Why this session matters to us
This is the instrument SDGCounting watches most closely on the subnational side. A Voluntary Local Review (VLR) is a city or region doing to itself what a country does in a Voluntary National Review: measuring its own progress against the Goals and publishing the numbers. The forum was the ninth of its kind, held in the tenth year that local governments have been reporting on SDG localization, and the mood was part celebration, part audit.
The celebration has a number attached. UN DESA’s VLR database now lists 397 reviews, which is what the President of ECOSOC meant when he said almost 400 reports were registered on the platform. A decade ago there were essentially none. The audit is what happens to those numbers next: whether a local review ever reaches the national ledger, the finance ministry, or a lender. On that, the room was more honest than celebratory.
Ten years, nearly 400 reviews, and a very uneven map
The growth is real and it is fast. But a count that size hides where it comes from. By the 2026 Sustainable Development Report’s tally, four countries alone, Brazil, Malaysia, Mexico and Argentina, account for close to half of every VLR ever produced. The reviewing habit is not spreading evenly across the world so much as deepening in a handful of countries where it has taken root. A headline figure of nearly 400 can read as a global movement; the distribution says something more like a proof of concept still waiting to scale.
The President of ECOSOC set the reviews against the backdrop the whole Forum was working against: the Secretary-General’s 2025 SDG progress report found only about 35 percent of targets on track or making moderate progress, nearly half advancing too slowly, and 18 percent that have slipped below their 2015 baseline. Against numbers like those, the case for measuring at the level where services are actually delivered is easy to make. The harder question is whether the measurement changes anything above it.
The gap the whole room named: local data that never reaches the ledger
Speaker after speaker, from four continents, described the same disconnect. A city produces evidence; the national statistics and the national budget do not read it. The Deputy Secretary-General put the fix plainly, and it is a measurement point before it is a money point.
“We must begin to build from the foundations up and not the roof down,” she added, before naming the constraint everyone returned to: the annual SDG financing gap in developing countries, which she put at $4 trillion. Reporting, she argued, has to lead to investment that actually reaches the local level, not resources that merely pass through it, a phrase UN-Habitat’s regional director for Africa used almost word for word.
The most concrete example of the connection working came from Mozambique, and it was explicitly a data story. Its delegate described a first Voluntary Local Review covering six districts and municipalities that was folded directly into the country’s second Voluntary National Review, presented to this same Forum on 10 July.
Italy reported the same move at larger scale: its national review this year incorporated 14 Voluntary Local Reviews from its regions and metropolitan cities. These are the cases that show what the instrument is for. They are still, on the evidence of the room, the exception rather than the rule, which is precisely why so many speakers asked for the local-to-national link to be made “routine” rather than heroic.
Where the numbers are supposed to bite: housing and SDG 11
The forum sat inside the week the HLPF reviewed SDG 11, and the housing figures were the ones that gave the reporting its stakes. UN-Habitat’s regional director for Africa put the scale in terms of a daily construction rate.
His agency’s answer is itself a counting programme: an SDG Cities effort now running in more than 200 cities, aimed at moving them “from data to bankable pipeline,” against a stated target of 1,000 cities and a billion lives by 2030. The Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, delivering his first report on the localization of that right, reframed why any of this counting matters. Local governments, he argued, are not consultees.
UN-Habitat’s Executive Director, closing the forum days after her agency published its SDG 11 review, was candid that the goal is off track where it counts most. More people now have public transport and waste collection, and more countries have national urban policies, but public space, air quality and housing are moving the wrong way, with roughly a billion people in informal settlements and two billion without safely managed water. She called that “the basic of the basics.”
Our read
A forum that could have simply banked the milestone, nearly 400 reviews in ten years, instead spent most of its time on the part the count does not capture: almost none of that local evidence is yet obliged to change a national number or a financing decision. The VLR has become a reporting genre faster than the system built any duty to read it. That is the same lesson the Beyond GDP panel drew from the Multidimensional Vulnerability Index one day earlier, a metric can be sound, adopted and widely produced, and still bind no one.
What would move it is unglamorous and specific, and the room kept circling it: make the local-to-national link routine (Mozambique’s “one product,” Italy’s 14 embedded reviews), and route finance to the level that does the delivering rather than through it. The Mayor of Genk offered the sharpest version of the ask, a “territorial delivery test” that would check, before a UN commitment is adopted, whether cities can actually implement it with the mandates, data, capacity and money on the ground. Watch whether the road to the 2027 SDG Summit turns nearly 400 reviews into a pipeline that national statistics offices and lenders are required to look at, or leaves them as very well-built documents sitting next to the national accounts.
Why it matters for the SDGs
Localization runs through SDG 17 (data, follow-up and review, and the means of implementation) and lands hardest on SDG 11, the goal under review this week and the one UN-Habitat says is furthest off track on housing and public space. The forum’s second panel organised itself around the Goals in front of the HLPF this year, SDG 6 (water and sanitation), SDG 7 (energy) and SDG 9 (infrastructure), on the argument that all three are experienced as local public services or not at all. And it reaches SDG 1 through the plainest claim of the afternoon: whether a family has water, shelter and transport is decided in a city, so the Goals will be measured, and met or missed, there.
Watch & read
- 9th Local and Regional Governments Forum, the official UN DESA event page (14 July 2026, Conference Room 2, UNHQ).
- UN DESA’s Voluntary Local Reviews database (the source for the nearly-400 count), and the 2025 SDG progress report for the global figures behind it.
- Our SDG 11 coverage from the same week: the SDG 11 thematic review and the UN-Habitat SDG 11 briefing, where the housing and informal-settlement figures are laid out.
- The national-review side of the same reporting chain: the Voluntary National Review presentations, and the measurement argument this forum echoed, Beyond GDP · Full HLPF 2026 coverage.
Quotations are lightly edited from an automated (Otter.ai) transcript of the UN Web TV recording and should be read as close paraphrase. Non-English interventions are summarised rather than quoted; where a speaker could not be reliably identified, they are cited by role or country. Figures are as UN and government speakers reported them and were not independently verified, except the VLR count and the SDG progress split, which are taken from the UN sources linked above.