nm1148: er can we start er first of all er there's the number of people here today is not as as high as it probably should be because i think er on the programme i-, it was actually recorded as no lecture today but i've asked i asked er the faculty office to inform students that there was actually a lecture today but obviously er that ha-, message hasn't got through luckily some people just came along anyway so that's good news for me er i also might like to apologize 'cause of my voice i've just i'm just recovering from a cold and it's gone down to my chest and affected my voice so i'm a bit squeaky ironic because i'm being taped today er by the university so they can advertise these lectures well no illustrate the lecturing er lectures to foreign students before they come here so as get an idea of the kind of er language and er lectures they'll be getting er i'm taking over from namex and namex who's who have covered the lectures up until now in environment and sustainability they've been looking at the strategic level looking at strategic aspects around land er housing development transport now we we call it strategic but in fact there's as you probably gather by some of the stuff that namex and namex have been talking about there's quite a lot of local things in their lectures as well about local green transport plans and the like and i think that's a a sort of thing that i would emphasize vis-à-vis the exam when it comes er is that there is quite a bit of overlap between strategic aspects and the local aspects although there is a a formal division in the lecture programme there's a fair amount of crossover and in that sense when it comes to exams d-, doing questions you can use material from one block alongside the other block so there's no necessary divide which again reflects sustainable development sustainable development which is attempts to be holistic to integrate and deal with all these things together as much as possible it fits the kind of concepts of sustainability however er the next few weeks will be taken up with what we call local aspects local dimensions of sustainable development looking at U-K experience er i will be covering er material related to local authority what local authorities are doing in relationship to sustainable development er i will be looking at the local economy looking at local economic development and sustainable development what is a green economy if you like er namex will be covering aspects of urban design looking at sustain-, sustainable urban design and finally the last sess-, session we'll do at the end of term will be me talking about the concept of the ecological city an ecological city is really an attempt to put together all the different aspects that you've been covering in this course as they apply to cities in general so in that sense it kind of goes back strategic again it starts strategic goes local and then comes back out so today's session er and what i'll do is i'll probably speak for about forty minutes take a break and then finish off after a coffee is i'm going to talk about er l-, the local er environment the role of local government and also look at the interaction with the community particularly through the idea and processes of Local Agenda Twenty-one which is the mechanism o-, i guess where local authorities are trying to engage with local communities i've given out a handout which kind of gives the main points or the main headings that i will re-, be referring to you can annotate my note or write your own notes to add to them there's a fair amount of literature in the reading list that you can use and i've asterisked the stuff that i think is most relevant there is i think t-, ab-, again er but i'll mention this now and i'll mention again le-, next week there's one er journal which i find very relevant to the stuff that i cover it's called er and i think it's on the reading list actually on one of the the it's called env-, er Local Environment News which is in the er Land Management Resource Centre there's copies of Local Environment News in the Resource Centre er and i've mentioned a few articles in the reading list from it but again it's worth having a flick through that journal because it's it's published every month it reports on various initiatives that are going on today going on at this moment in local authorities in local communities in local economies so you c-, if you skim through that journal you can pick up other th-, other things apart from i'm being talking about so again as a revision aid it's probably worth having a look at that journal er nearer the time when you get to the exam we're all aware as you've already mentioned or namex has already mentioned with the the rise of the environmental agenda various environmental problems have arisen and been acknowledged in the media by academics by environmental pressure groups and now increasingly by the world's governments those issues like the pollution arising from economic processes the depletion of the ozone layer overexploitation of natural resources the loss and damage to habitats and wildlife population growth poverty and famine in certain parts of the world all those issues have sort of come together and being acknowledged they've led over the last thirty years or so to a number of major international agreements conferences er to legislation at different levels European directives U-K national acts of Parliament and again as part of the handout and again just as an aide-memoire i've got a i've i've sort of d-, constructed a broad picture of some of those what i call pathways of environmental law the way that those issues have been picked up at different levels at the U-K level the European level and international level leading to conferences action plans strategies and acts and directives so again that's really sort of summarizing very briefly the major pieces of environmental law that have arisen particularly over the last thirty or so years this is a lot of these environmental issues have been identified at the global level have been seen to be global problems but there has been a push by national international organizations to act locally and there is a a rationale for local action particularly the emphasis on local action very much came out of the Rio conference on Agenda Twenty-one in nineteen-ninety-two that conference that international conference produced an action programme for sustainable development into the twenty-first century and the whole emphasis of the Rio conference was on involving a range of stakeholders in sustainable development in the actions towards sustainable development it also emphasized widespread participation as widespread as possible to kind of expand the range of people that were working towards sustainable development also the other thing about Rio which again namex probably has picked up on is that it defined sustainable development in quite broad terms it defined it in socio-economic terms not just environmental so the environmental problems that had risen to prominence were increasingly being redefined because it was humans it was us human beings social social animals who were causing and influencing environmental problems so words coming from Rio for sustainable development improving the quality of human life whilst living within the carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems that's the kind of message coming from Rio improving the quality of human life whilst living within the carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems so very it's very much