| The Habitat Agenda,
signed by 171 Member States, may be one of the
most sophisticated and complex political documents
to emerge from a United Nations conference.
Negotiated over two-and-a-half years in a series
of formal and informal meetings, numerous regional
workshops and countless national sessions of
both governmental and non-governmental organizations,
the Habitat Agenda contains over 90 commitments
and more than 600 recommendations. These numbers
hint at a complexity that has made the implementation
of the Habitat Agenda the subject of much
debate and its impact difficult to measure.
Eight years after its adoption, some are
now asking whether or not the Habitat
Agenda is too complex and whether
it should be replaced by a straightforward manifesto
like the Millennium Declaration.
From rural to urban
In 1945 when the United Nations was established,
less than one-third of the earth's population
lived in cities. Most international attention
focused on rural poverty and rural development.
This was still the case in 1976 when the first
United Nations Habitat Conference was held in
Vancouver, Canada, to address then-emerging
urban issues. In 1996, after another twenty
years of accelerated city growth and the unmitigated
expansion of poverty-stricken urban slums, the
United Nations convened a second global conference
on cities, Habitat II, in Istanbul. In a highly
visible, high-level attempt to shift the world's
attention to urbanisation and the urbanisation
of poverty, Habitat II was intent on producing
a political document, the Habitat Agenda,
which would lend practical support in making
cities everywhere more sustainable.
Falling behind
Since 1976, with global urbanisation came a
global shift in attitudes toward governance.
In the years between the two Habitat conferences,
there had been movement away from elitist, top-down
and opaque political methods toward those that
are more open, bottom-up and participatory.
By 1996, Habitat II delegations understood that
when it comes to sustainable cities and adequate
shelter a political agenda for Governments would
be necessary because the State has the primary
responsibility for urban policy. But such an
agenda is not sufficient - there has to be something
more.
Rates of urban growth, primarily in the world's
slums, were overwhelming national capability
and desire to help cities. In absolute numbers,
there were more slums, more homelessness, more
insecurity, more malnourishment, more unemployment
and more illiteracy than ever before. Even as
Governments were becoming aware that cities,
if properly managed, would be the key to national
development, the cities and slums of the developing
world were becoming less viable at ever-increasing
rates.
The reality is that almost all of the 3 billion
people that will be added to the global population
in the next 45 years will live in the cities
of developing countries. And it could be to
the slums of these cities, already packed with
a billion of the world's poor, that two-thirds
of the additional global population - or another
two billion people - will be drawn.
Against this backdrop, Member States began
drafting the Habitat Agenda, intending
to issue a document that would deal holistically
with all fundamental problems of urbanisation.
Civic engagement and good governance
In its most stunning departure from traditional
United Nations political documents, the Habitat
Agenda opens the door to civil society
as an active proponent of urban betterment.
Not as a lumpenproletariat to be entertained
and dismissed, but as a highly differentiated
society consisting of local authorities, community
groups, non-governmental organizations, the
private sector, youth, women, the elderly, persons
with disabilities, parliamentarians and professionals,
among many others.
Among these, local authorities were the key
partner, mainly for their position between Governments
and civil society and for their proximity to
people and their problems. After decades of
failed development schemes and increasing poverty
worldwide, it had become clear that national
governments, particularly in developing countries,
could not handle the problems arising from rapid
urbanisation and that civil society and local
authorities must be engaged as principal actors.
Never in UN history had local authorities been
approached to participate directly in a long-term
partnership. Never before had local authorities
and NGOs been invited to participate in the
drafting of an official United Nations plan
of action.
In another bold move, delegations recognised
that many urban problems were the result of
poor governance. Consequently, much space in
the Habitat Agenda was devoted to local
governance and institution-building. Although
the adjective "good" was dismissed,
terms like open, accountable, just, responsible
and transparent were used to qualify governance.
The document commits its signatories to enabling
local leadership, decentralising authority and
resources, creating gender sensitive institutional
and legal frameworks, encouraging the formation
of community-based organizations, institutionalising
a participatory approach to development and
management, managing a continuous dialogue with
civil society, capacity-building and training,
promoting equal access to reliable information
and ensuring the availability of education -
in short, all that constitutes good governance.
