Interdisciplinary, international, wide-ranging

Online, 17 and 18 November 2020. A large-scale, virtual platform for municipal partnerships with Eastern Europe! The event brought together under one roof the first online German-Ukrainian municipal partnerships conference, the second conference on municipal partnerships with Eastern Europe and the fourth network meeting for the first phase of the municipal partnerships for sustainability. More than 100 delegates from German and Eastern European municipalities, first and foremost from Ukraine, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, the Republic of Moldova and Serbia, logged on during the two-day event and helped make the conference a success.

The conference focused on opportunities for professionals to discuss and share lessons learned on implementing the 2030 Agenda at the local level. What are the political frameworks and strategies at global and local level? What can we learn from ongoing partnership projects on localising the 2030 Agenda? How can we promote creativity and innovation, and what sources of funding and support are available for this?

The Major Conference for Eastern Europe was opened on 17 November by Professor Claudia Warning, Director General at the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), and Dr Jens Kreuter, Managing Director of Engagement Global. “You are coming together today on equal terms – and who could be a better partner to the municipalities than the municipalities themselves? You know the problems at local level and you know the solutions at local level – so dialogue between yourselves is sure to bear fruit”, Professor Warning told the participants.

The issue of localising the Agenda in the context of German-East European municipal partnerships was first of all addressed in depth in a panel discussion between delegates from a local authority in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the BMZ and the Service Agency Communities in One World. Afterwards, in three specialist forums that were held in parallel, participants discussed their project experience with the 2030 Agenda in the areas of energy efficiency, good local governance and urban development. In each forum, one good practice example of project work from a German-Ukrainian partnership and one from a German-Eastern European partnership were presented in detail and subsequently discussed. The aim was to stimulate peer-to-peer dialogue between the participants and to learn from the challenges and successes.

There was unanimous agreement on one important finding from the specialist forums: localising sustainable development in line with the 2030 Agenda means focusing on local people and their needs. Problems and sustainability deficits often impact people, the environment, society and the private sector at the same time. It is therefore important to analyse and understand these effects in combination.

In an inspiring contribution on day two of the conference, Yelizaveta Zhukovska from the GIZ’s U-LEAD with Europe programme suggested ways of generating creative ideas in project work with partners. She presented the design thinking approach as a way of overcoming traditional concepts and work models, and as an interesting method for bringing about innovative changes, especially in public institutions.

The programme was rounded off with a virtual market of opportunities. Here, participants were able to browse the Service Agency’s offerings and then identify and obtain advice on the most suitable support instrument for their individual partnership activities. Partnerships currently implementing a Nakopa project were also able to compare notes and discuss current challenges, and get to know other projects.

The partnership conference showed that municipal partnerships are abuzz with activity and that many good and creative approaches to implementing the 2030 Agenda at local level were already available. As Dr Stefan Wilhelmy, Division Manager of the Service Agency, put it: “Even if the pandemic currently has the world in its grip, our work will not come to a standstill!”