Worlding aspirations propel urban planners to remake their cities with international best practices and global expertise, through which recognition from the world can be gained. The existing literature has well evidenced the negative impact of materialised worlding projects, but attentions to how global expertise transforms cities through talent cultivation were just emerging. This paper engages with this research gap by examining the processes and outcomes of a worlding project, which was aimed to improve the urban tree care practices in Bangkok by introducing the global tree-climbing expertise. Led by the Thai civil groups and supported by the city authority and various arborists, the worlding project realised as a training program for the municipal tree-pruning workers. However, a variety of temporal and place-specific factors, such as traffic, logistical limitations, tree accessibility, constrained the application of the tree-climbing technique in the Thai capital. Rather than lacking knowledge as the civil groups claimed, the frontline staff indicated the complex urban context surrounding their everyday workplace and employed available resources flexibly. By contrast, the civil groups’ worlding aspirations resulted in unrealistic learning settings and marginalised the voices of the frontline staff, which slashed the local applicability of the global expertise. As such, this paper argues that in order to unpack outcomes of urban worlding projects it is essential to compare the place context between expertise acquisition and application. In addition, inclusivity is paramount to create expertise coexistence, through which the potential of worlding projects can be maximised.