From the Earth Summit to Local Agenda 21

Working towards sustainable development

William M. Lafferty, Katarina Eckerberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134056378
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This collection of in-depth case studies emphasizes the diversity and inventiveness of local initiatives since the Rio 'Earth Summit' within different national settings. From the Earth Summit to Local Agenda 21offers a realistic counterpoint to the official monitoring and assessment procedures of national governments and international bodies. It highlights the problems of assessment and policy evaluation and clearly sets out the policy stages necessary for more effective realization of Local Agenda 21 objectives.

1. Introduction

The Nature and Purpose of ‘Local Agenda 21’

William M. Lafferty and Katarina Eckerberg

Humanity stands at a defining moment in history. We are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities between and within nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy, and the continuing deterioration of the ecosystems on which we depend for our well-being. However, integration of environment and development concerns and greater attention to them will lead to the fulfilment of basic needs, improved living standards for all, better protected and managed ecosystems and a safer, more prosperous future. No nation can achieve this on its own: but together we can – in a global partnership for sustainable development. Agenda 21, Preamble, Section 1.1.

One of the most characteristic features of the UNCED process is the goal of bringing together key social actors for joint co-operative efforts on vital issues of environment and development. The entire Section III of the Rio ‘action plan’ – Agenda 21 – is devoted to ‘strengthening the role of major groups’. The action plan itself builds on the premise that the achievement of sustainable development requires new forms of social learning, whereby major collective actors seek to resolve potential conflicts on environment-and-development issues through new forms of involvement and co-operation. Chapter 28 of the Agenda is devoted to one of the most important of these actors: local political authorities. The Agenda outlines the rationale for action in this area as follows:

Because so many of the problems and solutions being addressed by Agenda 21 have their roots in local activities, the participation and co-operation of local authorities will be a determining factor in fulfilling its objectives. Local authorities construct, operate and maintain economic, social and environmental infrastructure, oversee planning processes, establish local environmental policies and regulations, and assist in implementing national and sub-national environmental policies. As the level of governance closest to the people, they play a vital role in educating, mobilising and responding to the public to promote sustainable development. (United Nations, 1993: Agenda 21, Section 28.1)

It is thus a key role of local authorities to take responsibility for introducing, interpreting, adapting and eventually implementing the most relevant aspects of Agenda 21 for their local communities. This clearly does not mean that local initiatives are to be ‘governed’ by the authorities themselves, nor does it imply that national governments do not have a responsibility for guiding and assisting local authorities in the development of effective local programs. At both the national and local levels of governance, it is assumed that the role of authorities with respect to ‘major groups’ is to employ the powers and resources of government in such a way as to facilitate co-operation and co-ordinated action. It is the instrumental effect of the co-operation and co-ordination itself which is the goal, and it is the intention of Chapter 28 to focus the responsibility of local authorities for pursuing the goal through dialogue and public assistance.

The underlying facilitating and mobilising intent of Chapter 28 is also manifest in its exceptional brevity. With the exception of two ‘preamble’ chapters (1 and 23), Chapter 28 is the shortest chapter of the entire action plan. (Reprinted in its entirety here as Appendix 1.) This brevity should not be interpreted, however, as either a lower priority or an intended lack of substance. To the contrary. Anyone familiar with the UNCED process, both prior to and at the Earth Summit itself, knows that a need for increased local activity was a major theme throughout. The lack of specifics in Chapter 28 primarily reflects the considerable variation in central-local authority domains across the member states, as well as the wide diversity in specific types of local and regional authority within the member states. The challenge facing the drafters of the chapter was thus to place it firmly on (within) the Agenda in a manner which did not seem to presuppose any one form of local government, or any one type of specific local issue.

In trying to meet this particular challenge of ‘nonsubstantive instrumentality’, the chapter stipulates only four specific ‘objectives’:

a)By 1996, most local authorities in each country should have undertaken a consultative process with their populations and achieved a consensus on ‘a local Agenda 21’ for the community;

b)By 1993, the international community should have initiated a consultative process aimed at increasing co-operation between local authorities;

c)By 1994, representatives of associations of cities and other local authorities should have increased levels of co-operation and coordination with the goal of enhancing the exchange of information and experience among local authorities;

d)All local authorities in each country should be encouraged to implement and monitor programmes which aim at ensuring that women and youth are represented in decision-making, planning and implementation processes. (United Nations, 1993: Agenda 21, Section 28.2)

