ward, 2011; Roy and Ong, 2011; Peck and
Theodore, 2015). Yet, answers to the ques-
tion of why urban policy circulation has
increased in recent years have often been
limited to either the spread of neoliberalism
or technological advances and cheaper air
travel fares (Peck and Theodore, 2010).
Based on the analysis of the wide global cir-
culations of Bogotá’s transport policies
Ciclovı´a and Transmilenio BRT, I propose
an alternative theoretical direction to answer
this question by connecting debates about
policy mobilities with development studies
and, thus, unpacking how the emergence of
the ‘leveraging cities’ logic as a proliferating
global development practice can, at least in
part, explain the increasing speed of urban
policy circulation in recent decades.
In doing so, I follow Ananya Roy’s call
to move policy mobilities debates beyond
uncovering or identifying powerful actors
and networks that move policies around.
Drawing from Foucault,2 she is interested,
rather, in how studying the practices that
make a policy mobile can lead us to under-
stand the ‘apparatus’ that the movement of
those policies suggests (Roy, 2012). For
example, in Poverty Capital, Roy (2011)
analyses the global travels of microfinance
models as part of the emergence of what she
calls ‘millennial development’, a kinder and
gentler form of development that entails a
democratisation of capital and development
even if North-based institutions still domi-
nate the circulation of development mechan-
isms and their associated capital circuits. In
this article, I argue that to understand why
Bogotá’s BRT and Ciclovı´a programmes
have circulated so widely in the last decade,
given that neither programme is new, it is
necessary to understand the logic of ‘lever-
aging cities’ that increasingly dominates the
apparatus of international development
these days.
Urban Studies 57(11)
Key to this ‘leveraging cities’ logic is the
construction and mobilisation of particular
urban policies as world policy models or, in
the language of consultants and policy-
makers, international ‘best practices’. These
are not necessarily the ‘best’ policies available
in the world but rather those that have been
constructed as ‘best’ by a transnational episte-
mic community of experts and practitioners
that are often funded by international devel-
opment organisations and, increasingly, by
global philanthropy. These are often policy
solutions that can be easily abstracted, mea-
sured, and packaged under a narrative of
urban success so that they can seduce key
decision-makers in city governments across
the world. Through the circulation of these
urban policy models, international develop-
ment and philanthropic organisations comply
with their increasingly stringent quantitative
performance indicators. These policy solu-
tions, however, are far from being illustrations
of a clearly defined framework of action.
Instead, the circulation of urban ‘best prac-
tices’ becomes a logic of intervention in itself:
a ‘quick fix’ to frame the problem of sustain-
able development given the unwillingness of
development and philanthropic organisations
to intervene in the structural factors and mul-
tiple scales that produce environmental degra-
dation and climate change in the first place.
To build my argument, I rely on a combi-
nation of multi-sited research methods and
evidence gathered between 2011 and 2014
that include: (a) in-depth interviews with
more than 90 policy actors involved in the
construction and circulation of Bogotá’s pol-
icies in other cities, including Guadalajara,
San Francisco, and Washington, DC; (b)
participant observation at several interna-
tional conferences and study tours in which
Bogotá transportation policies were invoked
and/or mobilised as a model; (c) interviews
in Washington, DC and the San Francisco
Bay Area with representatives of the main
think tanks, development banks, and
Montero
philanthropic organisations that have
funded Bogotá study tours; and (d) data
from Transmilenio SA archives, which
includes a database of all city delegations
that visited the system from 2001 until 2011.
This combination of methods resonates with
the methodological shift to study urban pol-
icy suggested by policy mobilities authors,
who have called for multi-sited qualitative
and ethnographic methods that stay close to
the everyday practices of policy actors with-
out losing sight of political economy analysis
(Peck and Theodore, 2015; Roy, 2012). It
also helps illuminate how cities and urban
policy exchanges are becoming not only a
preferred scale of neoliberal capitalism but
also an increasingly important arena for
international development banks, global phi-
lanthropy, and think tanks to intervene in
global development problems. Against the
high hopes of development and philanthro-
pic organisations about the potential of cities
and South–South urban policy exchanges to
save the planet’s problems, the article con-
cludes with a note of caution. By promoting
the circulation of urban policy solutions and
‘best practices’, whether they originate in the
South or the North, this ‘leveraging cities’
logic contributes to the diffusion of a rapidly
spreadable yet limited approach to sustain-
ability that this article describes as ‘urban
solutionism’.
Beyond celebrations and
contextual critiques of the
‘Bogotá model’: Connecting
urban policy mobilities and
development studies
A new urban imaginary of Bogotá,
Colombia emerged in the last decade.
Traditionally portrayed as an urban dysto-
pia and a city of fear during the 1980s and
early 1990s, Bogotá became a world policy
model of sustainable urban transport in less
2267
than a decade. The transformation of
Bogotá during the 1990s and early 2000s,
based on the promotion of public space,
non-car transportation alternatives and
teaching citizens ‘cultura ciudadana’,3 has
been nationally and internationally cele-
brated and, more recently, replicated by
many cities in the Global North and South.
