Regions Insist on the Need for a Territorial Approach in the Cooperation Forum
ORU Fogar actively participated in the 2025 Busan Forum, celebrated on the 30th of September and the 1st of October in Seoul, Korea, organised by the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (GPEDC). This Forum took place at a key moment for global development, only a few months after the Fourth International Conference on Development Finance (FfD4) in Seville, Spain.
Alberto Cortés, Director of the Basque Agency for Cooperation for Development eLankidetza, represented ORU Fogar in the Forum. In his intervention, the importance of a territorial approach to guarantee an effective cooperation and the implementation of the 2030 Agenda was highlighted. He underlined that the challenges to sustainable development are systemic, and that they require actions integrating social, economic, environmental and cultural dimensions. The territory is the area where these impacts and connections are managed, and where the necessary confidence for transformation is built.
Cortés also emphasised that transformations require the participation of all actors and multiactor and multilevel collaboration, ensuring coherence between local, regional and national decisions. Following this line of thought, the regional level is essential to align the strategies from the top to the bottom and vice versa, ensuring a comprehensive approach. ORU Fogar, as an international organisation, plays a vital role to guarantee the coherence and effectiveness of these multiactor and multilevel approaches, and it can connect these processes to the UN’s multilateral architecture, to support the SDG’s localisation and the territorial realities’ transformation. ELankidetza’s director also called for strengthening international cooperation support to the Regions of the Global South, which are fundamental for the SDGs localisation.
The 2025 Busan Forum provided an opportunity to reflect on the FfD4 outcome and its practical translation; it has allowed to evaluate the progress using tested data; it has allowed to share experiences on national ecosystem strengthening, identifying priorities and mobilising support for cooperation. In this framework, ORU Fogar’s participation reaffirmed the importance of a regional and territorial approach towards the effective implementation of the 2030 Agenda and for catalysing systemic transformations on a global scale.
Going beyond the Forum, the Korean meeting hosted the Steering Committee of the Global Partnership For Effective Development and Cooperation (GPEDC) meeting, where – for the first time – Javier Cortés and the Basque Government assumed the representation of ORU Fogar. Ever since their approval for incorporation in 2014 in Abuja, Nigeria, ORU Fogar is part of the committee in this global partnership, managed by the OCDE and the PNUD from which the main global cooperations participate, from partner countries. ORU Fogar contributes to the partnership with the vision of decentralised cooperation, as well as with the partner regions from the cooperation. The Government of Catalonia held this representative role, until 2025, the year in which the Basque Government took over.
