OUTSIDE WORLD - CUDC Quarterly 3:3/4 - Winter 2004

Local Agenda 21
A Process for Sustainable Development in a German Town
by Anja Starick, Dresden University of Technology

Sustainability was established as a new principle in forestry at the end of the 18th century, with the basic idea that no more timber should be taken out of a forest than is grown anew in the same time. In the second half of the 20th century, sustainable development became a general concern of society, as it became obvious that (natural) resources would become scarce due to social and economic development.

A discourse that took place worldwide led to a shared understanding of what sustainability should mean. For a society that is stable, viable and capable of development in the long run, all fields of social activity need to be harmonized, with private interests taken into account in the formation of policy. Since a society is primarily formed by social, economic and ecological components and the interaction between them, the basic idea of sustainability has found its expression in the sustainability triangle (below). Side by side stands the pursuit of justice: future generations should have the same opportunities to shape their lives as people do now (justice between generations), and each person should have an equal chance to shape his individual life (justice within one generation). To achieve these goals, it is critical that technical knowledge is combined with the participation of individuals and social groups.

The vision of sustainable development is fixed in the Rio Declaration and Agenda 21. Both documents were signed by 178 states at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

Whereas the Rio Declaration focuses on general principles, Agenda 21 points out different actions to be undertaken to implement the vision of sustainable development.

Chapter 28 of Agenda 21stresses the importance of local activities for sustainable development and calls on local authorities to undertake a Local Agenda 21 (LA 21) process. This requires entering into a dialogue with citizens, local organizations and private enterprises to achieve a consensus on an LA 21 Program.

LA 21 in Germany – LA 21 is among the most intensive activities that have followed up the UNCED (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development). However, the intensity of activity varies from country to country. The leaders in Europe are Britain and the Scandinavian nations, where nearly all municipalities have undergone an LA 21 Process. Reasons for this can be found in the planning system and culture in those countries, including an established level of citizen participation in decision making.

While many German municipalities have started an LA 21 Process, there has been a difference in the acceptance of participatory processes between the eastern and western German Bundesländer (states), with substantially less activity in the east.

In order to promote LA 21 in the eastern Bundesland of Saxony, a pilot project was set up in 1999. As there are no hard rules as to how an LA 21 process is to be organized, the main aim was to show how LA 21 could work under the specific circumstances of a small eastern German municipality, how it can become an integral part of local politics and development planning, and what results can be achieved. As part of this pilot project, our team from the landscape architecture program of Technische Uiversität Dresden worked with the residents and local administrators of the town of Bannewitz.

If you read German, you can learn
more about Bannewitz at www.banewitz.de

Building public participation – For a German municipality, LA 21 first and foremost means establishing public participation. German municipalities are based mainly on representative forms of democracy. Elements of direct democracy are rare, and so is direct public involvement in decision making. As officials and parliamentarians are suspicious of all the locals coming and wanting to have a say in local politics – which they suppose to be their domain – the main task of the planning process is to induce public participation. Except for a few established stakeholders, it is often rather difficult to involve the broad public. Currently, LA 21 processes that gain an involvement of 1-3 percent of the residents over a period of several months are seen as being pretty successful.

A number of methods have been developed to encourage public involvement in planning and decision making for particular occasions, such as participatory studios and planning cells. These can be part of an LA 21 process. However, the process is unlikely to work if it doesn’t create a framework that allows public participation over a longer period of time. It should be structured to provide continuity, but be flexible enough to adapt to the local situation. It has to respect existing bodies (such as local parliament and administration) and initiatives (such as local associations and organizations) and should be based upon them. There is no transferable standard, but there are a few elements that have been used consistently in many German LA 21 processes:

• Topic groups that deal with a sub-area of the all-embracing vision of sustainable development. Within the sub-area, participants learn about the local demands in that field, develop aims and draft projects to be undertaken.
• Project groups that develop specific projects, draft steps for project realization and carry them out.
• Action groups that contribute by giving a helping hand in project realization or carrying out campaigns.

Combinations of these types are common and have proved to be successful. Without concrete project work, it is hard to gain interest in and understanding for general issues and debates. Without aims that deliver an overall vision, project activities tend to be less effective and appear to be less justified. The lack of one part or the other can be a main reason for an LA 21 process dying out. A number of organizational models can be used to coordinate between groups developing general goals and specific projects.

• Forums or roundtables are usually the committees where work is coordinated: between the different working groups, but also with the work of administration and local parliament.
• A plenum is either a meeting of all the people that participate in one way or another in an LA 21 process to share experiences, or a meeting for all residents to present results, find new ideas and win support for them.

It is advantageous to have an external moderator accompanying the process, especially in the beginning. It’s also crucial to have an LA 21 office as part of, or with close connection to, the local administration. This office serves as a point of contact for everyone, and organizes and coordinates process activities.

Which elements a process uses and how the selected elements are organized differs from case to case. Even if a frame for public participation is never put into practice exactly the way it is drafted, the process of drafting and revising that frame can be a determining factor in bringing public participation into being and in keeping it alive. The diagram below shows one of the drafts made for Bannewitz.

The organizational framework should attach great value to linking the activities of residents with the work of local authorities. In Germany, LA 21 has often been promoted by non-governmental organizations, especially by social and ecological groups, and local authorities have ignored these efforts. As a result, LA 21 has obtained the image of a new civil rights movement. We, however, not only think it would be wrong to relieve local authorities from their obligations, but also that much more can be achieved for sustainable development if LA 21 becomes integral to formal as well as informal activities in a municipality. Local authorities should come to see LA 21 as their chance for anticipatory and comprehensive planning and action in their domain.

