Abstract
Cities are engines of socio-economic development. This article examines and provides insight into the extent of localisation of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) using the City of Bulawayo (CoB), in Zimbabwe, as the case study. The key question posited is ‘Does Bulawayo demonstrate potential for sustainable development?’. Bulawayo is a strange case study as in the period of the Millennium Development Goals Zimbabwe had a massive increase in death rates from 2000 to 2010 due to the HIV pandemic, political chaos and economic disintegration of that period. Coming out of that period there was little to help cities like Bulawayo grasp the opportunity for an SDG-based development focus. However, after the paper creates a multi-criteria framework from a Systematic Literature Review on the localisation of the SDG agenda, the application to Bulawayo now generates hope. The city is emerging from the collapse of the city’s public transport and water distribution systems, once the envy of and benchmark for many local authorities in the country, and has detailed SDG plans for the future. Bulawayo now serves as a planning model for localisation of sustainable development goals.
Highlights
Since the adoption of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, there is a strong need for localisation of the global development agenda (UN, 2015)
Most importantly it seeks to provide answers to the 4 key questions embedded in the framework, namely: 1) What is the extent of awareness for SDGs within the City?
City Council’s planning staff have been exposed to and on a number of occasions had opportunity to engage on the subject of sustainable development, more so within the current SDG context
Summary
Since the adoption of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, there is a strong need for localisation of the global development agenda (UN, 2015). The notion of sustainable development was not immediately applied to cities but it soon grew through activities such as UN Habitat, Local Agenda 21, and ICLEI in the 1990’s (Peter Newman & Kenworthy, 1999). It followed in the 21st century into The New Urban Agenda (UN-Habitat, 2016) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with SDG 11 on cities (UNSDGs, 2015). Bulawayo (Map 1) is located on the main train line built to link Cape Town to Cairo It has a strong history in urban planning as a city that was designed to be a model for development in Africa (Mbiba Beacon & Ndubiwa Michael, 2008)
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