Monitoring
The long-term impact of commitments and recommendations
made at Habitat II depends on their implementation
at each level. Efforts to implement national
and local plans of action are to be monitored
and evaluated for the purpose of encouraging
and enabling all interested parties to improve
their performance. A major contribution
to the process of implementing the Habitat
Agenda is the commitment by Member States
to monitor their own progress.
From the Jordanian Istanbul+5 report
Problems of the existing situation
Accumulated financial deficit arising
from:
- Slackening in using the authority
to impose certain charges and their
collection;
- The high indebtedness of the municipalities
to the Cities and Villages Development
Bank, as it is the party authorized
to lend to municipalities;
- The small number of population (less
than five thousand persons in three-quarters
of the councils);
- Financial misadministration;
- Weak supervision, overlapping of
authorities (powers) and the freezing
of these powers;
- Lack of administrative and technical
qualifications in the councils' staffs.
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Policies and actions
- To update and modernize the legislation
in force;
- To define the priorities of the councils
according to plans which are annually
reviewed;
- To merge small municipalities;
- To establish budgets reflecting the
real position of the councils;
- To provide the technical, financial
and administrative expertise for the councils
and those working in them;
- To involve the Private Sector in the
administration of the projects financed
by the bank;
- The policy of the government in this
effect is to upgrade the efficiency of
the local councils, develop their performance
and free them from the debts as a first
step towards decentralisation.
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From the Slovenian Istanbul+5 Report
"Participation of the public has
gone through very interesting stages -
together with the development of the institutions
of the civil society and the episode of
the socialist self-management system -
and it has become a powerful force of
influence upon spatial decisions at all
the levels of the political life. In the
period up to the first democratic elections,
a delegate system was developed in the
self-management interest communities and
socio-political communities which included
an extremely high number of people, and
in a special way strengthened or supplemented
the incentives of the civil society. The
collapse of this system and fragmentation
of the existing political parties has
opened up new challenges which are especially
difficult in major towns. In villages,
traditional systems of informal decision-making
have remained strong. As far as the participation
of the public and participation in the
process of planning is concerned, they
are assured by the valid legislation and
implemented in practice." |
Istanbul+5
The first and, so far, only planned global
assessment on the Road from Istanbul was the
2001 Special Session of the United Nations General
Assembly held to evaluate progress in implementing
the Habitat Agenda. Each Member State
was asked to provide a report describing the
country situation, progress made in dealing
with the situation and measures planned for
making further progress.
To help organize in-country activities and
make national reports broadly congruent and
directly relevant to the Habitat Agenda,
20 key items were identified, in a consultative
process, as universal priorities from the Habitat
Agenda's commitments and strategies. The
20 key commitments were organised under the
headings of shelter, social development and
eradication of poverty, environmental management,
economic development, governance and international
cooperation, as per the guidelines for country
reporting issued by UN-HABITAT in October 1999.
For each of the twenty commitments, Member
States reported on new trends and emerging issues,
policy and legislative changes since Habitat
II, as well as institutional weaknesses, obstacles
encountered and lessons learnt, with emphasis
on sustainability and impact. The 2001 edition
of the State of the World's Cities report
was simultaneously developed by UN-HABITAT as
a conceptual "primer" using the same
structure.
With Member States at the centre of the reporting
process, Istanbul+5 was able to elicit progress
reports from 94 countries all following the
same outline, but each responding with unique
information (see boxes). Overall, one sees in
these reports the details of global urbanisation
and what has been undertaken around the world
to mitigate its ill effects.
The picture in 2001
At its most useful, the Habitat Agenda poses
fundamental questions to Government and civil
society alike. It lays out an array of subjects,
the totality of which define the sustainable
city. Reporting was envisaged as a critical
part of a corrective or curative process. Contrary
to the cynics, more than just positive results
were reported. Short-comings of many types were
reported with little attempt made to diminish
their importance. Rather, they were met head-on
with proposed and actual solutions that often
resulted in improved governance and greater
grass-roots participation.
By 2001, the Habitat Agenda appeared
to be working well for cities in many countries.
This is not to say it was working well everywhere.
Illegal evictions were still occurring, slums
were growing rapidly and many national governments
still gave their urban areas low priority. The
UN General Assembly, in its June 2001 Declaration
on Cities and Other Human Settlements in the
New Millennium, recognised these shortcomings.
