latin america and the caribbean in particular hosted some notable stakeholder participation arrangements for nup including in ecuador and brazil the majority of countries have general national planning authorities per cent while a substantial proportion have specialised national urban agencies per cent only three nations man a nup via subnational agencies per cent two of them marshall islands and tuvalu are small pacific states where geographic scale means a close overlap between national and local boundaries and the other is switzerland a federal state in which the competence for urban policy is attributed to local authorities