International exchange of experiences: lessons learned in the Covid-19 crisis

As soon as it was clear that the Covid-19 would pose serious challenges to municipalities around the world, the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) addressed Connective Cities to adapt its methodology to provide municipal practitioners with an opportunity to share their experiences in an agile and flexible way.

In many ways, local authorities are constantly at the forefront of global challenges, as they are the first level of government to feel the impact of any crisis. Yet municipalities also have the potential to act as fruitful sources of innovative solutions in addressing these challenges, and those solutions would also require cooperation with different levels of government and the involvement of many different types of stakeholders: Academia, Civil Society, Private Sector, etc..

The series started in July/2020 and had the objective to help improving the responsiveness and resilience of urban actors through exchange and peer-to-peer learning by promoting the exchange of practical solutions between practitioners and to disseminate good practices. The explosive spread of the virus put existing municipal structures and capacities to the test. On the other hand, the interconnectivity and digitalisation opened up the possibility of offering a series of exchange events 100% virtually.

Hardly all the benefits of a well-organised personal exchange can be fully replaced by the current technologies. Nevertheless, in a crisis like the one caused by the Covid-19, technology made it possible to organise more than 35 response dialogue events with the participation of more than 800 specialists in such a short time.

Our main objective was to bring together experiences to be presented during and discuss how local authorities can cooperate, learn from each other and ultimately build their capacity to address global challenges. On the 9th of December, Connective Cities organised the official final event of the series “Municipal Response to COVID-19”.

Besides a keynote presentation from the Head of the Urban Policies and Reviews Unit the OECD, the event on the 9th of December included a showcase of examples from Stuttgart-Germany, Belo Horizonte-Brazil, Aman-Jordan, Tshwane-South Africa and Lviv-Ukraine. In closing an e-learning course on crisis management was presented by Dr. Peter Tinnemann, Head Global Health Science Unit, from the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin.

During our additional session of 2020 on the 10th of December, tools and protocols that cities employ to monitor and control the infection chains during the COVID-19 pandemic were explored. While taking a closer look at the efficiency and effectivity of the tracking systems applied in the South Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, discuss existing challenges, and explore how can we enhance or scale-up tracing strategies. Speakers shared their experiences from different levels of local governance and research from Georgia, Serbia and Germany.

The Connective Cities team would like to thank all the inspiring and impressive urban practitioners who invested their time in sharing and discussing their good practices in response to the pandemic. In 2021 Connective Cities will continue to offer events and exchanges focused on the municipal needs connected to the Covid-19 pandemic. We warmly invite you to stay connected through our website and all our social media channels and stay tuned for updates and future events.