Climate-Neutral Cities in Albania: Cross-country collaboration via a national platform?

What happens when you bring together Albanian municipalities, a Mission City, national institutions, academia, and NetZeroCities representatives? A great co-creation process begins! Natalia Lewandowska from ICLEI Europe writes that the stage is now set for establishing an Albanian national platform to accelerate climate neutrality. 

Albania’s path toward EU accession has placed sustainability, climate action, and urban development high on the national agenda. As the country aligns its policies with the European Green Deal and the EU’s climate objectives, cities have a central role to play in driving this transformation – but mobility remains one of Albania’s biggest urban hurdles.  

In many cities, decades of planning have prioritised cars over people, leading to streets designed for traffic rather than for movement, connection, and public life. As car ownership continues to rise, congestion, air pollution, and safety concerns have become everyday realities, while walking, cycling, and public transport often remain underdeveloped. It was precisely this context that made sustainable mobility the central theme of our recent workshop in Tirana, offering local professionals a chance to reimagine their cities as spaces that put people before cars, and to set the foundation for a truly climate-neutral future. 

The EU Mission for Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities, through which the workshop was organised, offers a unique framework to help Albanian municipalities accelerate this alignment, turning European ambitions into local action. By joining this Mission ecosystem, cities like Elbasan are not only advancing their own climate goals but also demonstrating how local innovation and collaboration can support Albania’s broader integration with the European Union’s sustainability vision. 

A collaborative milestone for Albanian cities

Hosted by NetZeroCities and Build Green Group Albania (BGG), in collaboration with the Urban Research Institute (URI) and Elbasan, the Albanian Mission City, the event had a clear goal: to strengthen Albania’s engagement in the EU Cities Mission through sustainable mobility and by promoting a national platform model for climate-neutral urban development. 

What is a national platform and how can it help cities? 

National platforms provide the missing link between local innovation and national policy, turning shared climate commitments into collective progress. It gathers all key actors working toward climate neutrality, from cities and regional governments to national authorities, academia, businesses, and civil society, and offers a framework for collaboration. This is a form of multi-level governance, ensuring that cities are supported by national and regional structures as they work toward their climate goals. Within the platforms, cities form communities of practice to share experiences and co-create solutions, while stakeholders from various sectors collaborate to align efforts and resources. Each platform follows the EU Cities Mission methodology and is usually coordinated by a dedicated organisation with the mandate to guide and connect the national ecosystem for climate-neutral cities.

Across Europe, several countries have already established strong examples of how such collaboration can work in practice. Sweden’s Viable Cities, Spain’s citiES2030, Austria’s Mission: Climate-Neutral City, and Romania’s M100 Mirror Cities Mission Hub are all helping municipalities turn ambition into concrete action. While there is no single model for a perfect national platform, these examples demonstrate the value of coordinated efforts because many of the measures needed to achieve climate neutrality by 2030 simply cannot be implemented by cities alone.  

In Albania, the shared enthusiasm and commitment of all parties involved have created strong momentum to advance the development of a National Platform tailored to the country’s context. Building on this energy, the next steps will focus on turning this collective ambition into a structured framework for lasting cooperation and tangible climate action. 

Mobility and innovation in Albania through the Cities Mission

During the Walk21 Tirana conference, 37 participants from across Albania, representatives of five cities (Elbasan, Tirana, Përmet, Pogradec, and Roskovec), two national institutions (the National Association of Municipalities of Albania and the Albanian Development Fund), as well as academics and NGOs, gathered for an interactive workshop titled “Co-Creating Climate-Neutral Cities: A National Platform Approach to Sustainable Mobility in Albania.” The diversity of the represented stakeholder groups reflected a strong multi-level commitment to change and planted the seed for scaling climate action beyond the Albanian Mission City Elbasan. This advanced the second objective of the EU Cities Mission, ensuring that Mission Cities act as innovation hubs enabling all European cities to become climate-neutral by 2050.

Gledian Llatja, Mayor of Elbasan, and Zana Vokopola from URI showcased Elbasan’s pioneering work within the Mission through the Elbasan Climate-Neutral Innovation in Mobility (ECIM) project, a concrete example of how local leadership and targeted mobility actions can drive wider urban transformation. The acronym of the initiative is not coincidental – ECIM in Albanian means ‘let’s walk’!  

Moderated by Elbasan’s City Advisor from NetZeroCities, Bob D’Haeseleer, panellists Gledian Llatja (Elbasan), Zana Vokopola (URI), Françeska Korançe (BGG) and Adelina Farrici, representing the National Association of Municipalities of Albania, explored both opportunities and challenges of strengthening national support mechanisms for sustainable mobility and underlined the need for coordinated action across governance levels. They agreed that the active involvement of national institutions is essential to accelerate progress toward climate neutrality. At the same time, they noted that while informal exchanges between cities already take place (a natural advantage in a small country like Albania) these collaborations need to be formalized and structured within an institutional framework to ensure long-term impact. 

The interactive bootcamp that followed, co-facilitated by ICLEI Europe, BGG, and URI, provided a dynamic space for all participants to identify key barriers and co-develop actionable solutions. A final presentation of the NetZeroCities offer for Mission-minded Cities introduced tools and collaboration pathways for Albanian cities eager to engage with the Mission framework and take concrete steps toward climate neutrality.