Integrated Follow-up and Review Approaches to Urban Sustainability

In recent years, United Nations (UN) Member States have adopted a range of ambitious global agendas that address the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability. These include the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (adopted in September 2015), the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, the New Urban Agenda (October 2016), the Paris Agreement (December 2015), the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (March 2015), and the World Humanitarian Summit (May 2016). Achieving the goals set out in these agendas will require an unprecedented mobilisation of knowledge, expertise, financial and other resources. All relevant actors—not just the signatory Member States—need to be involved in this effort. Against this background, the Cities Alliance Joint Work Programme (JWP) on Cities in the Global Agendas has commissioned two papers that review the urban development and governance dimension of the global agendas (Satterthwaite et al. 2018) and explore the role of local governments and other local actors in the follow-up and review of the agendas (Dellas et al. 2018). The Cities Alliance also issued a subsequent call for best practices to identify existing successful examples of follow-up and review of the global agendas at the local level. The goal of this paper is to summarise insights gained from these two papers and the call for best practices to identify key opportunities and challenges with respect to the follow-up and review of the global agendas.