The Local Agenda 21 Planning Guide - Democrats Against UN ...

The Local Agenda 21 Planning Guide
The Local Agenda 21 planning process can be started on any scale—at the neighborhood, village, city, or metropolitan levels. Some
local governments are implementing Local Agenda 21 throughout their entire region, covering several cities, towns and rural areas,
while others have started it in only one or two municipal zones or wards. Whatever the scale, all efforts should incorporate the key
guiding principles of sustainable development planning including multi-stakeholder partnerships, community based dialogue,
systemic and holistic analysis, integration of social, environmental and economic considerations, and preparation of long-term
strategies. The planning approaches and tools that are used should involve and empower people.
The effectiveness of a Local Agenda 21 Action Plan will largely depend on the quality of the planning process used to create it.
Therefore, it will help to periodically review and reflect on local planning efforts to ensure that Local Agenda 21 planning is:
• systematically involving all major community groups such as different ethnic, gender, income and age groups, in
all stages of planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of the local Action Plan;
• creating awareness and commitment in households, neighborhoods and communities so that decisions and choices
made at these levels do not contradict sustainability;
• involving all relevant municipal departments and agencies in the process, and is creating linkages between the
ongoing statutory planning activities and the local Action Plan;
• creating a network of informed and committed partners to examine the systemic causes of problem issues from
social, economic and environmental perspectives;
• meeting immediate, priority needs in the short-term and is making steady progress to address the long-term
threats to local sustainability; and
• developing concrete targets and commitments to achieve measurable performance for sustainable development.
Finally, the Local Agenda 21 process is a means for creating strong and self reliant communities that will collectively create a
sustainable global community. To appreciate and recognize your individual contribution in making an impact at the global level, it
also will be necessary to create local management and information systems to monitor and record your performance.
As one of the main actors in the creation of Local Agenda 21 mandate, ICLEI continues to play an active role in promoting and
facilitating implementation of Local Agenda 21 at the local level, and in reporting on local progress and performance at the global
level through the United Nations and other international forums. We invite you to send us information on the status of your Local
Agenda 21 process and on the performance and impact of your local Action Plan. Your individual performance reports will help us
to document the cumulative impact of local initiatives at the global level. We hope that such reporting will help strengthen
international support for local initiatives and, consequently, local governance.
This Planning Guide provides a practical framework of action using various examples, cases, methods, tools and worksheets. We
invite you to use this material in your work and to provide us with critical feed back on its usefulness and appropriateness to your
local context. Based on the experiences and results we will be making suitable modifications to future editions of the Local Agenda
21 Planning Guide.
Above all, good luck with your local efforts, which have inspired us tremendously while preparing this Guide and which, we
believe, will ultimately reveal that sustainable development is within our grasp.
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