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<The Councillor as Guardian of the Environment>

An Essay and Workshop for Local Elected Leaders on Environmental Governance
with Emphasis on Adopting Environmentally Sound Technologies (ESTs)
- Training for Elected Leadership -

Part I - Essay on the Councillor as Guardian of the Environment
- ESSAY -
Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does
to the web he does to himself. Chief Seattle, Native American Leader, 1857.

Definition and Summary

D. Tactics, Strategies and Approaches for Sustainable Development

6. ACHIEVING AND SUSTAINING RESULTS

Achieving and sustaining local results, in the global competition between economic development and protecting the environment, will never be easy. The political necessities of meeting present day demands are often too strong to worry about the future. And yet, your elected leadership role also carries expectations of a longer term view and concern. While the case studies we have presented describe some successes as well as failures of local government efforts to fuse economic development and environmentally sound practices into a viable strategy, they should not be taken as prescriptions of how or how not to address sustainable development challenges in your community.

Achieving and sustaining results will depend in large measure on the ability of your council and staff to involve others in setting the agenda (determining the environmental risks to be addressed in what order of priority) and finding solutions that are unique to your communities needs and resources. It will also test your tolerance for ambiguity and change. What is sustainable development in today's terms may not be sustainable in the future. Rapid changes in demographics, life styles, and technologies, as well as natural disasters over which your council has little control, can rewrite the book on sustainability as a criteria for development.

The toolbox we have provided, thus far in our discussion, should work on any size, shape, type and model of economic development?environmental challenge. But, don't be deceived into thinking a major tune-up of your community's sustainable development strategies and programmes will endure for long. For example, comprehensive environmental audits, because they are so time and energy consuming, are often seen as one-time ventures. Consequently, they become a static snapshot of environmental healthiness at that point in time, not an evolving video tape that records on-going progress in all critical areas of environmental concern. It is better to conduct environmental audits that are more modest in scope and assure on-going conducts of inquiry and action, than to create archival documents of historic value.

But, this discussion is about those councillor tasks that follow visioning, coalition building, risk and technology assessment, response planning and resource mobilization. Specifically, how to achieve environmental results and sustain them, using the tools of implementation, and strategies for monitoring and evaluating results and consequences. First, let's look at the councillor role regarding implementation within the context of guarding the environment.

While implementation is largely a management and staff responsibility, the quality of the implementation process will depend, in large measure, on council's guidance (policy directives) and the acquisition of necessary resources. We have already discussed how the act of acquiring resources to achieve sustainable development and environmental protection is different from the more traditional elected role of allocating budget funds. Acquiring resources assumes an extra-budgetary process of garnering resources from and through a variety of mechanisms (e.g., sharing costs across organizational and political boundaries; bartering scarce resources for mutual gain; providing tradeoff opportunities with private corporations and community groups to achieve long term environmental goals).

An example of the latter is a scheme of credits to industries that exceed pollution standards which they can barter or sell to firms that are not yet in compliance. While the scheme at first blanche seems counterproductive to goal achievement, it is an incentive for individual organizations to raise their standards and to pass the cost on to others who are not yet in full compliance. The more difficult sustainable development and environmental visions can only be realized through incremental actions and sustained commitment. Updating the old adage that Rome wasn't built in a day, it took a quarter of a century to bring the Rhine River back from its near death experience.

The councillor role in implementing policies and programs is always problematic, given the conventional wisdom surrounding the policy-administration dichotomy. That's why we have dubbed this section the fine art of supporting implementation. But, the role of managers in the implementation process becomes increasingly ambiguous (fuzzy) when responsibilities for broad community mandates, like sustainable development, are shared across political and organizational boundaries. John Bryson and Barbara Crosby have given considerable thought to the dilemma of "tackling public problems in a shared-power world." In fact, it's the sub-title of their book Leadership for the Common Good. As they remind us,

"New policies, plans, programs, or projects do not implement themselves automatically, nor necessarily as their authors intended. Instead, implementation, or the operationalization of change, typically is a complex and messy process involving many actors and organizations that have a host of complementary, competing, and often contradictory goals and interests."²⁴

Bryson and Crosby also offer some guidelines for councillors to consider in the performance of their leadership role in the complex and often ambiguous arena of implementation.

1. Think strategically about implementation. This strategic approach to implementation involves a pattern of policies, plans, programs, actions, decisions and resource mobilization that defines the framework within which implementation will take place from the perspective of all affected stakeholders. Reconciling differences and reaching consensus on issues of mutual concern and interest is important and builds essential bridges between thinking strategically and acting strategically.
2. Have the appropriate public officials, and other key stakeholders with implementing responsibilities, develop action plans. These plans should detail the tasks to be performed, identify individuals and parties who are responsible for specific tasks, spell out deadlines and time frames, and define resource requirements.
3. Encourage and support changes that can be made easily and rapidly. Nothing fosters confidence, and builds on success, like success. Or, dashes hope and enthusiasm like bureaucratic malaise and other unnecessary implementation barriers.
4. Build into the proposed change the necessary resources to insure success. And, this means redundancy of resources in those places important to program implementation. We have all heard horror stories about multi-million dollar waste water plants and similar facilities becoming inoperative for lack of simple replacement parts. Less than a month after the Prime Minister of one South Asian country dedicated a new water treatment plant, it ceased operation when the local technicians couldn't repair a malfunction. In this case, orientation and operation training had been overlooked in the startup costs and operating budget. Employee training is a cost of business, not a fringe benefit.
5. Develop and maintain a coalition of implementers, advocates, and interest groups. We have discussed the importance of partners and coalitions earlier but worry that the process may be seen as necessary only in the visioning, assessment and policy making arenas (processes that are sometimes seen as the responsibility of elected officials, community leaders, business executives and environmental advocates). Those who are charged with implementing responsibilities also need to think and be encouraged to act within the broader framework of partnerships and coalitions.
6. Ensure that the policies, administrative orders and other top-down directives facilitate rather than impede the implementation of environmental efforts. It is not unusual for higher levels of government to legislate solutions that are sometimes unworkable at the local level. And, local councils have also been known to adopt policies and encourage administrative orders that challenge the ingenuity of managers to implement. Effective policy implementation begins with an open and collaborative dialogue among those who make policy, those the policy will affect directly, and those who will have the responsibility for implementing the new directive.
7. Exercise patience and persistence. Sustainable development and environmental protection and problem solving activities are often long term ventures with minimal evidence of immediate gain. This puts a strain on the political process, particularly at election time. The more open and widespread the "ownership" of environmental policies and programs are within the larger community, the easier it is maintain the implementation momentum.

