Item UOW/11/CFSD/3 - What's in a name? Local Agenda 21, Community Planning and Neighbourhood Renewal

What's in a name? Local Agenda 21, Community Planning and Neighbourhood Renewal, Karen Lucas, Andrew Ross and Sara Fuller (London: CfSD, University of Westminster/Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2003). Full report

This study, commissioned by the JRF under their Reconciling Environmental and Social Concerns programme, evaluates the effectiveness of LA21 strategies developed by local authorities in terms of their ability to contribute to the economic, environmental and social well-being of the communities they serve. The report qualitatively evaluates whether LA21 is in some way unique as a policy tool for implementing sustainable development and if the move towards Community Strategies thus enhances or undermines sustainable policy delivery. To this end, it presents the experiences of local authority officers, their external partners, frontline workers and local communities who have been involved in the development and delivery of LA21 programmes in over the last ten years and their counterparts in community planning. Its focuses on their perceptions of the processes that have led to successful community engagement on sustainable development issues and policy implementation and the barriers to such success in the context of eight deprived and disadvantaged neighbourhoods.