Decentralised Development Co-operation and City-to-City Partnerships

Decentralised development co-operation (DDC) and city-to-city partnerships, two types of partnerships for sustainable development between cities and regions in developed and developing countries, play a crucial role in advancing international goals such as the sustainable development goals (SDGs) and global agendas. Accounting for 3.6% of total official development assistance in 2021 and up by almost 40% since 2015, DDC and city-to-city partnerships are receiving increased attention, including through the G20 Rome High-Level Principles on city-to-city partnerships for localising the SDGs. 

The OECD work on decentralised development co-operation and city-to-city partnerships seeks to help cities and regions to increase the impact of their programmes by focusing their partnerships on those areas where they have developed unique skills and knowledge, collecting better data for transparency and accountability of impacts globally, exchanging resources and knowledge to ensure mutual benefits, and co-ordinating multi-level and multi-stakeholder partnerships for the achievement of the SDGs. 

The project’s main objectives are to:

• Provide guidance on implementation modalities for a higher impact of DDC policies, strategies and programmes
• Strengthen monitoring and evaluation and improve ODA data collection for evidence-based DDC
• Promote policy dialogue and mutual learning across levels of government within the same country and between peer countries, cities and regions.
• Mobilising financing in support of DDC activities
• Support capacity development and skills for effective, efficient and inclusive DDC implementation

Since 2018, the OECD has been supporting cities, regions and countries through policy dialogues and peer-to-peer learning activities on decentralised development co-operation and city-to-city partnerships. The work focuses on the analysis of recent trends and evolutions in order to understand emerging paradigms in DDC, and to suggest policy recommendations for effective DDC policies, financing, monitoring and evaluation and multi-level governance. This has resulted in a variety of outputs including the development of a systemic monitoring and evaluation framework for city-to-city partnerships to localise the SDGs, a global policy toolkit, a national review of DDC in Germany and dedicated case studies with France, the Basque Country (Spain), Flanders (Belgium) and Tuscany (Italy).