Here we see that, with the exception of securing the involvement of ‘women and youth’, the objectives of the plan are primarily procedural, but, in contrast to many of the other chapters of the Agenda, they are quite specifically procedural. They stipulate specific dates for specific types of activities, providing thereby benchmarks for follow-up and assessment. It is of key importance for the entire discussion of implementation and assessment, however, that we note that the initial objective – calling for a consensus on a ‘local Agenda 21’ – is without fürther specification as to what ‘a local Agenda 21’ actually consists of. This can, again, be interpreted as omission by design: rather than trying to outline in detail the content areas of a preordained plan or program, the chapter leaves this open. The message is (as clearly indicated in the chapter’s section on ‘activities’) that it is up to the local authorities to take responsibility for initiating and co-ordinating the dialogue among ‘citizens, local organisations and private enterprises’ which is necessary to determine the form and content of their specific Local Agenda 21 initiative.

At its most ambitious level, therefore, the task of implementing Chapter 28 is one of interpreting and ‘relativising’ Agenda 21 to suit local conditions and problems. The task should not be misconstrued as having to adapt to and apply a pre-determined program or plan. As the present collection of country reports indicates, this type of interpretation has, in fact, served to deter a more positive and active approach to the idea of ‘Local Agenda 21’. The underlying logic of the implementation problem (what Sabatier (1986) refers to as the ‘adequate causal theory’) implies, in this case, a process whereby local authorities function as responsible disseminators and facilitators of the Local Agenda 21 idea. The process requires subsequent phases of: (1) information and consciousness-raising; (2) interpretation and relativization of Agenda 21 to local conditions and problems; (3) development of priorities and local action plans with both general and sector-specific targets; (4) determination of appropriate steering instruments, including most specifically the procurement of voluntary agreements among sector-relevant social actors (‘target groups’); (5) integration of plans and priorities into public budgets and the mobilisation of other necessary resources; (6) the implementation process itself; (7) monitoring and evaluation (of both the enactment process and its effects); and (8) revision of goals, plans and initiatives.

It is important to emphasise that a list of this type (which is in any case merely suggestive) is designed to capture the general logic of the implementation task and not to express any kind of ‘necessary’ procedure. The ‘adequacy’ of the ‘causal theory’ in question refers to the implied instrumentality for a successful realisation of the policy intent. It is an expression of underlying general assumptions as to what is most probably necessary to achieve the policy goals in question. In the case of Chapter 28, the goals are the process itself, i.e. the process deemed necessary to bring Agenda 21 down to the level of most immediate impact on citizens, organisations and business. It must be assumed that local communities will vary considerably with respect to which aspects of the action plan are most relevant for moving the community towards more sustainable development. Conditions of regional location, geography, demography, and, most importantly, the nature of the local economy, will all affect interpretation and application of the plan.

CRITERIA FOR MONITORING AND REPORTING

The goal of the current effort has thus been to gather information and analyse the activities in the different countries in a manner which is both systematic and open. We wanted to lay a foundation for fürther conceptual and theoretical work, but we did not want to channel the process into such a narrow set of categories as to suppress important national characteristics and innovations. Building on the joint discussions in the project, the following ‘protocol’ of descriptive categories has been adopted as a basic monitoring framework:

1.Baseline conditions: What are the existing ‘baseline’ conditions for integrating environmental concerns at the local level of government (that is prior to Agenda 21)? What reforms, social experiments and environmental policies were in place for local government at the time of Rio, and how did these contextual conditions affect the introduction and implementation of the LA21 idea?

2.Antecedent role in UNCED: What role (if any) did representatives of the central government and/or organisations of local authorities play in developing the Local Agenda 21 initiative during the run-up to the UN Conference on Environment and Development?

3.Government reaction: How did central government (the legislature and responsible ministries/departments) initially react to and interpret the LA21 initiative? What programs, institutional changes, strategies, action plans, resource allocations, etc., were initiated?

4.Local-community reaction: Were there direct and independent reactions and initiatives on the part of individual local communities? What was the reaction of national umbrella associations for local authorities, and what programs or initiatives have they initiated? To what degree have either of these initiatives been integrated with central government initiatives?

5.NGO’s and the social partners: How have leading nongovernmental organisations (particularly leading environmental groups, but also national organisations for business, labour and farming) reacted to and become involved in the LA21 idea? What types of major-group co-operation (networks, covenants, charters, negotiations) have been brought into play?

