The Historical Context

The 1989 effort to consolidate a movement of local governments to address global environmental concerns, and the 1990 establishment of a special agency—the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI)—to support that movement, reflected two main influences.

American tradition of policy advocacy and direct action by local governments

First, ICLEI’s origination in the United States was rooted in an American tradition of policy advocacy and direct action by local governments on extra-local (i.e., national and international) issues. This tradition arose from the prominent role of the first American cities as economic and political centers of the British colonies, and the associated establishment of diverse and strong systems of local self-government. The local self-governance traditions were often institutionalized in the form of “home rule” constitutional status and the direct democracy ‘town meeting’ form of local government. Home rule status established broad, general legal authority for municipalities to legislate on all matters related to the ‘health’ and ‘wellbeing’ of their residents.

Throughout the 1980s, American cities and towns became increasingly vociferous advocates for change in American foreign policy, at times making direct interventions in international relations through international city-to-city partnerships and agreements, even in areas of international military conflict. While this period of American “municipal foreign policy” was unique to the time, it was based on two centuries of precedent and methods for municipal activism developed during the American Revolution, the Abolition movement, the Women’s Suffrage movement, and other major American historical events. 

Municipal international cooperation 

Europe was the birthplace of the municipal international movement, marked by the establishment of the Union Internationale des Villes (UIV) in Ghent, Belgium in 1913. This association became the International Union of Local Authorities (IULA) in 1928. In 1957, the World Federation of Twin Cities, later renamed United Towns Organization (UTO), was founded in Aix-les-Bains, France. 

Sister city relationship between towns already had a decades-long tradition when the modern concept of town twinning evolved after World War II. Hundreds of cities and towns were forging direct, specialized, policy-focused relationships across the previously controlled divides of East-West and North-South. The initial main idea was to foster peace through cooperation; later, local governments engaged in development work through decentralized municipal cooperation. 

Cities and towns were forging direct, specialized, policy-focused relationships across the previously controlled divides of East-West and North-South.

In Japan, the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan initiated an international ‘Mayors for Peace’ organization in 1982 to promote nuclear disarmament. UTO established the United Towns Development Agency (UTDA) in Paris 1989 working with its members on transnational development cooperation projects.

The 1980ies saw the establishment of World Association of Major Metropolises (“Metropolis”) in Paris 1984 fostering cooperation around the specific issues of large cities; and the Eurocities network in Brussels 1986 relating local governments to the European Union organizations.

Emergence of the environmental movement 

In the 1970ies and 1980ies, citizen initiatives emerged in Europe fighting environmental degradation, protecting minority rights and working on anti-nuclear and anti-war advocacy. Those social movements coalesced and joined forces in the foundation of “Green” parties. In UK the first political party with a predominantly environmental agenda, PEOPLE, was launched as early as 1973. The first green party in Germany was founded in 1978. The Green parties pursued a new political agenda and put environmental concerns on the floor of parliamentary debate and deliberation, often for the first time. From 1977 until 1989, Green parties participated in 57 national elections in 15 countries including Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and UK. On the local level, Green advocacy in city and county councils led to an increasing political weight and successful performance in municipal elections. In 1993 Francesco Rutelli, the candidate of the Italian Federation of the Greens, was elected as Mayor of Rome.

While during the 1980ies more and more European local politicians pursued an environmental or “green” agenda, the existing associations and networks did – or not sufficiently – respond to the need for environmental policies and actions; in particular, they did not organize exchanges of information and experience on environmental matters between local government globally, let alone take leadership on environmental and sustainability matters – and this almost two decades after the release of the Club of Rome’s study “Limits to Growth” and the emergence of national environmental policies in many countries. This explains why so many European cities responded enthusiastically to the invitation to attend the World Congress of Local Governments for a Sustainable Future in New York in 1990 where ICLEI was founded. 

Summary backdrop 

The appearance of new local government organizations at first reflected increased inter-national cooperation as the Cold War era came to an end. But it also assumed a transnational character, involving cooperation between cities independent of and even in opposition to positions of national governments, reflecting the beginning of the pending era of globalization. Municipalities were experimenting in this new terrain of direct cooperation, inter- and transnational policy advocacy, and direct action.

ICLEI’s establishment cannot be separated from the above three historical contexts.

Formative Years, 1983-1989

The idea of ICLEI originated during the implementation of a 1989 project to enlist North American municipalities to take direct action to regulate chloroflourocarbons (CFCs) and other compounds responsible for the depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer. This project was established as a response to the reticence of the United States government to ratify U.S. participation the UN Montreal Protocol. The project was modeled on a form of municipal engagement in international issues that had been mastered by a U.S. network of municipal leaders over the course of the 1980s.

