Locating the ‘Local Agenda’:
Preserving Public Interest in the Evolving Urban World
By Jeb Brugmann[1]
The urban environmental transition concept does not suggest the necessity of common transition patterns from city to city across different regions during specific historical periods. However, in the modern era we do in fact observe similar patterns of environmental transition in widely different cities of diverse societies. Large, low-income settlements, whether in 19th century London or late 20th century Lima, appear to suffer similar public health problems. Industrialization appears to correlate with patterned increases in certain ambient pollutants. High-wealth cities appear to displace increasing portions of their environmental burdens to other territories.
Similarities in the urban environmental transitions of our time can be viewed as arising, in large part, from common institutional factors. Nations and their cities and towns increasingly share similar norms of production and wealth accumulation, technology preferences, engineering standards, regulatory and governance approaches. These shared norms have been and continue to be spread and institutionalized via global institutions and their political projects. The norms produce similar developmental pathways and, therefore, related ways of managing the environment, of generating and managing waste flows, and of distributing environmental benefits and risks. For example, a globalized ‘green’ agenda, operationalized through mechanisms such as international conventions and technical assistance programs, will tend to reproduce very similar regimes of practice from city-to-city, especially since these mechanisms are dominated by OECD countries and their established accommodations to industry, their technology preferences etc.
This chapter explores the institutional preconditions for variations from the observed, dominant patterns of transition. Our particular interest is in transitions that better reflect dominant local aspirations, and that more effectively address broader public interests, such as equity, justice and sustainability. The chapter considers the strategic requirements for advancement of such distinct, local public interest agendas in the face of a globalized, neo-liberal political project that has co-opted and dominated traditional public sector ‘global agendas’ for poverty reduction, human and workers’ rights and environmental sustainability.
These issues are explored through consideration of the case of the worldwide Local Agenda 21 ‘movement’. During the 1990s, this loose but broad federation of local planning and governance projects working under the banner of Local Agenda 21 engaged more than 6,400 cities and towns in some 113 countries in developing locally-specific strategies for sustainable development. The Local Agenda 21 (LA21) case is of specific interest to the UET discussion because its principal objective has been to resolve the historical tension between global public agendas, which function through the localization of uniform global standards, and local public agendas, which struggle to advance distinct local development aspirations.
‘Agendas’
The colloquialism ‘agenda’ denotes a political project, with an associated discourse, that promotes institutions and patterns of production and social relations that complement its political objectives. The term ‘global agendas’ is used here to refer to political projects that promote generalized propositions about the world, its needs, priorities and ‘best’ practices. Global agendas are characterized by their universalist and often modernist impulses. Whether championed by private sector organizations, governments, international civil society (international NGOs or ‘INGOs’), or internationalized professions (e.g., engineering), the international nation-states system, coordinated via the United Nations and Breton Woods institutions and more recently the World Trade Organisation, has generally provided the vehicle for the advancement of current global agendas. ‘Development’, ‘sustainability’, ‘human rights’ are examples of global agendas.
Global agendas advance coordinated global development pathways and transitions, employing largely uniform rights, codes of conduct, standards, and priorities. As such, they are abstracted from place. Their relevance, definition and legitimacy are not contingent upon the specificities of local place. Global agendas have both led, and increased in prominence with, global economic and social integration; many argue that global strategies are needed now more than ever. Their intensifying reach into local society has met however with increasing resistance, whether because of their unanticipated impacts on local culture and power relations, because of the dependencies that they create, or because of the sheer inefficiencies associated with their monumental scale.
The term ‘local agendas’ is used to refer to the political projects of local community systems as they respond to their unique social, economic and ecological conditions and also as they seek their self-preservation and self-determination. They are vernacular in character and cannot be meaningfully abstracted from place. Local agendas frequently do not apply or reflect the categories constructed by global agendas. For instance, Guha and Martinez-Alier have documented forms of local community action which at once integrate and defy the abstracted categories of ‘human rights’, ‘green’ and ‘brown’ agendas that are often presumed to be distinct, or even in competition, in global policy discourse (Guha and Martinez-Alier, 1997).
From its beginnings, a central objective of the Local Agenda 21 (LA21) initiative was to find a way to give localities a lead in defining the meaning of the rejuvenated global development agenda, i.e., ‘sustainable development’, for their unique contexts. This, its founders argued, might facilitate an important institutional reform of the global development project whereby localities would gain greater strategic control over their developmental pathways, and national and global institutions would support these strategies. LA21’s objective was to make development more responsive to unique local conditions, more open to experimentation, and more transparent and legitimate to its presumed (local) beneficiaries. It proposed to build local capacity for managing the conflicts implicit in development’s prioritizing of economic, social and environmental objectives. In short, it represented an attempt to reform the machinery of global agenda implementation, providing primary strategic control to localities for achieving global public objectives.
The result, in many instances, was the formation of local development strategies with strong vernacular characteristics. Thus, in the city of Betim, Brazil, a very typical Local Agenda 21 effort involved the following activities. The LA21 process focused on strengthening the working relationship between the municipality and a low-income district, Citrolândia, a historically isolated and stigmatized community due to its former status as a leper colony. The development of this relationship focused on the rehabilitation of Citrolândia’s riverfront for recreational uses, due to the community’s complete lack of recreational spaces and its interest in achieving more equal social status with other city districts. “Over 3,000 square meters of sidewalks were paved, improving conditions in both the wet and dry seasons. The installation of 35 streetlights contributed to increased safety for local residents. Recreational benches and chess tables were installed. Water quality in the river is continuing to be checked by a monitoring group. The project also contributed to changes in the personal behavior of participants, not only in relation to environmental attitudes such as keeping the yards clean, but also in their personal and family relations” (ICLEI, 2000). Whether this activity aligns most with the UN’s ‘green’ Agenda 21, the ‘brown’ Habitat Agenda, or the 1995 Social Summit Programme of Action is impossible to discern—and locally irrelevant. Local Agenda 21 provided a mechanism for Betim to plan its own agenda.
