The Local Agenda 21
The Local Agenda 21 process offers a means to integrate sustainable development in cities. How many cities in France implement such projects? Only around 50 municipalities did so, even though some 150 cities showed some interest for approaches integrating the sustainable development concept. The complexity of the task combining strategy and action, the delay in adopting mesures in favour of environmental protection, the transversality of projects, the difficult relationship between elected officials – local government services – population, and the place of the participatory democracy in decision-processes, make it difficult at present for formal experimentations to take place in France.
Definition of the Local Agenda 21
The Local Agenda 21 is a political project for the sustainable development of the 21st century, and an action programme responding to sustainable development objectives, principles and challenges:
- Objectives of social equity, economic efficiency, improvement of the environment and the organisation, with the concern of simplifying and democratising methods in respect of decision-taking, management and control (governance);
- Principles of solidarity in time and space of transversality and globality, participation, and precautionary principle, and lastly the principle of subsidiarity requiring to deal with problems to their root as far as possible:
- Challenges to conciliate the long term and the short term, to share choices with the whole society, from simple citizens to economic and social actors.