2: CONTEXT AND GUIDANCE FOR VLR PREPARATION

2

CONTEXT AND GUIDANCE FOR VLR PREPARATION

2.1 EMERGENCE OF VLRS

The successful achievement of the SDGs is recognized today to be closely dependent on localization of these policy goals on the ground, in the localities where citizens carry out their daily lives. This implies that policy making, budgeting, execution, organizing, monitoring and reporting at the urban and regional scales have a crucial role in the 2030 Agenda. An OECD study has found that more than 65% of all SDG sub-targets cannot be reached without involving the cities.12

“Because of how transversal, complex and all-encompassing the Goals are, the subnational level as a whole— LRGs, communities, territories and all other local stakeholders — has to be engaged with the governance mechanisms (...). In many countries, this political framework, geared to build on the input of national governments, had no clear system in place to collect information on what local and regional governments were doing for the implementation of the SDGs. VLRs first appeared to fill this void and as a tool to show local and regional governments’ commitment. Local and regional governments have been at the forefront of implementation, awareness-raising, training and coalition-building.”13 VLRs have grown to become an important complement to the work that national governments have been doing to monitor the achievement of the 2030 Agenda worldwide.”14

UCLG and UN-Habitat have a longstanding partnership in support of the localization of the 2030 Agenda. They have been collaborating to raise awareness among LRGs on the relevance of SDG localization, while also amplifying their voices and advocating for their role in the achievement of the Goals to be duly acknowledged and supported. The two ‘Local and Regional Governments Forums’, organized in the framework of the 2018 and 2019 HLPFs, were a breakthrough in the global conversation on VLRs as a medium for locally-sourced information and mutual knowledge exchange at the local level in delivering on the 2030 Agenda.

In 2018, New York City and three Japanese cities (Kitakyushu, Shimokawa and Toyama) were the frontrunners that officially launched VLRs, soon followed by Helsinki and several others. In September 2019, New York City, together with UN-Habitat and other partner institutions and 22 local governments, launched the VLR Declaration for local and regional governments worldwide to formally commit to reporting on the SDGs.

The declaration consists of three key commitments: 1) to identify how existing strategies, programs, data, and targets align with the SDGs; 2) to provide at least one forum where stakeholders can come together to share experiences and information; 3) to submit a VLR to the UN during the HLPF.

The VLR movement is accelerating, with 96 LRGs having submitted VLRs to the GOLD platform as of 25 August 2021, and another 28 that are currently in the process of drafting one. (See map 1).

12 Bonn 2020 VLR. 13 UCLG and UN-Habitat, 2020, Guidelines for Voluntary Local Reviews- Volume 1. 14 UCLG and UN-Habitat, 2021, Guidelines for Voluntary Local Reviews- Volume 2.

Map 1: Local governments having published their VLRs (yellow) and those in the process of drafting them (green) as of 28 February 2021. Source: UCLG and UN-Habitat 2021, Guidelines for Voluntary Local Reviews- Volume 2.

Parallel to the VLRs, Voluntary Subnational Reviews (VSRs) have also emerged recently to bridge the national and local levels. VSRs are country-wide, bottom-up subnational reporting processes that provide both comprehensive and in-depth analyses of the corresponding national environments for SDG localization. They also include the experiences of LRGs from different parts of each country in implementing the SDGs on the ground. The elaboration of VSRs has been facilitated by UCLG since 2020: six pilot countries reported to the 2020 HLPF (Benin, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Kenya, Mozambique and Nepal), and eight pilot countries to the 2021 HLPF (Cape Verde, Germany, Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, Sweden, Tunisia, Zimbabwe). Ecuador has produced its second VSR in 2021. These reporting processes, along with the VLR processes, have had a positive impact in strengthening multilevel dialogue on SDGs delivery.15

15 https://gold.uclg.org/report/localizing-sdgs-boost-monitoring-reporting.

2.2. EXISTING VLR GUIDANCE AND ANALYSIS

Several guidance documents have been prepared in the last few years for VLRs, with growing interest in local and sub-national reviews of SDGs implementation. While UN guidelines such as the VNR Handbook have been initially used and adapted to local governments, more specialized guidance for the local level has emerged with the pioneering work of UCLG, UN-Habitat and other organizations.

At the beginning of the SDG global monitoring process (in 2016 and updated in 2018), the office of the UN Secretary General published standardized guidelines to assist national governments in drafting their VNRs. Complementing this is the yearly Handbook for the Preparation of VNRs, edited and published by UN DESA. The Handbook in its 2021 edition cites ‘culture’ as one of the crosscutting issues (along with gender, spirituality, equity, values, citizenship, youth, employment, the blue economy initiative, disaster risk management, climate change, information and communications technology (ICT) and data/statistics) which can be incorporated into the national planning and development documents that look to support the implementation of the 2030 Agenda.

Parallel to this process, UN-Habitat launched an online platform called ‘Localizing the SDGs’ offering local governments tools and resources to facilitate SDGs localization. UN-Habitat, the UN Environment Program (UNEP) and the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) released the ‘Roadmap for localizing the SDGs: Implementation and Monitoring at the Sub-national Level’. UN-Habitat also developed a series of guidance tools on SDG 11 Targets and Indicators. UN-Habitat’s instrument for urban monitoring — the City Prosperity Index (CPI) — also includes several SDG indicators, assisting cities to align their policy-making processes with the fulfilment of the 2030 Agenda.

