From Global Commitments to Local Capacity: Using Competency Frameworks to Localise Urban Agendas

Cities and national governments face mounting expectations to implement ambitious global frameworks -the New Urban Agenda, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement -yet the gap between commitment and delivery remains enormous and persistent. This lecture argues that this implementation gap is fundamentally a capacity gap: a deficit in the skills, systems, institutional arrangements, and political competencies required to translate international commitments into local action. Drawing on research from the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS) at Erasmus University Rotterdam, it presents competency frameworks as a diagnostic and planning tool -capable of identifying precisely where skills and structures are breaking down in any given urban context. The lecture offers practitioners and policymakers a concrete methodology for strengthening institutional capacity, a prerequisite for housing delivery at scale.