Sustainable communities in Europe

Book abstract:

This book examines the effects of one of the success stories from the Rio de Janeiro summit in 1992: the Local Agenda initiative (LA21). LA21 is a strategic programme. It was introduced in order to generate sustainable local communities throughout the European Union and to facilitate a greater sense of understanding between local authorities and citizens, as well as with relevant stakeholders.

The structure of the book is straightforward. Its introduction outlines the information and knowledge goals of the LA21 project as a whole, while incorporating the various conceptual and evaluative frameworks that have arisen in order to describe its development. The contributors then devote a chapter to profiling each individual country. Each contributor, in turn, evaluates how these countries have implemented LA21, along with their distinguishing features and degrees of effectiveness. The conclusions both collate all this information and summarise the most significant perspectives on the issues and problems discussed. In doing so, the book further aims to shed more light on the problem of global-local relations within the European Union.

The book promotes the LA21 movement in Europe. To this end it is written and structured in a manner that enables it to deal with complex but important policies clearly. Consequently, it is aimed at a broad readership.