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Sixth Global Summit: National-Local Cooperation as a Foundation for Sustainable and Effective City-Led Prevention and Response

Publication Date:

22/01/2026

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Event Reports

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hate preventionNational-Local CooperationSixth Global SummitSocial CohesionToronto

— 11 minutes reading time

This report provides a summary of discussions during the session and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Strong Cities Network Management Unit, Strong Cities members, event sponsors or participants.

Introduction

On 9 – 11 December 2025, the Strong Cities Network held its Sixth Global Summit in Toronto (Canada), bringing together more than 300 representatives of local governments, national governments, civil society organisations, academia, the private sector and international organisations. This included nearly 60 mayors and governors, as well as 110 other local government officials from 100 cities and 42 countries. Under the theme Stronger Together: Forging Safer, Connected, Thriving Cities in a Changing World, the Summit provided a platform for city leaders to share practical and innovative solutions to prevent and respond to hate, extremism and polarisation, and build safer, more resilient and more inclusive communities.

The Summit agenda included a plenary session on National-Local Cooperation (NLC) as a Foundation for Sustainable and Effective City-Led Prevention and Response, which invited Canadian national government and local government representatives to share how NLC is facilitated in Canada. This session was complemented by a parallel session on NLC Good Practices, inviting participants from other contexts to share what works and what doesn’t to facilitate sustainable NLC on prevention and response.

Both sessions built on Strong Cities’ work on NLC to date, which has included:

• Supporting the Global Counterterrorism Forum in developing its Memorandum on Good Practices on NLC and accompanying implementation toolkit;
• Providing dedicated support, through its Regional Hubs, dedicated support to strengthen NLC in countries such as Iraq, Malawi, Morocco, Tunisia and Uganda;
• Producing policy briefs to capture NLC-related practice updates, including a recent one on Opportunities and Lessons Learned for Secondary and Tertiary Prevention.

The sessions will inform Strong Cities’ ongoing NLC work, including the trajectory of its new NLC Working Group, which launched at the Summit in Toronto with support from the National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism (NCTV) of the Government of the Netherlands.

Featured Speakers – Plenary Session on NLC as a Foundation for Sustainable and Effective City-Led Prevention and Response

• Eric Rosand, Executive Director, Strong Cities Network – Moderator
• Robert Burley, Executive Director, Canada Centre for Community Engagement & Prevention of Violence, Public Safety Canada
• Amy Siciliano, Public Safety Adviser, Community Safety, Halifax Regional Municipality (Nova Scotia, Canada)
• Vicky Laprade, Project Manager, Canadian Centre for Safer Communities (Canada)
• Jonathon Reed, Director of Programmes, Next Gen Men

Featured Speakers – Parallel Session on NLC Good Practices

• Simeon Dukic, Senior Manager, Strong Cities Network – Moderator
• Agnese Nadia Canevari, Deputy Head, National Office Against Racial Discrimination (Italy)
• José Martínez Marín, Deputy Inspector – Police Department, City of Murcia (Spain)
• Shaida Bibi, Head of Community Cohesion – Midlands and East, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (United Kingdom)

Key Takeaways

Among the key elements for effective NLC are:

1. A consistent feedback loop between local government and other local actors and other levels of government;
2. Long-term, relationship-centred engagement between different levels of government actors and between government and non-governmental actors, rather than episodic or transactional interactions;
3. A recognition that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to addressing hate, extremism and related challenges and that NLC thus requires flexibility and adaptability as the threat environment changes;
4. Considering local governments and other local actors as co-designers of national prevention efforts, rather than just as delivery partners of such efforts;
5. Ensuring local needs drive national-level support for city-led and community-based prevention; and
6. Having the national government provide sustained, core support to local governments for prevention efforts, thus allowing them to retain qualified practitioners, ensure continuity of services and build durable local capabilities.

Key Themes 

1. NLC Should Be Relationship-Centred Instead of Transactional

The discussions underscored the importance of investing in long-term relationships to enable effective and sustainable NLC, agreeing that NLC should not be transactional nor a one-off engagement.

