Cities Support Programme: Climate Resilience Projects Strengthening Intergovernmental Coordination

Government Technical Advisory Centre (GTAC), South African National Treasury

South African cities continue to face significant development challenges, despite the progress in expanding access to basic services. There are extreme inequitable environments that exclude poor people from social and economic participation. These challenges are further exacerbated by the macroeconomic constraints to growth which impacts cities. The underlying imperative of the Cities Support Programme (CSP) is therefore to improve economic growth prospects in cities to help respond to the development challenges they face.

OneWorld has been contracted to provide technical and expert services to assist the National Treasury’s Cities Support (CSP) Programme in delivering climate resilience projects and strengthening inter- governmental coordination. The project aims to improve climate resilience and urban governance of the eight municipalities responsible for the urban governance of South Africa’s largest cities, with respect to climate change and environmental challenges, across three themes or objectives: Sustainable Energy (CR26), Financing Climate Resilience (CR27) and Disaster Risk Management (CR20), with knowledge management support as a cross-cutting objective underpinning each project component.

This involves designing and implementing adaptive processes for the establishment and maintenance of partnerships, including providing support to the partnerships, and the co-creation of flexible governance strategies to improve public sector service delivery and thus enhance metros’ climate resilience.

Secondly, the project aims to support and strengthen intergovernmental coordination to identify, agree and deliver on reforms that strengthen the Intergovernmental system or climate resilience and sustainability in the identified project(s).

In doing so, OneWorld aims to establish the effective implementation of an existing programme design through the development of a suite of tools such as establishing scoreboards for the overall programme and for each of the sub-programmes.

Priority focus areas for the initial period of the project are: diagnostic assessments, sustainable energy, financing climate resilience, disaster risk management and knowledge management.