The universality of the future Global Development Agenda entails a strong need for enhanced coordination and exchanges between international, national and particularly local actors and authorities, which will be the protagonists in delivering the forthcoming Sustainable Development Goals.
In this spirit, UNDP ART representatives, together with other UN entities, the European Union and international stakeholders, joined the Retreat organized by the global network of United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) in Barcelona.
The overall objective of the event was to discuss on how to capitalize on the existing collaboration for future partnerships in order to better tackle crucial development issues collectively.
Within the framework of the Local Governance and Local Development processes, as well as of national decentralization policies, partners debated on how to improve mechanisms and cooperation systems in order to respond to the current development negotiations – specifically the localization and implementation of the future SDGs and Habitat III – while setting their own priorities and approaches.
Based on the experiences matured during the dialogues on Localizing the Post-2015 Agenda, the need to build new strategies for the local and regional governments was stressed, particularly emphasizing the urgency to scale-up and include local priorities within national and global development agendas.
“Our wish is of course to realize and synergize all the framework in forms of feasible programs in larger scale both regional and global” said Josep Roig, UCLG’s Secretary General Barcelona[1].
The implementation stage of the future SDGs should be addressed through appropriate mechanisms and tools able to efficiently translate communities’ needs into concrete supporting action on the ground.
To ensure ownership at the local level, partners underlined that the negotiations on the future development agenda taking place at the inter-governmental level should follow a bottom-up approach, particularly because Local and Regional Governments, which bear a wide range of social responsibilities that go beyond services provision, are best placed to identify and respond to development priorities.
The Retreat was a crucial event allowing partners to plan their partnerships and to build synergies for the way forward. UNDP ART, invited by UCLG to take part to the event as one of the key partners, emerged as an essential actor in terms of strategic conceptualization as well as for the operationalization phase. It has been helping local and regional governments to identify and respond to their development priorities, and will continue to do so through the means of territorial platforms for continuous dialogue, by promoting ownership at the local level, and by making the voice of LRGs heard at the global level.
For further information, visit the website of UCLG and read the toolkit developed to contribute to the UCLG Strategic Framework.
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