How can community-led initiatives and local governments work together to build more sustainable and just cities? How can partnerships between them be designed to lift both parties up, to amplify their impact and reach?
Given that communities are well-positioned to know on-the-ground challenges and strengths in a given city, and local governments have the power to support and scale-up impact, working together provides an opportunity that may not have been there otherwise, to enable real change.
Working with nine urban ‘experimenters’, the Urban Community project provided microgrants for community-led initiatives as diverse as a pop-up cargo bike climate info point, skills sharing led by community members, and a garden all about food sovereignty and fighting food insecurity. These showed that while not always straightforward, there is untapped potential that could be unlocked by partnering up.
What communities stand to gain
Through partnering with a municipality, community-led initiatives can access support, resources, knowledge, and data that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to access. They can even get mandates and financial resources to take on projects that have been municipal.
ICLEI Member Rotterdam (the Netherlands), for example, has a “Right to Challenge” programme through which communities can challenge the way the city runs a public service, if they feel that they can do better. If the municipality agrees with the challenge, they can delegate authority over that service to the community group.
What local governments stand to gain
Initiatives of this kind often engage community members that may feel left out of traditional, government-led ‘stakeholder engagement’. By partnering with them, cities can reach a more representative group of inhabitants, building a more trust-based basis for change. This can, in turn, reinvigorate civic engagement and local democracy.
Furthermore, these initiatives last beyond election cycles. Engaging with community efforts can thus spark longer-term thinking and support continuity across elections. Plus, this thought-process is likely to be more creative, and to come with built-in community buy-in.
Pre-requisites for success
While there is untapped potential here, that does not mean that community-led initiatives in partnership with local governments are necessarily going to be successful. Luckily, we know of some factors that can help.
Local governments must make it easy for communities to pursue such partnerships. This means clear, simple, transparent, and accessible bureaucracy, and clear presentation of “who does what” on local government websites and other channels. Municipalities must also be prepared to take on long-term collaboration for long-term impact.
“AdaptCascais Fund” in ICLEI Member Cascais (Portugal), for example, looks to make it simpler for communities to access longer-term funding from the city, in an unbureaucratic manner, by providing a pot of 450,000 EUR and allowing citizens to choose which projects should be funded.
In the spirit of true partnership, communities and local governments must mutually support each other. Collaboration should be accompanied by regular meetings with follow-ups and moments for honest reflection, and all partners should acknowledge each other’s efforts, celebrate wins together, and consider how each can coach or mentor each other. For the latter point, get inspiration from ICLEI Member Brussels (Belgium)’s “Sustainable Neighbourhoods Facilitator Service”.
Of course, there remain many challenges to community led initiatives running in partnership with -local governments, which usually stem from a lack of something: trust, time, interest, representation, money, skills, imagination, transparency, or political will from either side. However, in many cases such partnerships can greatly amplify impact, and must therefore be well-understood and pursued.
What’s next
The insights gained through the UrbanCommunity project, and summarised in a succinct, visual four-page brochure found that: when it comes to making cities more ecologically sustainable and socially just, so much potential can be tapped by pursuing partnerships between local governments and community led initiatives. Yet, more dialogue and partnership building is needed.
To this end, ICLEI Europe and ECOLISE are convening an event on 7 November 2023 that will examine harnessing the power of community-led initiatives and local governments to make the EU Green Deal a reality. More details on this event will follow on ICLEI Europe channels shortly – subscribe to our newsletter to be the first to hear when registration opens.