SustainabilityLINKS

Linking People, Sustainability & Participation

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Current Strategies and Partnerships

The United Nations’ Agenda 21 urged grassroots involvement in the identification of sustainability agendas for the 21st century.  The UK’s Community Strategies took up this participation concept, although adapting the reason for it.  While community participation was originally intended to enable communities determine a less unsustainable lifestyle, British Government guidance focused on local service providers’ increased involvement in conventional decision and provision making.

Offered below is a Community Strategy that could have been produced had areas risen to the real challenges of Agenda 21.  Although it would be difficult to include some of these proposals, given the Government’s Community Strategy criteria and other external factors, many of the more specific measures could be easily adopted by local Strategy Partners.  For example, public transport usage would be made much easier if all bus stops displayed timetables giving service arrival times, destinations and other details.  Many such instances of good practice are already established in different parts of the country.

Under the Local Government 2000 all local authorities in England must produce a Sustainable Community Strategy.  A more comprehensive history of the development of Sustainable Community Strategies and Local Strategic Partnerships is traced on Prt.01 Programme Rationale.  It will be seen that the purpose of Community Strategies has changed from how communities can combat our global unsustainability to how they can best deliver local services.

However the most recent LSP Guide (published by Urban Forum and Community Development Foundation) identifies some of the original intentions that still remain.  

“The general idea is to have a Partnership and a Sustainable Community Strategy that:

…improves local quality of life through a long-term vision shared by partners.

…involves local people in deciding the sort of community they want now and for future generations.”

The LSP Guide

Urban Forum and Community Development Foundation

The Guide also notes the diversity of Strategies and Partnerships that can be found today.  Reviewing SCSs it finds that though all cover roughly the same ground their focus may vary.  However Partnerships may be quite different; it gives examples of one listing 150 member organisations with 15% from the VCS, while another comprises 18 members with 33% from the VCS.

 

Page Development

Although inspired by Agenda 21, and retaining the need for long term vision, Sustainable Community Strategies (or Plans) treat sustainability as the elephant in the office.  So just how would they look if they addressed our planet’s growing unsustainability, as originally intended?  

This page includes a few ideas about how our areas’ Sustainable Community Strategies should develop if they are to take sustainability seriously.  

Building on these, hopefully it will come to include suggestions from all those involved in S&P work around the UK.

Contributors are urged to acquire a copy of their own area’s Strategy to enable them to;

a. publish a local assessment, and

b. submit to LINKS any general observations for inclusion in a future update of this page.

 

Themes

This page is based on an assessment of Strategies published in Coventry and Warwickshire.  As elsewhere, the different themes serve to distinguish communities’ areas of concern

Although S&P thinking traditionally takes a more holistic approach to problem solving the way Strategy themes are identified and grouped does not necessarily undermine this – as  long as process participants appreciate that:

Many of the more serious problems we face are symptoms of more interconnected and fundamental causes than their categorisation suggests.

The common Strategy practice of addressing natural and built environment concerns together serves to seriously skew the theme agenda.  By lumping together natural and built, ‘Environment’ can come to be perceived in planning and development terms, whereby our natural environment is relegated to an open space version of developed space.

 

Local Strategy Themes

1. Unsustainability  How LSPs and SCSs can address global unsustainability at the local level.

2. Participation  How LSPs and SCSs can involve communities in decision making – particularly about sustainability issues.

3. SCS Themes  Identifying and grouping Strategy themes, and LSP theme groups.

4. Community  Including social inclusion, young and old, ethnic and cultural diversity, narrowing the gap, VCO involvement.

5. Community Safety  Crime and disorder.

6. Education  Including lifelong learning, student led initiatives, ESD.

7. Health  Including wellbeing, complementary medicine.

8. Economics  Including local economy, social economy, employment, town centres, ethical consumerism, SCP.

9. Environment  Including natural environment; access to green space, habitat and species biodiversity, pollution, maintaining and increasing natural features, urban trees.  Also built environment; housing, planning and development, infrastructure, sprawl.

10. Transport  Including traffic, road calming, buses, trains, passenger information, integrated transport initiatives, cycling, pedestrian issues, freight, air travel, parking, car sharing, socialised costs.

11. Waste  Including waste, recycling: disposal facilities and provisions, packaging.

12. Climate Change and Energy  Including energy conservation, renewable sources, global impacts on local environment, economy and communities, transition and energy descent, renewables.

When assessing the S&P credibility of a Strategy, it’s necessary to tick numerous boxes – why not consider these suggestions as you read your own area’s SCS?)

 

Unsustainability

The United Nations’ Agenda 21 urged grassroots involvement in the identification of sustainability agendas for the 21st century.  The UK’s Community Strategies took up this participation concept, although adapting the reason for it.  While community participation was originally intended to enable communities determine a less unsustainable lifestyle, British Government guidance focused on local service providers’ increased involvement in conventional decision and provision making.