However, from all the policies experimented
with in Bogotá, two programmes have been
particularly replicated: (1) Transmilenio,
Bogotá’s famous Bus Rapid Transit (BRT),
a system of high-frequency rapid buses with
dedicated lanes and stations that carries over
one million passengers per day; and (2)
Ciclovı´a, a 70-mile weekly street closure pro-
gramme to promote urban biking and physi-
cal activity that brings together one million
Bogotanos every Sunday in streets normally
reserved for car traffic.
Since 2001, cities as diverse as Guangzhou,
Johannesburg, and Guadalajara, among more
than 100 others, have implemented a BRT sys-
tem drawing inspiration from Bogotá’s
Transmilenio. In the same time period, mayors
and bicycle advocates in more than 400 cities,
including Los Angeles, Santiago de Chile,
Jakarta, and San Francisco, have referenced
Ciclovı´a to pass similar street closure pro-
grammes. Interestingly, other successful pro-
grammes experimented with in Bogotá,
including innovative ways of increasing urban
tax collection or the promotion of urban citi-
zenship, have not been so mobile and have
hardly been replicated in other cities. In a
recent article, Laura Lieto (2015) has argued
that when policies travel from one city to
another what travels is not the policy itself but
a socially constructed ‘mythical narrative’
about the success of that policy in the city
where it was implemented. In the case of
Bogotá, Montero (2017b) has shown that this
myth was a simplistic story of urban transfor-
mation success, the idea that Bogotá moved
from a chaotic Third World city into a sustain-
able transportation model thanks to a limited
2268
Figure 1. Number of cities with a BRT system (1974–2013).
Source: Elaboration by author based on Global BRT data (available at: brtdata.org, accessed July 2015).
set of public space and transportation planning
interventions.
Another interesting fact about the circu-
lation of Bogotá’s Transmilenio and Ciclovı´a
is that neither of these two programmes are
new ideas. For example, BRT has been
already happening and working well in
Curitiba since 1974, while Ciclovı´a has been
happening in Bogotá since 1974. Yet, both
programmes have experienced an exponen-
tial growth since the early 2000s (see
Figure 1 for BRT). In the last 15 years
they have travelled not only South–South
to cities in Latin America, Africa and
Asia, but also South–North to cities in the
USA, Canada, and Europe. Although
urbanism has been traditionally shaped by
urban planning models drawn from
European and North American cities, the
rapid spread of Bogotá’s Transmilenio
and Ciclovı´a in the last decade shows that
the current transnational traffic of policy
models and ideas of the ‘good city’ is more
complex than a North–South transfer.
In the last two decades, a prolific litera-
ture has emerged in architecture, geography
Urban Studies 57(11)
and urban studies around Bogotá’s policy
experiments with public space and non-car
modes of transportation. While much has
been written about Bogotá, both from cele-
bratory (Berney, 2017; Cervero, 2005;
Gilbert and Dávila, 2002; Montezuma,
2005) and critical (Duque Franco, 2008;
Galvis, 2014; Gilbert, 2008) perspectives, less
is known about how and why certain urban
policies and interventions tried out in
Bogotá became policy models and circulated
around the world whereas other policies
were silenced and ignored. One of the few
attempts to critically analyse the making of
Bogotá as a world model is Isabel Duque
Franco’s (2011) piece Bogotá: Between
Identity and Urban Marketing. Resorting to
neo-Marxist theories of urban marketing
(Arantes et al., 2000) and ‘city entrepreneur-
ialism’ (Harvey, 1989), Duque Franco
explains the international recognition of
Bogotá during the 2000s as the outcome of
two types of marketing campaigns orche-
strated by Bogotá’s mayors and local gov-
ernment agencies based on image-making
and competitiveness objectives rather than
Montero
the comprehensive needs of urban popula-
tions. While ‘city entrepreneurialism’ frame-
works have been useful to illuminate the
increasing primacy of economic growth and
competitiveness objectives in local govern-
ments (Hall and Hubbard, 1998; Jessop and
Sum, 2000), this metanarrative also obscures
the diverse constellation of actors, networks,
and agendas that are behind the construc-
tion and mobilisation of certain cities and
policies as world models. In fact, activists
and social movements have traditionally
relied on the construction and global circula-
tion of policy models and best practice
repertoires (Appadurai, 2002). By focusing
on the agency of mayors and local govern-
ment agencies as they react to neoliberalism,
‘city entrepreneurialism’ frameworks fail to
account for the diversity of local and trans-
national actors and agendas that can put pol-
icies and city models in motion. For example,
in the case of the ‘Bogotá model’, one cannot
ignore the important role of bicycle activists
and public health experts in spreading Ciclovı´a
(Montero, 2017a).
Here, recent debates on urban policy
mobilities (McCann and Ward, 2011; Peck
and Theodore, 2015) can help us move
beyond the celebrations versus critiques bin-
ary around the Bogotá model and focus
rather on conceptualising the multi-scalar
practices and power dynamics that facilitate
policy travel and circulation between cities.
