Presentation
Presentation
The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) establish a series of bold, yet essential, targets to be achieved by 2030, which combine social inclusion, economic development and sustainability. For local and regional governments (LRGs), they form a transformative agenda that strives to: improve the delivery of public services to citizens; enhance people’s engagement in public policy-making by breaking down dividing walls between different policy areas; and foster connections with, and between, different stakeholders. LRGs must deal with the vast majority of today’s most pressing challenges. These include: climate change, environmental pollution, social segregation and demographic change, waste management, energy efficiency, and local economic development. Equally importantly, all the SDGs have a territorial dimension. In fact, according to various studies, two thirds of these goals cannot be achieved without the direct involvement of local and regional government organizations. Collaboration with, and between, cities and regions across the globe has produced positive results in terms of the development of efficient and responsive territorial policies. In addition, city-to-city and region-to-region initiatives, which are also referred to as decentralized cooperation, present new opportunities for achieving the 2030 Agenda. Decentralized cooperation (DC) forms an essential part of the modern process of the internationalization of cities. It is one of the main reasons why cities and regions search for good practices and solutions in the international arena, with which to solve their own domestic challenges. Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, DC has been developed and improved. This has been achieved through collaborations between national associations of cities and local government organizations and by the implementation of local and regional government agendas worldwide. DC aims to directly support local development, decentralisation processes, and institutional reinforcement, among others. Thereby, it seeks to improve the designing of territorial public policy. DC has also been shown to offer specific advantages for local and territorial development and a key way to achieve the localization and implementation of the SDGs.
5