As the Community of Practice is evolving, both UN-Habitat and UCLG have established their respective online repositories for VLRs: The UN-Habitat VLRs resource page offers a list of VLRs, as well as ‘Resources’ co-published with UCLG and UNDP, products of its ‘Technical Cooperation’ with cities, information on programmes supporting ‘SDG Localization’, information on collaborations with ‘Partners’ including UCLG, the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), the UN Regional Economic Commissions and UN Country Teams.

UCLG’s Global Observatory on Local Democracy and Decentralization (GOLD) platform features a section on “Localizing the SDGs: a boost to monitoring & reporting”, which also offers a list of VLRs, as well as information on the GOLD’s yearly ‘Report to the HLPF’ (‘Towards the Localization of the SDGs’), the ‘VSRs’, the ‘Guidelines for VLRs’, the ‘Community of Practice’, and the report of the ‘CrossInstitutional Working Group on SDG Indicators’.

As stated in the platform, “With the start of the SDG acceleration decade, the GOLD is putting its efforts in supporting local and regional governments in the processes of monitoring and reporting on the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. (…) Country-wide, bottom-up Voluntary Subnational Reviews and Voluntary Local Reviews are becoming crucial tools with which local and regional governments report on the state of SDG localization in their territories.”

Within this context, the ‘Guidelines for Voluntary Local Reviews – Volume 1: A Comparative Analysis of Existing VLRs’, (‘VLR Guidelines Vol. 1’ for short) jointly developed by UCLG and UN-Habitat are aimed at showcasing the value of subnational reporting as much more than just a part of the reporting process. They have analysed in detail the structure, content and methods of the 37 VLRs that were published by June 2020, providing LRGs with an overview of the current approaches to the VLR exercise. They do so by studying the key elements underpinning the VLR process: a) what institutions and actors are actually being involved in a VLR?; b) where is the VLR process located institutionally in the broader scheme of multilevel governance?; c) what contents are VLRs including, and why?; and d) how are VLRs being undertaken, with what resources and what goals?

The broader goal of these and subsequent guidelines is to provide cities and other LRGs with cuttingedge knowledge and practical guidance on the VLR process, while kindling the sharing of experience and practices—and, ultimately, a global conversation—on monitoring and reporting on the SDGs at the local level.

This publication was followed the subsequent year by the ‘Guidelines for Voluntary Local Reviews – Volume 2: Towards a New Generation of VLRs: Exploring the local-national link’, which explore the link between VLRs and VNRs, “a connection that remains largely preliminary and informal, but is essential for achieving the SDGs by 2030. The guidelines demonstrate how VLRs and the global movement around them have revamped multi-level dialogue, increasing the demand for an effective multi-level cooperation and reinforcing the centrality and effectiveness of SDG localization. This volume also showcases growing evidence of the impact of VLRs/VSRs on VNRs and the national monitoring process.” Volume 2 builds on the contents of the 69 VLRs and the 250 VNRs that were available by 31 March 2021.

The publications were accompanied by side events co-organized by UN-Habitat and UCLG at the HLPF, i.e. the ‘VLR Series Launch’ held on 8 July 2020 and ‘VLRs and VSRs, Levers for Achieving the SDGs’, held on 14-16 July 2021.

Additional guidebooks that have been launched since 2020 to help communities develop VLRs include: the ‘State of Voluntary Local Reviews 2020: Local Action for Global Impact in Achieving the SDGs’, a review of the publicly available VLRs as of February 2020 prepared by the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES), which has also created a VLR Lab, and the ‘European Handbook for SDG Voluntary Local Reviews’ prepared by the Joint Research Centre of the European Union, which provides examples of official and experimental indicators that municipalities can use to monitor local SDG implementation.16

As noted by UCLG & UN-Habitat’s VLR Guidelines Vol. 1, “IGES engaged three Japanese cities in 2018 in an experimental attempt to report (from the bottom-up) on the local implementation of the SDGs. (…) The Brookings Institution, a United States-based global public policy think-tank, organized a seminar on VLRs in April 2019 and developed a pioneering VLR Handbook.” Various other guidebooks relevant for local monitoring of progress on SDGs are mentioned in the VLR Guidelines Vol. 1.

16 https://sdg.iisd.org/news/guidelines-for-voluntary-local-reviews-support-communities-assessments-of-sdg-progress/

As for a focus on ‘culture’ in the existing VLR agenda, this is only beginning to appear as a major theme, informed by direct or indirect efforts on the part of organizations active in this field. In 2018, UCLG published Culture in the Sustainable Development Goals: A Guide for Local Action, to support cities in the localization of the SDGs from a cultural perspective, and indexed all related good practices according to the 17 SDGs in its Observatory of Good Practices. IFLA has undertaken a study of Libraries in Voluntary Local Reviews, issued in May 2021, which “highlights greater understanding of the contribution of libraries to delivering the UN 2030 Agenda among local governments, in a wider range of areas, than in national reviews of SDG implementation.” UCLG, IFLA and ICOMOS have also been collaborating, through the Culture 2030 Goal campaign, on internal capacity building for their constituencies and members around the world to engage with local and national governments stakeholders in SDGs reporting processes.

Figures 7-14: The GOLD webpage and resources issued on the platform.