Moving beyond typologies of actors, modal-
ities of learning, and the rationalistic
assumptions of policy diffusion/transfer
debates, policy mobilities authors have ana-
lysed the mobilisation of urban policies as
an open-ended, socially constructed, and
power-laden process where power and poli-
tics come to the forefront (Peck and
Theodore, 2010). In other words, models
and ‘best practices’ travel not because they
are best but rather because they have been
constructed as ‘best’ at a particular moment
of time. Although the rapid spread of BRTs
2269
has been the focus of much research in
transportation policy studies (Hidalgo and
Gutiérrez, 2013; Hidalgo and Hermann,
2004; Marsden et al., 2011), including the
spread of Latin American BRT models in
Asian cities (Matsumoto, 2007), this
research has often privileged ‘policy diffu-
sion’ and ‘policy transfer’ perspectives that
emphasise who are the transfer agents,
where these agents learn about new policies,
and how the policy model adopted is similar
or different from the original examples of
Bogotá and Curitiba. Less is known about
why BRT and car-free programmes such as
Ciclovı´a became so prominent and replicated
in the last decade given that both had
already existed since the 1970s. Initially, pol-
icy mobilities authors argued that the
increased speed at which policies travel was
related to the spread of neoliberalism (Peck
and Theodore, 2010). Yet, more recently,
several authors have argued that resorting to
neoliberalism as a universal reason to
explain the increased speed of urban policy
travel is a limited view, especially when con-
ceptualising urban planning and policy pro-
cesses in cities of the Global South, where
neoliberal logics are often mixed with other
logics (Bunnell, 2013; Jacobs, 2012; Parnell
and Robinson, 2012).
In this article, I show that the rapid
spread of Bogotá’s now world famous
Transmilenio BRT system and Ciclovı´a car-
free programme is part of a larger set of
urban policy solutions promoted by interna-
tional development banks and global philan-
thropy to intervene in global climate change
through their replication in as many cities as
possible. It is precisely this increasingly fre-
quent logic of intervention within the inter-
national development apparatus based on
scaling up particular urban policy solutions
as a leverage to solve global development
problems, what I call in this article the ‘lever-
aging cities’ logic, which I seek to explain
and problematise in this article. In order to
2270
unpack this, in the following sections, I show
that the circulation of Bogotá’s Transmilenio
and Ciclovı´a since the early 2000s points at a
historical conjuncture in the apparatus of
international development characterised by:
(1) the rising power of global philanthropy
to set global development agendas; (2) the
generalisation of solutionism as a favoured
strategy of action among international devel-
opment and philanthropic organisations;
and (3) the increasing attention to cities as
solutions for global development problems,
particularly in the areas of sustainability and
climate change. To do so, I rely both on
empirical material on the construction and
circulation of Bogotá as a sustainable trans-
port policy model as well as on debates in
development studies about the rise of philan-
throcapitalism (McGoey, 2012; Rogers,
2011), the changing knowledge practices of
the World Bank (Goldman, 2005), including
its increasing interest in South–South knowl-
edge exchanges (Abdenur and Da Fonseca,
2013; Roy, 2011), as well as critical reflec-
tions on the idea that cities can be a potential
answer to development and sustainability
problems (Graute, 2016; Wachsmuth et al.,
2016). As Vanessa Watson (2009) has
argued, putting urban studies in dialogue
with development studies offers important
opportunities to expand our understanding
of cities as urban planning theory has often
been focused on the experience of cities of
the Global North while development studies
has traditionally focused on the reality of the
Global South.
The rising power of philanthropy
In the last two decades, the number of actors
and funding sources in development has
increased significantly (Kharas, 2007). While
development assistance in 2000 was over-
whelmingly provided by traditional bilateral
and multilateral donors, the percentage of
Urban Studies 57(11)
non-traditional actors such as philanthro-
pists, climate finance funds, social impact
investors, and global funds has risen from
22.8% in 2000 to 43.8% in 2009 (Greenhill
et al., 2013). The increases in the availability
of philanthropic funding are, of course,
related with the increasing economic
inequality and wealth concentration in the
last half-century (Piketty and Zucman,
2014). The parallel decrease in official devel-
opment assistance (ODA), particularly after
austerity measures hit European countries in
the late 2000s, has made philanthropic fund-
ing more visible and even more instrumental
in keeping the international development
apparatus moving. For example, in 2013,
the Seattle-based Gates Foundation became
the largest contributor to the World Health
Organization (WHO) budget, well beyond
the amounts provided by the US or the UK
governments. The influence of philanthropy
in development, however, goes beyond the
provision of funding; it lies also in its
increasing capacity of setting frameworks
and methodologies of action the philanthro-
pists deem appropriate (McGoey, 2012). A
recent report by Harvard’s Hauser Institute
for Civil Society shows how global philan-
thropic funding and assets have not only sig-
nificantly increased in recent decades but are
also now more interested in having an
impact in global development agendas, par-
ticularly in relation to the Sustainable
Development Goals (Johnson, 2018). The
fact that efforts to fight global problems are
increasingly governed by the logic and inter-
ests of the most affluent families on Earth is
certainly disturbing and calls into question
the extent to which the incorporation of new
actors actually democratises development.
While a discussion about the relationship
between philanthropy and the democratisa-
tion of development is beyond the scope of
this paper, in the following paragraphs I
analyse the ways in which this new philan-
thropic logic operates and how it is
Montero
influencing global development agendas and
urban policymaking processes.