The GA noted with concern, "that one of
the basic obstacles to the implementation of
the Habitat Agenda is the discrepancy
between commitments made at Istanbul and the
political will to fulfill them.... The gaps
and obstacles encountered in the past five years
have slowed down global progress towards sustainable
human settlements development. It is essential
that actions are taken to ensure that the Habitat
Agenda is now translated into policy and
into practice in every country."
And next?
One would assume that with that strong statement,
the General Assembly would be anxious to monitor
global progress. The 10-year anniversary of
the Habitat Agenda will be in 2006, but
there is no scheduled United Nations review
of progress for that or any other year. With
no further reviews on the agenda in the United
Nations system, there is a danger that the last
co-ordinated global assessment of progress -
the last chance to make the Habitat Agenda
a learning tool - will have been by the General
Assembly in 2001.
Given the long time horizon offered by the
Habitat Agenda, this oversight risks
a premature termination of its political usefulness.
Of course the global network of urban observatories
and UN-HABITAT's State of the World's Cities
report series will provide new information
on cities periodically. But the opportunity
for Governments and their key partners to engage
in productive dialogue at a milestone event
will have gone missing.
One of the main mechanisms to encourage countries
to be more pro-active in implementing the Habitat
Agenda has, so far, not been primed. The
global review process - and all the instructive
solutions that can emerge from it - is moribund.
Has the Habitat Agenda had its
day?
In 2000, with the Millennium Declaration,
the world's leaders launched the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs), distilling much that
resulted from Habitat II and the other UN conferences
of the 1990's into a set of eight goals and
18 time-bound and measurable targets. These
provide a simple framework for the whole United
Nations system to work together coherently as
no other policy has done before.
The MDGs invite all development agencies to
move to a higher orbit where collaborative success
will result in vast improvements in the human
condition. UN-HABITAT is now working with all
its partners to make life better for 100 million
slum dwellers (Target 11) and halving the number
of people without sustainable access to drinking
water and sanitation (Target 10). UN-HABITAT
has reoriented most of its activities, including
monitoring, toward these MDGs. The question
now is, have the MDGs made the Habitat Agenda
obsolete?
The answer is, not at all. Even with their
measurable and time-bound goals and targets,
the MDGs are at the level of a mission statement
which has been built on the outcomes of many
UN conferences. Nevertheless, the MDGs are not
accompanied by strategies or operational principles.
Those are left to Member States to devise. But,
why reinvent the wheel? It is in the Habitat
Agenda and other United Nations plans and
platforms of action where we can find a full
range of agreed strategies that will help us
to achieve the MDGs.
The road maps have already been drawn up. If
their comprehensiveness is intimidating, that
should not be cause for their dismissal. They
are still the instruments that can guide us
to our destination.
Istanbul + 10 and Vancouver + 30
In 2006, there is a unique opportunity to breathe
life back into the Habitat Agenda and
to serve the MDGs at the same time. The World
Urban Forum (WUF) will be held that year in
Vancouver, Canada, the site of the first Habitat
conference in 1976. It would be appropriate
that progress in implementing the Habitat
Agenda be reviewed during that session,
with resulting recommendations coming from all
partners. Because partner groups and local authorities
are central to the implementation of the Habitat
Agenda, as well as to the monitoring of
its implementation, the WUF would be a practical
venue for presentation and discussion of Habitat
partner views on progress made since 1996.
Partner groups at WUF 2004 in Barcelona this
September may determine priorities for reporting
and draft guidelines that will result in co-ordinated
reports and dialogue in Vancouver. This time
around, priorities for reporting might be selected
on the basis of the Habitat Agenda commitments
that support MDG targets.
In the future, reporting on progress could
alternate every five years between Governments
and Habitat Agenda partners within an
overall 10-year cycle, using the Governing Council
and the World Urban Forum as interactive instruments
of review. The task is to harness previous commitments
to serve our current goals. The commitments
and plan of action agreed to in the Habitat
Agenda are still vital to the creation of
sustainable human settlements, especially to
the improvement of slums and the promotion of
good urban governance.
Jay Moor is Chief of Strategic Planning in
the Office of the Executive Director, UN-HABITAT.
Turkish President Demirel (centre) flanked
by then UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali
and Habitat II Secretary-General Wally N'Dow.
Photo © A. Grossman/UN-HABITAT
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