Both district-level local agendas, like the above example, and broader city-wide agendas, as in the well-known case of Curitiba, Brazil, respond to the material, local world as it appears in local places: as an integrated reality. For this reason, unlike global agendas which aim to shape social reality to abstracted categories and global institutional norms, local agendas were proposed to produce elegant, locality-specific solutions involving simple interventions to address multiple, related social, economic and environmental problems.
Given their different orientations, global and local agendas frequently advance conflicting concepts and norms for governance. The oft-noted “distance between the urban poor and the donors” (Satterthwaite, 2001) describes the disconnection between a global agenda (i.e., development) and its related governance mechanisms, and diverse locally formulated agendas and their distinct governance processes. Global agendas work to establish and maintain systems of global social regulation, and therefore also generally privilege the operational needs of global institutions and their private and civil society partners. Local agendas work to maintain or to re-establish locally-embedded norms and to reinforce local community systems.
This being said, the simple dichotomy of local and global, and the associated choice between ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ governance, does not sufficiently explain our world as it functions. This paper proposes that local communities be considered as autopoietic systems (Luhmann, 1995), shedding further light on the “distance” described by Satterthwaite. Writes Jessop (2001):
The concept of autopoiesis (from the Greek for self-production) is used to denote a specific class of systems (whether natural, social, or artificial) that are concerned, at least in the first instance, with their own self-reproduction. Thus their operations are directed at maintaining their own existence rather than at serving the needs of other systems. In this sense such systems are self-constituting, self-organizing, and self-reproducing. These properties make them resistant to top-down internal management and to direct intervention from outside. They nonetheless co-exist and co-evolve in complex ways with other systems with which they are reciprocally interdependent. This poses in turn major problems regarding possible external steering (governing, guiding, managing) and/or strategic coordination.
The concept of autopoiesis offers a theoretical framework for understanding the persistent difficulties faced by international development institutions in making successful interventions at the local level. More pertinent to this discussion, it also explains why local communities, in a globalizing world, are today concerning themselves more with governance and policy issues at national, regional and global scales. This concern is increasingly actualized by urban strategies that are designed to influence conditions at all scales.
Therefore, for example, a community system (e.g., a fishing town) which co-evolves within a bioregional system (e.g., Lake Victoria), quickly learns that engaging in regional governance is a meaningful element of any local agenda to reduce the adverse impacts of aggressive exotic species, e.g., Nile perch and water hyacinth (Grossman, 1995). Thus, the Local Agenda 21 process in the coastal city of Mwanza, Tanzania—whose major employers are fish processing plants for Nile perch exports to Europe—closely links its focus on provision of basic water and sanitation services in hillside squatter settlements with a second focus on reducing pollution to the coastal ecosystem and its fishery (ICLEI, 1998a, pp. 169-180; also ICLEI, 1998b). From a local Mwanza perspective, issues of slum upgrading, sanitation, pollution control, employment and ecological rehabilitation are integrated concerns that must be addressed together and at multiple scales of engagement. Similarly, autopoiesis helps explain why nearly 600 cities and towns in 27 countries and six continents have joined together in a strategically coordinated ‘Cities for Climate Protection (CCP) Campaign’ to develop local strategies for mitigating and adapting to climate change.[2]
The concept of autopoiesis helps to clarify why thousands of independent projects to prepare very diverse local agendas also constitute, and are aligning with, a coordinated, strategic global agenda, which is here called the ‘Local Agenda’. On the one hand, the suggested Local Agenda, like other global agendas, promotes universal concepts like ‘sustainability’, ‘equity’ and ‘participation’ and proposed a universal institutional mechanism, a strengthened local state, for application of these concepts. On the other hand, the principal aim of the Local Agenda, as pursued through programs like LA21 and the CCP Campaign, is to increase the political space, and to build effective institutional mechanisms, for the development and assertion of vernacular local agendas and their implied, distinct local ‘transitions’.
It comes as no surprise that this strategic project is most actively advanced by cities, both independently and in alliance through their national and international municipal associations. Cities themselves represent socio-economic systems that are increasingly operative at scales ranging from the block and neighborhood to globally operative inter-urban networks and economically-connected distant hinterlands. A now vast body of literature has described and theorized this scalar expansion of urban systems (Sassen, 2002; Lo and Marcotullio, 2000).
This scalar expansion has added to the complexity of urban development processes by increasing the range of agents engaged in bargaining over local development priorities and resource allocation. The articulation and promotion of strategic interests in such multi-agency systems requires complex mechanisms of negotiation, facilitation, coordination, resource allocation, i.e. ‘governance’. Therefore, the Local Agenda, as a new global agenda, is challenged to address the governance challenges associated with achieving local agendas within a multi-scalar urban system.
Good governance in this complex environment requires an institution or institutional framework that can provide strategic coordination in favor of the local agenda (Brugmann, 1994). The institution charged with such strategic coordination must manage the interaction between local objectives and universal global agendas. As a programmatic initiative focused on establishing the Local Agenda, the Local Agenda 21 initiative proposed the local state for this function, for three reasons. While local government in many countries was shaped by global colonial projects, it is generally articulated to the specificities of place and legitimated in the context of place. At the same time, as part of the state, local government can claim a formal and legitimate place within the international nation-states system that governs global agendas. Finally, in most countries, local governments govern and operate existing development assets: the infrastructure of roads, sewers, water supply, local markets, and services such as waste management through which future development pathways and environmental transitions can be pursued.
We now review in greater detail how the LA21 project unfolded in the decade following its endorsement by the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), and how it related to other global agendas seeking to localize their priorities during this same period.
Local Agenda 21’s First Decade: Discerning the Institutional Project
The origins of LA21 strategy and practice predated the UNCED and had separate roots from the emerging global sustainable development agenda, with which LA21 is most associated.
