ORU Fogar participates in the United Nations Environment Assembly
On March 13, Isidre Sala, director general of Multilateral and European Affairs of the Government of Catalonia and member of the ORU Fogar Bureau, participated in the Sub-National Summit held in Nairobi, Kenya, during the Fourth Assembly of the United Nations for the Environment.
The Summit was opened by Joyce Msuya, Executive Director of Environmental Action and Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, and Maimunah Mohd Sharif, Executive Director of UN Habitat. It was an opportunity for a high-level dialogue between mayors, ministers, private sector leaders and civil society representatives on how to achieve sustainable cities and territories. In this dialogue, the representative of ORU Fogar provided the vision of the regions. Isidre Sala took part in a panel entitled "Implementation of the bottom-up agenda, the role of communities in transformations", a space in which it was discussed how citizen participation contributes to the fight against environmental challenges.
The director general argued that with the new dynamics that are taking place in the political sphere, traditional institutions are being strengthened through processes of participation. "It is not a question of replacing representative democracy with direct democracy, but of establishing processes of dialogue that complement institutions", said Isidre Sala. He defended transparency and a horizontality in which government-citizen dialogue allows for the most appropriate decisions to be taken. For Sala, institutions must be democratic hubs. And he pointed out that information technologies should not be conceived as substitutes for the participatory process, but as facilitators and potentiators.
Isidre Sala took advantage of his visit to Nairobi to have a meeting with the Council of Governors of Kenya and specifically with its coordinator, Ken Oluoch. During this meeting, they shared experiences of citizen participation. In Kenya there is no established mechanism to channel citizen participation, but the so-called "Civil society dialogues" have been initiated in each of the cantons.
On the 26th and 27th of March, Isidre Sala also represented ORU Fogar at the 17th Executive Committee of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (a UN/OECD body), which was held in Kampala, Uganda.
