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

The Local Agenda 21 Planning Guide
consensus about the nature of a problem. Additionally, a specific target may not always be realistic when applied to the extended
time-frame of a long-term strategic plan, which may cover a period of 30-100 years. Where targets are not appropriate or cannot be
agreed upon, a trigger can be established.
A trigger is a commitment to take a specified action at a future date. The implementation of this agreed future action is catalyzed or
“triggered” when certain specified conditions develop. The instrument is called a “trigger” because a future condition—for instance,
a decline in water supply or per capita income, or an increase in pollution, population, or disease—“triggers” a specified action that
has been defined by prior agreement. In the negotiation of a trigger, the stakeholders must agree upon 1) the future condition(s) that
they feel requires and justifies immediate action and 2) the different actions that must be taken when the trigger condition(s) takes
place. The triggered action could be the effecting of a regulation, the undertaking of further planning, or, as in the case of the city of
Los Angeles (see Case #10), the engineering of new infrastructure.
If the goal-setting process has resulted in the establishment of first-and second-level priority goals, stakeholders may choose to
establish targets for first-level goals and to establish triggers for the implementation of second-level goals.
The following example illustrates how goals, targets, and triggers are integrated together in an Action Plan.
ACTION PLAN GOAL #1
To promote technologies, products, and practices that reduce the use of non-renewable resources and the creation and disposal of
wastes.
ACTION PLAN TARGET #1.1
By 2010, reduce the generation of household solid waste by 50 percent from the 1995 levels.
ACTION PLAN TRIGGER #1.1
If household solid waste is not reduced by 25 percent of 1995 levels by 2000, then volume-based waste collection charges will be
instituted.
4.2.5 SELECT SPECIFIC IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGIES AND PROGRAMS
Once stakeholders have defined goals and agreed upon ideal target levels of achievement, they are in a position to create an action
strategy that can achieve those goals and targets. A set of criteria will need to be established to evaluate action options, such as:
• Will the selected actions be sufficient to achieve the related target?
• Is there likelihood that the selected actions can be successfully implemented?
• Do the selected actions fairly distribute the cost or responsibility for action among the responsible stakeholders?
A variety of group planning methods exist to guide the prioritization and selection of different action options. In addition to force
field analysis, SWOT analysis and comparative cost assessment can be very helpful for this purpose. When used to evaluate action
options, force field analysis compares the viability of different action options, given different social, institutional, political, and
economic forces that facilitate or hinder the situation.
Comparative cost assessment is one planning method used for developing detailed action proposals with the affected service users.
In this method, the Stakeholder Group or planners prepare a number of proposals that indicate how a specific community goal or
target could be achieved. Planners inform service users about the comparative costs that service users will have to pay for each
approach. Based upon dialogue between planners and service users, a final action program is jointly developed and agreed upon.
Once different action options are selected to address each of the goals, these different options should be reviewed together to identify
how they could be cost-effectively and jointly implemented. Such a review by the Stakeholder Group would provide the basis for the
finalization of an action strategy that integrates the diverse activities to be recommended by the Plan. The Prosanear Project (Chapter
3, Box A) describes how this approach was used in a number of community sanitation projects in Brazil.
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