In Canada, the Canada Centre for Community Engagement and Prevention of Violence (Canada Centre) was established by Public Safety Canada in 2016 as the “federal government’s lead to build expertise and capacity in what was then a very new field of preventing violent extremism”. Robert Burley, the Centre’s Executive Director, shared that from the onset, it has pursued partnerships and collaboration to deliver this mandate, stating that “we learn as much from our partners as they learn from us”. He underscored the importance of building a feedback loop with partners where they can share “what they are seeing and experiencing”, whether this relates to trends in the threat environment or gaps and challenges with response. This, in turn, informs the Centre’s own activities, with Robert sharing that feedback from partners has led to new initiatives. Amy Siciliano, Public Safety Adviser, Community Safety, Halifax Regional Municipality (Nova Scotia, Canada), added that, from a local government’s perspective – this relationship-centred approach has been crucial: she commended the Canada Centre for being accessible and engaged, “meeting us where we are” and supporting the Municipality by “providing relevant connections” to other experts and sharing their expertise and insights, while also being receptive to local perspectives.

Other countries are equally investing in building strong, multilevel partnerships to address issues ranging from hate to extremism and other threats to social cohesion. For example, Agnese Nadia Canevari, Deputy Head, National Office Against Racial Discrimination (Italy), shared that the National Office, which was established in 2003 and sits within the national Department for Equal Security, has invested significantly in building meaningful and mutual relationships with local actors through “a permanent mechanism of consultation” with NGOs and municipalities. She noted that the Office has a network of 14 large municipalities it works with, building their capacity to deliver anti-racism and anti-discrimination programmes, while also regularly convening them for multi-day seminars where policymakers from the municipalities can help “define [the National Office’s] priorities”. The Office additionally has a formal agreement with the National Association of Italian Municipalities (ANCI) to monitor and evaluate anti-discrimination and anti-racism efforts being delivered at the local level, findings from which can help improve local programmes, identify gaps in delivery and inform national support for such efforts.

Further, in the United Kingdom (UK), the Ministry of Local Government, Housing and Communities (MHCLG) has set up a Community Cohesion Unit to invest in action to safeguard social cohesion. As mentioned by Shaida Bibi, Head of Community Cohesion – Midlands and East, MHCLG, the Unit was established in a post October 2023 environment, in recognition of the impacts the Israel-Hamas conflict was having on social cohesion in the UK. The Unit has “a team that will go out and have conversations with different local authorities” on risks and their needs, ultimately seeking to build long-term, sustainable relationships with local governments, where the latter feels confident and capable of regularly sharing their concerns with MHCLG. She added that the Community Cohesion Unit also tries to relay information they receive from local governments to other national government departments, including – for example – the Home Office, which continues to oversee the UK’s counter-extremism Prevent Programme. Shaida underscored that, in addition to vertical cooperation, cross-government working as such is crucial to effective NLC, particularly given the range of on- and offline threats cities are at the frontline of response to: threats that may not fall under the jurisdiction of any one government ministry or department.

2. NLC Requires Inclusivity, Flexibility and Adaptability

Participants agreed that NLC should be inclusive (i.e., involving a range of actors, including a range of “types” of local government); flexible, given different actors have different needs; and adaptable, recognising that threats are always changing and evolving, and differ from city to city.

In Italy, Agnese shared that the National Office Against Racial Discrimination helps facilitate an inclusive approach to NLC by providing multiple mechanisms through which to engage local partners. This includes in project-specific technical committees, in which the Office always seeks to involve a diversity of local actors in the design and delivery of its projects. Agnese also pointed to the National Office’s partnership with ANCI as a means to reach municipalities that the Office isn’t directly engaged with (i.e., smaller, more remote ones).

Shaida added that, in the UK, MHCLG has also tapped into the national Local Government Association (LGA) to “share knowledge and learnings” with – and gain insights from – as broad an array of local governments it can. Speaking from the audience, Sean Arbuthnot, Prevent Manager, Birmingham City Council (UK), further highlighted why national governments should leverage local government networks. For example, he shared that the LGA has served as an effective platform to help its members understand national frameworks and respond to emerging issues, citing a consultative process it facilitated whereby members were convened to co-design a toolkit on managing public unrest.

