Durban's Local Agenda 21 programme has been at the forefront of the Local Agenda 21 movement in Southern Africa since the mid-1990s. This paper describes the first four phases of the programme, 1994-2001 and the difficulties faced in localising the sustainable development concept in Durban, in particular the initiation and development of the programme during a period of local government transformation and restructuring.

This paper examines the organisation and functioning of state-sponsored fruit and vegetables farmers’ markets in selected urban centres of Tamil Nadu. The study assessed actual and potential contributions to more viable livelihoods for small and marginal farmers, and to increased food security for low-income urban groups.

This includes case studies of how globalization is affecting Karachi, Luanda, Buenos Aires, Windhoek and cities in Pacific Asia and influencing social exclusion in Johannesburg and Faisalabad. It also has papers on the evasion of corporate responsibility in Bhopal and on the role of cities and city-networks in globalization.

This Working Paper examines the processes, challenges and lessons that can be learnt from the Local Agenda 21 programme in Nakuru, Kenya, where rapid population growth and falling standards of service provision have prompted the local authority to adopt LA21 as a new approach to urban planning and management.

This paper describes an initiative to support community-directed development projects in low income neighbourhoods in San Fernando, one of the poorer, peripheral municipalities in Buenos Aires. This was part of a national programme for 'vulnerable groups' in low-income areas and which sought to facilitate access to social services, increase participation and promote transparency in the use of government resources at local level.

This Working Paper describes activities that promote the sustainable development of Windhoek, Namibia, through processes that are consistent with the principles of Local Agenda 21, but that are based on the initiatives of civil society groups rather than local authorities.

Urban development
This working paper describes the Sustainable Penang Initiative (SPI), the first project in Malaysia – and perhaps the region – to address the challenge of sustainable development by organising popular consultations, creating community indicators, and channelling the inputs into the state’s strategic development planning. Central to this effort was a series of roundtables, organised around such themes as Social Justice, Economic Productivity, Cultural Vibrancy, and Popular Participation. This working paper not only documents the SPI, but also explores its successes and its limitations. It describes how the participatory dialogues caught on and spawned numerous follow-up activities, but also how the initial roundtables came to exclude certain segments of the population. Similarly, it describes how the SPI managed to bring previously neglected issues to the attention of the government, but also how certain issues came to be ignored by the SPI itself.