The early practice of what later assumed the label of LA21 planning represented classic local agenda formation efforts. These were distinguishable from other kinds of local planning practice by the strategic and institutional reform orientation of their approach. The International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), which founded LA21 as a general planning concept and international program, explicitly constructed its generalized LA21 approach from cases that pre-dated the UNCED and its Agenda 21 (ICLEI, 1996). Two frequently referenced cases were those of Cajamarca, Peru and Hamilton-Wentworth, Canada. In the early 1990s, the Province of Cajamarca, Peru undertook a dramatic restructuring of local government and used the resulting decentralized system to create its well-known, multi-stakeholder sustainable development planning process (ICLEI, 1995). In 1989, the Region of Hamilton-Wentworth, Canada, confronting the decline of its manufacturing sector, “decided that new mechanisms were needed to improve the coordination between municipal budget decisions and policy goals and objectives” as well as the integration of the region’s Official Plan and Economic Development Strategy (ICLEI, 1998a p.79). From this motivation, the Region in that year started its internationally recognized Vision 2020/Sustainable Community Initiative. Both Cajamarca and Hamilton-Wentworth were pre-occupied less with being ‘green’ than with ways to create greater strategic, public sector leverage over pressing, and inter-related, local social, economic and environmental concerns.
ICLEI itself was the offspring of the 1980s, grassroots ‘municipal foreign policy’ (MFP) movement. It had no origins or substantial support in the international environmental community. Driven by local elected officials, the MFP movement promoted the strategic interests of cities and towns in a variety of international relations areas, including refugee policy, local self-determination (e.g., in apartheid South Africa, in Sandanista Nicaragua), and international security (Shuman, 1986). ICLEI was but one of a number of new international organizations created by the local government sector in the 1984-90 period—including the World Association of Major Metropolises and the United Towns Development Agency—to advance the sector’s international interests. In 1990, ICLEI elaborated the global LA21 strategy to advance the interests of local agenda formation in the context of the emerging global sustainable development agenda.
To ICLEI’s organizers, the upcoming UNCED provided a critical strategic platform for promotion of greater development planning capacities in the urban sector. ICLEI proposed the LA21 concept to the UNCED Secretary General Maurice Strong and his team in January 1991. With their support, the LA21 concept was endorsed by the nation-states community in a distinct chapter (Chapter 28) of Agenda 21 at the UNCED (Hom, 2002).
Since that time, ‘Local Agenda 21’ has become the descriptor for a wide variety of local processes that reform local governance and planning approaches in order to address the primary social, economic and environmental challenges of a neighborhood, town or city in a more strategic and integrated way. In 2001, ICLEI completed a worldwide survey of local authorities and local authority associations engaged in LA21 practice (ICLEI/UNDESA 2002). The survey identified more than 6,400 LA21-type processes in 113 countries, documenting a substantial increase from the 1,800 LA21 processes identified in a similar survey undertaken in 1996 (ICLEI/UNDPCSD, 1997).
The data presented below is derived from the 633 survey responses received from local authorities (representing 9.9 per cent of the total identified LA21 processes) and from 146 responses received from local government associations. ICLEI tabulated results by country, region and GDP level. Where respondents from the same country reported different conditions, ICLEI undertook direct follow-up interviews with relevant respondents. In further analyzing the primary survey data, this author made a further review of international and country-level documentation of LA21 activities, including the document archives of the UNDP Capacity 21 Programme. Where ICLEI survey data did not permit characterization of LA21 activities in particular countries, the author relied on other researches (Lafferty, 2001), on correspondences with leading LA21 actors in the relevant countries[3] as well as on his direct field experiences with LA21 activities in 17 countries.
Analysis of the survey data reveals the formation of a distinctive institutional project that can be differentiated from much of what is frequently generalized today as ‘local initiatives’.
Table 1 presents the survey findings according to institutional origin and motivation of LA21 activities. As can be seen, the primary instigators of LA21 activities on a country-by-country basis have been organizations motivated by explicit local government development objectives, often within the context of, or in reaction to, decentralization. Such organizations were the primary agents behind 5,772, or 90 per cent, of the identified 6,416 LA21 processes (in 113 countries). Seventy-three per cent or 4,669 of the identified LA21 processes were first instigated by local government organizations, such as national associations of local government. By comparison, approximately 1,100 processes were instigated by national or international programs that explicitly and actively promote and support local government development, (e.g., UNDP Capacity 21, GTZ).
The LA21 survey data reveal a frequently coordinated effort by the local government sector, with both institutional and political dimensions, to strengthen the position of local agendas within a globalized development process.
Coordinated
The coordination of this effort is reflected by the substantial contribution of regional and national LA21 campaigns to the overall definition and growth of LA21 activities. These campaigns were primarily organized and coordinated by national or regional associations of local government or ‘local government organizations’ (LGOs), which differ from INGOs through their direct, democratic accountability to a local government membership.
LA21 national campaigns in 18 countries account for 41 per cent of the global total of LA21 processes. On average, the national campaigns each involved 146 cities and towns. In some countries these campaigns have succeeded in involving nearly all the country’s municipalities in LA21 planning. As an indication of the centrality of these coordination mechanisms to the LA21 project, the countries without national campaigns had, in contrast, an average of 40 participating cities and towns.
Table 1. Institutional origins of LA21 planning
Region
# of identified LA21 processes
LA21 processes motivated by local government development objectives and initiated by…
Local
Gov’t
LGO
National/
Internat’l
Program
Civil
Society/
NGO
Unknown
Or
Other
AFRICA
(28 countries)
151
26
46
?
79
ASIA-PACIFIC
(17 countries)
674
351
267
22
34
EUROPE
(36 countries)
5,292
4,206
485
254
347
LATIN AMERICA
(17 countries)
119
71
8
21
18
MIDDLE EAST
(13 countries)
79
?
?
?
79
NORTH AMERICA
(2 countries)
101
15
?
?
86
TOTAL
6,416
4,669
806
297
643
(Source: ICLEI, 2002; interviews and correspondence with principal country-level LA21 experts)
The formation of national campaigns was a central element of ICLEI’s LA21 coordination strategy since 1994 (ICLEI, 1997). ICLEI, itself an LGO, served as the catalyst or implementation partner in the formation of diverse national and regional campaigns in Africa, Europe and Latin America.
