Smaller municipalities face different challenges when entering adaptation planning than bigger cities. Previous EURESFO gatherings identified several issues that smaller municipalities struggle with. An insufficient staffing, access to available knowledge, lack of resources, complex and advanced tools, lack of organizational capacity for cross-sector collaboration are some examples of problems hard to overcome by themselves. This situation calls for different approaches to establish adaptation planning in small and medium-sized municipalities.

During the last decade collaboration and development on climate adaptation and urban resilience has intensified from international organizations, city networks, and local governments. It has become apparent that municipalities seek collaboration with other municipalities to embrace the complexities. If the efforts on collaboration around awareness have been challenging the focus on implementation will be even more so and require different sets of tools, organizational design, means, and measures; hence, initiatives like the Making Cities Resilient 2030 campaign has evolved from working on awareness to implementation and deeper collaboration.

In this workshop, we will explore how small and medium-sized municipalities can overcome their challenges and use their potentials to move forward using inter alia the exchange and collaboration between municipalities themselves, be voiced, and get the best support by regional and national authorities. This session will be inspired by different cases of small and medium sized municipalities and facilitators, their collaboration and networking. We will further explore and harvest experiences, best practices and utilize a forward-going movement and how we best can gather and share it in the near future.