Rethinking the international decision-making process: the relevance of local governments/ Interview with Emilia Saiz

Robert Chaouad, Fabien Carlet and Marc Verzeroli – What is United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) and what is its role?Emilia Saiz – UCLG is the product of a century-old movement, even older than the United Nations, as our first meeting was organised in 1913. It marked the beginning of a new model of governance, as cities decided to gather for the first time to address the specific challenges they faced, which meant not reaching out to the international community. These cities realised that the issues at stake in their sphere of governance were different from those of single cities and single countries. As such, the only way to overcome these issues was to seek solutions in a collaboration. This has been our philosophy ever since, for which we regard UCLG as the inheritor of that century-old movement.Since 1913, however, the association has grown into a confederation of networks with representation everywhere in the world. It gathers around 260,000 members that regularly meet t