In some regions, the leadership of national campaigns joined with regional LGOs to create regional LA21 campaigns. Regional campaigns have promoted and supported national campaigns as well as regional LA21 practice generally. The European Campaign for Sustainable Cities and Towns counts 1,650 cities and towns from 39 countries in its membership and coordinates work among ten regional city networks. It continues to organize projects, seminars and conferences, to provide guidance materials and best practice resources, and to undertake LA21 research. It also actively advocates LA21-related policy positions to the European Union. Demonstrating its strategic orientation, the campaign has launched a new project, called Common Cause, to support global coordination among LA21 actors. Its website poses the questions, “How can a Local Agenda 21 Campaign look beyond the local level? How can it be linked up with others to work together on a world-wide level?”
Institutional
The ICLEI survey provides evidence that LA21 has been a local government-led institutional project. In 71 per cent of the reported LA21 processes, the local authority has been the responsible, lead agent for the process. Local authorities have directly managed the process and its budget in 60 per cent of reported cases. LA21 processes have been integrated into the official municipal planning and decision making systems in 59 per cent of the reported cases.
In addition to the specific projects and investments that were generated by these processes, the survey data indicated that LA21 activities were being used to reshape the form and functioning of the local state. In particular, LA21 was used to strengthen the working relationship between the local state and civil society. For instance, 67 per cent of the surveyed African LA21s reported an increase in municipal public consultation. Sixty-one percent reported an increase in multi-stakeholder partnerships. More than 40 per cent reported an increase in interdepartmental coordination and municipal transparency as well as changes in formal decision making structures. More than one-third of the LA21 survey respondents from Africa, Europe and Latin America reported that LA21 planning has been integrated into formal municipal decision-making, budgeting and/or statutory planning processes.
Political
Through ICLEI and the aforementioned campaigns, the self-described ‘LA21 movement’ has actively promoted positions within international policy forums such as the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, the 1996 UN Conference on Human Settlements, the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, and the APEC process. These positions consistently sought fuller recognition and support for the role of local government; called for direct flows of ODA to local governments and for recognition of decentralized (city-to-city) cooperation as a mode of development assistance; and critiqued decentralization efforts that affected a withdrawal of the state from development responsibilities. In 1998, ICLEI went further to caution against the adverse impacts of neo-liberal privatization policies and, even, of the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment, policy work that today continues to prevent legal curtailment of local powers to establish procurement preferences.
The ICLEI survey data, along with a considerable body of case studies, indicate that the engaged local government community did succeed in establishing a coherent project of local state reform and re-building aimed at increasing local capacities for the development and promotion of locally-distinct development strategies or ‘local agendas’. Of course, in such an extensive undertaking, a range of practice can be found; some of the shortcomings of practice will be reviewed in the last section of this chapter. Overall, however, the documented Local Agenda 21 activities are distinguishable from ‘local initiatives’ generally due to their emphasis on building local government as the lead strategic agent and facilitator for local development planning. In so doing, many LA21 efforts consistently approached the concept of ‘participation’ as a parallel, structured process of both instigating community-based development projects through the engagement of local stakeholders as citizens in reformed processes of local state priority-setting, policy development and resource allocation. Along the way, in each locality, in each country, as well as in key international forums, the agents of the LA21 project confronted numerous challenges.
First, the LA21 processes established in each city had to confront myriad local social, political and institutional impediments to the reform of development processes. For instance, the ICLEI survey data indicate limited success in attracting private sector participation to LA21 processes.
Second, the often arms-length LA21 stakeholder planning bodies established by many municipalities to coordinate LA21 planning had to manage resistance within local authorities themselves to participatory reforms in governance, operating procedures, and policy.
Third, the LA21 movement, as a global project, had to confront resistance from alternative global projects for reforming governance and development patterns in cities worldwide. As will be described below, the proponents of the LA21 project naively assumed, on the basis of their initial positive reception at UNCED and the emergence of linked discourses on sustainable development, participation and decentralization, that ample international resources and national policy reform could be secured to help local practitioners deal effectively with the first two areas of challenge. To their surprise, the opposite would be the case.
Competing for the ‘Local’: How the International Community Responds to Local Agenda 21
In endorsing Local Agenda 21, the UNCED’s Agenda 21 strategy delegated responsibility to “UNDP, the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat) and UNEP, the World Bank, regional banks” to mobilize resources for LA21 implementation (United Nations, 1992; Chapter 28). The response was mixed at best. No international community support was made available until 1994-95, when UNDP and UNEP made small grants, together totaling less than US$100,000. Meanwhile, LA21 activities were started with local resources and, in a few countries such as the United Kingdom, with support from national governments. For this reason, LA21 planning first established prominence in Europe, where budgetary resources from national municipal associations, central governments and local authorities were pooled to establish national LA21 campaigns.
The Government of Canada made the first large investment to support LA21 activities in developing countries, reflecting Canada’s prominent role in the UNCED. In the mid- to late 1990s the UNDP Capacity 21 Programme assumed a major role in providing support for the establishment of LA21 programs in developing countries. The Capacity 21 support was augmented by some bi-lateral development assistance agencies, particularly from countries where LA21 planning had taken hold, e.g., the Netherlands. Excepting the sustained policy support for LA21 provided by the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, the Capacity 21 effort remained the only sustained, resourced effort of the international community to support LA21 activities on the ground.
UN-Habitat showed substantial resistance to the promotion of LA21 throughout the 1996 Habitat II Conference process. During the Habitat II preparatory process, sympathetic governments repeatedly proposed, to no objections, the inclusion of text that endorsed LA21 as an implementation mechanism for the Habitat Agenda.[4] But the texts subsequently produced by the secretariat repeatedly omitted these proposals. Even after eventual, explicit LA21 endorsement at the Habitat II Conference, UN-Habitat endeavored to establish its own ‘local Habitat Agenda’ process in parallel (and in competition to) LA21. It was not until 1999, when the UN Commission on Human Settlements finally endorsed LA21 as a key Habitat Agenda implementation mechanism that this resistance was largely put to rest.