In 2006, Matthew Bishop published an
article in The Economist titled ‘The birth of
philanthrocapitalism’ to describe a new
trend among philanthropic foundations ‘to
become more like the for-profit capital mar-
kets’.4 Praising the superiority of business
and market logics against those of govern-
ments and non-profits, the article indeed
pointed at the Gates Foundation, established
in 2000, as a prime example of this new way
of operating for charitable foundations.
Although ‘philanthrocapitalism’ (Bishop
and Green, 2008) could be seen as a conti-
nuation of the business-inspired methods
promoted by Rockefeller, Carnegie, and
Ford foundations already in the 1960s
(Robert and Witte, 2008), McGoey (2012)
has argued that there are two important
novelties in how philanthropy and develop-
ment currently relate to each other: (1) the
unprecedented level of philanthropic spend-
ing for international development purposes;
and (2) the generalisation of the belief that
capitalism, market logics, and searching for
private enrichment can, through charity and
philanthropy, advance the common good.
However, while much has been written about
the increasing use of business-inspired tools,
market logics, and performance metrics
among philanthropic foundations, less is
known about this new breed of donors’
interest in intervening in policymaking and
policy agendas, both at the local and global
levels. In this context, Robin Rogers (2011)
has argued that critics of the new protagon-
ism of philanthropy in the world of develop-
ment are not so much worried about the
unprecedented increase in the availability of
philanthropic funding but rather in the
empowerment of a global elite in making
decisions about global development agendas
and policymaking strategies, what she calls
‘philanthro-policymaking’. Rather than an
2271
interest in mobilising particular business
practices or policies, what this philanthropic
logic seeks to mobilise and scale up are mod-
els and ‘best practices’ that have proved
effective in increasing the foundations’ per-
formance indicators to meet their mandated
goals. As noted by Edwards (2009), this
emphasis on scaling up models with a clear
impact on their performance metrics, such as
greenhouse gas emission reductions, is at risk
of ignoring the structural causes that create
problems such as poverty, inequality, and
environmental degradation in the first place.
From 1974 until 2000, some cities in
Colombia and Latin America referenced the
example of Bogotá toward making changes
in their urban transport planning. However,
it was in the mid-2000s when Ciclovı´a and
Transmilenio started to travel widely around
the world. As noted by Enrique Peñalosa,
mayor of Bogotá: ‘at some point [in the early
2000s] . Bogotá became famous, it became
sexy’ (Peñalosa, personal interview, 2013).
But this sexyness was produced and funded
by particular actors. In fact, the speeches
and meetings of Enrique Peñalosa and his
brother Gil Peñalosa with mayors and local
policymakers around the world have been
key to the extensive global circulation of
Bogotá’s policies (Montero, 2017c; Wood,
2014). Yet looking at the political economy
of who paid for the Peñalosa brothers’ tra-
vels as well as the travels of numerous offi-
cials, journalists, and NGOs who came to
Bogotá on study tours since 2005, one rea-
lises that the world recognition of Bogotá is
not the result of a marketing strategy
designed and orchestrated from Bogotá.
Instead, the trips of the Peñalosas to confer-
ences and events around the world have been
sponsored by several transnational networks
of actors, most of which are funded by inter-
national development and philanthropic
organisations (Montero, 2017a). ITDP and
EMBARQ, two Washington, DC-based
2272
sustainable transport think tanks funded by
global philanthropy, have been two key
mobilisers of the Bogotá model worldwide.
As noted by one of the heads of ITDP (per-
sonal interview, 2012), ‘when we all [first]
heard [Enrique Peñalosa] speak . we were
shocked. Not only what he had done in
Bogotá was great, he was also a very charis-
matic speaker.’ While other Latin American
cities already had a BRT, they did not have
an English-speaking charismatic storyteller
such as Peñalosa to spread the message
worldwide: ‘Although Quito had a BRT
story, [it] did not have the bicycle and public
spaces stories that Bogotá had . also there
wasn’t a good speaker [in the case of Quito]
. there was a mayor but he could not speak
English’ (ITDP leader, personal interview,
2012).
These global think tanks saw in the
Peñalosas and, therefore, in Bogotá, perfect
messengers to spread their sustainable trans-
portation message worldwide, especially as
generous amounts of philanthropic funding
started to become available to promote BRT
internationally. In the last decade, Hewlett
and the Energy Foundation have provided
ITDP with plenty of funds to organise study
tours to cities with a BRT for Chinese and
Mexican delegations as they identified urban
China and Mexico as cost-effective places to
invest in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Similarly, US study tours to learn from
Latin American and Asian BRTs have been
funded by American foundations, particu-
larly the Rockefeller Foundation and Alton
Jones Foundation (now Blue Moon).
