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.

The report illustrates that effective constitutional and legislative guarantees of the right to adequate housing are not only realistic but have already been adopted successfully in a number of countries with diverse legal, social, economic and cultural systems.

The publication, Financing Adequate Shelter for All, aims at addressing the housing financing problem in developing countries. The publication is the result of two conferences organised by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) in Gavle, Sweden; and New York, U.S.A., as part of the preparatory process of the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on the Overall Review and Appraisal of the Implementation of the Habitat Agenda.

This publication is set to highlight the broad range of issues that requires consideration with regard to local democracy and decentralization in East and Southern Africa. It aims at providing brief overviews on decentralization processes in the five selected countries in the region. It summarizes the many different aspects of decentralization highlighting key issues that need to be addressed by practitioners.

This publication documents good practices of water demand management in practice in five African cities namely; Cape Town, Durban, Hermanus, Johannesburg and Windhoek. The publication was supported by the Water for African Cities Programme, an initative developed to help African cities to take a fresh start at managing their most important resource, water more efficiently.

This a report of the seminar held in Fukuoka, Japan in October 2001. The UN-HABITAT Fukuoka office in collaboration with the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) organized the seminar which looked into various issues affecting securing land for the urban poor.