Dialogue 4: Integrated Governance in Spatial Planning for a More Just, Green, and Healthy Urban Future

COVID-19 has amplified existing inequality patterns and represented a major governance challenge requiring inter-sectoral, multi-actors and multi-level coordination to address fragmented reality. The additional and related trends and shocks of spatial inequality, food security and b=nutrition, climate change and digital transformation currently present both challenges and opportunities to put forward initiatives that can successfully integrate multi-level governance in urban development through spatial planning.

The Decade of Action calls for accelerating sustainable solutions to all the world’s biggest challenges, ranging from poverty and gender to climate change, inequality and closing the finance gap, mobilizing all sectors of society on three levels: global action, local action, and people action, through multi-level governance.

Multi-level governance has emerged as a paradigm shift in governmental and public management approaches that strive for broad consultative processes and mechanisms for vertical and horizontal coordination among and between a diverse range of actors and levels of government. This involves both the formal and informal institutions as well as the public, private and social sectors.

Both governance and spatial planning are defined as enablers for the territorial and urban development process. The relations between governance and spatial planning are symmetric in the sense that both enablers can be the departing point of a process that will end up reinforcing the second. A governance initiative can represent the starting point of a spatial planning process, while territorial planning can structure the development of enhanced governance structures.

The interconnection between governance and spatial planning has contributed to achieve progress in the implementation of the SDGs in an integrated manner, with impacts in the areas of poverty and social exclusion, territorial cohesion, local climate action, integrated digital transformation strategies, improved private sector involvement, enhanced local employment and opportunities. It is through these integrated initiatives that territories and cities achieve critical advancement of several SDGs at a time, ensuring the Decade of Action will lead to the accomplishment of the agenda 2030.

Transformative action beyond boundaries

Panel One

• How can urbanization serve as a vehicle for economic development of a country? How to make sure that investment in urban infrastructure and services underpin economic transformation?
• Can linking investment in urban development, based on sound territorial planning and objectives of structural transformation, lead to more synergies of investment in various sectors of economy? How can governance and spatial and investment planning go beyond their jurisdictional boundaries? Can we think of innovative approaches to territorial governance that improve horizontal and vertical coordination for sustainable urban development?    

Panel Two

• How can developing countries better coordinate investment opportunities and public revenues to finance sustainable urban development at national and sub-national levels.
• How can external finance be more effectively leveraged in cities of the Global South  - particularly small and intermediary cities.