I had been meaning to share this reflection following a presentation I gave on behalf of Vector5 at an international meeting, where I spoke about our work supporting Mataró City Council, with the support of Barcelona Provincial Council. We often work with the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals, but on this occasion we were able to take a step further: analysing the full set of municipal plans and agreements from a cross-cutting perspective. Policy coherence and cross-cutting approaches are embedded in the very logic of the 2030 Agenda, but they also represent a challenge that has remained unresolved since the early days of democratic local government in Spain. Hopefully, the new municipal term that will emerge from the 2027 local elections will provide an opportunity to address this challenge more decisively. It is simultaneously a political, technical and organisational challenge and, ultimately, it comes down to two fundamental issues: efficiency and impact.
How many plans can a municipality have? And, above all, how can we make sure they all work in the same direction?
This was the question I used to open my presentation on 21 April 2026, in Barcelona, at the European meeting of SUP4SUD – Strategic Urban Planning for Sustainable Development, an Interreg Europe project. Vector5 was invited by the Barcelona Metropolitan Strategic Plan (PEMB) to share Mataró’s experience of integrating the SDGs into municipal strategic planning.
The presentation drew on a specific experience: Vector5’s work with Mataró City Council to analyse the alignment of municipal planning with the 2030 Agenda, a process led by Mercè Casals, from Vector5, with the support of Barcelona Provincial Council.
In Mataró, we analysed 69 municipal plans and agreements, together with strategic projects and other relevant actions.
The conclusion is highly relevant to many local governments: the challenge is not necessarily to create more plans, but to make the plans that already exist work as a system.
The 2030 Agenda provides us with a framework for precisely this kind of cross-cutting analysis: understanding how different policies relate to one another, which priorities they share, where overlaps or gaps exist, and how they contribute to the major challenges facing the city. In Mataró, we applied a methodology combining the mapping of municipal planning, alignment with SDG targets, engagement with municipal teams, links to public spending, and tools for governance and monitoring.
Because a collection of good plans does not automatically result in a good governance system.
This is also one of the major challenges we encounter at Vector5 when supporting local governments: moving from sectoral planning towards more cross-cutting governance, capable of connecting social, environmental, economic, territorial and good governance policies.
The challenges facing our cities are already interconnected. The way we govern them needs to be interconnected too.
This is where the 2030 Agenda — in dialogue with integrated frameworks such as Urban Agendas — can become much more than an alignment framework. It can serve as a lever to govern complexity more effectively and generate greater impact.
🎥 The video features an excerpt from my presentation at SUP4SUD.
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