Guadalajara (Mexico), August 22 (EFE). Citizen participation and policies close to neighborhoods and people are key to achieving the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, and experts gathered in Mexico at the summit on Monday agreed on the Habitat International Program for Latin America and the Caribbean. Caribbean 2022.
During the opening table of the summit, which is being held in Guadalajara until August 24, Elkin Velasquez, UN-Habitat Regional Representative for Latin America and the Caribbean, said that bringing citizens together is a priority.
“It can allow us to make a mobilization on a scale, up to concrete actions and establish specific road maps in each of the 16,000 municipalities in Latin America, and the next task is the revolution of proximity, so that each (neighborhood) regional project has global agendas,” he explained in his speech.
He pointed out that countries have not fully succeeded in introducing global agendas into the lives of societies and families, which can be an important factor for change not only with their organizations but also through actions that contribute in the short and medium term to improvement. their quality of life.
The international official added that a “polarized region” such as Latin America could find in global agendas a transversal reference that does not respond to a political ideology or a particular party, but rather to the interests of all citizens.
In his participation, Aníbal Gaviria Correa, Governor of Antioquia, Colombia, emphasized that in order to advance global agendas around equality, housing and sustainability, the active participation of citizens is essential and that public policies emerge from their needs and initiatives.
“There is a lack of more participation from the bottom, and it cannot be a global agenda from top to bottom, but from the bottom up, there can be no global agenda of countries, it must also be an agenda of regions, cities, municipalities as well as universities with the participation of youth and citizens” .
He cited as an example the actions that have emerged from civic groups and organizations to advance issues such as reducing the use of plastic and increasing less polluting modes of transportation such as bicycles, which have a national and global impact on the goal of sustainability. .
The Colombian official suggested that each municipality in the region promote concrete actions and strategies to measure their progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals so that national governments know where they should strengthen their public policies.
Nearly 1,700 governments, professionals, academics and civil organizations from all countries of the region are participating in the 2022 International Summit on Habitat in Latin America and the Caribbean with the aim of developing a common urban agenda. EFE
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