Examples such as Bogotá have helped con-
vince local and state policymakers around
the world that BRTs were a cheaper, faster,
and easier-to-implement alternative than
subways and light rail. For example, in 2006
the Hewlett Foundation funded a study
tour that brought several policy actors and
journalists from Guadalajara, Mexico, to
Bogotá to convince them to implement a
Urban Studies 57(11)
BRT in Guadalajara. When I asked the pro-
gramme officer of the Hewlett Foundation’s
Environment Program why Hewlett was
interested in promoting BRT in Guadalajara
she answered:
we have a theory of change, and in that theory
we need to have a technology or best practice
that can be implemented and is replicable .
we’re interested in BRT because we’re inter-
ested in reducing [global greenhouse gas] emis-
sions. (Hewlett Foundation Program officer,
personal interview, 2013)
By promoting certain policies and elevating
them to the status of international ‘best
practices’, international development and
philanthropic organisations are playing an
increasingly important role in setting global
development agendas. In the case of
Bogotá’s BRT and Ciclovı´a, they have
served to put into motion a particular under-
standing of the kinds of policies and technol-
ogies that are appropriate to attack the
problem of sustainable development: policies
that are easy to implement, whose impact on
reducing greenhouse gas emissions can be
easily measurable, and that have a story that
can seduce philanthropists, development
officials, and local policymakers around the
world. The increasing circulation of sustain-
ability policy models and ‘best practices’ can
then be seen not only as a generalisation of
the agenda of sustainable development but
also as a global battle between weak versus
strong interpretations of the very idea of sus-
tainability (Bulkeley et al., 2013).
The World Bank: From
knowledge bank to solutions bank
In Imperial Nature, Michael Goldman
(2005) argued that the power of the World
Bank resides not only in its financial capa-
city to lend money but also in its knowledge
Montero
production capacities. The increase in phi-
lanthropic funding and the emphasis of phi-
lanthropy on scaling up technologies and
‘best practices’ coincides with a turn in inter-
national development banks to ‘solutionism’
or a focus on quickly disseminating knowl-
edge about policy solutions. During the
Transforming Transportation 2013 confer-
ence, Jim Yong Kim, president of the World
Bank, described in the following way what
should be the role of the World Bank in
transforming transportation worldwide
(emphasis added):
Our role is to bring knowledge and experience.
But it’s a very specific kind of knowledge and
experience . It’s the kind of knowledge that
says: we’ve built these canals and are trans-
porting people and we’ve built this bus rapid
transport system and, you know, there is a the-
ory about it, there are specific sort of scientific
principles but it’s really this broader experien-
tial knowledge what we’ve been talking about.
So we would sit down and say . here are 50
innovations in other cities across the world.
We think given all this information a good
strategy for you might be this .We’ve been
called a knowledge bank and I’ve been referring
to the Bank that we need to take the next step
and be the solutions bank. I think if we can
do that efficiently and effectively we can have
an enormous impact in how cities in the future
are built.
Indeed, the most awaited moment of
Transforming Transportation 2013, the dis-
cussion between Jim Yong Kim and Michael
Bloomberg, was a collection of stories from
cities in the Global North and the South that
have been able to improve their transport
systems according to a particular interpreta-
tion of sustainability, that is, in a way that
reduces greenhouse gas emissions and also
improves the lives of the poor, what World
Bank officials love to call ‘a win-win situa-
tion’. These stories and ‘best practice’ solu-
tions are far from being examples or
2273
illustrations of a clearly defined framework
of action. Instead, their circulation becomes
a logic of intervention in itself; a ‘quick fix’
to frame the problem of sustainable develop-
ment given the unwillingness of development
and philanthropic organisations to intervene
in the structural factors and multiple scales
that produce environmental degradation
and climate change. This concentration
on stories and ‘best practices’, however, also
allows global philanthropy to bring into
conversation and collaboration a transna-
tional community of practice that includes
not only transport experts and engineers but
also government officials, development bank
officials, civil society actors, and private
investors from around the world.
The strategy of replicating ‘best practices’
to catalyse change is not by any means new
among development banks and US founda-
tions. In the world of international develop-
ment, this logic can be traced back to the
popularisation of diffusion of innovation
theory in the 1960s and 1970s. One of the
key thinkers in this area was Everett Rogers,
whose 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations
set an important precedent in using social
science methods to study and promote the
spread and diffusion of development ideas,
particularly the agricultural extension model
of rural development. The tenets of Rogers’
classical diffusion theory were criticised for
presenting a model of diffusion in which
Western innovations entered the non-
Western rural periphery through ‘modern’
and pro-development individuals in contrast
to ‘traditional’ and passive receivers (Blaut,
1977, in Chabot and Duyvendak, 2002).
Despite criticisms, Rogers’ ideas had a great
impact in the context of rural development
in the 1970s and 1980s. But if North–South
and North–North exchanges of policy ideas
and solutions have been an important infra-
structure behind the transfer of development
ideas during the 20th century, the 21st
2274 Urban Studies 57(11)

Table 1. BRT study tours to Transmilenio SA in Bogotá (2000–2011) by origin of delegation (country).

Country Number of % Participants % Delegation size

delegations (average)

Colombia 241 28.9% 5261 53.2% 21.8

Mexico 70 8.4% 673 6.8% 9.6
Brazil 62 7.4% 663 6.7% 10.7
Peru 45 5.4% 376 3.8% 8.4
Ecuador 37 4.4% 248 2.5% 6.7
United States 33 4.0% 196 2.0% 5.9
Venezuela 27 3.2% 175 1.8% 6.5
Chile 24 2.9% 165 1.7% 6.9
Argentina 24 2.9% 114 1.2% 4.8
South Africa 21 2.5% 343 3.5% 16.3
China 18 2.2% 174 1.8% 9.7
India 16 1.9% 129 1.3% 8.1
Guatemala 15 1.8% 59 0.6% 3.9
Panama 13 1.6% 68 0.7% 5.2
Bolivia 13 1.6% 42 0.4% 3.2
Korea 12 1.4% 167 1.7% 13.9
Japan 12 1.4% 60 0.6% 5.0
Spain 12 1.4% 28 0.3% 2.3
Puerto Rico 11 1.3% 47 0.5% 4.3
Sweden 10 1.2% 92 0.9% 9.2
Other countries 117 14.0% 817 8.3% 7.0
Total 833 100.0% 9897 100.0% 11.9
Without Colombia 592 71.1% 4636 47% 7.8

Source: Elaboration by author based on data from Transmilenio SA archives.

