Publications & Documents

Cities are crucial for national economic, social and environmental performance. A national urban policy (NUP) has been recognised by the international community as an important instrument for harnessing urbanisation to achieve national and global goals. This report, prepared for the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III), provides an assessment of the state and scope of NUPs across 35 OECD countries. It also describes how urban policy, and its place in national political agendas, is evolving.

This publication has been prepared for the Habitat III conference and builds on existing United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN Habitat) methodology. It is inspired by the joint work of UN-Habitat and the OECD following their co-leadership of Policy Unit 3 on National Urban Policies during the preparations for the New Urban Agenda. The findings of this report will contribute to the global monitoring process of National Urban Policy, as will the Global Report on National Urban Policy, jointly produced by UN Habitat and the OECD.

This report provides an overview of “multi-level governance” reforms in OECD countries. It looks at institutional reforms, which reorganise powers, responsibilities and resources across levels of government, as well as territorial reforms, which address territorial structures, often modifying regional and local government administrative areas. The report describes the rationale for different reforms, their characteristics and outcomes, as well as the obstacles faced by governments in designing and implementing them. The success - and failure - of past reforms provide useful lessons that can be applied to future reform efforts. The report includes five case studies that take an in-depth look at countries that have undertaken considerable multi-level governance reforms: Finland, France, Italy, Japan and New Zealand.

Public procurement is a critical element of sound governance and countries implement diverse tools and strategies to increase its efficiency and cost effectiveness. Framework agreements, in particular, aggregating public demand and streamlining procurement processes are increasingly used by central purchasing bodies in OECD countries. This report examines the use of framework agreements and their developments in Chile, benchmarked against the practices in other OECD countries. Implementation of framework agreements in Chile have provided business opportunities to a growing number of suppliers and a wide variety of goods and services to public entities. Yet, the steady increase of the number of suppliers and contract management activities now question the sustainability and the effeciency of the system. This report analyses different policy options that ChileCompra could consider and suggests ways to streamline processes, improve the effectiveness of the system and increase efficiencies while promoting inclusiveness.

This report provides an overview of spatial and land-use planning systems across the OECD. It contains country fact sheets that focus on formal aspects of planning systems, as they are defined by laws and regulations. The country fact sheets describe the responsibilities of each level of government with respect to spatial and land-use planning. They include a description of all spatial and land-use plans of a country and show their hierarchical relations in a diagram. For most countries, the fact sheets also contain key statistics on land use. A summary chapter provides an overview of the information in the country fact sheets and discusses land value capture tools, land expropriation procedures, reforms of the planning system, and other issues. The information provided in this report was collected through a survey that involved academic experts on planning from all 32 countries covered.