again de-, defined in terms of human processes quality of life issues in relationship to environmental constraints one of the key outcomes of Rio of the Rio conference in ninety-two was Agenda Twenty-one chapter eight of Agenda Twenty-one called on the world's governments and local communities to prepare Local Agenda Twenty-ones for their countries and for local areas within them the need to operate at the local level the community level to produce these Local Agenda Twenty-ones was based on a ver-, er on a number of premises firstly the need to tackle environmental problems at all relevant levels in other words environmental problems were being caused by actions not just by international governmental policy but also by businesses organizations and individuals living their lives carrying out their businesses carrying out their functions so in order to tackle environmental problems you need to address them and act at all levels wherever wherever the decision making processes are taking place are causing or influencing the quality of the environment secondly another rationale for ou-, operating locally is to build consensus between all key interests in other words to incorporate all the major stakeholders all the groups as far as possible in this process of sustainable development and there was also an emphasis at Rio to include to be socially inclusive and include those groups that are normally marginalized so there's an emphasis on involving the poor the unemployed children ethnic groups male and females within the process in order to do that again you need to operate where people are operating themselves and communities are seen as one of the key areas where people see are identify with local areas and therefore those are the areas that are most meaningful for these people to be involved in decision making also apart from trying to involve people there was a need seen at the national international level to spread ownership to spread a sense of ownership of sustainable development down into local communities so the s-, the n-, the nations of the world at Rio were signing up some reluctantly others more enthusiastically but there was a feeling that this agreement at international level needed to permeate down through the different layers of government the different layers of society and economy and finally another rationale for local action in sustainable development is that it allows local solutions local decision making local knowledge to be used the u-, European Union used the word subsidiarity to describe this that you should devolve power and decision making down as far as as is possible as far as is appropriate okay there will be some decisions there'll be some actions that needed to be taken internationally there'll be some that need to be taken at national level there's some that n-, need to be taken at regional level but there are others that need to be taken at the local level so again it's that idea of trying to devolve influence and power and decision making as much as possible so that's the kind of rationale arguments why you should have local action on sustainable development in terms of the U-K there have been a number of phases since the late eighties i guess when after the brundtla-, Brundtland Report in eighty-seven local authorities and governments in the U-K started becoming aware and committed in various ways to sustainable development as a concept and in local authorities there was a significant er commitment produced during the late eighties and early nineties Jeremy raemaek-, Raemaekers' article which is on the reading list reviews action that was being taken in the late eighties and early nineties and in some respects his phases he's he's divided up into different phases his phases of action er er by local authorities are very much the ones that have continued so the work that was done in the early nineties has really continued through into the new century so it's worth just reviewing them the first phase of local authority action was was geared around producing environmental charters and action plans [sniff] now what happened was after Brundtland a-, an organization that is very astute an e-, environmental organization which is very astute Friends of the Earth said we want local government we want government in the U-K to take up take on board sustainable development so they what the s-, Friends of the Earth did is they produced a model charter you know for sustainable development it's really a kind of a a policy statement or commitment by an organization to the principles of sustainable development and Friends of the Earth produced this charter and sent it to all the chief execs the chief executives of all local authorities in the U-K and said you should be signing up to this Brundtland there's been a Brundtland Report United Nations is pushing this the uni-, the European Union is pushing this you need to take action at the local level and so they produced this model charter and said you could do this and of course local local authority chief execs said oh look they've already got they've already done one for us so we can use this one so you know the ch-, Friends of Earth are very astute they say well if you give them what they need without them having to do much work for it they'll use it and that and that's what basically happened local authorities started signing up producing these environmental charters which is really just a commitment it was a broad statement of commitment to the principles of sustainable development and also at about the same time so that kind of put it on the agenda that put it on the local agenda at the same time local authorities started saying well what do we do environmentally you know let's let's have a look at our environmental practices 'cause 'cause local authorities who have been involved in environmental health waste disposal planning and development were involved in environmental policy anyway so they they started producing kind of quick and dirty and i think that is the key words quick and dirty and then dirty quick and dirty action plans so they kind of they asked all the departments of the local authority what are we doing what are you doing that is supporting sustainable development so all the departments wrote back with what what actions they are doing to support er environmental protection and sustainable development and local authorities often quickly produced these and said right this is our environment-, this is our statement of environmental action this is what we are doing and maybe even intending to do so that that first phase which was in about the late you know from eighty-seven through to eighty-nine very quick stuff really put sustainable development on the local political agenda and also made initial commitment by local authorities and also outlined what they were doing in this area second phase was the production of State of the Environment Reports SOTERs for short State of the Environment Reports and Environmental Audits these were a a bit more thorough so you've got the quick and dirty stage one once that the dust had settled on them they said right er we need to map out the state of our local environment so and it usually was planning departments who had access to m-, a lot of this information produced documents which ranged in thickness from so thick to so thick or in volumes which kind of mapped out the state of the local authority's environment so they looked at their environmental assets their environmental problems they mapped so G-I-S started becoming used G-I-S was