From environmental plans to sustainable development strategies

Abstract

IN AUTUMN 1983, THE UN GENERAL ASSEMBLY ASKED THE UN GENERAL SECRETARY TO ESTABLISH a Commission to develop 'a global agenda for change', or more precisely 'long-term environmental strategies' that take into account the interrelationships between people, resources, environment and development on a global scale (WCED, 1987, ix). A few weeks later, General Secretary de Cuellar won the Norwegian politician Gro Harlem Brundtland as chair of the Commission on Environment and Development. The commission of 22 experts started working in October 1984. After two and a half years of debate and public hearings around the world, it published Our Common Future (WCED, 1987), essentially the first global sustainable development (SD) programme or strategy in a broader sense that explored the future of both the 'what?' and the 'how?' of policy making.In the 20 years since this defining event, the SD concept became a more moderate and mainstream reform agenda that aims in particular at better integrating economic, social and environmental policies at all government levels. Since this integrative objective is not well attuned with the sectoral structure and the functioning of governments, the SD agenda did trigger several innovative governance arrangements (such as inter-ministerial committees) as well as new policy and assessment tools (such as green budgeting and SD indicator sets), many of which are (supposedly) held together and orchestrated by comprehensive governmental SD strategies. This special issue takes stock of this development. With two general papers and three country studies on Germany, Norway and the UK, the special issue explores to what degree SD strategies at the national level have become the centre-tool of SD policy making in Europe. It describes some key characteristics, strengths and weaknesses of selected national SD strategies, and it explores the possibilities and limitations of reflexive governance and strategic management in the public sector. This stocktaking gives a preliminary idea of how effective SD strategies are in reshaping policies, and how their performance could be improved. Let us now briefly chart the way from the Brundtland Report, via sectoral environmental plans, to cross-sectoral SD strategies. The editorial then introduces the five contributions of this special issue, and it lays out the analytical framework used in the three country studies.

Renewable Energy in the Context of Sustainable Development

“…The concerns were reinforced in the goals of Agenda 21 (UNCED, 1992), aiming at the adoption of strategies to harmonize these different sectoral processes (Steurer and Martinuzzi, 2007). In the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation adopted at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002, governments were called upon with a sense of urgency to substantially increase the global share of RE and to take immediate steps towards national strategies for SD by (UN, 2002.…”

From “Sustainable Development” to a Governmentalization of Change? Translations and Implications of an Institutional Concern in France and the European Union

“…These strategies, which are consequently analyzable as technologies of government, are a way to develop the environmental plans that the states had deployed in the 1990s (Steurer and Martinuzzi 2007b). They express a holistic ambition for all the processes of policy development.…”

“…These commitments, renewed during the 19th extraordinary session of the UN General Assembly in June 1997 (“Rio+5”) were brought up again in Johannesburg in 2002 in the “Plan of Implementation of the World Summit on Sustainable Development,” which encouraged the implementation of these national strategies by 2005. These renewals of commitments have contributed to accelerating the process in European countries (Steurer and Martinuzzi 2007b), similarly to the diffusion of other innovations in the repertoire of instruments of environmental policy (Busch and Jörgens 2005:particularly 868-72).…”

Objectives and Indicators in Sustainable Development Strategies: Similarities and Variances across Europe

“…Key drivers behind the development of SD strategies in Europe were a chain of international events and EU commitments: the 1992 Rio World Summit, the 2001 Gothenburg European Council, the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit, and finally the 2006 EU SD Strategy (Quental et al , 2009; Steurer et al , 2010; Steurer and Martinuzzi, 2007). The idea of cross‐sectoral SD strategies emerged for the first time at the Rio World Summit in 1992 (UN, 1992).…”