Many varied issues were raised during this Wilton Park dialogue, reflecting the scale and complexity of the challenge. However, responses converged around three distinct themes – political buy-in, urban finance and knowledge sharing and technology, with the impacts of climate change and natural disasters cutting across all three.
Examples from Rwanda and Zambia emphasised that climate change and natural hazards are now a defining constraint on urbanisation. Flooding, landslides, drought and extreme heat are reshaping where and how cities can safely grow, placing new demands on planning systems that are already stretched: hazard mapping, resilient design standards and the relocation or upgrading of settlements on exposed land. The cost implications are equally significant. Building to a climate-resilient standard raises upfront capital costs, while repeated disaster recovery diverts budgets from planned investment, and the burden falls hardest on states with the least fiscal space and the weakest access to affordable finance. Treating climate resilience as integral to urban planning and investment decisions, rather than as a separate agenda, was seen as essential.
Political buy-in
Urbanisation is a political process as much as a technical one. Despite agreement that technical issues are important, most projects were thought to fail for non-technical reasons, such as political buy-in and policy continuity.
Consequently, ownership of projects at a national level was seen as crucial, which the Commonwealth could do much to encourage. The pilot programme provided evidence that can be built on for delivery; a next step is to foster the political leadership needed to see these technical solutions through.
Continuity in commitments was another acute challenge highlighted. In Fiji, the proportion of people living in informal settlements has fluctuated greatly with each new government and, with elections upcoming, uncertainty remains over future commitment to this work. In contrast, an informal settlement in Kigali was successfully redeveloped through smaller, incremental policies implemented over many years, evidence that significant change is possible where governments commit to objectives across several years and, potentially, several election cycles.
Throughout any planning process, communities must remain at its heart, considering their interests and involving them in project plans, objectives and timelines. Such cooperation not only makes projects possible, as in Fiji, where as much as one fifth of the urban population in informal housing observes traditional landownership practices, but can also strengthen implementation: if a project falters, communities can petition authorities over neglected timelines.
Many barriers to delivery are systemic, however, and constituents may blame governments for failings that are more complex. Here, the Commonwealth’s role is best understood as that of an enabler rather than an intervener: providing support, capacity and trusted evidence so that leaders and officials are better able to manage the urbanisation process, explain its challenges and build community buy-in.
Beyond local engagement, taking this agenda through the Commonwealth ministerial process is seen as key to progressing it. With the 2022 Declaration already providing the commitment to sustainable urbanisation, CHOGM 2026 presents an opportunity to make this a priority for the next ten years. Such a commitment will require national leaders to take ownership of this agenda, and would also enable the demonstration of results, evaluation and learning, and accountability, rather than simply moving from one agenda to another.
The Commonwealth could also function as a mechanism for collective bargaining. Asked ‘what can the Commonwealth do that no one country can do on its own?’, participants cited its negotiating power with financial institutions, investors and lenders. With access to favourable finance a significant challenge for many member states, the Commonwealth’s collective voice, deployed at the right level, can leverage better terms, as with past bargaining with MDBs in the context of the Climate Finance Vulnerability Index (CliF), which Jamaica has triggered.
Urban finance
Some participants felt strong project planning would lead to financing. There was also strong agreement that traditional sources of finance are shrinking, and that mobilising new sources of finance and partnerships is key.
As many Commonwealth states are non-AAA credit rated, they are penalised within current financing structures, including private loans and lenders of last resort, making project delivery fundamentally harder. Some lenders also remain concerned about these states’ high levels of urbanisation-related debt. With rural-to-urban migration set to place further pressure on cities, planning and the funding for it must be actively managed. Approaches differ: Uganda’s Parish Development Model, for example, provides strategic investments to farmers, as part of urbanisation projects, to moderate migration, while other cities, including in Uganda, have invested heavily in receiving migrants and integrating them into urban communities. Both sides of this debate were reflected in the discussion.
Although the Commonwealth could work to negotiate a settlement like CliF, there should also be greater collaboration between member states, and with the Secretariat and the CSCC, to advocate for new solutions and fairer sources of finance, including legal instruments that enable better access to finance, help develop bankable projects, and targeted engagement with pension funds and sovereign wealth funds.
