Page Aim
Although inspired by Agenda 21, Sustainable Community Strategies treat our global unsustainability as the elephant in the community. How would these Strategies look if they addressed our predicament, as originally intended?
The Model Sustainable Community Strategies page includes a few ideas about how areas’ SCSs would develop if they took sustainability seriously.
Page Contents
Current Strategies and Partnerships
SCS Themes
Local Strategy Themes Three of the website’s pages are arranged according to common Sustainable Community Strategy themes: see the Helpful Books and Model Resolutions pages. This is to help monitor SCS processes and inform other participation in local decision making.
Unsustainability: How SCSs, LSPs, Citizen’s Panels and
other participation processes can address global unsustainability
at the local level.
Participation: How communities can use participation opportunities
to influence decision making.
Community: SCS Community topics including social inclusion,
young and old, ethnic and cultural diversity, narrowing the gap,
VCO involvement.
Community Safety: Crime and disorder.
Education: Including lifelong learning, student led initiatives,
ESD.
Health: How to bring wellbeing and complementary medicine
information to the health remit.
Economics: SCS Economics topics can include the social
economy, employment, town centres, ethical consumerism, SCP.
Environment: Natural environment concerns such as; access
to green space, habitat and species biodiversity, pollution, maintaining
and increasing natural features, urban trees. Also various
built environment concerns including housing, planning and development,
infrastructure, sprawl.
Transport: Road calming, buses, trains, passenger information
giving, integrated transport initiatives, cycling, pedestrian issues,
freight, air travel, parking, car sharing and how communities pay
for the costs arising from private car usage.
Waste: Waste, recycling: disposal facilities and provisions,
packaging.
Climate Change and Energy: Energy conservation, renewable
sources, global impacts on local environment, economy and communities,
transition and energy descent, renewables, etc.
Page updates
VCOs are urged to acquire a copy of their area’s Strategy to enable them to;
Publish
a local sustainability audit.
Send
LINKS any general observations for inclusion in a future
update of this page.
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’ and users' increased involvement in conventional decision and provision making.
Offered below is a Sustaianable Community Strategy that could have been produced had areas risen to the real sustainability challenges of Agenda 21.
Although it would be difficult to include some of these measures, given the Government’s Community Strategy criteria and other external factors, many of the more specific ideas could be easily adopted by local SCS 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 SCSs and Local Strategic Partnerships is traced on the National Initiatives page.
However the current 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. But then this only serves to highight the different nature of different areas' LSPs - the Guide observes that while another comprises 18 members with 33% from the VCS.
SCS Themes
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 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 confuse the environmental
issue. 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.
Participation opportunity
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
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 ask if it:
Misuses
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’). 'The words 'sustain' and 'sustained'
are often used where it would be less pretentious to
use 'maintain' or 'maintained'.
Explains
that our present way of life is not only environmentally
unsustainable it is also economically unsustainable,
and that ongoing environment and economic decline will
bring about unwanted but unavoidable social change.
Recognises
the need to deal with sustainability concerns systemically
and imperitively, rather than through measures adopted
on an optional and piecemeal basis.
Gives
details of proceedures to sidestep institutional inertial
and fast track necessary change.
Acknowledges
the need for organisations to work not only within conventional
financial and legislative frameworks but also similarly
non-negotiable environmental limits.
Tackles
the growing need to deal with both the symptoms of unsustainability
and the structural causes.
Commits
Partners and Strategies to include area performance
comparisons of recognised sustainability charters and
awards, such as those established by ICLEI, SoER and
Aalborg.
Monitors
the sustainability focus of other locally produced plans
and (eg regeneration programmes, public-third sector
compacts) and LSP partner organisation annual reports.
Ensures
that the LSP includes representatives from sustainability-driven
organisations and that 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.
Establishes
a means whereby process participants are able to identify
those external factors serving to obstruct or undermine
the realisation of the area’s sustainability objectives;
eg the manufacture 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.
Acknowledges
that setting more long-term area visions should take
on board the increasingly serious impacts of our unsustainability.
Includes
actual follow-up evidence of areas’ commitment to sustainability;
eg their domestic recycling opportunities, the availability
of public transport information in libraries and other
public places.
Highlights
the growing urgency of the need for culture change.
Sets
up a reality check mechanism for identifying greenwash
and other instances of presentation over substance.
Commits
to Transition area working.
Asks
that funding sources truly understand the local implications
of global unsustainability - and are drawing up funding
bid criteria accordingly.
Acknowledges
the big picture. Strategies could include tables
clearly summarising how concerns a) are being, and b)
could be, addressed at international, national, subregional,
district, neighbourhood and personal levels.
Participation
Our global unsustainability means people all around the world must.play a much bigger part in making the decisions that affect our lives. SCSs should include:
Guidance
on the way that the third sector can decide on the input
VCS representatives make.
Acknowledgement
of the authority that mandated VCS representatives bring
to the LSP board.