used to map out the various environmental resources operating locally the pr-, you know the s-, the sites of s-, scienti-, special scientific interest er areas of outstanding natural beauty nature reserves that kind of thing it was very much a mapping exercise of the state of the local environment at about the same time circa nineteen-ninety they also started to be a bit more thorough about the local authority's actions they started undertaking environmental audits of local authority policies and practices this is where i bring in my one of my overheads er yes i've got a overhead which kind of shows the er what we're talking about here this is a this is this is the sophisticated version of what a er environmental audit should be doing this is er like i say something that's been developed over time the idea behind eco-audit is to appraise your policies and actions as an organization it can be a private organization like a developer and developers have done these things as well or a business like B-T or Shell or a local authority in this case you need as part of the a start in the process you need to get that co-, corporate commitment which is what these charters really did they sort of put the thing on the agenda you need to er review initial review of your environmental impacts of you policies and your practices so the policies you have the money you spend where you spend it what impact does it have on the environment you should and this again is a case of sh-, lots of shoulds in here you should produce an environmental policy which kinds of maps out what you intend to do what the objectives are of the council the local authority you should specify that in terms of actions and targets and then you kind of enter you enter this circle this benevolent circle of environmental care i guess you might call it s-, having specified actions and targets that you are going to undertake as an organization you gain corporate management commitment through a a management programme to implement the policy so you basically spread these targets these commitments these policies throughout the organization you get them to sign up to do things like increase recycling locally or to er protect all your nature reserves or to manage then improve those areas so those are the kind of things you might include in there you undertake internal audits to check whether things are happening so you check that people are doing these things and that the the the the the targets are being met you produce an environmental report you you can and you should to be er authorized un-, through this get verification from an independent auditor there's environmental auditors who can check that what you've done is correct and you can register for er under the nati-, as a national standard that you have got the system in place and you're implementing it and then you basically keep going around in circles refining improving developing new targets developing new policies to improve your environmental performance that is the ideal kind of auditing system we're talking about in the early days local authorities were not shall we say as sophisticated in in this and they were basically just doing initial assessments targeting and implementation processes but phase two in the early nineties moved to phase three phase three was very much more using this to produce an environmental management system to try and make this a self-sustaining process so they moved from if you like a partial auditing process to a full i-, auditing process and for instance namex and i often use namex 'cause for namex Borough as an example namex Borough implemented this kind of system an environmental management system for its er leisure services department it's interesting that they haven't got much further than that because it takes a lot of effort to get these things up and running a lot of political commitment and a lot of officer commitment to actually run with these kind of things to create a kind of e-, environmental audit a management system which is self-sustaining so stage three was if you like a more sophisticated version of the earlier auditing process moving into a management system which runs constantly through the organization at about the same time this is sort of ninety-two three four five onwards in response to Rio in ninety-two local authorities many local authorities started developing their own Local Agenda Twenty-one and you can see these two things in parallel this kind of environmental audit and management system is very much looking at the local authority internally it's an internal organizational tool for improving environmental performance Local Agenda Twenty-one is a more external process it is outside the local authority it involves engaging in dialogue developing action programmes with partners with the stakeholders with community groups with businesses with schools with other organizations that are working living and operating locally so you can see these two as linked the environmental management systems internal to the organization Local Agenda Twenty-one much more external but basically developing the same idea of trying to build action programmes policies and actions to support sustainable development at the local level there is i guess possibly a s-, a phase five in the la-, latter part of the er nineteen-nineties some new tools started being used more often as part of this broad programme things like sustainability appraisals were d-, being done so policies and pla-, plans and programmes the local authority have like their development plan or their economic development strategy or their tourism strategy or their housing strategy were appraised they were looked at and checked against sustainability criteria at the same time local authorities started as did the government started developing indicators in other words ways to measure sustainable development sometimes these were kind of technical you know energy efficiency per per housing you you know in in relationship to housing units or it could be mu-, much more er broad like having fish certain types of fish in the river but that was a kind of indicator that things were getting better that there were improvements in the environment and also at the same time targets were being developed so again they were getting much stronger on developing targets what are we trying to improve how much by how much so you could say that the mid- nineties with environmental management systems and local agenda rolled forward into the current century developing some new tools sustainability appraisals indicators and targets to try and develop this theme what i'll do is i'll just cover s-, in bi-, little bit more detail some points about state of the environment reporting and then we'll have a break and come back and talk about Local Agenda Twenty-one the rationale for state of the environment reporting before developing an action programme local authorities need to identify it and quantify the nature of the environment or the environmental assets and problems in an area so in order to actually sta-, before you start taking action in this sphere you need to identify the state of the environment so that's the reason for undertaking a state of the environment report another reason why local authorities did state of the environment reports was they saw it as an opportunity to start bringing in outside partners because in order to get some of this information and data local authorities had to contact other organizations and particularly some of the environmental groups Friends