Leadership for Urban Resilience and Sustainable Development

The Challenge

R-Cities is partnering with Citi Foundation to better enable the public sector to lead multisector solutions to deliver resilience and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in cities. This program aims to harness the unlocked capacity of the public sector to engage with business to understand their roles in the city system and harness their potential to build urban resilience. Hence the program will help cities build better partnerships, including with the private sector, to build urban resilience and advance SDG agendas.

Program Objective

We believe there is an opportunity to create better in-house capacity within the public sector to engage businesses to understand these resilience challenges and participate in the delivery of the SDGs and urban resilience in cities. To achieve those goals, it will require more dynamic and better facilitated challenge-framing and engagement models that can enable necessary effective collaboration.

Therefore, this program will test and refine resilience assessment and engagement models in two different governance systems. It aims for the following objectives:

Develop leadership capacity building and project development tools that support public and private sector actors to collaborate on building leadership for resilience, as well as contributing to the SDGs.

Publish a roadmap of resilience building partnerships that will capture and reflect on how the leadership capacity building and project development tools are enabling the following:

• Increased institutional capacity to align key stakeholders around key resilience challenges.
• The advancement of the SDGs and resilience agenda through multi-sector collaboration, including with the private sector.

For the longer term outcome, this program is looking to demonstrate a roadmap that can be replicated across cities to build leadership to deliver resilience and the SDGs in cities through the co-design of tools and engagement models involving governments, communities and the private sector.

Program Components

Resilience and Asset Management Practice

The program is looking at how the public sector can develop tools to engage asset owners and managers to streamline resilience into their asset management practice by understanding their assets’ reliance, interdependencies and influence on the city system.

Multi-sector Coalition for Localizing SDGs

The program is looking at how the public sector can build and test resilience assessment tools as well as an engagement strategy with private sector, philanthropy and non-government actors for SDG localization at neighborhood level.

Partners