Habitat III: Open-ended Informal Consultative Meetings
The preparations for the Habitat III Conference are underway. Scheduled for 17-20 October 2016, the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) is a major global summit that requires mobilizing all expertise on sustainable urban development.
In that perspective, UCLG Africa Secretary General, Mr. Jean Pierre Elong Mbassi, is expected to participate in the Open-ended informal consultative meetings or Policy Units in New York, from 25 to 29 April 2016. Our Secretary General will take part in Policy Unit number 3 on “National Urban Policies”. Other experts representing various constituent groups and stakeholders, and whose selection is guided by geographical and gender balance, as well as qualitative criteria in terms of contribution to the Habitat III preparatory process, will meet next month in New York.
United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) has been invited also to co-lead Policy Unit 4 on Urban Governance, Capacity and Institutional Development. A role that UCLG will carry out in close collaboration with Global Taskforce of Local and Regional Governments. Read here
These experts will form several Policy Units and will provide targeted recommendations on one of the underlined 10 topics. They will be tasked to identify the challenges, including the structural and policy constraints, to the New Urban Agenda; to identify the policy priorities and critical issues for the implementation of the New Urban Agenda and finally to develop action-oriented recommendations for the implementation of the New Urban Agenda.
The 200 individuals who make up key thematic expert groups for the drafting of the New Urban Agenda come from the worldwide ranks of experts in housing, planning, design and urban development. They will establish their inputs on the 22 technical “issue papers” produced by agencies across the multilateral system in 2015, as well as the government and stakeholders reactions to those papers submitted over the summer of last year.
Beside the inputs of the Policy Units, a number of regional and thematic high-level meetings involving a wide range of participants are taking place resulting in “final participants’ declarations” that will be considered official inputs to the Habitat III process. The latest meeting was in Prague, Czech Republic, for the Europe Region. Regional meetings for Africa and Asia-Pacific also took place respectively in Abuja, Nigeria and Jakarta, Indonesia. The final regional meeting for Latin America and the Caribbean will take place in Toluca, Mexico, from 18 to 20 April 2016.
All the information concerning the Regional and Thematic meetings for Habitat III are available here.
For more information on the process of the Policy Units, visit the website here.