of the Earth Royal Society for the Protection of Birds Greenpeace local environm-, er wildlife trusts had information that that was was plugged into this state of the environment report so in that sense it also was part of the process of going outside of the local authority invol-, starting starting to involve people there are numerous examples of state of the environment reports er there is a a kind of U-K version of state of the environment it's basic-, the indicators report done in nineteen-ninety-six which kind of maps out the state of the U-K environment there's there's been state of the re-, environment reports done at city-wide level LPAC did one for London to look at the state of London's environment Hertfordshire have got two a two volume thick state of the environment report namex before it was abolished namex just before it was abolished produced a state of the environment report which was very thin very short summary of it do you want a a handout to help you on your way we're kind of er oh we're actually only on we're only on number two sf1149: okay thank you nm1148: namex which which namex Borough prides itself on its environmental performance and its commitment to sustainable sustainable development but they only produced a state of the environment report in nineteen-ninety-seven they were quite late compared to many local authorities but it's interesting the later state of the environment reports often include much more social information s-, social data so for instance namex's has chapters and indicators on social on the social environment on economic development and on health so the later state of the environment reports started to spread out into this broader range of socio-economic information there are a number of issues and problems with regard to undertaking these state of the environment reports it takes time to produce them it takes a lot of energy to get t-, the data together and it takes resources so many local authorities haven't done a state of the environment report because of that problem or like namex delayed it until late in the nineteen-nineties some local authorities actually use consultants to produce state of the environment reports so they actually use consultants to do this job for them so there are difficulties and issues around the time and resources required there's another problem which is a a sen-, or ownership sustainable development is supposed to build a sense of ownership you remember and most of these state of the environment reports are prepared by the local authority by officers a kind of technical exercise of collecting information some like Humberside before it was abolished another county that was abolished er Humberside County Council used consultants to do it but again there's a difficulty you're you're basically handing over the ownership of this process to outside parties in one at least one case er Gloucestershire Gloucestershire County got a a forum of stakeholder groups together an environmental forum and they were the organization that produced the state of the environment report this again was the probably the best example one of the best examples of trying to spread ownership and involvement in this stage by getting a range of stakeholder groups environmental groups businesses community groups to actually put together this report helped build this sense of ownership but many like i say ended up being left on a shelf as a technical exercise another issue was the range of issues that it incorporated many of the early ones and many of them generally concentrate on the physical environment more recently as i mentioned in the case of namex they've expanded the kind of issues to look at what you might call the social environment as well as the physical natural envi-, environment so so-, some tackle the environment in in one way and some in oth-, in another finally questions can be raised about state of the environment reports i should have brought a couple along to show you but they end up often being a collection of facts with little direction they're really just a a research information collection exercise and once you've produced it you say so what almost there is a danger of saying so what certainly the best local state of the environment reports were then used were then taken forward as part of the environmental action programme so they actually were linked to subsequent policies and strategies that were being developed Lancashire's er environmental forum was a very good example of this there's an environmental forum in Lancashire and they produced a state of the environment report which was then quickly turned into an action plan in response to some of these issues some local authorities are developing more holistic and more focused sustainability reports i mentioned Lancashire they produced this initial acti-, er state of the environment report which then influenced the policy making then they did a second one they did a second green audit which was a lot more focused around the policies that they were developing at the time and also a lot more holistic it covered health poverty er economic development et cetera they also have been used again where they've been useful they've been used often as a basis for then deciding on indicators in other words what what are the having looked at the state of the environment locally what are the key things in terms of what's going bad so they start l-, if you look over time some things are water quality could be in-, er be be decreasing so they say right well that should be our k-, a key indicator of environmental quality locally so if they're used in that way they can lead on to defining a kind of indicators that people w-, will then use to judge improvements in the environment so that is the state of the environment reporting i say a a big surge of effort went in in the early nineties but the time and effort required to do it led to delays and in some cases led to local authorities not bothering in to do one at all they some of them did lead on to i-, actions and some of them did lead in to Local Agenda Twenty-one processes and we'll have a look at that we'll just have a break er and then we'll have a look at Local Agenda Twenty-one and the experience of local authorities in that area so we'll have a break now for five ten ten offers of ten ten minutes come back on the hour probably take about half an hour through to finish up on Local Agenda Twenty-one okay nm1148: thank you er what i'll do is i'll just finish off this session which has been looking at local authorities and local action by concentrating a little bit on Local Agenda Twenty-one er because this is very much the arena where local authorities have put a fair amount of action er in the U-K much more than other places we are in fact this is some of my students here er the post grads went to Baltimore at er Easter for a field trip it's a nice life doing a post grad isn't it and er we mentioned it we mentioned or sort of seemed to mention Local Agenda Twenty-one to a planner in Baltimore and they'd just never heard of it so in America Local Agenda Twenty-one as a concept has has very little resonance even though what they were doing in Baltimore was very much what local authorities in this country would call sus-, er age-, Local Agenda Twenty- one so it's strange that these concepts can be picked up and run with and given great prominence in one country and have very little meaning in another but it has er been a key issue in the U-K it i sort of mentioned it's based on chapter twenty-eight