A consistent message across discussions was that resilience is still too often understood narrowly as “climate resilience.” A more holistic framing instead highlights resilience as a combination of social resilience, including community cohesion, crisis response and early warning; economic resilience, such as stability and investment readiness; and infrastructure resilience, including energy security, redundancy and continuity of public services. 

Multi-level governance (MLG) emerged as a practical delivery challenge. Participants stressed that adaptation and resilience solutions must be developed horizontally across sectors and actors, and then supported vertically across local, regional, national and EU levels.

A case in point is the Basque experience, where the Basque Network of Sustainable Municipalities was created to facilitate collaboration across governance levels and link local action with European projects. This is further reinforced by the Basque energy transition law, which establishes mechanisms to integrate adaptation across institutions, public entities and departments, while also engaging private sector actors and citizens to broaden participation in resilience-related initiatives.

Local and regional governments were repeatedly positioned as the key integrators: close enough to citizens and vital services to make measures real, but dependent on enabling conditions above them. A recurring theme was the need to strengthen horizontal coordination inside and across administrations, because cascading failures often travel through interdependencies such as energy, water, health, mobility and data. 

Several examples presented during the sessions illustrated both the challenges and the progress in this area. In Barcelona, a persistent gap in coordination was identified between emergency response and urban planning functions. Civil and social emergency services are currently responsible for risk response protocols, while planning departments have increasingly focused on long-term risks such as heat and flooding. However, limited exchange between these functions has led to gaps in knowledge and integration, highlighting how institutional separation can weaken overall resilience capacity.

Many contributions framed engagement as a governance function, not a communications exercise. Building trust takes time and consistency, and in polarised contexts it often requires working with trusted intermediaries and being transparent. It was stressed that deeper stakeholder engagement is essential to legitimacy and uptake, particularly when measures affect everyday life, distributional outcomes and perceptions of fairness.

Practical lessons on engagement were also shared. Participants warned that one-off consultations can create fatigue, while sustained involvement works better when cities cooperate with trusted local intermediaries (e.g., voluntary sector actors, community champions or other locally credible messengers) and communicate transparently. Experiences from Dortmund’s heat action planning highlighted both the importance and the difficulty of this approach.

Several sessions highlighted that data is becoming a central component of governance processes, not only as a technical resource but as an enabler of more equitable, informed and actionable decision-making. When combined with structured approaches such as citizen engagement roadmaps and open-source stakeholder mapping, data can help identify underrepresented groups early on and support more inclusive forms of participation.

At the same time, data plays a critical role in assessing current conditions, tracking progress and informing decisions across governance levels. Experiences from CDP-ICLEI track reporting, illustrated how data can reveal both achievements and structural gaps. By analysing city-reported information, CDP has identified a set of indicators linked to multi-level governance, highlighting, for example, that a significant share of local governments are not yet engaging effectively with other governance levels. This type of analysis also sheds light on broader challenges such as the “place gap” in urban climate finance, where cities require project-level funding but lack the enabling conditions to access it. Reporting on progress towards targets, including where cities are falling short, becomes in itself a governance tool, helping to prioritise future action. Complementary tools such as the InVEST, developed by the city of Milan and LINKS to assess ecosystem services, further demonstrate how data can support more informed planning and investment decisions.

EURESFO 2025 also showcased delivery-focused governance through the 2025 Local Sustainability Award, announced in Rotterdam: Grenoble won with its Breath of Schools programme, transforming streets around schools into greener, 

This directly aligns with the upcoming thematic stream on Strengthening the Governance of Resilience: Unpacking regulation for local action and leveraging policy insights from the ground, which focuses on how resilience is shaped, governed and implemented across levels.

Building on these exchanges in Rotterdam, in Guimarães the stream will further explore how cities and regions navigate evolving policy and regulatory frameworks in practice,