At the request of the Government of Colombia, the World Bank supported a LA21 capacity-building program in that country. This was the limit of support provided by the Bank and the regional development banks, which generally pursued their urban investment programs without any reference to LA21 planning, even when they were taking place in the same city. When the World Bank decided to support participatory development planning on a large scale, it undertook a review of LA21 methodology and experiences. The outcome was the establishment of its own ambitious program in cooperation with UN-Habitat, called the City Development Strategies initiative. This initiative, launched in 1999—the same year that the UNCHS finally endorsed LA21—avoided association with LA21 and, as will be explored, generally promoted a quite different agenda for localities.
Preparations for the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) provided an opportunity for the international community to align more fully with the expanding LA21 movement. On the eve of the WSSD, the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) issued a special set of guidelines for implementing the promises of Agenda 21, called Strategies for Sustainable Development. The document conspicuously focused on the limitations of both local government and LA21.
Representative of many international community documents in the post-UNCED period, the DAC strategy document highlighted problems with local government accountability, transparency and effectiveness—although recognizing that LA21 “can also become a means for promoting these qualities”. It highlighted the faults of a minority of cases in order to diminish the majority: “While many [LA21s] have led to practical results and impacts, some may be little more than documents setting out goals or plans of government agencies developed with little consultation. They may, in other words, simply be conventional plans renamed.” Even in success, the DAC guidelines reported failure: “Other LA21s developed in highly participatory fashion and resulting in well-developed action plans, have however foundered because of the limited capacity of city authorities to work in partnership with other groups” (OECD, 2001, p.32).
The “Local-level Strategies” section of the DAC guidelines does not once mention local government. It focuses instead on an alternative conception of local agency, using the notion of ‘local communities’ to highlight the central roles of community-based organizations, NGOs, traditional fora, “local groups” and “user groups”. The section on “Convergence and links between national, sub-national and local strategies” also does not mention local government. In a section on decentralization, the guidelines emphasize only the need for “local level institutions for planning and decision-making” (p.20). The ongoing role of local government as regulators, service providers, developers and managers of public infrastructure goes unnoted.
The DAC guidelines call for “deep structural changes” to achieve sustainable development. But in the local context they appear to envision a deepening direct engagement of international institutions (directly or via INGO intermediaries) with local residents or CBOs—not with representative local governments, via LA21 processes or otherwise.
Thus when the parties gathered for the WSSD, the stage was set for an ambivalent position on LA21. On the one hand, governments and senior United Nations officials offered distinctive recognition to the worldwide Local Agenda 21 movement. In his opening address to the Summit, Mr. Nitin Desai, the Summit’s Secretary General, placed Local Agenda 21 at the top of his list of sustainable development accomplishments during the last decade, stating
Many assessments have been made, Mr. President, in preparation for this
conference on how much progress has been made in meeting the Rio challenges…We know that there have been some successes—that there is heightened awareness, and that there have been many concrete achievements, particularly in communities which have established local (sic) Agenda 21s (Desai, 2002).
But the ceremonial recognition was not accompanied by any substantive support. As the Plan’s main reference to Local Agenda 21 indicates, the international community avoided any explicit commitment to LA21’s institutional project to shift strategic direction for development to localities via a strengthened and rejuvenated local state. The Plan endorsed efforts to
149. Enhance the role and capacity of local authorities as well as stakeholders in implementing Agenda 21…and in strengthening the continuing support for local (sic) Agenda 21 programmes and associated initiatives and partnerships (UN, 2002).
Careful drafting ensured that “local authorities as well as stakeholders” are grammatically designated to provide the indicated “strengthening” of support for LA21. The Plan avoids any explicit or implicit statement of commitment on behalf of central governments or official development assistance institutions.
In the world of the UN, hours, if not days, are spent negotiating single words or phrases. Significant meanings are buried in subtle parsing and semantics. Thus final UN texts of the UNCED, Habitat II and WSSD period repeatedly used the phrase ‘local communities’ to replace the proposed use of ‘local authorities’ from early drafts, elevating an entirely different concept of how localities are represented.[5] In this way, the UN’s persistent use of the phrase ‘local Agenda 21’ instead of the term ‘Local Agenda 21’, which has been consistently advanced by the local government community since before the UNCED, has a defined purpose: this thing we call LA21 is accepted to the extent that it localizes the global agenda, Agenda 21. A LA21 with a capital ‘L’, to imply that it is something distinctly local, has never been accepted or used in a negotiated UN text.
Why has the development community so frequently dismissed or marginalized LA21 activities in their programs and budgets at the same time that they have constructed and financed their own, extensive ‘local initiatives’ programs as a modality for international development assistance?
One of the primary arguments used in the international development community during the 1992-2002 period is that LA21 planning is restricted to, and addresses the concerns of developed country communities. However, as shown in Table 2, the LA21 survey data undermine these claims. In fact, the LA21 movement is presently growing fastest in middle GNP (US$756-$9,265 per capita) developing countries.
Table 1. LA21 activity by national GNP
1996
2001
% change
1996-2001
Low GNP (<US$755)
63
183
190%
Mid GNP (US$756-$9265)
118
883
606%
High GNP (>US$9265)
*Totals minus Germany
1,631
(1,601)*
5,400
(3,348)*
231%
(109%)*
(Source: ICLEI, 1997; ICLEI, 2002)
Another mischaracterization of the LA21 movement, often used to marginalize if not also to de-legitimate its status in the development community, is that LA21 is primarily a part of the global ‘green’ movement and its ecology-focused agenda. As such, the argument goes, LA21 imposes a global (green) agenda rather than uplifting local agendas, as the LA21 movement claims. It thereby risks misdirecting the attentions of developing country communities from their more urgent ‘brown’ needs.
This characterization of LA21 also is contradicted by the ICLEI survey data. The African survey respondents list the top ten priorities in their LA21s as: capacity-building, community development, economic development, employment, health, land use, poverty alleviation, water resource management and women’s issues. In Latin America, we find a unique regional emphasis on culture and tourism, education and literacy, and natural resource management, along with many of the same concerns as in Africa. The Asia-Pacific respondents (most from Japan, South Korea and Australia) give unique emphasis to consumption patterns, along with air quality, biodiversity, climate change, community development, energy, land use, transportation, and water resource management. The European respondents share many of the same ‘green’ concerns as their Asia-Pacific counterparts, but also list community development, education, and health among the top ten issues addressed.