Accessing finance is a challenge for local communities as well as states. Many cannot pursue sustainable urbanisation projects or use homes in informal settlements as collateral for loans; some states have changed the status of such settlements so communities could borrow. Antigua and Barbuda’s Sustainable Island Resource Framework (SIRF) Fund similarly provides low-cost, non-collateral support to households and small businesses experiencing extreme drought and can subsidise hurricane shutters and rainwater harvesting.
Unplanned developments also often lack the means to adhere to planning and building standards, compromising safety and deterring private investors. As the financing gap for sustainable urbanisation is too large for public funds alone (likely requiring at least $4 trillion), private investment must be harnessed. Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) were repeatedly raised as an avenue to explore. The award-winning Bristol City Leap PPP, for instance, intends to distribute £2.8 million to community projects as part of accelerating Bristol’s transition to carbon neutrality, though it required five years of negotiation and planning. Long-term planning and legal certainty are therefore crucial for meaningful private engagement, with enforceable standards, such as the OECD UNDP Impact Standards for Financing Sustainable Development, playing an important role in signalling credibility.
Standards also reflect learning, what has worked and what has not, and so offer a mode of knowledge sharing: a significant opportunity for Commonwealth states.
Knowledge sharing and technology
Of all the capabilities the Commonwealth could offer member states, knowledge sharing was the most cited. It was widely acknowledged that, despite often quite different contexts, many of the challenges facing member states are similar.
Housing featured more prominently than during the 2025 Wilton Park dialogue, with many member states facing comparable housing crises, partly explained by similar issues associated with built environment legislation and unregulated urban expansion. The Commonwealth could be an ideal platform for exchanging knowledge, experience and ideas on an issue that so widely affects its members, and its capability for issue-specific exchange and partnership was also seen as advantageous geographically: the Commonwealth is unique in its South-South partnerships, and in how it connects Pacific, Asian, African, Caribbean and European states, something to continue to build on.
Underpinning much of the housing and planning challenge is land. Participants pointed to the difficulty of securing land for affordable housing and infrastructure, to overlapping statutory and customary systems of tenure, and to incomplete or out-of-date land registration. Insecure or contested ownership slows planning approvals, deters investment, prevents households from using property as collateral, and makes the upgrading of informal settlements harder to deliver, as in Fiji, where a significant share of the urban population in informal housing observes traditional landownership practices. Land tenure reform, better land records and clearer planning frameworks are therefore prerequisites for much of the wider agenda, and an area where Commonwealth states have directly comparable experience to share.
In line with the pilot programme’s findings, the need for holistic, multi-level approaches was repeatedly mentioned, largely relating to governmental mechanisms, financial flows, and capacity building. Departmental siloes, and disconnection between national and local governments, are common: communication bottlenecks have impacted project delivery in Kenya, while Zambia introduced a new ministry to ensure green economy and environmental issues inform everything the government does. Noting that cities are often not legally able to access funds from donors or the private sector directly, despite being responsible for delivery, Zambia has also expanded initiatives such as the Constituency Development Fund in support of its decentralisation agenda and community-driven development.
Before the technology agenda, participants returned to a more fundamental constraint: data. Decisions about urbanisation are frequently taken without reliable, current or comparable information on population growth, land use, informal settlements, service coverage, infrastructure condition or municipal revenue. Where data does exist, it is often held in departmental siloes, collected on incompatible bases, or not made available to the local authorities that need it most. The challenge is therefore threefold – access to data, its management, and, crucially, its use in decision making – and it is here that emerging technologies offer the clearest early value, provided the underlying data foundations, standards and capacity to interpret them are in place.
Alongside human capacity building, such as Fiji’s partnership with the Commonwealth Association of Architects to address the professional skills gap facing its national building cohort, the use of emerging technologies was explored. Where capacity is stretched or extracted by demanding tasks that pull the strongest staff away from other work, AI tools can shrink the time needed to make calculations, compile data, prepare contracts and filter project proposals; an AI mechanism is being developed to reduce the time it takes cities to find and access investment finance, drawing on Bristol’s experience of securing funds for the LEAP project.
With the meaningful use of quantum technology in planning contexts now being explored, member states can help drive its development: quantum engineers need states’ knowledge to develop effective country-specific algorithms, and case studies to capture investment, meaning Commonwealth states can directly shape how this technology evolves.
As skills are shared asymmetrically across the Commonwealth, a common resource of expertise could be established for any member state to call upon, rather than each state expanding all its training and personnel separately. Greater emphasis on inter-Commonwealth trade and investment would also encourage private financing and strengthen the sharing of resources and expertise.