ABSTRACT
The President’s Council on Sustainable Development (PCSD) has recently presented to the President a national sustainable development action strategy, Sustainable America: A New Consensus for Prosperity, Opportunity, and a Healthy Environment for the Future (PCSD, 1996). This report recommends innovative changes in the nation’s regulatory, policy and community decision-making processes — for both institutions and individuals — in order to achieve the complementary goals of economic prosperity, environmental protection and greater social equity. The work of the PCSD has been the only national-level strategy process, and PCSD staff interviewed talked of its work as ‘multi-stakeholder’. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is working on an ‘Environmental Goals Project’, initiated in 1992 (see section below on focus), which also involves a public participation process. Various state and city strategies for sustainable development have been developed (for example, Minnesota, Detroit, Seattle, Chicago, Chattanooga). Many of these have been catalogued by the Centre for Policy Alternatives (Nguyen and Roberts, 1994).
