Up-scaling City Networks for Knowledge Exchange at Regional Level

The New Urban Agenda (para 149) for sustainable cities, strives to support local government associations as promoters and providers of capacity development, recognizing and strengthening, as appropriate, both their involvement in national consultations on urban policies and development priorities and their cooperation with sub-national and local governments. The National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA) has been actively involved in development city government networks for supporting advocacy, building capacities, disseminating knowledge and peer learning as part of its project initiatives. Aligned with the SDGs and the New Urban Agenda, NIUA has pioneered in introducing knowledge networking among Indian cities and positioned itself as the national hub. The proposed networking event at the World Urban Forum 9 aims to share learning's from the different initiatives at NIUA and discuss the successes of knowledge networks amongst cities and institutions on the global platform with the intention of leveraging these at the trans-national level. This event will showcase collaborations, cross-learnings from networking initiatives and will explore prospective partnerships to foster achievement of SDGs. The event aims to develop networks dedicated for building capacities of Indian Cities that can be scaled up to regional levels. Two major discussion points would be addressed: (1) City networks and knowledge network initiatives across nations elaborating roles of the national and regional hubs in particular. (2) Incentives that would encourage national and trans-national governments to formalize knowledge networks.