Offered below is a Community Strategy that could have been produced had areas risen to the real challenges of Agenda 21.  Although it would be difficult to include some of these proposals, given the Government’s Community Strategy criteria and other external factors, many of the more specific measures could be easily adopted by local Strategy Partners.  For example, public transport usage would be made much easier if all bus stops displayed timetables giving service arrival times, destinations and other details.  Many such instances of good practice are already established in different parts of the country.

Sustainable Community Strategies carry sections outlining a general overview to contextualise their work and an area vision to provide objectives for participation processes to work towards.  When assessing the S&P credibility of a Strategy, it’s necessary to look for these factors (why not tick the boxes as you read your own area’s?):

  Avoidance of the misuse of the word ‘sustainable’, as in ‘sustainable growth’ (economic growth is a finite and can not be sustained), or ‘sustainable funding’ (where third sector organisations are encouraged to adopt market practices) or ‘sustaining development’ (the interpretation mistakenly brought to the term sustainable development, which was really intended to mean ‘developing sustainability’).

1. An explanation that our present way of life is not only environmentally unsustainable it is also economically unsustainable, and that ongoing environment and economic debilitation will inevitably bring about unwanted but unavoidable social change.

2. Recognition of the need to deal with sustainability systemically, rather than piecemeal by the public / third sector ring-fencing themes and delegating responsibilities.

3. A grid contextualisation of Partnership commitment to address themes, what individuals can do, and what actions are being taken at national and global levels.

4. Establishment of a means to sidestep institutional inertial and to fast track necessary change.

5. An acknowledgement of the need for organisations to work not only within conventional financial and legislative frameworks but also similarly non-negotiable environmental limits.

6. Awareness of the growing need to deal with both the debilitating symptoms of unsustainability and the structural causes.

7. A commitment from Partners that Strategies (and partner organisation annual reports) should include area performance comparisons of recognised sustainability charters and awards, such as those established by ICLEI, SoER and Aalborg.

8. A mechanism to monitor the sustainability focus of other locally produced plans and contemporaneous developments, eg regeneration programmes, public-third sector compacts.

9. An undertaking that LSP members should include representatives from sustainability-driven organisations and / or their meetings should embrace input on sustainability-related agenda items from those with expertise in the relevant fields.  A key ‘Real World’ theme group should monitor Strategy processes and audit the drafts.

10. A means whereby process participants are able to identify those factors serving to obstruct or undermine the realisation of the area’s sustainability objectives;  eg the use of household appliances with standby rather than on / off switches, the unnecessary illumination of billboard advertisements, the United States’ refusal to sign the Kyoto treaty.

11. A wariness that setting more long-term area visions should take on board the increasingly debilitating impacts of our unsustainability.

12. The inclusion of actual follow-up evidence of areas’ commitment to sustainability.  For example – their domestic recycling opportunities, the availability of bus timetable information at stops and public transport information in libraries and other public places.  

13. An awareness of the growing urgency of the need for culture change.

14. A recognition that sustainability is not able to be ringfenced for action by, and delegation to, one or two specific public services and / or third sector groups.

15. A means to incorporate an awareness of the likely needs and aspirations of future generations in current local decision-making.

16. A mechanism for identifying and eliminating green wash and other instances of presentation over substance.

17.   Commitment to Transition area working.

18. An indication that associated funding sources truly understand the implications of our unsustainability and draw up funding bid criteria accordingly.

19. An acknowledgement of the big picture.  SCSs are customarily divided into sections, identifying community concerns, outlining proposals to address these, suggesting how providers will deliver; they also include baseline and target statistics. Some Strategies say what individuals can do.  All should include a section (or column if in table form) on overview – giving information about, eg, how our actions impact on people living elsewhere, the ways in which identified concerns could be better tackled at national level, the associated hazards and benefits of globalisation, where present trends are leading.

 

Participation

  Our global unsustainability means people all around the world must work to live more sustainably.  It would help contextualise community efforts if they were set against personal, national and international attempts to address the same difficulties.

 Write to your LSP telling them about SustainabilityLINKS.

 

Community

     Our Sustainable Community Strategies should make a commitment to broaden the local community base for participation in decision-making.

     Strategies should publish a separate participation audit outlining areas’ participation opportunities, the nature, objective and level of these, public input take up rates, etc.

     Does the Strategy recognise that the third sector must do ever more with ever less or seek to redress a growing imbalance between the socialisation of business costs and privatisation of their profits?   

     Does your Local Strategy give any evidence that the information streams are two-way, with a means for strategy participation to channel local findings back to Government.

