Guide for Local Agendas for Peace and Decentralised Cooperation: Guidelines for strengthening local policies
Local governments and their communities are key to strengthening democracy, defending civic space and developing initiatives, policies and relations that foster peace and peaceful coexistence within their territories. To this end, decentralised cooperation could be instrumental in building territorial peace and paving the way for other approaches to the concept of peace that deliver alternative and effective proposals for reducing violence and conflict.
Nevertheless, at present there are regrettably few local public policies for peace and only minimal relations among local governments in matters of peacebuilding. Decentralised cooperation therefore has ample room for growth and experimentation, making analysis, reflection and debate on the role of decentralised cooperation and territorial peace highly relevant.
We are therefore pleased to present to you this “Guide for Local Agendas for Peace and Decentralised Cooperation: Guidelines for strengthening local policies for peace”, which we at the Observatory for Decentralised Cooperation EU-LA have drafted in cooperation with the Gernika Gogoratuz Peace Research Center and which is part of the Observatory’s Collection of Studies. This commission is largely the result of efforts by Jokin Alberti and Tica Font, with support from Maria Oianguren, Liliana Zambrano-Quintero and the International Catalan Institute for Peace (ICIP).
The objectives of this study are twofold: to illustrate the potential of decentralised cooperation in designing, implementing and strengthening local policies for peace and to analyse current initiatives that could benefit from good practice guidelines. With a critical perspective, the publication opens with a glossary of concepts that frame the proposed shift in paradigm and analyses the major challenges facing the peacebuilding process and the role of local stakeholders.
This is followed by an attempt to identify and systematise the main decentralised cooperation initiatives for peace between Europe and Latin America and ends with conclusions and recommendations.