Table 3. Substantive Focus of LA21 Processes, by Region and Income Level
Responses to survey question: “Which of the following statements best describes the focus of your LA21 process (please check only one)?”
Responses by Region
Global
Africa
Asia-Pacific
Europe
Latin America &
Caribbean
North
America
Focus Area
Economic Development
13%
26%
11%
9%
25%
23%
Environmental Protection
45%
16%
54%
40%
14%
34%
Social Issues
5%
13%
6%
1%
7%
0%
Focus on Economic, Social and Environmental Issues Equally
35%
45%
27%
50%
50%
36%
No Answer
2%
0%
2%
0%
4%
7%
Responses by Income Level (GNP/capita)
Low Income
Middle
Income
High
Income
Economic Development
34%
14%
10%
Environmental Protection
17%
43%
50%
Social Issues
9%
5%
4%
Focus on Economic, Social and Environmental Issues Equally
40%
35%
35%
No Answer
0%
2%
2%
The sheer number of issues reported to be addressed would appear to indicate either very extensive and comprehensive planning processes or an approach that considers these different concerns in an integrated fashion during the design of specific solutions, as exemplified in the earlier examples of Betim and Mwanza. On the basis of this observer’s work with LA21 communities, and the considerable body of ICLEI case studies of LA21 practice, the latter explanation better represents the practice in the developing world, where there are neither resources nor time for extensive, comprehensive LA21 planning as undertaken in some European cities.
Hence, an explanation for the international development community’s tepid response to LA21—which persisted and even deepened as the LA21 movement grew—must be found in other issues. One could claim that poor information-sharing about emerging LA21 practice in developing countries, or the competition for declining ODA funds, or the simple desire of each UN programme to have and control its own campaign—rather than to support such a ‘public domain’ endeavor—provide explanations. Such explanations might suffice, were it not for the fact that the development community was simultaneously promoting an alternative model of urban governance and development planning.
‘Private Interest Governance’ as an Alternative Global Reform Agenda
For more than a decade, seemingly in response to the neo-liberal policies of the time, international development institutions and development INGOs have steadily constructed a model of what can be called ‘private interest governance’, which fundamentally competes with traditional notions of public governance through the local state. As the central focus of the LA21 movement was to renew and strengthen forms of public governance, the LA21 approach clashed fundamentally with the mainstream of development community thinking as it emerged in the post-UNCED years.
Responding to the policies of their national government benefactors, many international development organizations emerged in the post-UNCED years as active agents of the neo-liberal project to restructure local political economy in support of market liberalization, privatization and diminished public sector roles and obligations. Emphasizing private investment as an alternative to public sector strategies, whether at the scale of micro-credit or of corporate foreign direct investment, the development community enlisted politically-willing local governments into this alternative development and governance paradigm. They were joined by development NGOs (NGOs), whose capabilities and techniques for providing stop-gap support to marginalized communities were well honed during decades of local state intransigence towards their growing local informal areas.
In this context, the development community developed a new international discourse on ‘good governance’ and ‘local initiatives’ in parallel to LA21.
‘Governance’, to paraphrase Jones, serves as code for “alternative state projects” advancing “new forms of representation” that “support the ideological and material effects of policy aimed at ameliorating crisis” in capital accumulation (Jones, 1998). The neo-liberal, private interest governance project supported and legitimized new localized
(not ‘local’) mechanisms for planning and resource allocation to replace national corporatist economic management. These were frequently defined by centrally-mandated local government reforms, steered by ‘public-private partnerships’ and programmed according to the priorities and terms of international development assistance organizations (Peck, 1995). The new governance discourse employed the same friendly, albeit vague terms as the LA21 effort, such as ‘bottom-up’, ‘grassroots’, ‘responsiveness’, ‘participation’, ‘partnerships’ and ‘accountability’, but represented quite distinct and even incompatible strategies, consistent with the neo-liberal vision of an “era of entrepreneurial governance and hollowed out states” (MacLeod and Goodwin, 1999, p. 715).
As stated by the Governance Cooperative, a Canadian coalition of NGOs, trade unions, and business associations, supported by the Canadian International Development Agency:
The need for the concept of governance derives from the fact that today, government is widely perceived as an organisation. In its early form government was seen as a process whereby citizens came together to deal with public business….Today, government is viewed as one of several institutional players, like business or labour, with its own interests” (Martin, 1998)
This deterioration of consensus that public policy and government process is or ought to be the locus of social decisional authority is a point celebrated by an increasing chorus of development studies experts and many INGO and other mission-oriented private organizations that themselves seek a stronger, more direct and more legitimated role in development. “Instead of seeing weak institutions of the state, which require strong measures designed to strengthen,” writes McCarney (1999), “weak states are instead regarded as an opening for alternative understandings, if not nurturings, of altered power concentrations in state-society relations.” Through governance, decisional authority is transferred from mechanisms of the state (including citizenship) to evolving groupings of ‘stakeholders’ representing their diverse group interests.
The post-UNCED urban sector programs of the World Bank exemplify this new governance approach and its primary purposes. The aforementioned City Development Strategies (CDS) initiative[6], now involving hundreds of cities throughout developing world, has provided a highly effective mechanism for engaging local public and private sector institutions in joint development planning. While, as in the case of LA21, participating cities have made diverse application of the CDS process, the dominant urban development paradigm that is promoted, reinforced and rewarded by the CDS program is the ‘competitive cities’ paradigm. To quote the World Bank’s Country Director for the Philippines, in his December 2003 speech to leaders of 31 participating Philippines cities, the CDS aims to advance a particular global agenda:
Under the global context where capital, talent and jobs move more freely and quickly to locations offering the best business environment, Philippine cities will have to achieve fast and continued progress in governance, infrastructure and environment for the national economy to remain competitive (World Bank, 2003).