   Does your area’s Strategy acknowledge that we are now seeing  evidence of our social unsustainability all around us – in the increasing divide between rich and poor, the high incidence of mental health problems, the closure of local shops and services, the focus on obsessive individualism, the continuing breakdown of family life, the rise in violent crimes and fear of crime, the cult of the meretricious. 

   Environmental ecology has shown us the extent to which all aspects of the natural world are interconnected. Social ecology has yet to awaken us to the extent all aspects of the human world are interconnected.  Does your Strategy explain why social problems are not isolated difficulties needing a plaster here a policy there, but symptoms of the  alienation and disaffection of an increasingly unsustainable way of life?

   Does the Strategy recognise that the third sector must do ever more with ever less or seek to redress a growing imbalance between the socialisation of business costs and privatisation of their profits?   

   Does it recognise that   to the belief that “If unsustainability is the problem, volunteering is the answer”, where people’s voluntary action can range from an involvement in decision making processes and community work to switching off lights and recycling.  what’s needed is a commitment to combating unsustainability akin to that which our ancestors have brought to efforts to counter enemy invasion and occupation?

   Is there practical provision for S&P proposals to be carried through by developmental community work?

   Though very difficult to tackle themselves, environment and economic issues are easier to present than the social ones.  SCSs customarily confine their community sections to conventional social concerns such as deprivation, disorder  and crime.  Does your area’s Strategy acknowledge that our unsustainability means we must all begin to address much more fundamental social problems through changing the way we behave?  That we’ll all have to become less materially acquisitive, that we’ll all have to forgo our various personal interests in favour of joint efforts to achieve a common end – our survival?

 

Community Safety

      In their present form, Community Strategies approach these topics on a superficial level, offering to deal with various symptoms, many of which actually serve to provide evidence of contemporary societies’ structural faults.  Is there no room in these Strategies for a recognition of the current lifestyle causes of crime and disorder, such as loss of community, increasing materialism, the interconnectedness of social ecologies, a growing individual alienation and absence of the transpersonal?

     Does your area Strategy see crime and disorder as being one of the social costs of an increasing wealth disparity?

 

Education

    Education is the most important key to the successful transition to a less unsustainable lifestyle. Do LSP processes embrace ESD?  Its provision is a necessary condition of any public consultation exercises.

    One important aspect of ESD is the identification of obstacles to change.  Do your local participation processes  involve consultees in exercises to identify these (eg, the institutional, economic, personal and conceptual factors) and the means for to work through them.

     ESD should be factored into public-third sector educational provisions, information giving, compacts.  

     Community Strategies should commit to the delivery of sustainability-related national curriculum material and cross reference to documents outlining how the LEA is addressing this responsibility.

     It’s almost 15 years since Agenda 21 yet there is no evidence in public places that communities should be addressing our global unsustainability – in this respect library services are particularly failing our communities.

     School teachers have said that ESD would benefit from more support through the national curriculum, the availability of local teaching resources, increased networking, more information and outside expertise.

Is your SCS on target in meeting its stated sustainability and participation objectives?  Or are these being sidelined and neglected?  Why not write to your area’s LSP Chair and tell him / her of your support for such aims and ongoing interest in their realisation?

 

Health

      A discussion of specific social (as opposed to personal) lifestyle causes of ill-health and their remedies.  Does the Community Strategy address such concerns as these? The health damage caused by eating processed foods, non-organic fruit and veg, meat?  Traffic levels?  Hospital hygiene under-funding?  Workload stress?  Pharmaceuticals?  The links between income and environmental quality?  Crop spraying?  Domestic cleaning and garden products?  The loss of playing fields and other open space?  A focus on countryside leisure rides rather than public footpath networks? Relaxed health and safety enforcement?

Our global unsustainability isn’t only about environmental destruction – it’s also about the economy and society.  The way that people live in the west, and are aspiring to live elsewhere, is based on self destructive systems.  

The global economy is built on the untenable belief that growth can be exponential, that it can increase year on year.  Many national economies are also increasingly reliant upon nothing more substantial than the creation and servicing of debt.

Societies depend on their environments and economies.  As these cease to deliver what is needed of them, societies must adapt.

Present Sustainable Community Strategies inevitably focus on the five funding-stream related themes identified by Government: young people, older people and health, safer / stronger communities, economic development and enterprise and – the optional – environment and sustainability

 

Economics

     Areas’ economic strategies should provide measures such as real cost, footprinting and carrying capacity production and consumption audits, thereby indicating an appreciation of long-term and / or global perspectives.

     Strategies should recognise the importance of the community-based economy, implementing such initiatives as the New Economics Foundation’s ‘plugging the leaks’.

     An area’s economic strategy should recognise the unsustainability of economies build on such foundations as growth, debt and social injustice, and seek linkages with organisations promoting alternatives.

     They should encourage the creation of employment opportunities that are sustainability-related and / or actually meet local needs.

