This is an unquestionable priority for the region as cities are growing exponentially and becoming more and more unmanageable. The rate of demographic growth has been outstanding as the region is home to over 2.2 billion people, according to UN data.

This exponential rise in people living in urban spaces and the daunting problems that come with it, will accelerate even further in the near future.

By 2050, there will be an additional 1.2 billion people inhabiting urban spaces in the whole Asia-Pacific.

How can central governments from the region manage the complex reality of the present and the unfolding scenario of potentially ungovernable urban spaces?

Finance is one solution and here we need to talk about huge amounts of it. But attention should also be given to governance and this is what a recent report published by UN-ESCAP titled “Urban transformation in Asia and the Pacific, from growth to resilience”, does.

Interestingly, the publication also focuses on localizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), promoting the idea that city governments throughout the region should do much more to be active in implementing the Agenda 2030 and its related SDGs.

According to the report, between 2017 and 2024, only slightly more than 50 local and subnational governments have been involved in what the UN refers to as voluntary local reviews (VLRs). These are documents in which cities and other local governments at subnational levels report on their actions taken to implement the SDGs.

Yet even if more city governments were to engage in what are very formal, top-down processes, the whole region is still far from enabling bottom-up and truly participatory frameworks.

Localizing the SDGs should not just be seen as a reporting exercise. Rather, this process should be seen as a real opportunity to involve and engage the citizenry in the real decision-making.

There are myriad ways in which local governance can be made not only more transparent but also more inclusive and bottom-up. This area of deliberative democracy should not be seen by politicians as a threat.

If governments from the region have their own people’s interest as a priority, then deliberative practices at ground level should be seen as the biggest opportunity to manage urban spaces that are already hardly manageable.

Talking about the SDGs, allowing people to express their concerns, vent their frustrations and propose new ideas should be seen as the easiest way to begin deliberative democracy. The ESCAP publication does dedicate some space to the imperative of involving and engaging citizens, primarily youth

“Youth participation in urban policymaking is essential for fostering inclusive, equitable and sustainable cities. Involving young people in decision-making processes is important to ensure urban environments are designed with their unique needs and rights in mind,” says the report.

But the above and a few other lines from the publication only pay lip service to the real need of finding new ways of turning around local governance and truly making it a process centered on empowering people, starting from the younger generation.

While Bangkok hosts its biggest high-level policy making gathering, several seas and thousands of miles away, New York City is hosting the 24th session of UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues known as UNPFII.

Yet while there should be a focus on solving the mess faced by urban spaces throughout the region, we cannot forget the role that indigenous peoples from Asia and the Pacific have in ensuring that the whole continent, with its astonishing diversity, thrives.

Migration to cities is happening because of the unequal distribution of opportunities in rural parts of the region. Climate warming and biodiversity loss are key enablers of such dynamics.

Indigenous peoples, many of whom have been forced to move from their ancestral lands, could hold the key to ensuring more balanced development processes among semi urban, rural and remote regions.

That is why, if we talk about a new form of urban governance, then we should also highlight the need to ensure that indigenous peoples have much stronger governance tools at their disposal.

And this is really about decision-making.

The key theme of this year’s UNPFII is finding new ways to enhance the implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Efforts to ensure the right to self-determination of indigenous peoples are central to this quest.

This is inevitably an issue of rethinking the whole way governance systems are working so that they can do a much better job at recognizing the inalienable rights of indigenous peoples at local, regional and global levels.

Connecting the dots is not easy. Yet the biggest challenges faced by the Asia-Pacific region are interconnected. No serious policy maker or pundit can imagine a prosperous region without undertaking the challenging task of seriously exploring how local governance systems and models can be revamped and opened up.

Trying to do so without involving and engaging the indigenous peoples, starting from those who are most neglected, would be foolish.

Among them, indigenous peoples should have a say. Forgetting about their role as stewards and protectors of local ecosystems and not recognizing their voices would further imperil the Asia-Pacific region’s odds of succeeding at enhancing its prosperity and well-being.

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The writer is a freelance columnist focusing on regional integration in Southeast Asia, human rights and development.