Agreement
on the relationship between decision and provision making
roles. ie Should a role in decision making be
conditional on an organisation's or individuals own
provision making?
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.
A
commitment to broaden the base for participation in
decision-making.
A
means to make associated information streams two-way,
ie enabling strategy participation to channel local
findings back into central Government policy making.
Establishment
of a means to identify and incorporate the survival
needs of future generations in current local decision-making.
Participation opportunity
Write to your LSP telling them about SustainabilityLINKS.
Community
Under this heading current SCSs bring together such concerns as young & old, ethnic & culture diversity and volunteering.
Strategies
should include a participation audit outlining their
areas’ various democratic participation opportunities;
monitoring should cover such details as the nature,
objective and level of these, public input take up rates,
etc.
Strategies'
Community sections should 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 continuing breakdown
of family life, the rise in violent crimes and fear
of crime, the cult of obsessive individualism and 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. Strategies should
explain why so many 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?
Strategies
must come to recognise that the third sector is
being expected to do ever more with ever less and seek
to redress a growing imbalance between the socialisation
of business costs and privatisation of their profits.
Strategies
should promote the importance - and many different ways
- of volunteering in addressing our unsustainability.
People’s voluntary action can range from an involvement
in decision making processes and community work to switching
off lights and recycling.
Does
it recognise that 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 failing to acknowledge that many crime and disorder problems are actually caused by the way we live, Sustainable Community Strategies restrict remedial measures to cosmetic actions rather than addressing the real causes. These include loss of community, personal alienation and social disaffection; widening income and wealth divisions; the cult of celebrity and general failure to recognise the significance of social ecology; the me society and absence of transpersonal values.
Does your area Strategy
recognise crime and disorder levels as a social cost
of developing an ever more acquisitive driven and materially
divided society?
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 or democratic participation
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
to work through them.
ESD should be factored
into all public and third sector educational provisions,
information giving, compacts.
Where possible Community
Strategies should commit to the delivery of sustainability-related
national curriculum material, cross referencing this
to documents outlining how the LEA is addressing ESD
responsibilities.
It’s over 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 (local authorities
only statutory cultural provision) are particularly
failing us all.
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.
Are those organisations
working on S&P being encouraged to explain the ways
in which a) global concerns affect our communities,
and b) how the way we are living impacts upon the world.
Participation opportunity
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
Strategies broaden the focus of this theme to embrace well being concerns.
To what extent does your local Strategy encourage discussion of specific social (as opposed to personal) lifestyle causes of ill-health and their remedies? Does the it such concerns as:
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 enforcement
of health and safety in the workplace?
Economics
Related SCS themes include local economy, employment, town centres, SCP / ethical consumption.
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.
Areas’
economic strategies should include measures such as
real costings, carbon footprint indices, carrying capacity
ratios; and production and consumption audits. These
would show Partners' true appreciation of and commitment
to 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.
Local
economic policies should encourage the creation of employment
opportunities that are sustainability-related and actually
meet local needs.
Local
food production should be a encouraged.
While
employment is often given as a reason for increasingly
unpopular development programmes, there is little strategic
resistance to those national trends that cause unemployment
to rise - such as the closure of local shops, care homes,
community programmes and repair workshops and 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
your area's Community 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?
Fairtrade
policies are already being pursued in many areas across
the country, and many others are committed to their
establishment through Sustainable Community Strategy
proposals. Is your area's SCS seeking to address
the wide range of SCP issues, or even explaining the
need for an ethical approach to consumption, production,
trade, investment, travel, etc?
Environment
Related SCS themes include natural environment, built environment, biodiversity, housing, development.
Does your SCS acknowledge that by dealing with natural and built
environment concerns together processes can skew the Strategy process
agenda? By fusing natural and built, ‘The Environment’ can
come
to be dealt with as little more than a planning issue, whereby our
natural environment is relegated to an open space version of developed
space.
Does your SCS acknowledge 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 allotments,
smallholdings
and community workshops – and the active promotion of these.
Does your area SCS measure 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 a 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.
Participation opportunity
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
This section of SCS brings together such concerns as waste and recycling. disposal facilities and provisions, packaging.
Strategies must take on board and publicise the real
importance of real cost accounting principles.
They should support for the establishment of repair workshops
and a greater sorting and selling of household waste.
Climate Change and Energy
Local Strategic Partnerships, Citizens
Panels, Third Sector Assemblies, et al, should join their local authorities
in endorsing the Nottingham Declaration, and actively promoting
an understanding of the links between energy use and climate change.
Perhaps these organisations could even make the first move in those areas
where councils have yet to support the Declaration.
LSPs are an ideal vehicle for the acquisition and delivery of
energy descent / Transition Town status and good practice.
Please
contact us with any information or feed back:
E-mail - info@sustainabilitylinks.org.uk
Post - Sustainability LINKS, 3 Park Road, Bedworth CV12 8LH