ABSTRACT
The choice of Leicester as Britain's first Environment City (EC) was not an accident. It was the natural conclusion of a process that appears to have begun in the late 1980s and revolved around the work of the Leicester City Wildlife Project, subsequently to become the Leicester Ecology Trust. Key operational concepts are 'partnership', 'policy integration' and 'target-setting', alongside the more nebulous notions of 'inter-and intra-generational equity'. Leicester's campaign for designation in 1990 was unique in that it was not required to bid competitively against rival cities, unlike the three subsequent designated Ees. One area where the Royal Society for Nature Conservation was prescriptive from the outset was with regard to the formal structure of the EC campaign, which at local level was to be built around Specialist Working Groups and an Executive Forum. Measured against the broad aims established for leicester, the city's response to the experiment appears to have been largely positive.