6.Political impact: Where and how have specific LA21 initiatives made the greatest impact? What is the short-term (5-year) prognosis for further development and institutionalisation of the LA21 idea?

These issues were to be addressed within a context whereby we stressed the essential difference of the LA21 initiative. Recognising that the Rio action plan would have to be relativised according to the state of existing programs and initiatives in each country, we had to determine criteria which focus on the particularity of the Local Agenda 21 idea. Based on two existing overviews of the initial reactions and background conditions for the reception of LA21 in Scandinavia, Germany and Great Britain (Armann, Hille and Kasin, 1995 and Voisey et al., 1996), and guided by recent conceptual work on the nature of sustainable development’ (Lafferty and Langhelle, 1995), we arrived at an operational set of criteria. To qualify as an initiative reflecting the intentions of Chapter 28, a ‘Local Agenda 21’ should reflect the following characteristics:

1.A more conscious attempt to relate environmental effects to underlying economic and political pressures (which in turn derive from political decisions, non-decisions and markets.)

2.A more active effort to relate local issues, decisions and dispositions to global impacts, both environmentally and with respect to global solidarity and justice.

3.A more focused policy for achieving cross-sectoral integration of environment-and-development concerns, values and goals in planning, decision-making and policy implementation.

4.Greater efforts to increase community involvement, i.e. to bring both average citizens and major stakeholder groups, particularly business and labour unions, into the planning and implementation process with respect to environment-and-development issues.

5.A commitment to define and work with local problems within: (a) a broader ecological and regional framework, as well as (b) a greatly expanded time frame (i.e. over three or more generations).

6.A specific identification with (reference to) the Rio Summit and Agenda 21.

In applying these criteria, we have tried to differentiate between three different types or levels of ‘environment-and-development’ activity.

The first level refers to policies and initiatives which are primarily designed to either conserve nature or improve and redress the environment. They are initiatives which could have been taken prior to the publication of the Brundtland Report, and which are addressed to environmental concerns in a relatively narrow, more technical and more ‘natural-science’ type of perspective. Such activities are simply referred to as ‘environmental initiatives’, and are not presumed to reflect any of the above six characteristics.

The second level refers to policies and initiatives which specifically refer to the concept of ‘sustainable development’ as expressed in the Brundtland Report; or which use broad concepts such as ‘global ecology’ which reflect the concerns of the Brundtland Commission without using the explicit terms and categories of the report itself. Such activities should reflect most or all of criteria 1 through 5 above, and can be referred to as ‘initiatives for sustainable development’. Most of these local initiatives would have been instigated in the period following the publication and dissemination of the Brundtland Report, that is between 1987 and 1992.¹

Finally, at the third level, are activities which make specific reference to the Rio Summit and/or Agenda 21. Only these activities qualify, in the strict sense of the term, as ‘a Local Agenda 2V. Such activities should reflect all six of the above criteria, and they should do so as a conscious attempt to implement the intentions of Chapter 28 of the Agenda.

It should be stressed that these brief ‘guidelines’ have been circulated as a sensitising device so as to facilitate a common approach and reporting on Local Agenda 21. The differ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Half Title Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: The Nature and Purpose of ‘Local Agenda 21’
• 2 Finland: Working With La21 Under Conditions of Economic Uncertainty
• 3 Sweden: Setting the Pace with Pioneer Municipalities and Schools
• 4 Norway Confronting the Inertia of Existing Reforms
• 5 Germany Five Years After Rio and Still Uphill All the Way?
• 6 Austria A Late Start with a Strong Potential
• 7 The Netherlands Subsidized Seeds in Fertile Soil
• 8 The United Kingdom A Mirage Beyond the Participation Hurdle?
• 9 Ireland Does the Road from Rio Lead Back to Brussels?
• 10 Conclusions Comparative Perspectives on Evaluation and Explanatio
• Appendix 1: Agenda 21, Chapter 28: Local Authorities Initiatives in Support of Agenda 21
• Appendix 2: Country Reports on Chapter 28 of Agenda 21, Submitted to Dpcsd/‘Earth Summit +5’: Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly, New York, June 23–27 1997
• Appendix 3: The Ballagio Principles: Guidelines for Practical Assessment of Progress Toward Sustainable Development
• Index