Box 4.2: Central funds, local delivery — financing resilience at the community level

Box 4.2: Central funds, local delivery — financing resilience at the community level

Some national governments have responded to the impacts of COVID-19 by channelling financial assistance through municipal governments and communities, providing much needed funds while ensuring these are allocated to local needs and priorities. For example, in Canada, the government has amended the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Programme to allow provinces and municipalities to access federal funding to undertake a range of local projects, such as upgrading schools and hospitals to investing in green spaces and cycling lanes, to “support longer-term goals of sustainable, economically healthy, low-carbon, and inclusive communities”.20

Other governments have pursued different models that have nevertheless combined central resources with local capacities to deliver effective support to help at-risk communities weather the economic challenges of the pandemic. In Kenya, an ambitious programme called Kazi Mtaani (‘Jobs in the Neighbourhood’) was piloted in April 2020 in eight informal settlements in Nairobi, Mombasa and other cities. The project supported poor communities by recruiting residents as paid workers into a public works programme focused on upgrading their communities, and was subsequently expanded to support hundreds of thousands of people across the country.21

especially valuable during the pandemic. At the metropolitan scale, for instance, cooperation between neighbouring municipalities enabled the implementation of special regulations for public transport systems and other mobility measures within urban agglomerations. At the regional level, cooperation between cities and their surrounding regions facilitated the management of food supply and other goods flows across the urban-rural continuum as well as continuity of basic service provision such as water, sanitation and waste management. Evidence suggests that metropolitan areas with institutionalized governance frameworks are more likely to coordinate their actions. In the Metropolitan Area of Guadalajara (Mexico) and Grenoble-Alpes Métropole (France), the adaptation of previous metropolitan policies linked to the rural territories such as land use plans or programmes for the agricultural sector have helped both metropolises to implement a better response to the pandemic.22 In the US, coordination between the governors of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania in the formulation of health policies led to the creation of a common set of guidelines on social distancing and limits on recreation that were also subsequently adopted by other states.23 In Serbia local governments established emergency task forces to enforce containment and other restrictive measures, as well as support the effectiveness of response by local community institutions.24

Additionally, economic policies have also been adopted through horizontal coordination between cities. In the Brussels metropolitan region, municipalities within the metropolis agreed on a four-phase plan for recovery which involved funds for aid to people and businesses affected by the pandemic.25 The Metropolitan Area of Barcelona’s ApropAMB plan allocates €16.6 million to reactivate local economies and strengthen social cohesion by financing a range of recovery projects.26 In the US, similar measures were also taken in Los Angeles County where an Economic Resiliency Task Force was established, with 13 sector-specific work groups focusing on areas such as business, healthcare, labour and hospitality.27 Remarkably, cities also undertook horizontal coordination for pragmatic policy reasons aimed at mutual benefit sharing in relation to the pandemic: this was the case in Denmark, where municipalities joined forces to jointly purchase protective equipment for their personnel.28

Finally, in some metropolises the need for coordination to address the pandemic has accelerated pending legal reforms. The Council of Mayors and the Planning Office of the Metropolitan Area of San Salvador, In the US, coordination between the governors of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania in the formulation of health policies led to the creation of a common set of guidelines on social distancing and limits on recreation that were also subsequently adopted by other states