Subnational governments increasingly act as international agents in their own right, seeking recognition, resources, and partnerships independently of national foreign policy. This growing paradiplomatic activity raises a governance question that mirrors, at the territorial scale, the accountability concerns raised by the Congress at the global one. Cities and regions gain real international agency, yet the institutional architecture that would make this agency accountable, measurable, and developmentally meaningful often lags behind the visibility it produces.
This panel treats that lag as its central problem. It asks under what conditions the international action of subnational governments strengthens democratic governance rather than merely simulating it, and what happens when visibility outpaces the institutional capacity to justify or sustain it.
Four lines of inquiry organize the discussion. The first examines international visibility as a form of territorial soft power, questioning when it reflects genuine institutional capacity and when it functions as symbolic projection detached from governance. The second addresses the methodological challenge of measurement, treating indices and observatories of territorial internationalization as instruments that render subnational international action auditable rather than anecdotal. The third turns to the jurisdictional and normative frameworks that determine which actors, from municipal governments to chambers of commerce, may legitimately internationalize a territory, and the legal mechanisms available to hold them accountable. The fourth asks whether territorial internationalization produces verifiable endogenous development, drawing on recent work on multilevel governance and urban diplomacy to assess the persistent gap between international visibility and effective territorial outcomes.
Together, these lines interrogate whether paradiplomacy can be governed democratically or whether it risks reproducing, at the local level, the very accountability deficits it was meant to help overcome. The panel welcomes theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions from international relations, comparative politics, public administration, and urban studies, with particular but not exclusive attention to Latin American and other Global South cases where subnational internationalization has become central to territorial development strategies.