of Agenda Twenty-one produced at Rio er i-, in that chapter it said and i quote pardon me er by n-, it said by nineteen-ninety-six it said by nineteen-ninety-six most local authorities in each country should have undertaken a consultative process with their populations and achieved a consensus a Local Agenda Twenty-one for the community so that was the that was the that was the charge that was the challenge of Agenda Twenty-one from the Rio conference what's happened in the U-K well there's been a lot of activity er this diagram which is attached as a little article which is an update on progress of Local Agenda Twenty-one er this diagram shows that of of last y-, from la-, about last year er thirty-six per cent of local authorities had produced a Local Agenda Twenty-one an action plan for sustainable development in their area forty-five-point-two per cent were on target i er the target moved as all targets m-, they produced this target in nineteen-ninety-six and that went by er and then they moved th-, the goalposts and said right by two-thousand er all the local authorities should have produced a Agenda Twenty-one in nineteen- ninety-nine just before the deadline forty-five- point-two per cent were working towards it so you can see that quite a large percentage of local authorities had produced or were hoping to produce by two-thousand a Agenda Twenty-one statement there were a number though with no commitment no response or a c-, d-, definite commitment not to do one however that's a s-, sizable minority majority i suppose sizable majority of local authorities have been working on it in terms of oh boy how local authorities have done this er Steven Young and this again that's er er on the reference list Steven Young has done some research survey work looking at local authorities researching them er done a a kind of comprehensive review as as far as possible of the different approaches to Agenda Twenty-one at the local level and he's identified four basic approaches that local authorities have have used to produce these action plans these statements of sustainable development at the local level firstly er a top down strategy in which the local authority is firmly in control of the process er maybe involves consultation with er inverted commas around consultation involves some consultation with local community groups and local environmental groups but very much it's a local authority controlled process and as you can gather from what we said about Agenda Twenty-one and Rio that kind of process is really not in line with the philosophy of sustainable development as proposed at the Rio conference second approach has been a limited dialogue strategy er heavily top down from the local authority but with some flexibility with some negotiation and compromise from the local authority on what's finally included or going to be included in these local sustainable development strategies thirdly he identified a yes but strategy this applies a bottom up and relatively open process of discussion with local community groups and others but there are certain key policies certain key proposals which remain non-negotiable so in other words the local authority go to the local community and say right we want to produce this we want you to be involved but and this is the but there are certain th-, certain things we're committed to we're committed to building this road or we're committed to allocating this green field for housing development or whatever so they kind of set out the rules before the start at its worst form it em-, it this this but emerges during the process in other words they say oh we want to get your views we want you to be involved and then people start get involved going along to meetings or making comments and then suddenly the local authority turns around and says ah no sorry but so the worst kind is when they tell you halfway through that this is er there is a but but in its best form and r-, reminds me of Islington when i used to work with Islington Council they tell you beforehand they say we're going to enter into dialogue we're going to involve people but there are certain things we're not going to move on we are committed to equal opportunities was Islington's but er we are committed to social housing they had sort of very good right on P-C objectives but that's so that's a kind of the best better form of it if they tell you before you start this process what the limits are what the goalposts are at least the people can say okay i accept that or or they won't join in finally er Steven Young identified a bottom up strategy which is the ideal type in relationship to Local Agenda Twenty-one it involves active engagement with a full range of interests so you you are really open the gates to bring in the range of interests in your local area you as an authority you listen it's a listening process you learn you listen and then you learn which is kind of the opposite that what's what you're trying to do now and which i never do being a lecturer an academic you never listen to people you've d-, you develop the skill of talking and telling people what to do and then marking their essays on that basis now i'm being cynical er it's not necessarily leading the process but sharing ownership with the partners in the process so that's the ideal type that's if you were doing Local Agenda Twenty-one as it's supposed to be done that's the kind of process you would you would apply also the local authority will be prepared to make radical changes to its policies and practices as part of that process so if local p-, stakeholders as part of this process of consensus building arrive at a view that you should you should build in the green belt or that you should invest as much money as you can in a public transport initiative then the council would say yep that's what we'll do it's listening and responding again i g-, i go back to Baltimore because it's interesting i'm the the post grads know about this but Baltimore have just produced a new plan for Baltimore Plan Baltimore which is a broad strategy but they're actually ma-, the major part of their plan in Baltimore is to go to local community groups so they've set up a whole series of community initiatives to get local communities to come forward with ideas and proposals of what they want locally and the and the council have committed themselves wherever possible to fund those ideas and initiatives so it's the same thing but they've never heard of Local Agenda Twenty-one in Baltimore the thing in the U-K er or or or certainly Steven Young's view was that this had not been achieved in the U-K this ideal type was not in evidence in the su-, in the survey that he looked at but he did find evidence that it was being developed that this kind of approach this open listening responsive non-dictatorial approach was being developed so there was evidence that things were moving that way there are examples of this process in fact there are there are examples at different levels and i will mention some more strategic levels as well as the local level in the U-K this kind of stakeholdering involvement has occurred at the national the regional and the local level at the r-, at at at the national level there is a U-K round table on sustainable development and this round table has produced advisory reports which is supposed to feed in to government policy so there has been an initiative at least at the national level they produce reports on transport housing capacity energy economic development a range of reports and they are kind