Today, like businesses, the public service must implement sustainable development strategies. In this article, we focus in particular on the territorial public service. For her, it is as much a question of responding to major societal problems as of providing responses adapted to territorial issues and the needs of local populations.
The role of the territorial public service for sustainable development
The notion of sustainable development has allowed a broader reflection on the organization of our societies and work, and where to place our priorities. Like companies that are committed to sustainable development, the local public service has every interest in being an agent of change. Moreover, Committee 21 (French Committee for the Environment and Sustainable Development) has launched its guide “for the appropriation of the 2030 agenda by French communities with the aim of enabling communities to engage in a sustainable development approach based on a global reflection on the territory and its future.
The competences of local authorities have strong links with SDGs – the Sustainable Development Goals. Based on the study cited above, we can for example note that:
- All local authorities, in a fairly homogeneous way, are concerned by the SDGs;
- If we take into account all the competences of local authorities, they largely cover the 17 sustainable development objectives;
- The implementation of concerted and articulated actions between the communities, having all types of combined skills, would make it possible to have a non-negligible positive impact.
How to act in favor of the Sustainable Development Goals?
Of course, each local authority has its own powers dictated by law. Thus, in each of the three strata of local authorities, the fields of competence grouping together the most SDGs are as follows.
At regional level:
- The economy (13 SDGs),
- Planning and development (13 SDGs),
- Education and urban planning (13 SDGs).
At the departmental level:
- planning and development (13 SDGs),
- Social action and health (12 SDGs),
- The economic domain (12 SDGs)
- Teaching (11 ODD).
For the municipal group:
- Planning and development (13 SDGs),
- Urban planning (13 ODD),
- Public transport (12 SDGs)
- Teaching (11 ODD).
It is therefore on these lines of work that your local authority will have the best chance of having a strong positive impact.
How to pilot a public policy of sustainable development?
Preparing, managing and evaluating the deployment of a public policy is no easy task. However, it is totally worth it. it is above all a question of defining what makes sense according to your field of expertise and the needs of the local territory, and to achieve effective and motivating management for the stakeholders.
The key steps to achieve this could be summarized as follows:
- Prepare the project : identify the strengths of your organization as well as the opportunities on which you can rely, define the aspirations for your project, visualize the results…
- Define objectives and indicators in order to be able to monitor the results and make the appropriate decisions, build dashboards that will help you in this process…
- Develop a stakeholder map and create tools and forums for discussion to work together towards the achievement of public policy objectives for sustainable development.
You will find many more details about these steps in our training program Managing a Public Policy.