Implementing a program – To allow local authorities to deal with the complex technical problems of LA 21, even in small communities where expertise is limited, we developed an LA 21 Program for Bannewitz. At that time, only one such program existed in eastern Germany, so we could feel free to set an example. Along with the general aims set out in LA 21, we developed several specific aims:

• to become the local strategy and at the same time the action program towards sustainable development,
• to integrate and coordinate public participation and local planning,
• to feed back into regional and national politics.

We also tried to respond to the main institutional barriers to implementation of LA 21 in German municipalities. These are: 1) a highly differentiated planning system, with a variety of planning instruments more or less strictly assigned to departments, and 2) a lack of local autonomy, with a variety of tasks that are important for sustainable development decided on by regional or national authorities.

Framing the discussion – Not all topics that are important for sustainable development can be discussed at the same time, and not everything can be done simultaneously. Also, in order to encourage public participation, the topics of uppermost concern to residents need to be dealt with first. However, it can be rather difficult to get a broad local public to agree on a couple of topics that might be more important than others for the rather abstract matter of sustainable development.

We developed a frame of contents to define a convincing initial set of topics and to show how every small activity can contribute to the overall vision of sustainable development. Drawing on programs for sustainable development at the global, national and regional level, and on successful LA 21 processes in municipalities comparable with Bannewitz, 55 "local political action fields" were determined. They were given priorities and put into a hierarchy.

The graphic above is an extract of the frame of contents. The general set of action fields (column 1) is used to categorize the specific topics that people in Bannewitz most frequently mentioned as priorities. The result is five action fields (and subfields):

• Public Participation: Children and Youths, Associations
• Culture: Identity, Local History and Traditions, Rural Life and Culture
• Land Use: Land Use Planning and Building
• Recreation and Tourism
• Cultural Landscape and Homeland: Landscape and Settlement Scenery, Conservation and Management of Monuments

Column 3 of the frame of contents assigns all the plans that already exist and all the planning instruments available to the corresponding action fields. This gives a starting point for the discussion of what is to be done and what means can be used in each action field.

Existing plans and programs all need to undergo a sustainability check, examining whether or not their aims support each other and the general vision of sustainable development, respectively. Within the action fields chosen for discussion at a specific point of time, existing plans and programs are to be publicly evaluated and enhanced in detail. Often available planning instruments can be taken as a starting point for structuring discussion that goes beyond existing plans and programs and for achieving new outcomes. However, planning instruments do not exist for all action fields. Nor are they always appropriate for broad public discussion. Gaps in the planning system are particularly obvious in the social and economic fields. In these cases a new structure that can be refined over time can be used instead. We drafted and tested one for the "Recreation and Tourism" action field consisting of:

• Preamble: relation to regional and national plans and programs, global dimension
• Legal frame and administrative setting
• Recent state, importance for a sustainable development
• Aims and ways, program links
• Problems-conflicts-barriers, open questions, hints for regional and national planning levels
• Monitoring literature

Though the program is about comprehensive and integrated development planning, action fields are first dealt with separately to get a grip on the complex task and to allow a step-by-step approach necessary for public participation. Descriptions and mental maps show possible positive and negative interactions with other action fields (below).

The key elements of this structure are the "Aims and Ways" and and a clearly defined "Action Program", which lists the projects and initiatives to be undertaken and points out the instruments required to achieve them.

To define this program, we preferrred a cooperative approach. It breaks a project down into small units that planners, residents and representatives of the local authorities work on together in workshop sessions. The main contribution of locals comes in the workshops, with the main contribution of the planners being between them. Again, this structure was tested for the "recreation and tourism" action field in a process that developed a concept for walking, hiking, cycling and bridle trails.

As the workshops progressed, each idea for the action program was recorded in a "box of ideas". No idea would be lost, and there would always be a pool of ideas to choose from.

Both the "Aims and Ways" and the "Action Program" form an integral whole from a planning point of view. In order to facilitate the participatory process, however, they are kept separate. Tables and mental maps are used to show how they are linked.

Results – Though specific project results for Bannewtiz are not transferable, the organizational principles for public participation and the draft structure for an LA 21 Program can be a basis for LA 21 processes in other municipalities, at least throughout the eastern part of Germany. They are not only theoretically grounded, but also practically optimized. This theoretical and practical basis can help raise the awareness and understanding of the residents, both of LA 21 and of the potential of their own communities.

For all participants, it was very satisfying to see one action field discussed and one planning process finished. Even more, as residents started to see what could be done, they started to take the process in their own hands. The concept for trails is now being realized. A project for enhancing the area’s scenery has been begun, using the cooperative planning approach. A social and cultural network has been established around a local monument, Schloss Noethnitz. New drafts have been made for reusing the architectural artifacts of hard coal mining in an area called Mariensacht.

Not only residents, but also representatives of local parliament and administration could see that their role within the community is not undermined but strengthened. Thus they have accepted the participatory process and its requirements, such as the need for an LA 21 appointee.

For the team from TU Dresden, the Bannewitz project has shown that public participation does not make planners redundant, but it does require a new approach to planning. Among other things this calls for a broader spectrum of skills, including participatory planning methods. Planning will certainly not be easier – but perhaps more appropriate, successful...and interesting. 

Anja Starick was in residency at Kent State during the Fall of 2003 as part of the continuing series of exchanges between Kent State and Technische Universität Dresden. She is completing her graduate work in landscape architecture under Professor G. Hahn-Herse, with a particular emphasis on sustainable development and cultural landscape planning.