In the early 1980s, three distinct campaigns were established in the United States to use local government mechanisms to address the challenge of nuclear weapons proliferation. The Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign was established in 1980 in Western Massachusetts and along with the Jobs With Peace Campaign, established in Boston in the same period, it used the mechanism of coordinated non-binding local referenda in hundreds of cities and towns to mobilize public debate about the arms race and growing military budgets. The separate Nuclear Free Zone campaign originated in New Zealand, and used the mechanism of legally binding local referenda to attempt to establish regulatory restrictions on nuclear weapons development in municipal jurisdictions. A key effect of these three campaigns was to engage a large number of local elected officials (LEOs) in local debates regarding nuclear arms proliferation and American foreign policy generally.

In 1982, a small group of this LEO constituency met at the annual conference of the US National League of Cities (NLC, the largest mainstream municipal association in the United States) and decided to form a caucus in association within the NLC to share experiences regarding their local initiatives. The original group included Mayor Frank Duehay of Cambridge, Massachusetts; Mayor Sue Harris of Salem, Oregon; Commissioner Mike Lindberg of Portland, Oregon; Alderman David Orr of Chicago; Councilmember Jim Scheibel of St. Paul, Minnesota; and approximately 20 others representing every region of the country.

In 1983, in response to a local Nuclear Free Zone referendum, the city of Cambridge established a small specialist department, the Cambridge Commission on Nuclear Disarmament & Peace Education. Cambridge Mayor Duehay asked the new director of the Commission, Jeb Brugmann, to coordinate the work of the new nationwide caucus, operating under the name Local Elected Officials for Social Responsibility (LEO/SR). From the period of 1983-1987 Brugmann organized the biannual meetings of the caucus and maintained an ongoing exchange of information about local ordinances and educational initiatives pertaining to international peace, human rights, and immigration issues. By 1987, the caucus had more than 600 LEOs in its network.

In parallel with the formation of LEO/SR, the legal scholar Michael Shuman and Mayor Larry Agran of Irvine, California established a non-profit organization called The Center for Innovative Diplomacy (CID) in 1982 to collect, analyze, and disseminate information about local government involvement in international affairs. CID published a quarterly journal, The Bulletin of Municipal Foreign Policy, and ran a series of workshops on the legal mechanisms for local government participation in international relations. By 1987, CID had also become a regular participant in the LEO/SR network and biannual meetings.

During the period of 1983-1987 the range of international initiatives by local governments in the United States expanded beyond the nuclear arms race issue to include: the ‘Sanctuary City’ movement for refugee rights for war refugees from Haiti, El Salvador and Guatemala; municipal divestment from Apartheid South Africa; and, with the national government support of both the Reagan and Bush Administrations, the re-establishment of official Sister City ties across the East-West Cold War divide.

The ‘Stratospheric Protection Accord’ and the Genesis of the ICLEI Idea (1989-1990)

In 1988, Brugmann assumed the position of national field programs director for CID, where he initiated a new project called The Stratospheric Protection Accord (SPA). The SPA aimed to test the legal mechanisms and capabilities of municipalities to enter into transnational agreements to directly regulate substances that were threatening global environmental and human health. Mayor Agran played a leading role in this initiative. Drawing on the home rule status of municipalities in California, he sponsored a local ordinance, subsequently adopted by the Irvine city council, to regulate the use of CFCs and ozone-depleting compounds in Irvine and to capture and recover CFCs from refrigerators and automobile air conditioners. This action was deemed to be over-reaching the scope of municipal regulatory authority, but the associated measures would become standard practice in the context of subsequent US federal government regulation of CFCs. Secondly, Agran secured the commitment of the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist, Dr. Sherwood Rowland, to host a scientific briefing for US local government leaders about the science of stratospheric ozone depletion and CFCs.

Brugmann organized the Irvine meeting through the LEO/SR network. More than 30 major US cities/counties as well as the Canadian cities of Toronto and Montreal attended the meeting in early August 1989. The scientific briefing was followed by a planning session, during which the participating LEOs agreed to sponsor Irvine-styled local by-laws within their jurisdictions. Drawing upon the media relations strategy developed for LEO/SR initiatives throughout the 1980s, the SPA initiative secured immediate and prominent national media coverage of the Irvine initiative.