The official CDS vision statement for the city of Olongapo, Philippines illustrates how the program’s central emphasis on growth and competitiveness is frequently localized.
Olongapo seeks to be the first full-fledged free port city in the Philippines within the next decade. It must grow into a dynamic entrepot for trade, commerce and tourism. It must be a hub, a warehouse, a marketplace, a transshipment area, a center for the exchange of goods and services and a window of the country directly linked to the world...The reduction of government intervention in trade matters as well as a liberalized economy will be its foundation. Trade incentive packages should be offered within the area to encourage business and services to relocate to the City... (City of Olongapo, 1999).
In this agenda for development, where cities are primarily viewed as ‘locations’ for global business, localized strategies for city competitiveness are implementing globally homogenous urban infrastructure, services and environmental management norms, thus creating a recognizable new urban environmental transition patterns.
As documented by Sassen and her collaborators (Sassen, 2002) this ‘global city’ transitional pattern is characterized by a central business district that receives priority investment for a high standard of environmental infrastructure and services, connected through transportation and communications infrastructure to the global market. These central business hubs are supported by residential quarters and educational and research facilities for professional workers, where public-private partnerships provide a similarly high standard of urban infrastructure and services. Environmental problems (e.g., air quality, flooding) affecting these areas receive priority government attention.
In the metrics of this paradigm, certain urban investments are raised to obligatory, urgent status to secure and position the competitive, global, livable, tourist-friendly city. Hence, in the aforementioned example of Mwanza, Tanzania (where the LA21 process prioritized municipal expansion of water and sanitation services to informal settlements and protection of the local/regional fishery) a simultaneous, parallel World Bank urban infrastructure program allocated its resources instead to improving services in the central business district and to upgrading the regional primary road network to facilitate (largely fisheries-related) trade shipments in and out of the city. Only two per cent of the total project budget was applied to low-cost sanitation facilities (UNDESA, 1998).
Of course, this kind of resource allocation (which in a case like Mwanza ignores the prioritized needs of more than half the local population) leaves large development gaps unfilled. In the expanding urban and commercial districts where informality reigns (often to the benefit of the desired global trade) an entirely different standard for development is applied, requiring its own parallel institutional strategy. Under the new project and its governance model, the hollowed-out state abandons all pretenses of pursuing historic public obligations and of developing the fiscal, legal or administrative capacity to pursue equitable city-wide development. Here also, the transnational private sector, in spite of the promises of foreign direct investment (FDI), shows no interest to invest. The resulting institutional gap is fixed through the local establishment of a quasi-private sector in low-income communities that, to use the jargon of the development community, starts with small ‘upgrading’ activities that, over time, might be ‘brought up to scale’. Here, a variety of private, non-state ‘local initiatives’ are welcomed to fill the gap: self-help programs, service-providing community-based organizations, NGOs, collectives and micro-enterprises. A global infrastructure of best practices recognition is mobilized to celebrate these gap-filling local initiatives, thereby providing anecdotal doses of encouragement as the objective trends of declining access to urban services, declining public health, and declining environmental justice becoming increasingly stark.
In this gap-filling ‘local initiatives’ strategy, NGOs provide a strategic global mechanism to promote and coordinate the new market-based, local collective action sector. The volunteering NGOs thus advance from their traditional roles as chroniclers of base local realities and as advocates for state intervention into the role as alternative to the state, often acting without reference to local state projects, such as LA21. Through this perhaps unwitting alignment with the broader neo-liberal project, the NGO and CBO are engaged, and now celebrated in the official development assistance community, as the primary institution responsible for development of basic services to the poor. Co-opted in this way, the participating NGO retires much of its historic strategic position as coordinator of social movements.
Indeed, as Azevedo (1998) observes, the multiplying community-based initiatives are not generally aligned with social movements, focused on broader public or social claims, but rather are “demand-driven movements” focused on specific private, group claims. “Their goals are therefore negotiable,” writes Azevedo, and are therefore suited to the ‘governance’ paradigm of interest-group negotiation, “as there are no questions of principle at stake…they do not challenge the broader political and social system.”
Azevedo further observes the limitations of the ‘participation’ techniques advanced by this governance paradigm, noting its restricted and “instrumental” nature. “Participation,” he writes, “is restricted to communities that are to benefit directly from a specific project or local programme…”
…Community organizations participate in these programmes for pragmatic reasons, to obtain extra resources from the authorities. Such programmes, which have their virtues…are at best palliative measures, such that their attractions to the low-income population would evaporate if government agencies fulfilled their legal objectives by providing a basic minimum of social services. (p.264) (my italics)
Azevedo’s last observation is just the point. The private interest governance model presumes a government that will fail and that should be dismantled, devolved and de-centred. It moves us away from the compelling question of how we provide services as a public obligation and norm and of how we satisfy the broader public interests of justice, equity and sustainability. It redirects our attention towards the ongoing negotiation of incremental, palliative gains through ‘partnerships’ in which international aid agencies, INGOs and/or transnational companies make time-bound local project investments with the ‘participation’ of the ‘targeted’ poor and their free labour. These partnerships replace commitment to the development of local public institutions capable of long-term investment in and maintenance of public infrastructure and services, not to mention regulation of private practices. Traditional inequalities in North-South relations and associated aid and trade conditionality thus are augmented by a more trenchant reshaping of local social relations as private arrangements multiply and erode public ownership, control, procedures and cultures of choice making.
Thus, in the private interest governance model, stakeholder participation is used as a social process to orchestrate a new concept of ‘inclusiveness’, based not on effective enfranchisement in a functioning state, but on one’s ability to project one’s private claims. By providing a project-based solution to a stakeholder’s immediate private interest, the neo-liberal project is re-legitimated. ‘Local initiatives’ provide a short-term institutional fix by isolating smaller private claims (e.g., for increased household water supply) from abandoned and burgeoning public needs (e.g., for public health). This fix can be described as a hybrid of market-based and collective action models of urban services provision (see McGranahan et al, 2001, pp. 84-111.) But the model builds no local institutional capacity to address broader public interests or to advance a strategic local developmental project—a distinctive local agenda tailored to local specificities. Strategic control often remains with the international partners, which reflexively assert universalizing, global institutional norms, such as ‘cost recovery’, ‘bankability’, ‘soundness’, ‘scalability’, or ‘replicability’. The strategic leadership—INGOs and international agencies—have no direct local legitimacy; that is, they are supra-national and report to inherently non-local boards of directors. To address this problem, the strategic agents depend upon enlistment of the weak, ‘facilitating’ local state and willing national and international municipal associations, which often merely lend their names and logos.
