City Diplomacy: Connecting Global Cities Strategically

This event explores the capacity of city diplomacy and transnational municipal networks to support effective implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 11 and the New Urban Agenda. It will convene representatives of key city networks, as well as experts in global politics and urban planning, to explore the challenges and possibilities of paradiplomacy, networking, and other collaborations, to launch a global commission on city diplomacy, and to develop a rating and training resource for urban collaborations. By gathering representatives of the major global and regional city networks, as well as representatives of international active global cities, the event will launch development of an action plan to encourage network-to-network collaboration on global challenges, develop a roadmap to an index of city diplomacy efforts, and roll out a training program in negotiation and diplomacy for cities (between December 2016 and July 2017) in order to further enhance the capacity of city diplomacy linked with major other processes such as the Sendai Framework and the Addis Ababa Agenda. The side event will be followed by additional international meetings of the commission, specifically at COP22 in Morocco, the C40 bi-annual summit in Mexico City, a two-day commission UCL retreat at the University of Oxford, the WHO Healthy Cities summit in Rotterdam, and the Chicago Forum on Global Cities.