ABSTRACT

The World Wide Fund for Nature UK’s education department comprises seven specialist units covering formal and non-formal education. This chapter is written from the perspective of the community and governance unit, that since the Rio Earth Summit has concentrated much of its energy on supporting the key audiences within Local Agenda 21. At the time of writing this chapter WWF UK has produced more than 20 LA21 resources and training programmes. This chapter is a commentary on, and an overview of some of the issues regarding the processes within LA21 and the people who have driven it during its evolution since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, particularly in relation to WWF UK’s own experience. It attempts to describe how the Agenda is moving from purely green to one that is increasingly demonstrating the interrelationship between the environmental, social and economic elements of sustainable development. It provides a broad-stroke approach to the political dynamics and some of the difficulties of overcoming the inertia of the status quo. There is no pretence that the story of LA21 so far, is a smooth and logical step-bystep progression it is throwing up too many challenges for that. In the examples of work used as illustrations there is real optimism about our ability to do things better, particularly in the way communities are addressing some new and some familiar concerns about their local quality of life issues. But also, there is real anxiety in our awareness that LA21/ Agenda 21 is not the only world wide agenda. The Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) for example, if finally implemented in anything like its early drafts, poses a major potential threat to all that LA21 will have achieved by local authorities and communities. The between-the-lines question in this chapter asks if we have yet been made strong enough

by the LA21 process to stand up to the negative and retrogressive forces that continue to perpetuate our present unsustainable state. Just as different levels of governance, community and business are beginning a new dialogue for sustainability, those who represent the advantaged and the status quo are wielding massive economic power, through MAI, to protect their position. The question has to remain only partly answered in this chapter because we are dealing with complex, long-term and real-life issues that to a great extent locate us at the crossroads in a journey which will determine whether the world turns towards or away from sustainability.