Contribution of Local Agenda 21 to Practical Implementation of Sustainable Development: The Case of the Czech Republic

Abstract

Local Agenda 21 (LA21), a voluntary tool for implementing sustainable development (SD) in local level, is one way of implementing sustainability principles in practice. Twenty years after the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development Conference in Rio de Janeiro, which made the first reference of LA21 (intended as a framework for the twenty-first century respecting SD principles), this article deals with evaluating the real contribution of this initiative to the implementation of SD in practice on the example of selected municipalities in the Czech Republic. This contribution is examined by a comparative analysis of the indices of change in selected indicators (three to four indicators for each pillar of SD) for municipalities involved in the LA21 initiative in comparison with reference municipalities, which have not been involved in LA21 so far. The analysis results indicate that different trends in some of the indicators can be observed in municipalities implementing LA21 and in the others. This applies, in particular, to the environmental indicators (such as the degree of waste separation, indicating in part the degree of environmental awareness), but also to some of the economic ones (municipal capital expenditures indicating investment activity).

Acknowledgements

This article is the result of research findings funded by a financial grant project GACR 402/09/0248, “Theoretical Analysis of Dependencies between Environmental Policy, Regional Policy and Regional Planning”, supported by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic and project GACR P404/11/1962, Mechanisms of the selective development of peripheries in Czechia and Austria during the post-industrial period, supported by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic and EU project title: GILDED SSH7-CT-2008–225383.

Notes

1. LA21 is anchored in Article 28 of Agenda 21, stating that “by 1996, most local authorities in each country should have undertaken a consultative process with their populations and achieved a consensus on ‘a local Agenda 21’ for the community” (UN, 1994, p. 233).

2. Another definition of LA21 is made by Lafferty (2001, p. 65), who says that LA21 “is a strategic program, plan, or policy that has emerged from a consultative process initiative by local authorities with both local citizens and representatives of relevant local stakeholders, with a particular interest in involving women and youth.”

3. There was no municipality in Category A at the time of writing.

4. According to CSO (2010) data, stable landscape-forming features include hop fields, gardens, orchards, permanent grassland, woodland and water bodies. In contrast, unstable landscape-forming features include arable land, built-up areas and other anthropogenized areas. At this point, however, it is worth noting that Michal (1994) includes hop fields among unstable landscape-forming features, which is in contradiction to the CSO definition of the ecological stability coefficient.

5. Other entities, such as NGOs, can be involved in the LA21 process as well.