Through this form of ‘governance’ we continue the development tradition of advancing uniform norms of development—and uniform environmental transitions. Diluted are the broader, integrated and non-instrumental public claims, among them equity and sustainability, whose ‘stakeholders’ may have weak or—in the case of future generations or ecosystems—no voice.[7] These are claims that can only be secured by strong, public norms, legitimated through political process, and enforced by strong public institutions.
Conclusions: A Public Interest Movement in Search of an Agenda
LA21 proposed to address the failures of the modern state vis a vis key public interests such equity, justice and sustainability. It did so by promoting strengthened capacities for the local state; more inclusive, accountable and integrated local planning and resource allocation processes; and greater local state capabilities as a strategic agent for development. It envisioned a role for cities not as uniform host locations for corporate headquarters and call centers, but as generators of culturally distinctive development pathways in the tradition of cities like Curitiba and Porto Alegre (Brazil), Bologna (Italy) and Barcelona (Spain). Each of these widely recognized cities illustrate the vision of the Local Agenda: places with distinctive local models of public interest governance, led by strong, interventionist local governments, which oversee the coherent implementation of a distinctive local developmental strategy over a period of decades. But today the LA21 vision and movement often competes with the neo-liberal development project for the commitment of local authorities, and the latter has exponentially greater resources and institutional means to localize its agenda.
The focus of LA21 on planning practice, adaptable in a low-cost fashion to specific places, gave it practical merit that enabled its remarkable spread. Yet the primary shortcoming of LA21 in the face of a neo-liberal political tide may have been its lack of a clearer, more explicitly communicated and advocated governance or political project.
In the early stages of methodological formulation and negotiation of LA21 movement protocols between local, national, regional and global LA21 actors, the Local Agenda itself was left loosely defined. In LA21, the Local Agenda was little more than an ethos and set of planning principles; it rarely produced explicit political proposals. Thus LA21 failed to ally with and support compatible social or political movements. The Local Agenda’s most compelling proposals were left poorly defined: the centrality of local agendas in a period of globalization; the need for a strong local state to advance compelling public interests in a rapidly urbanizing world; and requirement for significant local state reform to make the local state a functional, viable, and strategically capable institution for a new ‘public’ that would include long-excluded majorities and voices.
Lacking a fully explicit political-institutional agenda, LA21 also failed to develop effective institutional strategies. Proposals were made to key development organizations, such as UNDP, to create new finance ‘windows’ for LA21 plan implementation or to better interface with established project cycles, but these were poorly pursued. Key questions, such as how to engage the private sector as agents of local state strategy, were not addressed in the vast majority of LA21 experiments. LA21 developed expertise in environmental and development planning, but remained weak and failed to align with innovations in local finance, such as micro-finance and the development of municipal bond markets. As a result of lack of innovation in the spheres of finance and enterprise models to deliver local strategies, LA21 had no substantial capacity to deliver.
Failing viable delivery mechanisms in a period of market-based opportunity, many cities with active LA21 processes eventually dedicated greater political and institutional resources to alternative private interest governance initiatives, which offered options for finance and private sector engagement. Lacking effective and unified leadership in the wider local government community, with a clear and compelling political and institutional program, most cities saw few alternatives to neo-liberal reform.[8]
However, this competing reform project has largely failed its public promises. Structural adjustment, privatization, FDI and increased trade, de-regulation and voluntary industry codes, and the notion of scaled ‘local initiatives’ together have failed to narrow the gap between poor and affluent, to extend environmental justice or to increase sustainability. The failures of 1990s neo-liberal experiments have created new openings for a Local Agenda. While neo-liberal experiments have re-engineered the urban world, the reforming and recasting of the local state has not been finished. In fact, neo-liberal programs in many countries may have cleared the way for the rebuilding effort, having curtailed historically problematic urban governance and management practices, rooted in colonialism, centralized planning and resource allocation, and legalistic or elitist approaches. Like autopoietic systems, many cities that have simultaneously experimented with LA21, CDS and other private or community action initiatives are creating their own models, which renew or define new functions for the state and public processes.
In a time of renewed calls for state-building, even in the bastions of neo-liberalism (e.g., to address public issues like security), the timing for a Local Agenda may have never been better.
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[1] The author would like to thank Peter Marcotullio, Gordon McGranahan, Laila Smith and Wayne Wescott for their insightful comments this paper.
[2] See the ICLEI Cities for Climate Protection Campaign website www.iclei.org/co2/
[3] The author would like to specifically thank Karen Alebon, Txema Castiella, Sam Chimbuya, Stefan Kuhn, Sean Southey and Wayne Wescott for clarifications about practice in their country or region.
[4] The author was the principal representative for local government in the drafting committees for the Habitat Agenda.
[5] From 1991 to 2000 the author served as a principal technical representative of local government in major United Nations negotiations on urban development and sustainable development, and witnessed increased substitution of ‘local communities’ for the proposed references to ‘local authorities’ as the decade went on.
[6] For more information see www.citiesalliance.org.
[7] Thus the 2nd World Water Forum in 2000 rejected the notion of an individual’s right to a minimum quantity of potable water.
[8] During the 1990s, most international associations of local government were fiscally weak, lacked coherent programs (even on central themes like decentralization), and invested most of their political resources in internecine competition and symbolic positioning. The International Union of Local Authorities (IULA), United Towns Organisation/Cities Unis, and World Association of Major Metropolises had marginal, if any, LA21 involvement. They participated in the major international policy forums of the decade, but provided little if any specific policy proposals to these forums, other than general calls for recognition of local government as an order of government.