New Urban Agenda Implementation: Transformative governance and planning partnerships with community collaboration

This blog post describes our Programme’s Implementation workstream and it is part of a series of four published by our team as we present our work at the World Urban Forum (WUF9). The other pieces cover the Intelligence, Investment and Integration workstreams.

The Resilience Brokers Programme is an ambitious five-year initiative, aimed to develop and demonstrate innovative tools and build the capacity to enable and accelerate the journey towards climate-compatible, risk-resilient and equitable futures, in 200 city regions worldwide.

The Programme is designed to foster new forms of cross-sector collaborations with the potential to unlock, mobilise and redirect the transformative power of trillions of dollars of private funding into sustainable development projects. The introduction of sustainable development paths at this scale will support the implementation of the New Urban Agenda and the achievement of the Global Goals. We are at WUF9 and look forward to introduce interested city-region champions and potential new partners to the Programme.

The Resilience Brokers Programme will establish collaborative laboratories (collaboratories) in all 200 target regions. These collaboratories will convene and network a cross-sector team of local stakeholders–including government, business, community, faith and academia parties. Multidisciplinary teams based at the collaboratories will manage the development and implementation of city-region specific, urban-rural development projects. All projects will be designed and implemented in a way that is sustainable, people-centered, responsive and integrated.

Resilience Brokers will equip the collaboratories’ teams with the tools, training and support they need to make informed decisions that reflect systems impacts across sectors. Tools will include the new resilience.io integrated systems modelling of human, ecological health, economics and resources at city-region scale; and human, ecology, resources and planetary systems at Earth scale.

All activity delivered through the collaboratories will be coordinated through the Programme’s regional hubs and will contribute to scale capacity building, learning and practice to other city regions globally. Regional hubs will facilitate a number of city-region demonstrators–with the appropriate culture and language variations–to improve networking and collective learning. We anticipate that different versions of the resilience.io platform will evolve to suit the needs of different cultures and regions.

We have developed targeted plans and established the relevant partnerships to support the delivery of activities aimed to engage in depth with audiences requiring a more targeted approach:

• The Programme will enable new governance structures to be explored through a democratic, long-term and integrated, multilevel, proficient governance system that takes full advantage of the digital age through the resilience.io platform.
• Working with partners who have access to global networks of young people, we plan to create a cohort of young global leaders within the Programme. We are also planning a gaming and education version of resilience.io, designed to engage with young people and improve their understanding of how their region works–with the aim to encourage high levels of youth participation in the planning and design of the city regions where they live.
• The Programme’s innovation and technology scaling process will support social and technical entrepreneurs to model their innovations and make them available to all Programme’s city regions, as resilience.io platform Apps.

Read one of the other pieces from our team for the World Urban Forum (WUF9) on Intelligence, Investment and Integration.

Originally published at resiliencebrokers.org on February 6, 2018.