This stage will stimulate a fruitful collective reflection on the existing approaches to care, starting from UCLG's own approach promoted with GOLD VII and finding synergies with other movements and schools of thought. For instance, the feminist municipalist movement, the social and solidarity economy movement, and the work on human rights cities have all inspired compelling understandings of care. Exploring the links that exist between different understandings and agendas around care is fundamental in order to uncover common values and principles that can serve as a foundation to build shared systems of care.

The guiding questions are: “How can we define ‘care’”? “Why do we need caring cities and territories?”, "Which values and principles underpinning different agendas can be applicable to the caring agenda too?”.

This stage opens up space for a wide range of contributions that convey the idea that there is a diversity of infrastructures, both soft and hard, that if promoted can contribute to more caring cities and regions. This includes hard infrastructures, like public spaces of certain characteristics, local buildings and offices like social or health centers, pipe networks for public service delivery, etc., and soft infrastructures, including partnerships and institutional instruments, like policies, programs, concrete participatory mechanisms and, importantly, the financial infrastructure that is necessary to implement a care-related approach to local and regional development.

This stage will allow us to discuss, from the local to the global sphere, at a more macro level, which changes are indispensable for the proposals from stages 1 and 2 to be effectively implemented. This stage will dig deeper into the particularities of some preliminary solutions already identified, which might include: the continuation of the renovation of the multilateral system; the rethinking of the current global financial system, completely inadequate to reach LRGs and their communities’ efforts; the political capital that is necessary to implement initiatives to promote caring cities and regions; the strengthening of partnerships with different actors, amongst others; and the overall governance framework within which LRGs operate, which can be a resource or a constraint to promoting caring cities and regions.