The Habitat Commitment Index 2.0: Monitoring and Evaluating City Performance in the light of the SDGs and the NUA

This side event discusses the urgency and challenges in measuring and evaluating city performance in the light of the SDGs and commitments made in the NUA. Doing so, presenters and commentators will discuss questions such as: how should commitments and goals be monitored? Who should monitor? How can monitoring efforts go beyond assessment exercises but also increase accountability, feeding back into policy debates and discussions at the local level? And finally, how can alternative and innovative types of data complement government statistics?

Responding to the question of how commitments could be monitored,

the New School will present the Habitat Commitment Index 2.0 (HCI 2.0), a research initiative that measures city performance using a set of indicators that relate to Habitat III commitments. The HCI is an innovative way to assess and compare performance thanks to its methodology, which establishes predicted achievement levels by per capita GDP levels. The HCI 2.0 follows the HCI 1.0, which measured the fulfillment of Habitat II commitments at the country level. The results of the HCI 2.0 give surprising insights in city performance globally, highlighting cities that have achieved significant improvements despite low GDP levels, as well as those cities that count with high economic resources, yet are lagging behind in terms of performance. The presentation also highlights the most significant challenge to global monitoring today: the lack of comparable city level data.

The presentation will be followed by comments and a discussion among representatives from academia, local and national governments, a development agency, and the audience.