of monitoring government policy in that area to try and change it to make it more sustainable at the regional level i've been directly involved with an organization called SERPLAN which is the regional planning conference for the south-east of England and as part of their new regional planning strategy they set up a sustainability panel of stakeholder groups including academics like me which worked through a series of initiatives to try and make their regional strategy sustainable and indeed eventually they called it a sustainable development strategy for the south-east of England ironically as you may or may not know that strategy then had went through public consultation and er public examination where it got hammered by the panel chair who basically suggested that er SERPLAN's strategy was well economically unsustainable i guess er and criticized it quite heavily however the process occurred there was this rou-, er round table a forum where different interests were involved at the regional level it's also occurred at county level i've mentioned Gloucestershire with their regional their their county forum Lancashire had has got one er Hertfordshire a number of other counties namex the one we're in now had one namex got abolished a couple of years back as a county council but for a few years from ninety-four through to ninety-seven it also had an environmental forum where these initiatives to try and make the policies and practices of the council and the county more sustainable occurred there are there is an article which i think is on the reading list which i wrote looking at these examples so you can look at more detail at what happened when they tried to do these things and finally local level namex namex is a good example it prides itself on its local sustainable development strategy [sniff] it combines corporate environmental management doing those environment management systems with the council combines the internal stuff with an external programme they divided up their Agenda Twenty-one into three ways firstly they had a local age-, local authority Agenda Twenty-one so in other words that was screening the local authority so they had environmental management systems they had sustainability reports and implications they had various other initiatives so that was the internal local authority Agenda Twenty-one they had a business Agenda Twenty-one they still have in fact i gave a talk to their business Agenda Twenty-one meeting er couple of months back at Green Park which is engaging with business and trying to make businesses in namex more sustainable things like green transport plans which this university is now implementing kicking kicking and er screaming its way into parking charges going up which we all know about and love so there's a a business Agenda Twenty- one and thirdly there was a er neighbourhood Agenda Twenty-one which they called GLOBE if you've ever seen GLOBE Go Local on a Better Environment is it what it stands for go bet-, Go Local on a Better Environment GLOBE so they have about nine GLOBE groups in namex which are neighbourhood level and in fact you are sitting in one of our in one of the neighbourhoods 'cause the university has its own GLOBE group which i am a member not a very active member of it these days which i bet you don't know about do you not many people know about this as they say but there is a university GLOBE group which has made undertaken some survey work on cycling and made inputs on waste management and on transport policy for the university there's nine of those for different parts of namex and they have tried the council have tried to facilitate local action so they've not sort of that's why it took so long to get the university g-, up and going because they didn't push it but they kind of facilitated it they often in particularly in the early stages of GLOBE groups they they obviously try and get existing people who are active involved and then they invite people to come along but they often use consultants in the early parts professional facilitators to to listen and develop er a an action plan for the local community er two of the the m-, two of the two or three of the m-, the early groups the early groups are the most active well the most active n-, er Newtown have been very active er Battle in off the Oxford Road have been active Katesgrove and Southcote have been very active groups and Caversham as well so there actually are these local neighbourhood groups and there's a there's a neighbourh-, there's a forum the council has a c-, has a forum and that forum is is made up of all these neighbourhood groups but they also have councillors members the the senior members of the council involved senior officers from the departments of the council come along and answer questions and feed information and receive information from the GLOBE groups so they've they've been given quite a bit of prominence in in influencing the council and they've fed in a number of initiatives that the council have worked with so you can see that there are examples then of of these kind of fora and stakeholder groups operating at different levels in terms of the issues arising from them er we've we mentioned er there's been quite a bit of of activity not a hundred per cent but i think something like seventy or eighty per cent of local authorities have been involved have developed these the reality is that it's variable in terms of bottom up approaches namex again i say is probably one of the better ones but there are other good examples they've used quite a lot of innovation they've used fora getting workshops together they've built they've used consensus building consensus building b-, b-, is based on the principle of win- win trying to negotiate win-win situations so they're trying to build an agreement and a commitment to environmental policy and action which everyone can sign up to which benefits everyone to try and resolve conflicts of interest it was interesting er in Lancashire for instance Lancashire they spent a long time negotiating with major stakeholder groups business and others and they got to a stage where they could agree to about something like ninety-six per cent of the proposed actions in their plan but there was there was still er four per cent or so of things that they couldn't get agreement on so they left it they kind of put it on the back burner and said right we're we're not going to er derail the process just because there's four per cent of issues here that people can't agree on so they kind of put it on the back burner and they come back to it and they've come back to it those issues to try and address them again so there are ways of managing this process of of conflict mediation they've used visioning visioning has become a big thing in Agenda Twenty-one so you i don't know there's lots of little stories of you know people getting together in village halls in in villages and they pi-, they they they sort of almost wipe wipe your brain clean they say right clear your brain of everything and let's and create a vision what do you want your village or neighbourhood to be like in twenty years' time so you kind of just clear it and say what way if you wa-, if you wanted an ideal vision of the future what would it be and they use that visioning as part of the ob-, then the objectives well how do we get there so they start working back and saying right what do we need to put into place to move towards that vision they've done apprais-, village appraisals they've done planning for real exercises planning for