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SD Strategies

Researching innovation practices for coordinated action

Fifteen years ago, Agenda 21, the United Nations' call to action for sustainable development, envisaged that the necessary harmonization and extension of existing policies and plans would occur through the adoption of an identifiable strategy for sustainable development. Rather than develop a new strategy document, the overall objective was "to improve or restructure the decision-making process so that consideration of socio-economic and environmental issues is fully integrated and a broader range of public participation assured (paragraph 8.3, Agenda 21 – UNCED 1992)."^[1]

A sustainable development strategy is not simply a document. It's a continuing and adaptive process of strategic and co-ordinated action (Figure 1). It has been described as:

• "developing an underlying vision through consensual, effective and iterative process; and going on to set objectives, identify the means of achieving them, and then monitor the achievement as a guide to the next round of this learning process."^[2]
• "sets of coordinated mechanisms and continuing processes of monitoring, learning and improvement." ^[3]
• a shifting pattern of governance away from "grand planning schemes to adaptive strategy processes, from authorities to competencies, from pure hierarchies to a combination of hierarchies and networks, from control to monitoring, evaluation and feedback, and from knowing to learning." ^[4]

IISD continues to research and communicate innovative practices in sustainable development strategies to government practitioners around the world. Two such studies are:

Contents

• National Strategies for Sustainable Development
  In this international and collaborative research project, strategic and co-ordinated action toward SD taken at the national level in 19 countries—before and after WSSD—was researched.

• Governance Structures for National Sustainable Development Strategies
  IISD was commissioned by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2006 to study approximately 20 countries to identify good practice examples of governance structures for the National Sustainable Development Strategy and to study their effectiveness.

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