09/11/2015

Towards Habitat III: Global Taskforce of Local Governments meets in Barcelona on 10-12 November 2015

UCLG has been invited to co-lead Policy Unit Four on Urban Governance, Capacity and Institutional Development with the London School of Economics as part of the preparations for the Third United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development, Habitat III, to be held in Quito, Ecuador, in October 2016. UCLG will carry out this role in close coordination with the Global Taskforce of Local and Regional Governments, that is meeting in Barcelona on 10-12 November 2015.

The invitation to UCLG to co-lead one of the ten Habitat III policy units is a strong sign of the recognition of the role of local government networks in the Habitat III process. The policy units’ goals are to bring together high-level expertise to explore state-of-the-art research and analysis on each thematic area, identify good practices and lessons learned, and develop policy recommendations in each area to feed into the New Urban Agenda, the 20-year global agenda on sustainable urban development that will come out of the Habitat III conference.

Each policy unit is made up of 20 experts from different world regions that represent different constituencies, who were nominated by Member States and stakeholders and appointed by the Habitat III Secretary General. Policy Unit Four includes a range of prestigious academics and policy-makers. The local and regional governments’ networks have made proposals of experts through the GTF which have mostly been retained.

The first draft the policy papers will be completed by the end of December 2015 and the deadline for the final drafts is February 28, 2016. It is expected that the Global Taskforce will play a facilitating role in the briefing of the different experts, aiming to provide a local perspective to each of the policy areas.  A briefing and planning meeting of the Global Taskforce is planned for early November.

UCLG, the Global Taskforce and the LSE will coordinate the inputs of experts in urban governance for the policy paper of Policy Unit Four, which will take the Habitat III issue paper on urban governance, published earlier this year, as its starting point.

With this aim, the Global Taskforce will be meeting in Barcelona on the 10-12 of November, in order to plan the next steps in the process of the Habitat III preparations. This three days meeting organized in Barcelona aims at providing briefing to Global Taskforce members and plan the work ahead and exchanging with the experts of the Policy Units.

UCLG Committee on Social Inclusion, Participatory Democracy and Human Rights together with other members of the Global Platform for the Right to the City will play an active role in this meeting. Indeed, the Committee co-president Patrick Braouezec and CSIPDHR’s current coordinator, Magali Fricaudet, will be participating in the planned sessions. In addition, the Committee’s former coordinator, Eva García Chueca, as a member of Policy Unit on Right to the city and inclusive Cities, and Nelson Saule, from Polis Institute, that is coordinating the Global Platform and will co-lead the Policy Unit on the Right to the City will take part to the meeting.

The Committee aims to get the Global Charter-Agenda for Human Rights in the City’s principles, values and rights recognized and included at policy papers issued from this Global Taskforce meeting –and, eventually, to get them included in the New Urban Agenda. The Committee has also elaborated a position paper on the Policy Unit on Inclusive Cities on order to contribute to share its expertise towards the New Global Agenda.