UNITED NATIONS	HS
	Commission on Human Settlements	Distr. LIMITED HS/C/17/L.1/Add.4 7 May 1999 ORIGINAL: ENGLISH

1. Committee I considered agenda item 7 (a) at its 2nd meeting, on 6 May 1999. It had before it the report of the Executive Director entitled "Local implementation of the Habitat Agenda, with particular attention to local Agenda 21s" (HS/C/17/5).

2. In introducing the item, the representative of the Acting Executive Director said that both the Habitat Agenda and local Agenda 21s were useful frameworks for organizing local action for sustainable development and, depending on the predominant problems that needed to be addressed within a given local area, they could either be used separately or ideas from both agendas could be integrated into a comprehensive local action plan for sustainable development.

3. He outlined the main recommendations of the report, which included:

    (a) Local frameworks for planning and implementation should be improved through campaigns to publicize the Habitat Agenda and the enactment of legislative reform to create more space for partnerships and public participation;

    (b) Partnerships should be enhanced through forums of local authorities and by ensuring that all partners are involved in local action;

    (c) Resource mobilization should be improved through better utilization of local revenue sources and better access by local authorities to national and international credit sources;

    (d) Methods and tools for local implementation should be improved through the development of incentives and disincentives to motivate participation by all groups, the use of "visioning" techniques for building consensus among partners, and the inclusion of negative lessons in best-practice programmes;

    (e) The monitoring and evaluation of local implementation should be improved through the establishment of measurable targets responsive to local needs and the setting up of local urban observatories; and

    (f) The effectiveness of international cooperation should be enhanced through the accommodation of the results of local-level consultative processes by international organizations and increased support by UNCHS (Habitat) to partnerships among local-level stakeholders.

4.  Finally, the representative of the Acting Executive Director drew attention to the points suggested for discussion in the report, namely:

    (a) Initiation of national publicity campaigns to increase awareness of both the Habitat Agenda and Agenda 21 and to support their implementation at the local level, in conjunction with the two global campaigns on secure tenure and urban governance proposed in the Centre's work programme for the biennium 2000-2001;

    (b) Revision of legal and institutional frameworks at both the national and local levels to enable or facilitate partnerships and participation;

    (c) Development or intensification of programmes for training local-level stakeholders on how to establish and manage partnerships;

    (d) Development of programmes and projects designed to improve local financial and human resources, in conjunction with the Centre's proposed global campaign on urban governance; and

    (e) Establishment of local urban observatories.

5.  Several delegations, in welcoming the report, supported its recommendations and underlined the close relationship between the Habitat Agenda and Agenda 21.

6. Most delegations taking the floor shared experiences from their own countries. Recurrent experiences and themes included:

    (a) The destructive impact of war on human settlements and the need for international assistance in rehabilitation and reconstruction, as well as the need to find community-based solutions to social conflicts and to integrate women in shelter solutions;

    (b) The adoption of proactive (rather than reactive) enabling approaches by central Governments, including the decentralization of decision-making and financial authority to local authorities to enable them to plan and implement sustainable local-level development;

    (c) The creation of partnerships, especially for the development of housing, including rental housing, and related infrastructure, and the provision of incentives to the private sector to provide housing loans for low-income families;

    (d) The revision of legal and regulatory frameworks, including the simplification of real-estate laws in order to boost local revenues and to increase poor communities' access to affordable land;

    (e) Training of all stakeholders involved in local-level development, including continuous training programmes for newly elected local officials, in some cases using UNCHS (Habitat) training manuals;

    (f) Ensuring that the Habitat Agenda and Agenda 21 were concerned, not with creating new institutions, but with changing ways of planning and implementing local-level development;

    (g) The establishment of national and local urban observatories and of nationwide systems for the systematic collection of comparative data and information from local authorities;

    (h) Diversification of financing for housing development in order to reduce direct government subsidies and to ensure transparency and equity in any remaining subsidy systems;

    (i) Establishment of international organizations for information exchange on sustainable development;

    (j) Use of national economic crises as opportunities for correcting problems facing housing-finance institutions, in order to make such institutions more sustainable and less vulnerable to national or regional monetary fluctuations, as well as for mainstreaming into national human-settlements policies the fundamental ideas in both the Habitat Agenda and Agenda 21.

7.  Several delegations made suggestions for additional actions that needed to be taken by Governments and other relevant organizations, including:

    (a) Large-scale demonstration, pilot or model projects should be implemented to illustrate how the ideas contained in both the Habitat Agenda and Agenda 21 could work in practice;

    (b) Professionals should be added to the list of local-level stakeholders mentioned in the theme paper;

    (c) Environment, energy and human-settlements management in natural disaster-prone areas should feature prominently within global campaigns;

    (d) There should be greater exchange of information between developed and developing countries;

    (e) Mechanisms for the pricing of local services and government subsidies should take the issue of equity seriously as a guiding principle;

    (f) Urban observatories should not only be local but, depending on prevailing circumstances, provincial and national observatories could be established as well;

    (g) Local-level implementation should be an important dimension of the UNCHS (Habitat) work programme for the next biennium;

    (h) Means should be developed for monitoring the use of international financial grants by local authorities and non-governmental organizations, in order to ensure efficiency and transparency;

    (i) Local authorities needed to be more democratic if they were to develop the capacity to deal with local issues and partnerships; and

    (j) Solutions needed to be found to make the ideas in the Habitat Agenda and local Agenda 21s work more effectively in the generally poverty-stricken rural local-authority areas of developing countries, especially in Africa.

8.  In responding to the issues raised by delegations, the representative of the Acting Executive Director said that the discussion had shown the complexity and diversity of ideas in both the Habitat Agenda and Agenda 21. He noted that delegations had stressed the importance of the relationship between local authorities and central Governments and that some delegations believed that enabling policies needed to be proactive rather than reactive and that the devolution of responsibilities without corresponding resources would be ineffective. Finally, he assured delegations that the various suggestions would be taken into account in the future work of the Centre, which would also focus on the most vulnerable communities.

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