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Municipal Partnerships for Sustainability Project Successfully Started

Kick-off workshop

With the official launch of twelve Municipal Partnerships for Sustainability between German municipalities and municipalities from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Serbia, the new SKEW pilot project, ‘Municipal Partnerships for Sustainability’, has successfully started.

Participants of the workshop reading in a brochure.
Brankica Durković, Tanja Kukobat, both from Zemun in Serbia, and Tijana Todorović, Aleksandra Tomić from Valjevo in Serbia. Photo: Barbara Frommann

Gelsenkirchen, 17 January 2017. At the kick-off workshop in Gelsenkirchen, SKEW welcomed around 100 municipal representatives from Germany and Southeastern Europe. For the two-year project phase, the partner municipalities agreed to long-term and systematic cooperation and to a dialogue process on the 2030 Agenda and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 

SKEW accompanies, advises and supports them during this process.

Martina Rudowitz, first Mayoress of the City of Gelsenkirchen, is standing and talking at a speaker's desk.
Address by Martina Rudowitz, first Mayoress of the City of Gelsenkirchen, during the evening reception on 16 January 2017. Photo: Barbara Frommann

Mayoress Martina Rudowitz welcomed the guests to the Hans-Sachs-Haus in Gelsenkirchen. She appreciated  the fact that the municipalities present are keen to continue to open up internationally, for the purposes of economic, ecologic and social sustainability. “I wish you lasting and great success in this”, she said. Ulrich Kaltenbach from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) emphasized: “Municipalities worldwide are faced with enormous challenges. Increasing urbanisation, poverty, the growing number of refugees, climate change, health care and mobility are but a few of them. In many cities, several smart minds are already working on practical solutions for these challenges. Municipalities are therefore very important. They have the knowledge to find solutions to global problems at the local level.”

Over the course of both conference days, the participants worked intensively on the topic of the SDGs and on ways to implement them at the municipal level. Among the partnerships are both new municipal partnerships as well as partnerships that have already cooperated for a long time and are now seeking new joint impulses for sustainable municipal development. Both small rural municipalities as well as metropolises are participating. With the partnership between Munich, the district of Treptow-Köpenick in Berlin and Subotica in Serbia, an international tripartite municipal partnership is also represented in the pilot project.

A group of participants is sitting on a table and discussing.
Group of Serbian participants working on the interlinkages between the SDGs. Photo: Barbara Frommann

Through in-depth professional and personal exchange, the ceremonious handover of the “Memoranda of Understanding” and the comprehensive inputs during the kick-off workshop, the municipal actors are now well prepared for the next project steps. The partner municipalities had agreed in advance on one of two possible approaches. Depending on local requirements, they decided to focus either on the (further) development of municipal sustainability strategies relating to the 2030 Agenda. Or they chose the approach “learning by doing” which focuses on selected SDGs and the implementation of a pilot measure in both partner municipalities. At the end of the workshop, all partnerships presented the areas and/or goals that they would like to work on jointly over the next two years. 

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