     Local food production should be a encouraged.

     While employment is often given as a reason for unpopular development, there should first be strategic resistance to national trends causing unemployment through the closure of local facilities such as shops, care homes, community programmes and repair workshops and through the foreign relocation of businesses, information services and product sourcing.

     Does the Strategy commit the area’s community to a custodial investment in its future generations? There needs to be a reversal of present trends to both:  a) realise  capital investments of the past (eg school playing fields) to fund  current account expenditures, and b) fund present market sector capital investments by transferring debt repayments to those generations who follow us.

   Is employment that squanders natural capital or brings little social or local benefit being scrutinised?  Does the Strategy identify and create work opportunities that would help realise agreed sustainability objectives?  Are employers being encouraged to offer their workers community involvement hours?

   Do your area’s LSP processes encourage input from local supporters of organisations such as the New Economics Foundation and Green Economics Institute?

   When considering a Strategy’s themes and suggested actions, organisations working on S&P should be helping those directly involved in SCS processes address the various ways in which global concerns affect our communities – and how the way we are living impacts upon the world.

   SCP and Fairtrade policies are already being pursued by some areas, many others commit to their establishment in through  Sustainable Community Strategies.  Does your area SCS promote an ethical approach to production, consumption, trade, investment, travel, etc?

   Many areas have acquired Fairtrade Status, many more Strategies include related undertakings, such as SCP.  Do they follow this through with related ethical consumption?

 

Environment

      Awareness that the accepted Strategy practice of jointly addressing natural and built environment concerns serves to seriously skew the Strategy process agenda.  By lumping together natural and built, ‘The Environment’ comes to be dealt with as, and perceived in terms of, a planning issue, whereby our natural environment is relegated to an open space version of developed space.

   An appreciation of the finite nature of resources and the interconnectedness of ecosystems.

   Strategies should actively promote the creation of diverse habitats – woods, wetlands, naturalised riversides – to evidence commitment to biodiversity.

   There should be a local allocation of land for smallholdings and community workshops – and the active promotion of these.

    Recognition of the links between quality of life, social deprivation and lack of access to a diversity of natural environments.

    Have local development plans referred to the flood plane information on the Environment Agency website?

    Strategy processes should enable communities to differentiate between important environmental concerns and those of a cosmetic nature – all too often disempowered people ignore the big issues, permitting Strategy resources to be diverted into such matters as the removal of graffiti or  landscaping of subways.

    Does your SCS enable decision makers to bring historical perspective to local development?  In years gone by building was seen as an investment, a bequest, for future generations.  Today, some building programmes (such as for new hospitals) are very likely to be financed by arrangements committing our grandchildren to the necessary investment and interest repayments.  Other constructions (such as out of town retail parks) are erected that are  not only aesthetically offensive, but will prove of little use a few years from now.

Let your LSP know that you’re interested in their SCS and draw attention to the concerns you look forward to it addressing.

 

Transport

    Area Strategies must recommit to a full integrated transport agenda – establishing such provisions as modal interchanges with left luggage facilities, public transport timetables, fares and other details, including taxi information.  

    Strategies should encourage other public places to promote integrated transport facilities and services.

    Strategies should work towards a reversal of conventional transport planning policies, shifting provision from motoring-down to pedestrians-up.

    Areas need to work towards ensuring cost parity between local transport options – at present the widening travel costs incurred by car and public transport users are a major disincentive to change.

    Does your SCS encourage the development of walkway networks and other pedestrian access provisions?  Does it address the problems of thoughtless parking, alley gating, busy roads with no crossings; pedestrian routes incorporating circuitous diversions, high bridges or bleak subways; the need for footpaths away from vehicular routes; failure to maintain disused railway track links?  Do plans include an audit of road user signs likely to mislead pedestrians?

   Strategies should tackle the stealth privatisation of public space – footpaths, roadsides, verges, side streets, greens – through parking.

 

Waste

     Strategies must take on board real cost accounting principles.  

     There should be support for the establishment of repair workshops and a greater sorting and selling of household waste.

 

Climate Change and Energy

     Local Strategic Partnerships should join their local authority in endorsing the Nottingham Declaration, and actively promoting an understanding of the links between energy use and climate change.  Perhaps LSPs could even make the first move in those areas where councils have yet to support the Declaration.

 Website links

Visitors can follow through the same twelve S&P themes on the pages listed below.  

S&P Information Resources for LSPs – lists some UN documents, Government papers, books and publications from a variety of other sources in order to help inform SCS and LSP theme group discussion and decision making.

Model Resolutions for LSPs etc  – gives LSPs and third sector organisations a chance to network on S&P concerns.

Model Sustainable Community Strategy – sets out the S&P overview that it’s necessary to bring to different local SCS themes and those involved in their LSP’s associated theme groups.

  

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