This HIC-HLRN proposal for cooperation with the new UN Habitat governance aligns with UN General Assembly (GA) resolution A/RES/72/226 which, in 2018, called for UN Habitat’s reform and established a UN Habitat Assembly with universal State membership meeting every four years, and an Executive Board convening two or three times each year. The GA also had called for UN Habitat’s new executive director (ED) to present a stakeholder-engagement policy by February 2019. However, that policy has not yet materialized, and the ED called upon the Executive Board to for a working group on the subject in November 2019.

In the meantime, the HIC-HLRN joined with a group of nine CSO representatives at the first UN Habitat Assembly to propose a mechanism(s) to engage with UN-Habitat`s ambitious normative and operation roles in supporting governments to develop human settlements globally. The proposal takes the form of a review of stakeholder mechanisms around UN Habitat and across the UN System, proffering the best examples for a system by which three broad sectors (civil society, local governments/authorities and the private sector) self-organize, as the UN-Habitat has urged, to form their own internal governance, modeled after the precedents of UN Environment at Nairobi and the Rome-based UN agencies (FAO, IFAD, WFP and CFS).