Further, in Canada, Public Safety, through the Canada Centre’s Community Resilience Fund grant programme, supports the Canadian Centre for Safer Communities (CCFSC) to build the capacity of its network of local actors to address hate and extremism. As Robert Burley noted, the “bottom line is to assist local stakeholders: we provide funding and capacity and then move out of the way” for partners like the CCFSC to support their networks in delivering context-appropriate prevention efforts.

3. NLC Should Move Beyond Project-Specific Funding and Invest in Building Sustainable Prevention Capacities and Infrastructure

In both sessions, participants observed that NLC has often been limited to project-specific funding, where national governments provide short-term grants to partners to deliver a specific set of activities. While project-specific funding is of course important, there was consensus that national governments should also invest in the core capacities and infrastructure of their local partners, which can help facilitate the sustainability of impact. For example, Jonathon Reed, Director of Programmes at Next Gen Men, an organisation that works across genders to reimagine masculinity, shared concerns about losing qualified and credible staff members, who have built important relationships with the organisation’s beneficiaries, due to a lack of core funding support. Staff turnover can, in turn, impede sustainable impact and affect continuity of the services being provided. Vicky Laprade, CCFSC Project Manager, added that threats to social cohesion are long-term challenges that require long-term solutions, underscoring the importance of building institutional capacity over just providing time-limited project funding.  

In the parallel session, José Martínez Marín, Deputy Inspector – Police Department, City of Murcia (Spain) shared that his city thinks of NLC in three categories: understanding, adaptation and ownership. Once local governments understand relevant national frameworks for prevention (which, he added, they should be involved in designing in the first place), it is upon them to work with their community-based partners to adapt (i.e., contextualise) and take ownership over the local implementation of those frameworks. However, he emphasised that this is a long-term effort that requires building relationships and working with numerous community-based partners and government departments: a process that may be impeded if a lack of core funding and capacity (or, at the very least, a long-term project funding) leads to frequent staff turnover and, in turn, gaps in services.

4. Prevention, Youth Engagement and the Digital Dimension

Next Steps

Building on the discussions, as well as the Summit’s parallel session on NLC in crisis management and the launch of the NLC Working Group, the Strong Cities Network will continue to collate, capture and disseminate lessons learned with its global network.

Key next steps include:

• Building out a library of NLC practices as part of the Strong Cities Network’s digital Resource Hub – drawing on the global network and building on Strong Cities’ existing NLC-related outputs to create a digital library of NLC case studies.
• Advocating for greater provision of core (rather than just project-specific) support to local governments and their partners, identifying and disseminating relevant examples.
• Continued facilitation of national-local dialogues, recognising the impact these have had in contexts ranging from Malawi to Morocco.
• Identifying additional in-kind and financial support for Strong Cities’ new NLC Working Group, which was launched at the Summit with support from the Government of the Netherlands.

Additional Resources

Recent Strong Cities policy briefs and resources:

• City Leadership in Partnering with Local Communities for Social Cohesion: Ten Considerations for Mayors and Local Governments, Strong Cities Network, 2025
• National-Local Cooperation: Opportunities and Lessons Learned for Secondary and Tertiary Prevention, Strong Cities Network, 2025
• City Leadership in the Face of Rising Incivility and Polarisation: Ten Considerations for Mayors and Local Governments, Strong Cities Network, 2025
• Innovations in Prevention: Piloting Multi-Actor Frameworks in Small and Mid-Sized Cities in the United States, Strong Cities Network, 2025
• A Toolkit for Cities: Building a Multi-Actor Local Prevention Framework, Strong Cities Network, 2025
• A Toolkit for Manitoba Municipalities: Addressing Anti-Government Hate and Harassment, Strong Cities Network, 2025
• A Guide for Cities: Preventing Hate, Extremism & Polarisation, Strong Cities Network, updated 2025
• A Guide for Mayors: Preventing and Responding to Hate, Extremism & Polarisation, Strong Cities Network, updated 2025
• A Guide for City-Led Response, Strong Cities Network, May 2024
• City Spotlights Library, Strong Cities Network

Donors & Partners

The Sixth Global Summit was co-hosted with the City of Toronto and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, and delivered with generous support from the Government of Canada, The Fourth Freedom Forum, The Toronto Foundation and Charities Aid Foundation.

Contact Information 

For more information about the Sixth Global Summit or the Strong Cities Network, please contact [email protected].

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