Foreword
Global sustainable development agendas increasingly recognise the crucial role of local and regional governments and partnerships at the subnational level. Two-thirds of the 169 SDG targets will not be achieved without cities and regions deploying their policy and investment prerogatives in areas such as housing, mobility, energy, climate, waste, drinking water and sanitation, among others. International agendas such as the Paris Climate Agreement underline the importance of the subnational level in advancing international co-operation. Subnational governments have been on the frontline of global response efforts with regard to recent humanitarian, health and climate shocks. Through their international development co-operation activities, subnational governments help drive the localisation of such global agendas, notably by sharing knowledge and good practices with their peers.
Since 2017, the OECD Centre for Entrepreneurship, SMEs, Regions and Cities (CFE) and the OECD Development Co-operation Directorate (DCD) have carried out joint work on DDC to assess key trends and innovative mechanisms on how cities and regions design, finance, implement, monitor and evaluate their DDC activities with partner countries. This stream of joint work has also provided recommendations on DDC policies, data and reporting, capacity building, multi-level co-ordination and partnerships.
This new report seeks to contribute to the sustainability and effectiveness of city-to-city partnerships. It discusses the framework conditions for effective city-to-city partnerships and takes stock of existing monitoring and evaluation mechanisms. It proposes a systemic monitoring and evaluation framework for city-to-city partnerships to localise the SDGs, combining a self-assessment and a set of SDG indicators. This framework aims to bridge the gap in terms of measuring the progress of cities engaged in partnerships on the 2030 Agenda and their compliance with the G20 Rome High-Level Principles on city-to-city partnerships for localising the SDGs. The report also presents lessons learned from a pilot-testing of this new framework with 27 partnerships supported by the European Commission and highlights policy implications and ways forward to enhance the sustainability, transparency and accountability of city-to-city partnerships, as a shared responsibility across levels of government and stakeholders.
An earlier version of the report was discussed at the 32nd Session of the Working Party on Urban Policy on 29 November 2022. The final report was approved via written procedure by the Regional Development Policy Committee (RDPC) on 5 April 2023 under cote CFE/RDPC/URB(2022)16/REV1.