Third Local and Regional Governments Forum 2020

The third edition of the Local and Regional Governments Forum on the 2030 Agenda took place on July 13, 2020, and was dedicated to the theme “The Decade of Action – bolstering change from the ground-up”. This event was held during the UN High-Level Political Forum on sustainable development.

The Forum highlighted the rapid actions local and regional governments have taken in preventing and responding to the COVID-19 pandemic through universal public service delivery and shared examples of how they can act as the catalysts in the bottom-up trasformation towards sustainability and resilience after the pandemic. The Forum emphasized the importance of multilevel governance, sound local finances, and decentralized cooperation and territorial cohesion in the aftermath of the outbreak.

The participants agreed that local and regional governments have a key role to stop the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in territories while ensuring access to essential public services, including housing, public transport and education, as well as access to food supplies and support to the most vulnerable, among other tasks. The COVID-19 aftermath is an opportunity to go beyond temporary solutions to build the long-term resilience of regions, cities and communities by choosing recovery policies that build back better, utilizing the SDGs as an overarching framework and multilevel governance as its core.

Representatives of local and regional governments from all over the world took part in this event. They included President of UCLG, Mayor of Alhoceima (Morocco) Mohamed Boudra, Mayor of Bogota (Colombia) Claudia Lopez, President of UCLG-Eurasia, Mayor of Kazan (Russia) Ilsur Metshin, UCLG Vice-President, Mayor of Surabaya Tri Rismaharini, President of ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, Mayor of Bonn Ashok Sridharan and others.

In his speech Mayor of Kazan Ilsur Metshin highlighted that in a drastically changing world we are paving the way to a new round of IT technology. “The goal of introducing digital technologies is now not only improving the quality of life in the city, but also provision of vital support in the event of global cataclysms. Urban life can receive a qualitatively new impetus for development – e-government, e-medicine and tele-consultations, remote work, online education and e-commerce have already become part of everyday life,” Ilsur Metshin said.

Secretary General of UCLG-Eurasia Rasikh Sagitov, Vice-Mayor of Kazan Evgenia Lodvigova, Head of International Relations Department of the Kazan Municipality Ruslan Galiakhmetov and others took part in this event as well.

13.07.2020

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