century seems to bring a growing momen-
tum to South–South exchanges as different
actors are realising the potential of these
exchanges to produce policy and institu-
tional changes (Abdenur and Da Fonseca,
2013). Indeed, since the 2008 Accra Agenda
for Change, the World Bank has increas-
ingly focused on organising and funding
South–South study tours as a logic of devel-
opment action. For instance, in 2008, the
World Bank established the South–South
Experience Exchange Facility as a new fund
that sought to serve ‘a strategic instrument
to leverage greater development impact from
results-oriented [South–South] knowledge
exchanges’.5 Indeed, one important way in
which the global philanthropy and develop-
ment banks have mobilised the Bogotá model
worldwide has been through the funding
and organisation of study tours. From
2000 until 2011, about 10,000 decision-
makers from around the world visited
Bogotá on a study tour to learn about
BRT.
Based on the data presented in Table 1,
one could conclude that study tours to
Bogotá have been predominantly South–
South exchanges, as 76% of Bogotá study
tours between 2000 and 2011 came from
Latin American and Caribbean countries.
However, interviews with Transmilenio staff
reveals an infrastructure of North-based
organisations that have coordinated and
funded Bogotá study tours:
the entities that have brought more delega-
tions to Bogotá are two NGOs: one is called
ITDP and the other is EMBARQ, which is
Montero
based in Washington, DC and is funded by
the Shell Foundation. Other entities that have
brought delegations are the World Bank and
the Colombian Ministry of Transport . the
Inter-American Development Bank and the
Asian Development Bank have also brought
delegations . and also bus manufacturers
such as Volvo or Mercedes. (Transmilenio SA
study tour manager, personal interview, 2013)
The circulation of Bogotá’s transport poli-
cies therefore cannot be conceptualised as an
urban marketing campaign orchestrated
from Bogotá or as a matter of South–South
learning alone. Rather, the organisation and
funding sources behind Bogotá’s study tours
show that the circulation of Bogotá’s trans-
port policies is part of a larger network of
transnational actors, particularly global phi-
lanthropy and development banks, that have
used Bogotá as a model to materialise a par-
ticular global development agenda – fighting
climate change – through a particular logic
of action: replicating a set of transport pol-
icy solutions or ‘best practices’ that can be
easily communicated and replicated in other
cities.
Increasing attention to cities as
arenas to solve global
development problems
While international development interven-
tions have been legitimised since the 1970s
under the broad goal of achieving ‘a world
free of poverty’, several authors have shown
how the project of development increasingly
relies on narratives of sustainability and cli-
mate change to legitimise its interventions
(Adams, 2003; Goldman, 2005). In this con-
text, international development institutions
are re-conceptualising the developing world
not only as spaces for poverty and economic
development interventions but also as places
in need of being saved from environmental
threats and global climate change through
2275
market mechanisms and cost-effective poli-
cies. Yet, given the constant failures and dif-
ficulties of reaching a multilateral climate
agreement among national leaders, interna-
tional organisations and global philanthropy
have been increasingly turning their atten-
tion to cities and city models as a new way
to intervene in global climate change
(Graute, 2016; Wachsmuth et al., 2016).
Because this emphasis on scaling up policy
solutions has coincided with an increasing
attention to cities as a space for sustainable
development interventions, this has made
philanthropists and development institutions
increasingly interested in urban planning
and the dynamics of inter-city policy transfer
as new arenas to effect global impact.
For example, when I asked an official
from the Global Environmental Fund
(GEF) why they were working with cities he
said: ‘there’s more attention recently to cities
because they can take decisions by them-
selves. National decisions take longer . sen-
ate, debates, etc. . Mayors are more
independent, they can take decisions faster’
(GEF official, personal interview, 2013). Yet
not all decisions can be made by local gov-
ernments. For instance, GEF would negoti-
ate issues such as fuel standards with
national governments but, he added,
‘recently, opportunities to work with local
governments are increasing . as sustainable
transportation is becoming a critical issue
for local governments’ (GEF official, personal
interview, 2013). Indeed, cities were explicitly
included in the new UN Sustainable
Development Goals with their own goal
(‘Make cities and human settlements inclusive,
safe, resilient and sustainable’). This has made
not only the World Bank but also global phi-
lanthropy increasingly interested in urban
planning and the dynamics of inter-city policy
transfer as a way to effect global impact:
The change that happens in cities can change
the world . And whether it is facilitating the
2276
spread of good ideas between cities to help
mayors tackle some of their toughest chal-
lenges, or leading a global coalition of large
cities to take real action against climate
change, Bloomberg Philanthropies leverages
the power of cities [to] create lasting change –
especially when national and international bodies
refuse to act. (Bloomberg Philanthropies, 2015,
emphasis added)6
This logic of action focused on cities is not
limited to new foundations such as
Bloomberg, the Clinton Climate Initiative,
the World Resources Institute, or Hewlett.