Achieving the results of environmental programs and directives will depend on an implementation strategy and resource base that are congruent with the challenge. The ability to sustain the results can be strengthened when there are procedures and processes in place to monitor and evaluate on-going implementation. We will only look briefly at these important councillor tasks because they are described in much more detail in the Councillor as an Overseer handbook which is an integral part of this UNCHS Series for Elected Leadership Training.

The fundamental questions to be asked in monitoring and evaluating all local government projects and programmes are:

1. Are we doing what was decided should be done? (issues of implementation based on action plans developed by implementing agencies and organizations and approved by authorizing bodies.).
2. Are we achieving the intended goals and objectives? (based on the results we had hoped to accomplish).
3. Does the programme, policy, service, project still make sense, given new events, demands, technology, etc.? (does it meet our expectations of sustainability?)

These questions become very difficult to answer when the implementation of complex development and environmental endeavors span the entire range of community engagement. And this broad gage involvement (many partners, coalitions and stakeholders) should be the case when undertaking and carrying out comprehensive development and environmental protection efforts designed to achieve results that are sustainable over time. Because the monitoring and evaluation process is so important, it should not be vested in some obscure corner of the municipal auditor's office. These are responsibilities that need to be built into the environmental risk and environmental technology assessment stages of diagnosis and to each component of implementation.

Monitoring is a process of what the specialists call formative evaluation. It identifies glitches and hiccups in the implementation stage so they can be fixed as they are discovered. It is also a navigational devise to keep projects and programmes on track. Which means it is tied directly to the goals and objectives your council wants to achieve. Perhaps you recall Murphy's Law. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. It is hardly reassuring to remember that Murphy was not only considered to be a wise sage about managerial matters, but also an optimist. Monitoring is an on-going management responsibility and needs to be budgeted and built into the cost of implementation.

Successful implementation also includes something called summative evaluation which answers the questions concerned with: Were the policy and programme goals achieved as intended, and how successfully were they achieved? In the context of this discussion, did your efforts result in a cleaner and more livable environment and can those accomplishments be sustained over time?

For the final time in this discussion of your role as Guardian of the Environment, we suggest you pause for a moment and reflect on the challenges of achieving and sustaining success in this role.

Think of a policy or programme that you as a councillor supported, or better yet, championed, and yet were disappointed in the final results. Record what you believe caused the gap between your expectations and the reality of implementation?
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________

What do you believe could have been done differently to have achieved the anticipated success of the policy or programme?
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________

As we near the end of this discussion, we want to share a story of success from the ranks of local elected leadership. It is one that many of you have probably heard before but it bears repeating and reflecting upon as you fulfill your role as Guardian of the environment. It is the success that citizens of Curitiba, Brazil have experienced under the leadership of former Mayor Jaime Lerner, his elected colleagues and a team of dedicated professionals. They rewrote the book on how to solve seemingly intractable urban problems. They consistently thought and acted outside the boundaries of conventional wisdom in their search for practical solutions. They believed in the values, strategies and possibilities of sustainable development?and made it happen!

How do you spell sustainable development? C-U-R-I-T-I-B-A

• Your role as Guardian of the Environment is supporting development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Your responsibilities within this role transcend physical and time boundaries. Your decisions can affect the lives of your neighbors and your children's children.
• There is a symbiotic relationship between economic and social development and the state of the environment. Since technology is at the leading edge of each of these dynamic forces, the pursuit of technological solutions to sustainable development cannot be separated from the social, economic, cultural and political reality in which it takes place.
• The environment is something to be managed on a sustainable basis-not something to be "protected" from development.
• The leadership role in sustainable development requires awareness (seeing what is) as well as vision (what can be).
• Seeking partners and building coalitions may be the most important thing you do to achieve sustainable development as a community goal. It's everyone's responsibility and everyone's future?so involve the private sector, NGO's, social clubs, religious organizations, schools and universities, and every man, woman, girl and boy in your community to make it happen.
• Developing scenarios (verbal pictures describing potential future states based on various assumptions) can help update your community's guidance system. Invite participants to take surrogate roles for those who aren't present (e.g., girls and boys, future generations, the likes of Nakuru flamingos)
• Assessing environmental risks is the process of taking your awareness and pursuing it further through additional data gathering, information expansion, analysis and clarification.

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