Consensus Building among Multi-stakeholders in Intercity Cooperation: Drivers and Challenges in the Case of Kitakyushu and Davao

Abstract

Cities emerged as international agents and started engaging in intercity cooperation as a mechanism to address global challenges through regional solutions and also join resources to tackle local challenges and fulfill their management responsibilities. Collaborative planning to improve environmental conditions is one of the possible scopes for international cooperation, as stakeholders can share multiple information, knowledge, technologies, and governance experience. However, despite the benefits in a multi-stakeholder scheme, building consensus in such a diversified setting is a complex, time-consuming process, to reach a shared understanding about a certain problem and possible ways to address it.

During the last decade, the Japanese government, one of the largest world’s donors of gross ODA, has been increasing the funding activities to promote intercity collaboration for the development of more sustainable societies, engaging multiple stakeholders for a wide diversity of projects. This research had selected three international projects in Davao, supported by Kitakyushu, and identified four groups of major drivers and challenges (communication, political and institutional, financial, and technical) that can either foster or hinder consensus building among multi-stakeholders in the context of intercity cooperation for collaborative environmental planning.