Enhancing Effectiveness in Planning: An Innovative Approach to Implement the 2030 Agenda at the Local Scale

Abstract

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, signed by the 193 Member Countries of the United Nations in 2015, established 17 Sustainable Development Goals and 169 targets, which balance the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. These are assumed to inform national and regional development strategies as well as local plans. To this purpose, Italy approved the law 221/2015, which implemented the National Sustainable Development Strategy. Italian Regions, in turn, are called to define a Regional Strategy for Sustainable Development, which has to contribute to the achievement of the objectives of the National Strategy. Such strategies need to be operationalized in terms of administrative actions. This requires new and innovative procedures able to adequately place plans and programs within the framework of the aforementioned key aspects of sustainability. This paper proposes an innovative approach to harmonize local plans with Sardinia’s Regional Strategy for Sustainable Development. The illustrated procedure provides a new tool, which integrates the objectives of the Regional Strategy for Sustainable Development into local plans and programs and simultaneously assesses the efficiency of these strategies in the related territorial context. In this way, environmental concerns are complemented with social and economic issues according to a new approach to sustainable and inclusive territorial development, which requires a distinct governance model characterized by close cooperation with the public, private and voluntary sectors as well as with organizations of the civil society.