That evening Mayor Agran received a phone call from Dr. Noel Brown, the North American representative of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Brown expressed his support for the SPA initiative and the commitment made by local leaders to take action on the stratospheric ozone problem. He asked how UNEP might help. That evening Agran and Brugmann discussed the requirements for scaling the SPA initiative, and similar initiatives, globally. Agran suggested that an “international secretariat” would be needed to coordinate these initiatives internationally and urged Brugmann to work it into future SPA initiative plans. During the ensuing weeks Brugmann prepared a proposal for the SPA initiative that included establishing an “international secretariat for local environmental initiatives.” The initial ambition articulated in that proposal was to create “an agency that would be more entrepreneurial than bureaucratic,” strongly defining the identity of ICLEI for the years to come. With Mayor Agran’s active support, the proposal received small start-up grants from prominent U.S. charitable foundations.

From this starting point, the foundation for ICLEI’s establishment was quickly laid. Immediately following the Irvine meeting, Agran and Brugmann participated in the annual Mayors for Peace conference hosted by the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Presenting the SPA Initiative on this occasion, they broadened the network of supportive mayors beyond North America. In late August 1989, Brugmann met with Dr. Noel Brown at the UNEP offices in New York and proposed that they join together to organize the first major conference of city leaders at the UN Headquarters, the World Congress of Local Governments for a Sustainable Future. Brugmann explained that one objective of the congress would be to charter the establishment of ‘an international secretariat for local environmental initiatives’. Brown accepted the proposal. Immediately thereafter, Brugmann presented plans for the SPA and the UN World Congress plans to the biennial world congress of the International Union of Local Authorities (IULA) in Perth, Australia. Based on the positive response received there, IULA’s secretary general subsequently agreed to join UNEP and CID as official co-founders of what would become ICLEI.

From Perth, Brugmann travelled to Indonesia, the Netherlands, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Ireland to present the World Congress plans to mayors and local government associations. During these meetings he also presented his first draft for the proposed ICLEI charter, and secured the participation of an international group of local government leaders as the ICLEI Charter Committee. The Charter Committee reviewed and amended the draft ICLEI Charter for ultimate submission to the World Congress delegates in September 1990.

Meanwhile, following the Irvine SPA meeting, one of the new Charter Committee members, Berkeley (California) Councilmember Nancy Skinner, drove the continuing effort in the U.S. for local regulation of CFCs, forging an alliance with national NGOs to also introduce Irvine-styled legislation in state legislatures. Responding to the regulatory initiatives of cities, counties, and states, the major manufacturers of CFCs subsequently agreed in a White House meeting to accept nationwide regulation under the Montreal Protocol standards on the condition that Congress would make it illegal for states and municipalities to separately regulate the compounds. (1) The Montreal Protocol provisions were introduced by the Bush Administration into the 1990 U.S. Clean Air Act with the chemical industry’s requested provision. Senator Al Gore then introduced an amendment on the Senate floor to strike the provision disallowing local regulation. This amendment to preserve the traditional ‘home rule’ and federalist regulatory powers of U.S. municipal and state governments was adopted by a Senate vote of 72-18.

Brugmann meanwhile focused full-time on the organization of the World Congress and the establishment of ICLEI. Ursel Stapelfeldt joined his team to head the European organizing effort from Paris, with support from Dr. Siegfried Brenke, Head of the Urban Affairs Division of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), who had also joined the ICLEI Charter Committee. Richard Eidlin assumed responsibility for logistical organization of the Congress. Hosted at the United Nations headquarters by UNEP and Dr. Brown, the Congress was financially supported by a diverse mix of organizations ranging from the liberal Charles Stewart Mott Foundation to the conservative Edison Electric Institute, the Dow Chemical Company and Waste Management Inc. The U.S. Agency for International Development, under the Bush Administration, provided support for the participation of Latin American mayors.

In preparation for the Congress, Brugmann’s additional objective was to prepare two major program initiatives to be led by the new ICLEI organization. The first was a natural outgrowth of the experience with the Stratospheric Protection Accord initiative, this time focusing on local measures to reduce the full range of gases contributing to global climate change. Brugmann conceived this ‘Urban CO2 Reduction Project’ as a research and development collaboration of municipalities across continents to prepare and test methods for comparative measurement of local greenhouse gas emissions and to plan for their reductions. It established ICLEI’s standing action research methodology when establishing new areas of municipal-level practice.

