University of Vaasa - Vaasan yliopisto

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Portuguese local authorities are frequently the main employer, playing a central role
in local development, regardless of size, location, or demographic characteristics.
They are responsible for providing a great diversity of services to their populations,
such as educational facilities, environmental protection and management, land use
planning, transportation, cultural events and social care.
Portuguese municipalities have significant asymmetries in their levels of
development. Their significant diversity in valuable natural, social and cultural assets,
serious human pressures, and importance for the Portuguese public administrative
structure, and, in addition, government strategic and operational responsibilities in
connection with their advantageous position near local communities, show how
relevant environmental profile assessment is for environmental integration in public
services.
Up to now, many local authorities have not accepted assessment of their own
environmental performance as part of their responsibilities, although the
municipalities carry out various environment-related public services. Nevertheless,
several initiatives have been undertaken by the Portuguese municipalities, revealing a
rising interest in achieving better environmental and sustainability performance.
Some of them are related to EMS implementation and the majority are related to
LA21.
LA 21 is a growing practice in Portugal, but many of these strategic processes are in
their early stages, as is observed by Schmidt et al. (2006) for the whole country.
According to O’Riordan (1998), the degree and depth of LA21 processes offers a
good indicator of how far a given region is making the transition to sustainability.
Nevertheless, Portugal is still a European country with relatively few LA21
processes in progress. In addition to the weak uptake, many of the processes in
Portugal have difficulty in keeping in operation and implementing the Action Plan. It
is urgent to evaluate LA21 in Portugal in accordance with objective and standardized
quality indicators (Agenda21Local, 2007).
We should also stress the initiative ECO XXI, which is an award that took its
inspiration from the underlying principles of Agenda 21. It was developed and
managed by a Portuguese non-governmental and non-profit organisation (Associação
Bandeira Azul da Europa, a member of the Foundation for Environmental Education)
to recognize good sustainability practices in municipalities. In this way, ECO XXI
intends to raise the importance of a set of aspects considered basic to the construction
of local sustainable development, on the basis of two pillars: education in
sustainability and environmental quality. The existence of this award is intended to
foster pedagogical activities among municipalities, which are considered as
privileged agents in the promotion of sustainable development (ABAE, 2007).
However, despite certain positive signals by the Portuguese local administration,
little research work analyses the aggregated level of environmental integration in this
sector, giving the overall extent to which a variety of environmental issues and
practices have been adopted by these organizations.