real is kind of er getting community groups into a room usually with the developers and the planners to negotiate and discuss development proposals on particular schemes so they run again Islington have run planning for real s-, er on on development sites on on major development areas saying you know getting people together stakeholders saying what do we want to see on this what's what's viable what's economic what can we get on this planning for real er citizens' juries and various other initiatives and if you look at y-, er Steven Young's report and there's a copy in the Resource Centre in Land Management you'll see examples of these things there has been difficulties in you know the whole idea of Agenda Twenty-one is is to di-, have dialogue in fact namex call their Agenda Twenty-one process a dialogue with the community with business but there are difficulties in communicating communicating having dialogue is not easy there there are problems because you tend to have the people that always join you have the green ghetto might call it people that are always involved in environmental issues and the people that get involved in Agenda Twenty-one you want to try and open up the process to those people who don't usually join in i i've talked to the Agenda Twenty-one guy at namex and he says well there's about in each of each of these GLOBE groups there's probably about maybe tops five per cent maybe not of the local population that's in that are involved in some way but maybe about another thir- , about thirty per cent have heard about it obviously not the thirty per cent in in the university here but er we're still talking about seventy per cent who haven't even heard about what's happening in namex despite that it's very proactive and it advertises itself and it has puts it in the paper quite regularly people just don't pick it up er there certainly is apathy people do not want to get involved don't want to be involved in this don't care in fact there was research done in Lancashire er part of the Lancashire programme they they they actually interviewed they kind of took at random people from the community and got them into little workshops and discussed sustainable development and many of them were apathetic because they basically just didn't believe they didn't have any faith in local government or big business or the central government to do anything there was apathy because they basically felt they won't do anything or it won't matter 'cause it's all run from Washington or from global conglomerates who go on and pollute the at-, pollute the atmosphere and the seas or whatever so the-, there is apathy a large ap-, element of apathy in this br-, in the communities which which again is is just very difficult to break down there is social exclusion sm1150: er is with with all of them is there a problem of being a sort of a lack of direction as it gets more further and further away from i mean er i'm wondering about the expertise of er some of these GLOBE groups and now nm1148: yeah sm1150: i just thought er if namex only put itself together nm1148: yeah sm1150: er is there do they put someone in a position who knows actually what's of the government's actually about or nm1148: yeah well it well it well namex you know using namex as example as a good example namex don't want to define things they they don't want to dictate so they've allowed the local groups to define their own terms what this means for them what it means for them actually is very simple things like dogs' mess you know that that was the key issue in Southcote ward er neighbourhood was dogs' mess that is sustainable development you know and w-, so if you look at it you think well is that is that what sustainable development is about well to them it's important so you can they you have to work with their own definitions of what's important also about direction another problem and i don't know if i can't remember if it's on my list is is local groups tend to think locally they tend to see the world in the neighbourhood and so namex have tried to introduce a transport group to think about strategic transport issues in namex and they've had a very bad response or a bad i'm sorry a very limited perspective from GLOBE groups they just don't see the strategic issues so you you you're right there are problems about well direction vision i suppose er and and and and whether it really is about sustainable development or about more mundane things i don't know it depends but you you've got from namex's point of view they feel they got to respect giving these people er a their voice to listen to them er social exclusion many groups are again apathetic because they've been excluded from decision making for years and not listened to so they're not going to get involved sh-, i remember when i was in Sheffield [laugh] Sheffield did something like this they did a they did a city centre plan for Sheffield back in actually back in well early nineties and they wanted to e-, engage with local groups who are normally marginalized so they they they sp-, specified er Asian women young unemployed people and a gr-, and various other groups that they wanted to have dialogue with and they set up they set up workshops the young unemployed one these young kids who were basically pissed off about being on the dole and getting nothing out of society basically smashed the place up they just they smashed the they had they had er a fo-, a forum meeting or a workshop and after sort of growling a bit because they didn't see what how this was relevant to their needs this wh-, why do why do you wh-, why do you want some input on a on a city centre plan when all's we need is a job you know and and you've got to then got to convince people that this might lead to a better economy and a better environment but they basically smashed the place up and it fell apart but that you know if you're dealing it goes back to Baltimore dealing with some of the areas that we were walking around in Baltimore must be very difficult to getting people engaged given the conditions and issues that they're facing so social exclusion involvement of people er the namex solution was to concentrate on real issues in other words if dogs' muck is the issue that people are worried about then let's deal with it in other words let's build from the bottom you know let's build awareness and and and involvement if if dogs' musk is the issue then they they they say right well let's concentrate on it so they as i say a lot of the initiatives in Southcote are are going round flagging dogs' muck they have little flags they put on the grass identifying to show people how extensive this problem is awareness building so it's interesting you can start from very mundane but very important issues for people and the hope the hope again is that it then raises awareness raises people's er eyes above the local but it's been a problem range of interests involved again er well it goes back it's very you know if you're if you're if you're a officer working for the council and you want to facilitate a local agenda process you're you're likely to go to the people that are active you know those are the people that have shown interest in the past that are more prepared to get involved and so you end up with a kind of a list of acceptable people er so there's a danger you you therefore don't include or don't seek out those groups that that might cause trouble like unemploy-, well Sheffield were brave you know they kind of went right we're going to involve the young unemployed of Sheffield