Community Planning and Sustainable Development

Background

The Local Government in Scotland Act 2003 made community planning a statutory duty for councils in order to improve services and quality of life through joint action with the community in its widest sense.

Sustainable development has been identified as one of the key cross-cutting policy themes of Community Planning in order to ensure that actions today do not limit quality of life in future.
Read more on the LGS Act >>> (external link)

Partnership Working

The Edinburgh Partnership leads the Community Planning process in Edinburgh. Launched in June 2003 it includes all major public sector organisations in the city, key strategic partnerships and representatives from the voluntary and community sectors.

Under this umbrella approach, the Edinburgh Sustainable Development Partnership (ESDP) has been identified as one of eight key strategic partnerships operating in the city with a central role to play in the Community Planning process, promoting sustainable development.

This reinforces the stated aim of the ESDP which is “to establish sustainability as the underlying principle in the development of the city, working through the Community Planning process.”
Appropriate internal link to go here >>>

Edinburgh's City Plan

Edinburgh's City Plan was published in February 2000 with the aim of getting organisations to work together for the greater benefit of the community, ensuring that the community is able to influence what these organisations do on it's behalf. It set out a common vision for the future of Edinburgh, shared goals for all the major public sector organisations and their partners in Edinburgh and contains 87 action points describing the actions the partners will take to achieve these goals.
More about the City Plan >>>

The Future

The Edinburgh Partnership Group is developing the next phase of community planning through the creation of formal lines of communication with a number of high level strategic partnerships including the ESDP. This will ensure more integrated working on cross cutting issues and will bring the work of existing partnerships into the community planning process linking their targets and progress reporting into a single performance framework for the City Plan.

Community Planning therefore presents a significant if challenging opportunity to embed Sustainable Development principles at the heart of a range of key strategies, policies and programmes influencing the development of the city.