The second initiative to be introduced for discussion at the congress was a more loosely defined ‘Local Agenda 21’ initiative. The aim was to determine how the relatively new concept of ‘sustainable development’—meeting the needs of current generations without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their needs—would be applied in the context of municipal planning and resource management. Related to this, the initiative also sought to organize the preparation of local level inputs into the pending policy discussions between national governments for the 1992 U.N. Conference on Environment and Development.

On September 5-8, 1990 more than 400 local government representatives from 42 countries participated in the World Congress of Local Governments for a Sustainable Future. They exchanged their local environmental management best practices, discussed the preparation of the Urban CO2 Reduction Project and the Local Agenda 21 proposals, and on September 8th debated, amended, and adopted the Charter for the new International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI).

The World Congress concluded with the election of the first ICLEI Executive Committee and its first chairman, Sir John Chatfield, a long-time Conservative Party British local government leader who saw the establishment of ICLEI as a step towards “reestablishment of local self-government where it had been abolished by forces of centralization.” From its beginnings, ICLEI’s efforts to expand the scope of local self-government to address problems of global scale embraced a full spectrum of political traditions.

Establishing ICLEI Operations (1990-1992)

In October 1990 Brugmann established the first ICLEI office in Cambridge, Massachusetts across the street from Cambridge City Hall, and incorporated ICLEI USA in the following months. During these months immediately following the World Congress he focused on securing support and raising funds for the Urban CO2 Reduction Project and Local Agenda 21 initiative, as well as securing local government hosts for the a new ICLEI World Secretariat. 

While gathered in New York on September 9th, city leaders were invited to meet with the new ICLEI Executive Committee to express their interest in hosting the new ICLEI World Secretariat. Subsequently, full proposals to host the secretariat were received from Berlin, Edinburgh, Fredrikstad (Norway), Freiburg, Glasgow, The Hague, Hannover, Miami-Dade, Montreal, Newcastle upon Tyne, and Toronto.

Responding to letters from involved U.S. city leaders in support of the Urban CO2 Reduction Project (UC02R ), Brugmann gained the support of the Chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Government Operations Committee, Congressman John Conyers, for the project. Conyers sent a request to the Bush Administration’s Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), William K. Reilly, to directly consider EPA support for UC02R. By serendipity, Brugmann was en route to meetings with EPA officials in Washington, D.C. when he met Reilly on the same flight and spoke with him directly regarding ICLEI’s proposal. Soon thereafter, the U.S. EPA became the first dedicated financial supporter of the UC02R project, endorsed months earlier at the World Congress. Proposals meanwhile gained support from a variety of U.S. charitable foundations, including the Pew Charitable Trusts, W. Alton Jones Foundation, German Marshall Fund, making them the first financial supporters of ICLEI’s first large-scale initiative.

Also moving quickly to establish international support for the proposed Local Agenda 21 initiative, in November 1990 Brugmann presented a detailed plan for the initiative to Maurice Strong, secretary general of the pending United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). Brugmann’s proposal was endorsed by Siegfried Brenke of the OECD, who now also served on the ICLEI Executive Committee. Brenke accurately captured the purpose of Local Agenda 21 when he wrote to Strong that ICLEI could make a substantial contribution “by integrating relevant aspects of local environmental policies in[to] the [UN] agenda, or by complementing the [UNCED] through a “local agenda 21”, by which the most important topics would be discussed from an urban policy perspective.” 

On the basis of these foundational efforts, a very substantial agenda was prepared for the ICLEI Executive Committee’s second meeting in London, UK on 12-13 January 1991, only four months following the World Congress. At the meeting, Toronto, Canada was selected at the host city for the ICLEI World Secretariat, and Freiburg, Germany was selected to host the ICLEI European Secretariat. Brugmann was formally appointed to serve as ICLEI’s first secretary general. 

On 17 January, Brugmann met with Maurice Strong, Yolanda Kakabadse, Joseph Wheeler and others at the UNCED Secretariat in Geneva, where they agreed on arrangements by which ICLEI’s Local Agenda 21 process would coordinate technical inputs from local government experts—water engineers, energy managers, urban planners and transportation planners etc—into the preparatory process for the UN Agenda 21. This invitation set a new United Nations precedent, whereby direct input would be accepted from the local government sector for consideration in the national government deliberations for the UNCED.

Meanwhile, the first local governments were officially joining the new organization. ICLEI was designed as a democratically governed association, whereby local government members elected the organization’s Executive Committee and approved the ICLEI strategic plan. ICLEI’s first official member was the city of Newark, New Jersey.

