Across cities worldwide, local governments are confronting shared challenges, from housing affordability pressures to climate risks, transport and accessibility challenges, and persistent social inequalities, often within constrained fiscal and administrative contexts. At the same time, subnational governments carry significant responsibility for public investment and service delivery, making effective local action critical. In this context, learning from peers has increasingly emerged as a strategic practice.
Rather than designing policies from scratch, cities are turning to ideas developed elsewhere to accelerate implementation, reduce uncertainty and improve outcomes. However, while cities are highly engaged in learning from one another, these processes often remain fragmented, informal, and oriented towards general inspiration rather than a structured adoption of coherent programmes. As part of the OECD’s work on promoting inclusive growth in cities, and in partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies, this toolkit addresses this gap by examining how cities adopt ideas from their peers and by providing practical guidance to help local governments make that process more deliberate and strategic. It builds on the OECD’s longstanding work on urban policy and inclusive growth, including the OECD platforms dedicated to supporting peer-to-peer learning between local governments and facilitating the dialogue with national governments and a broad range of stakeholders, such as through the OECD Champion Mayors for Inclusive Growth Initiative.
Drawing on evidence from a survey of 76 cities across 43 countries, 16 in-depth case studies and a series of expert and practitioner workshops, the toolkit is designed to be actionable and grounded in the realities of local policymaking. It proposes a set of 14 actions to help cities move from ad hoc exchanges to more structured, and effective idea adoption. These actions are conceived as a catalogue of potential approaches rather than a linear sequence of steps, recognising that cities engage in policy adoption in diverse ways depending on their institutional structures, political priorities and resource contexts. Grounded in observed practices across cities, they reflect what local governments are already doing, while offering a more structured way to organise and strengthen these efforts. These actions can be combined, adapted and sequenced flexibly, allowing cities to select those most relevant to their priorities and capacities.
This report was submitted for comments to the Working Party on Urban Policy (WPURB) on 29 April 2026 under cote [CFE/RDPC/URB(2026)15].