Planning, Local Governance & Development
Local development
is a wide field of intervention that aims to mobilize local human and natural
assets to ensure sustainability and resilience for local communities and
territories. However, issues of planning and governance are central to it.
In an era of
increasing environmental, social, and economic challenges, and particularly in
countries rocked with instability and crises, achieving development requires
more planning efforts and more attention to governance issues. Indeed, with
scarcer resources and uncertainty, there is a need to ensure that a minimum
shared understanding of priorities exists among stakeholders, that resources
and efforts are directed towards those priorities and that robust
decision-making and organizational frameworks exist to ensure implementation.
UPLoAD team has an extensive practice, research, and teaching experience in the planning and local governance fields. In this
regard, it provides local authorities or national and international
organizations supporting them with two types of service:
· Planning
consultancy services to local
authorities seeking to have a more confident grasp on their territorial
challenges and the way to address them. This includes assistance in leading
planning processes in order to reach comprehensive Strategic Plans and/or Local
Action Plans. UPLoAD relies in this on context-sensitive methodologies that
would best allow to map stakeholders, challenges, and priorities and to collectively
identify desired futures, rising opportunities and possible ways to move towards
more sustainable and resilient directions.
· Governance analysis
services aiming to
strengthen local authorities’ capacity to lead on local development. This
includes studies to local authorities on the potential for development of new
services and their governance, reports to national and international
organizations on governance-related challenges faced by local authorities when
engaging in local economic development, and reports to think tanks seeking to
enhance decentralization and local authorities’ capacity and accountability in
delivering local services.