In April 1991, Philip Jessup was hired to serve as director of UC02R, supported by energy expert Ralph Torrie and Uwe Fritsche of the Freiburg-based Öko Institut. Jessup and Torrie had been deeply involved in the 1988 establishment of Toronto’s precedent-setting target to reduce the city’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 20%, historically the first municipal-level commitment to substantial GHG reductions. 

Based on its action research model, the UC02R project gathered detailed city-specific data and examined energy supply and end-use patterns for all fuels and modes of energy use in the eleven represented urban areas. Through a series of six, one-week workshops, it supported the development of the first-ever local action plans to reduce municipal greenhouse gas emissions in Ankara, Bologna, Copenhagen, Denver, Hannover, Helsinki, Miami-Dade County, Minneapolis, Portland (Oregon), Saarbrücken, St. Paul and Toronto. This experience provided ICLEI with invaluable expertise on the way to support local governments in the setup of their climate/energy plans. Together with the participating experts from the twelve represented municipalities, Jessup and Torrie established the basic practices for local climate mitigation planning, which are part of mainstream urban energy planning and management today.

In August 1991, ICLEI convened the first meeting of the newly formed Local Agenda 21 preparatory committee, on the occasion of the World Cities and Their Environment Conference hosted by Toronto Mayor Art Eggleton in Toronto. The preparatory committee brought together future leaders of the Local Agenda 21 planning movement from around the world.

The ICLEI World Secretariat finally officially opened in Toronto in September 1991 with a small staff of eight people. In January 1992, Konrad Otto-Zimmermann assumed the position of deputy secretary general for ICLEI Europe, and the ICLEI European secretariat was opened soon thereafter.

The 1992 UN Earth Summit (1992)

ICLEI’s founding congress gave ICLEI a mandate “to represent local government interests and concerns in the process of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development”. (2) Complementing the efforts of the Local Agenda 21 initiative to understand the practical implications of ‘doing’ sustainable development at the local level, the ICLEI secretary general also coordinated local government technical inputs into U.N. preparatory negotiations for the draft UN Agenda 21. Historically, United Nations negotiations focused strictly on actions and commitments of its national government members. Therefore, the proposed inclusion of even the simple phrase “local government” in the Agenda 21 text was considered unacceptable to some member governments, even though the text focused substantially on topics such as waste management and water supply, which are substantially local government responsibilities. One influential government frequently objected to any reference to local government actions as a violation of their national sovereignty. Meanwhile, other governments proposed texts that treated urban growth as a problem, and promoted initiatives to stop urban migration. ICLEI actively used its limited status in the UNCED preparatory negotiations to advance positions in support of building the capacity of local government to better manage the world’s growing cities. 

Thanks to the leadership of UNCED Secretary General, Maurice Strong, an innovative advocate and leader for the involvement of non-state actors in U.N. processes, nine Major Groups were formally designated in Agenda 21 as critical actors in the sustainable development process. (3) For the first time in United Nations’ history “Local Authorities” were designated as a distinct major stakeholder group in international policy, distinguished from the traditional category of ‘Non-Governmental Organizations”. The role of local government as a major group was specifically elaborated in Chapter 28 of Agenda 21, through which the Local Agenda 21 initiative instigated by ICLEI was formally endorsed by 172 governments. During the drafting process for Chapter 28, the UNCED secretariat staff frequently exchanged texts with ICLEI for content suggestions.

Finally, so as to demonstrate the leadership being taken by local governments to address major environmental and resource problems, the UNCED secretariat commissioned ICLEI to organize the UNCED Local Government Honours Programme. The Programme provided awards to twelve local governments for their achievements. The awards were presented during a special 1992 Earth Summit ceremony by UNCED secretary general Maurice Strong. 

The Cities for Climate Protection Campaign (1993-2002)

As the culmination of the UC02R Project, the 1st Municipal Leaders’ Summit on Climate Change and the Urban Environment was organized at UN Headquarters in January of 1993 and followed by the Convention of European Municipal Leaders on Climate Change in Amsterdam in March. The organization of such events quickly proved to be a tremendous launching pad for developing the ICLEI membership, engaging partners, and serving as platforms for communities of practice ... 

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Sources

(1)  As reported by David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council, who participated in a White House /U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on the 1990 Clean Air Act.

(2)  Report of the World Congress of Local Government for a Sustainable Future

(3)  The Major Groups established in Agenda 21 are: Women, Children & Youth, Indigenous People, Non-Governmental Organizations, Local Authorities, Workers & Trade Unions, Business & Industry, the Scientific & Technical Community, and Farmers.

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