Established philanthropic organisations such
as the Rockefeller Foundation are also
quickly incorporating this emphasis on cities
as, for instance, the recent Rockefeller
Foundation programme ‘100 resilient cities
challenge’ illustrates. Key to this ‘leveraging
cities’ logic is the construction and mobilisa-
tion of a particular set of urban policies and
planning mechanisms as world policy mod-
els. Through the circulation and replication
of these models, often labelled ‘best prac-
tices’, philanthropic foundations and devel-
opment banks satisfy their impact and
performance metrics but also, and despite
their invocations of political neutrality,
intervene in the political realm by helping
place particular topics and policy frames in
local and global agendas.
And while Bogotá’s Transmilenio has
become ‘the most powerful BRT reference
for planners and practitioners worldwide’
(Hidalgo and Gutiérrez, 2013), as more cities
around the world have implemented BRT,
Bogotá or Curitiba are not the only cities
that are able to produce inspiration and
learning among urban policymakers and
planners. My interviews for this project
reveal the important role that ‘peer’ cities
play in the circulation of urban ‘best prac-
tices’. As noted by a former director of
Transmilenio and now senior consultant at
EMBARQ’s office in Mexico City:
Urban Studies 57(11)
These days there are more city references for
organizing BRT study tours. The captive mar-
ket that Bogotá had for a while is, today, not
the case anymore. For example, intermediate
cities can now go to Pereira [a city of a half
million people in Colombia] . Cities tend to
look for their peers. (EMBARQ Senior
Consultant, personal interview, 2013)
The fact that there are now other cities that
can serve as BRT references does not mean
that model cities such as Bogotá or Curitiba
do not matter anymore. Rather, they work
in combination with ‘peer’ cities. Size, urban
structure, and similarities in the planning
apparatus or stage in the planning process
are important variables that delegates look
for in other cities to identify ‘peer’ cities. For
instance, in November 2011, a delegation of
ten public officials from Ho Chi Minh City,
Vietnam, visited Bogotá to learn about
BRT. During their three days in Bogotá,
they rode buses together, toured different
station areas, and visited Transmilenio’s con-
trol centre. They also met with senior staff
from Transmilenio SA, public officials at
Bogotá’s Urban Transport Management
and Planning Agency, and the local NGO
Ciudad Humana. The visit was part of a
larger study tour organised and funded by
the World Bank. South–South Experience
Exchange Facility. Vietnamese planners and
engineers first visited a set of Asian cities
(Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Jakarta) that had
‘newer systems in place’ so that they could
learn from cities at an early stage in the plan-
ning process. Some months later, the World
Bank brought another group of Vietnamese
policymakers to a different set of Latin
American cities (Bogotá, Curitiba, Rio) that
had ‘mature BRT systems at work’ so that
they could experience how BRT works in
model cities with well-established systems.
According to Andre Bald, a World Bank
Senior Infrastructure Specialist, the lessons
learned during the study tour influenced
Montero
planning in Ho Chi Minh immediately and
‘the city identified a major transit corridor
within which to develop its first BRT’.7
Beyond the geographical or cultural proxim-
ity of these cities, the ways in which the
World Bank presented these cities as ‘peers’
played an important role in persuading
Vietnamese policymakers and transportation
planners to implement a BRT system in Ho
Chi Minh City. This decision also meant
channelling government funding to BRT as
opposed to other alternatives that could
have also been considered sustainable trans-
port such as expanding the metro system or
improving public transport and reducing
emissions in non-urban areas.
Conclusions: Leveraging cities and
the limits of urban solutionism
One key finding of this article is that the fast
and wide travels of the Bogotá model
around the world cannot be understood
without acknowledging the role of several
international development organisations,
particularly the World Bank, and two global
think tanks – ITDP and EMBARQ –
funded by global philanthropy. However,
As this paper showed, the influence of phi-
lanthropic and development organisations
goes beyond their provision of funding; it
lies also in its increasing capacity of setting
frameworks and methodologies of action to
intervene in the global problems they deem
appropriate. This, however, is not a story of
a powerful set of international organisations
imposing their agendas top-down in cities
but rather an ongoing shift in the logics and
modes of operation of the international
development apparatus, which is increas-
ingly focused on cities, urban policies, and
urban planning mechanisms as a way to
intervene in global development problems.
In my analysis, I highlighted three key
2277
features that led to this current conjuncture.
