Local Environment @ 20

Twenty years ago in Volume 1, No 1 of Local Environment, my then co-editor Bob Evans and I wrote our opening Editorial “From Global to Local”. In it we reflected on the post – Rio Earth Summit and the “new environmental agenda of linked social, economic and environmental issues”. We used that phrase because at that time because, certainly in the UK where we were based, it was easier to morph the (old) environmental agenda into a “new” environmental agenda of sustainability, than it was to create a whole new agenda around sustainability. The vehicle for this change was Local Agenda 21 (LA21), and it was willingly taken up by UK local authorities hungry for a new role after the kicking they had received under successive Thatcher governments. Why, because in LA21, local government had a new role:

Local authorities construct, operate and maintain economic, social and environmental infrastructure, oversee planning processes, establish local environmental policies and regulations, and assist in implementing national and subnational environmental policies. As the level of governance closest to the people, they play a vital role in educating, mobilizing and responding to the public to promote sustainable development. (United Nations Environment Programme Chapter 28, 28.1)

Pushed globally by the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), now ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability, and in the UK by the then Local Government Management Board, our emerging journal aimed to “play a major part in helping to develop and evaluate local environmental and sustainability policies, politics, practices and action”.

In Volume 12, 2007, we changed the name of the journal to Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability reflecting the growing significance of what we called “just sustainabilities”:

Sustainability cannot be simply a “green”, or “environmental” concern, important though “environmental” aspects of sustainability are. A truly sustainable society is one where wider questions of social needs and welfare, and economic opportunity are integrally related to environmental limits imposed by supporting ecosystems. (Agyeman et al. 2002, p. 78)

Integrating social needs and welfare offers us a more “just”, rounded, equity-focused definition of sustainability and sustainable development than that of the 1998 Brundtland Report, while not negating the very real environmental threats. “Just sustainabilities” we defined as:

The need to ensure a better quality of life for all, now and into the future, in a just and equitable manner, whilst living within the limits of supporting ecosystems. (Agyeman et al. 2003, p. 5)

This renaming reflected our increasing conviction as an Editorial Board that, in a world of increasing inequality, issues of social justice and equity were becoming the defining challenges to local (and global) sustainability.

I would like to thank first my former co-editor Bob Evans for his dedication and service to the journal, the past and current Editorial Boards especially current Associate Editors Stewart Barr, Rob Krueger and Michelle Thompson-Fawcett and Editorial Assistant Michele Dupuis. Finally, thanks to the Editorial, Marketing and Production teams past and present at Taylor & Francis and all the authors and reviewers who have made the journal what it is today.

As we enter the next 20 years of Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability, I hope that we can continue our tradition of producing critical writings by and for academics and practitioners with the central purpose of developing an understanding of and developing approaches to just sustainabilities based both on critical research and practical experience.