In Latin America, besides the experience of Colombia, Brazilian local and regional governments have been among the most active. As mentioned above, the national associations of municipalities provided newly-elected local authorities with a Guide for the Incorporation of SDGs into Municipal Multi-Year Plans. Cities like Rio de Janeiro or Barcarena (in the state of Pará) and federal states like the Federal District, Ceará, Paraíba, Paraná, Piauí, São Paulo and Bahia have either integrated the SDGs in their plans, or have committed to. A similar trend can be observed in Mexico, with several states – Nuevo León, Colima, Hidalgo, Zacatecas and Jalisco (which is also working on local indicators) – and cities (e.g., Guadalajara) leading the process of alignment with the SDGs. In Argentina, several provinces – Jujuy, La Rioja, Mendoza, Neuquén, Salta, San Juan, Tierra del Fuego y Tucumán – as well as the city of Buenos Aires have already signed agreements with the national government for the localization of the SDGs. A few pilot projects, moreover, have been initiated by a few municipalities, including the city of Vicente López, in the conglomeration of Buenos Aires. In Costa Rica, the national local government association is training municipal planners on SDG implementation, while the national government has been sponsoring projects on waste and water management, climate change mitigation and risk prevention, biodiversity conservation and coastal protection, integrating them in the SDG framework. In Honduras, the capital city has developed a strategy to link local policies to the SDGs, and various regions and municipalities are training to be able to do so in the near future. In Africa, the local governments and, in particular, the metropolitan municipalities of South Africa – a country that has not committed to report yet – have already been aligning their local plans with the general national development plan, which was conceived consistently with the requirements of the SDGs. eThekwini-Durban has aligned with the 2030 Agenda its own long-term strategy (‘Imagine Durban’), its five-year Integrated Development Plan, and their respective budgets. In Benin, LRGs are revising the current third generation of local plans in order to make the SDGs a condition to access national funding for municipalities (the Fonds d’appui au développement des Communes). In Botswana, the national association of local authorities (BALA) remarks that the recently-developed National Framework for Local Economic Development defines actions in support of the SDGs, and that since April 2017 it has been deployed in four pilot districts and will be soon rolled out to the rest of the country. In Kenya, the Council of Governors is promoting the review of the County Integrated Development Plans (CIDPs) and is already mobilizing all counties to take the SDGs and the Africa Agenda 2063 into consideration when re-negotiating the Plans’ next iteration for 2018-2022. On the other hand, many projects devised by Moroccan municipalities, even if resonating considerably with the SDGs, have not been developed within their framework. In Nigeria, even though the State Development Plans of many states – Benue, Taraba, Yobe, Kaduna, Ebonyi, Kano, Jigawa, Anambra, and Delta, for example – mention the SDGs, few are already overtly aligned with the Goals. The central government clearly affirms that local governments are “pivotal to the achievement of the SDGs because it is the only tier of government that can feasibly understand, monitor and react to the millions of activities that will collectively add up to the SDGs”.34 The government of Sierra Leone involved 19 local councils to integrate the SDGs into their district-level and municipal development plans. In Togo, local governments are being involved in the definition of the national development plan, as well as of different programmes that – once linked to the MDGs – are now being adapted to the SDGs – even though delayed decentralization reforms (for example, as regards the organization of municipal elections) can hamper the alignment process. In Uganda, finally, the government has disseminated development-planning guidelines for local governments; it has supported planners’ fora and networks; and it is now overseeing the integration of the SDGs in local plans and budgets, as a trickle-down strategy to align them with the National Development Plan II.
34
34 See also: Presidency of Nigeria, Nigeria’s Road to the SDGs – Country Transition Strategy, October 2015, page 9. The document is available online at this address: http://www.ng.undp.org/content/dam/nigeria/docs/IclusiveGrwth/Nigeria%20transition%20strategy%20to%20SDGs.pdf