First, the rising influence of philanthropy in
international development, which does not
only reside in its funding resources but also
in its capacity of setting frameworks and
methodologies of action the philanthropists
deem appropriate to intervene in the global
problems they consider important. Second, I
signal the turn of international development
organisations to ‘solutionism’: an increasing
focus on solutions and ‘best practices’ that
can be quickly spread as a framework for
development action. In this logic, it is impor-
tant to have examples and ‘success stories’
to seduce policymakers worldwide and help
these model solutions be quickly communi-
cated and disseminated. Finally, given the
constant failures at reaching a multilateral
climate agreement among national leaders,
international organisations and global phi-
lanthropy are increasingly turning their
attention to cities and city models as a new
way to intervene in global climate change
or, as Bloomberg Philanthropies puts it, to
‘leverage the power of cities’8 to solve global
climate change. This has made international
development organisations and foundations
increasingly interested in cities and urban
planning as a key arena to promote the new
2030 Sustainable Development Agenda.
Therefore, under the current historical con-
juncture, global impact for international
development organisations and global phi-
lanthropy is increasingly conceptualised
through the lens of affecting the largest
number of cities directly as opposed to tradi-
tional strategies, such as, for instance, struc-
tural adjustment recipes, where global
change was conceptualised as affecting the
national level, which was then supposed to
trickle down to cities. Under this logic, the
rapid circulation and global adoption of
Bogotá’s Transmilenio and Ciclovı´a pro-
grammes can be conceptualised, then, as
part of a larger set of cost-effective, impact-
2278
oriented, and financially sustainable policy
models promoted by international develop-
ment banks and global philanthropy to
intervene in global climate change through
their replication in as many cities as possible.
In doing so, I related the increasing speed in
the circulation of urban policy solutions
with the changing landscape of actors, fund-
ing sources, and logics of intervention of the
international development apparatus.
In his book To Save Everything, Click
Here: The Follies of Technological Solutionism,
Evgeny Morozov (2013) criticises ‘technologi-
cal solutionism’ as an increasing tendency in
our society to put faith in technology and
algorithms to solve complex problems that, in
reality, require changing political, economic
and social structures. He concludes that a
future dominated by technological solutions
will be rather dark and undemocratic. Indeed,
he cites urban design professor Michael
Dobbins to show the limits of solutionism:
‘solutionism presumes rather than investigates
the problem that it is trying to solve, reaching
for the answer before the question has been
fully asked’. In the absence of a common defi-
nition of how sustainable development should
be implemented, the increasing circulation of
sustainability policy models and ‘best prac-
tices’ can then be seen as a global battle about
how to interpret and solve the problem of sus-
tainable development. Against the high hopes
of development and philanthropic organisa-
tions about the potential of cities and South–
South policy exchanges to save the planet’s
problems and move beyond the North–South
structures that have traditionally characterised
the international development apparatus, this
article concludes with a note of caution. By
promoting the circulation of urban policy
solutions and ‘best practices’, whether they
originate in the South or the North, this ‘lever-
aging cities’ logic contributes to the diffusion
of a rapidly spreadable yet limited approach
to sustainability, as this logic does not necessa-
rily intervene in the structural factors and
Urban Studies 57(11)
multiple scales that produce environmental
degradation and climate change. In doing
so, this article does not seek to undermine
the value of mobilising ‘best practices’ to
inspire change in cities but rather to criti-
cise the prescriptive and acritical adoption
of urban policy solutions from elsewhere to
avoid the more complex, and needed, act
of asking questions about how urban prob-
lems work, how they work differently in
different cities, and how these urban prob-
lems are connected to larger and multi-
scalar processes.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Hillary Angelo
and David Wachsmuth for their extensive feed-
back on different versions of this article. The arti-
cle has also greatly benefited from comments
received at NYU’s Democratizing the Green City
workshop, UC Berkeley’s Ten Years of Global
Metropolitan Studies event, a research seminar at
Mexico’s CIDE-Aguascalientes and São Paulo’s
International Conference on Policy Diffusion and
Development Cooperation.
Funding
This study was funded by the Institute of Global
Conflict and Cooperation: Dissertation Writing
Fellowship; the UC Berkeley Institute of
International Studies: John L. Simpson Memorial
Research Fellowship; and the UC Pacific Rim
Research Program: Graduate Student
Dissertation Research.
ORCID iD
Sergio Montero https://orcid.org/0000-0002-
8708-1290
Notes
1. Jim Yong Kim’s intervention during the
Transforming Transportation 2013 event in
Washington, DC (18 January 2013).
Montero
2. Roy draws from Foucault’s definition of
apparatus or dispositif as a ‘thoroughly het-
erogeneous set consisting of discourses, insti-
tutions, architectural forms, regulatory
decisions, laws, administrative measures, sci-
entific statements, philosophical, moral, and
philanthropic propositions’ (Foucault, 1980:
194; cited in Roy, 2012).
3. Literally, a ‘citizenship culture’, this concept
was introduced by Bogotá mayor Antanas
Mockus and guided his interventions in the
city during his two administrations (1995–
1997 and 2000–2003). For a contextualisation
of the Mockus framework see Mockus (2001,
in Spanish).
4. Available at: http://www.economist.com/
node/5517656 (accessed 12 April 2017).
5. Available at: http://wbi.worldbank.org/sske/
resource-library/vietnam-urban-transporta-
tion (accessed 23 March 2015).
6. Bloomberg Philanthropies, 2015. Available at:
http://www.bloomberg.org/about/our-approach/
(accessed 3 May 2015).
7. Available at: https://www.knowledgesharing
fordev.org/story/improving-urban-transporta
tion-ho-chi-minh-city-vietnam (accessed 12
April 2017).
8. Available at: http://www.bloomberg.org/
about/our-approach/ (accessed 1 May 2015).
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