South East Europe Urban Resilience Building Action Network

About the Project:

Severe floods (2014-2015) that struck South East European (SEE) countries have once again confirmed that disasters do not know of any borders and that disasters are often “shared”.

The lessons learned from the last regional flooding go to show that connectivity/cooperation weaknesses were twofold: first one concerning institutionalization of municipality level cooperation of DRR stakeholders (urban level of cities/municipalities/counties) and the second one concerning their operative interconnectivity at regional/cross-border level i.e. replication modality of best practice examples and regional know-how sharing at the level of municipality DRR specifically in the area of local DRR prevention initiatives.

A year after the flooding, this problem of more formalized/institutionalized DRR cooperation model between relevant DRR stakeholders both nationally (at the urban level) and cross-border within SEE countries still remains unresolved.

Furthermore, bearing in mind that the DRR system of the participating countries is based upon the bottom-up approach calls for a well-coordinated approach at the local level so that in the case when the emergency exceeds local capacities of state level Civil Protection agencies are engaged and subsequently civil protection mechanism triggered. Moreover, civil protection system is getting more decentralized in the SEE countries meaning that municipalities are increasingly becoming the first responders, therefore the peer-to-peer experience exchange and support is increasingly critical. This project will also support further decentralization of the governance mechanisms and make them more transparent and accessible at local level. Additionally, as institutional interventions are always inevitably calling for improving/strengthening capacity building and awareness raising this segment will also be taken into consideration and adequately addressed.

Expected Outcome:

The outcome of the project is to enable South East European countries to reduce the likelihood of conflict and to lower the risk of natural disasters, including from climate change.

Impact

START DATE

January 2017

END DATE

December 2019

STATUS

Completed

PROJECT OFFICE
IMPLEMENTING PARTNER

United Nations Development Programme

DONORS

European Comm. Humanit. Aid Off

UNITED NATIONS DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME

TOTAL CONTRIBUTIONS

$564,319

DELIVERY IN PREVIOUS YEARS

2016$0

2017$219,077

2018$277,511

2019$8,093

Full Project information