Local Environment and the UN Sustainable Development Goals

Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability was first published in spring 1996, in the heady post-1992 UN World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) days. After this “Rio Earth Summit”, Local governments in the UK and around the world were literally scrambling to understand the policy and planning implications of Local Agenda 21, and both academics and practitioners realised there was a need to collaborate in new and creative ways, turning theory into practice, and improving/generating theory through practice. Local Environment was born out of this local sustainability mandate from the UN.

In our first Editorial, my co-founder Bob Evans and I wrote:

However much some would wish it otherwise, the environmental debate is as reflective of social and political inequality, and is as fundamentally conflictual as any other, and there is unlikely to be environmental quality, howsoever measured, without a much greater degree of social equality. This applies both within and between nations, and globally.

In this we were signalling what we called at the time The New Environmental Agenda – the niche that Local Environment would always occupy: an exploration of the inextricable policy and planning linkages between the simultaneous achievement of environmental quality and human/social equality, or more broadly, between what was then largely environmentally oriented sustainability agenda, and the political project of environmental justice. Our framing of this nexus between the two concepts and their respective social movements developed into the increasingly influential policy and planning goal of just sustainabilities:

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.

To achieve the fullest potential of just sustainabilities, four conditions need to be met, not individually, but simultaneously:

1. Improving people’s quality of life and wellbeing;

2. Meeting the needs of both present and future generations (intra- and intergenerational equity);

3. Ensuring justice and equity in terms of recognition, process, procedure and outcome;

4. Recognising ecosystem limits and the need to live within them.

In September 2015, the United Nations Assembly formally adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), superseding the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), to be implemented by 2030. In October 2016, the UN HABITAT III Conference in Quito launched the New Urban Agenda (NUA) which seeks to inform urban policy and practice in the context of global sustainability and resilience. While national governments were responsible for developing and negotiating the NUA objectives, city and local governments will play a focal role in leading their coordination, management implementation.

Both the SDGs and NUA are reflective of, and build on, the four conditions of just sustainabilities, and are therefore central to the mission of Local Environment. Of the 17 SDGs, all fit the concept of just sustainabilities in that they acknowledge the links between environmental quality and human equality; that stopping poverty must be linked with strategies to improve gender equality, people’s health and education, to reduce inequality, and encourage economic growth – at the same time tackling climate change and working to preserve our natural capital.

But if there were one SDG that could be seen as the “home” of Local Environment, it would be the “urban goal”, SDG 11 which hailed the NUA. It requires that we “make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”. Clearly, urban policy and planning is critical to the urban goal. It defines an explicitly urban planning target, 11.3: “By 2030, enhance inclusive and sustainable urbanisation and capacity for participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management in all countries”.

Since the early days, Local Environment has maintained its focus, preceding both the SDGs and the NUA. In our Aims and Scope:

Our focus is specifically on sustainability planning, policy and politics in relation to theoretical, conceptual and empirical studies at the nexus of equity, justice and the local environment. It is an inclusive forum for diverse constituencies and perspectives to engage in a critical examination, evaluation and discussion of the environmental, social and economic policies, processes and strategies which will be needed in movement towards social justice and sustainability – “Just Sustainabilities” – at local, regional, national and global scales.

Consequently, the scholarship we have published over the past 24 years, and will continue to publish, is pivotal to tackling the all of the SDGs whilst also shaping the developing NUA.