it failed er but certainly not many other other authorities would say ooh no way you know we're not going to get into a dialogue with er people down this part of town or whatever so it can be tricky er conflicts of interest you know we live in a society with dif-, people have different interests and you have conflicts of interest planning has historically been about mediating conflicts between developers and residents between environmental groups and companies between neighbourhoods and other neighbourhoods or whatever but there are some conflicts like the ones in Lancashire that could not be resolved they negotiated they built up consensus they had workshops but still there was a a a small minority of issues or proble- , or policy objectives which were not agreed upon so in that sense there are some issues that maybe cannot be resolved through consensus building or certainly take er make it very difficult coordination i've just mentioned you know the tendency for for local people to think local [laugh] not think global [laugh] they they g-, they think and act local er the thing about sustainable development as Rio said is you need to take action at all levels so if the people of namex did have a problem with transport then they've got to think about how that problem which level they need to a-, tackle it you know who do they lobby or argue for if they want to push a transport issue they have to go to the regional level really nowadays er they could go through the local transport plan but they need to think you know strategically and that's often a problem also all these initiatives you know the local the county region and central they're not linked the only way they are linked is really by certain individuals who are who are members of each of these fora but often they don't know the others exist so you have these kind of different layers of fora but there's no linkage SERPLAN when i was working with ser-, SERPLAN on their strategy we produced a participation strategy and one of the key things wi-, within it was to try and use the local groups the county particularly the county level fora to plug in as a kind of consultation mechanism to to get that feedback on the on the regional strategy but it never really happened it never really worked it was never developed so there's there is a fragmentation between these different levels of Agenda Twenty-one stakeholder groups integration we've talked about coordination between the levels integration the danger is and it's always been a danger in organizations you give you give a guy some guy the job title you're Agenda Twenty-one officer there there there he is he sits there you we're doing the job we got a guy doing it or a team doing it but the thing about the thing about sustainable development and Agenda Twenty-one is it it's got to permeate decision making it needs to be integrated across the organization and you have problems 'cause people doing their jobs as they've always done their jobs don't want to change the way they do their jobs they don't want to take on board these environmental funny things i remember i i did a project er for the government on defence estate looking at redundant defence estate and we had meetings with the mi-, Ministry of Defence who run the defence estate and i did this paper for them about environmental appraisal and i said you can look at the im-, the defence estate in different ways and one way you can look at it is to er have a sustainability or environmental appraisal of the development process that occurs redevelopment and also you you have development appraisal financial you know like land mangers do it's what la- , it's what surveyors do they do development appraisals to to evaluate the market viability of a development scheme and this guy from the M-O-D said i don't want to see environmental appraisal in the same paragraph as development appraisal that's a serious that's a serious appraisal that isn't that's Mickey Mouse appraisal so that's the kind of attitude you can get in an organization like the M-O-D the Ministry of Defence and in f-, in fact i was i was interviewing another guy er in one of the regions in ninety- seven five years after a report came out in central government encoura-, well asking departments to do environmental appraisals of their policies and programmes and this guy said oh someone's just realized we've got to implement this environmental appraisal stuff and this is five years down the line they hadn't heard about it so it hadn't intergra-, it hadn't integrated gone down to the bo-, the grass roots so integration it's okay having this commitment and policies but it's got to it's actually got to mean something it's actually got to influence people's decision making and often people aren't prepared to move very easily nm1148: in Local Agenda Twenty-one initiatives or maybe they think the environmental agenda is a threat to their economic interests certainly there are tensions whether that it's a threat is another thing but the invo-, the involvement of business has not been very high it's been a problem that's why namex have their business agenda they said they almost set it aside as a separate agenda and it's only belatedly that namex have really started trying to get to grips with business Agenda Twenty-one in namex finally sustain the initiative you know back in Rio they said by nineteen-ninety-six we'll local government will have had a dialogue with their communities and produced a s-, er agenda twent-, a Local Agenda Twenty-one nineteen-ninety-six so what do they do they have another conference in New York in ninety-six and say right we'll move the date two-thousand we you know 'cause nineteen-ninety-six has come and not many people have done this so we we got to keep it going so two-thousand now is the is the new date you know we've just gone past that what's going to keep it going again you know there's a there's a danger here that that people have sort of done it and it's gone and the thing about sustainable development and about Agenda Twenty-one is it it's supposed to keep going it's supposed to keep going in circles the dialogue is supposed to keep going the actions are supposed to keep greening practices but it is difficult maintaining this particularly when you have government and local authority priorities go up and down you know the environment was big in the ear-, early nineties it sort of dropped during the mid-nineties it's not picked up as well as it did before you know you're fighting other priorities social e-, exclusion inclusion now big agendas education okay you can you can define education as sustainable development but there are problems trying to keep Agenda Twenty-one Local Agenda Twenty-one in the environmental agenda keep going luckily ev-, every so often we have an environmental disaster somewhere even in Holland where firework factories blow up er and cause and people say well hey what's this going on even in Holland which is supposed to have a fantastic environmental s-, er regulation system so you every so often you have a disaster which then puts it back on the agenda and they say oh yes we must you know we must tackle environmental problems so that's what we got we've got a a a p-, a substantial process variable quality variable impacts difficult to ke-, keep it going but it's still on the agenda next week i think we're looking at the local economy so very much looking at the business side of it and how you might have a green economy what it might look like what vision of a green economy thanks very much