Context

This book owes its origins to my 30 plus years of practical experience – and oftentimes frustration – in attempting to pursue public policy on sustainable development as a civil servant in the UK, EU and UN. Despite those frustrations, I remain of the view that sustainable development, in the form of the Brundtland Report's ethical call to transformative action, has powerful lessons for how we might govern and, especially, for the future role of public bureaucracy.

My involvement with sustainable development as a bureaucrat began when I worked as part of the team which wrote the UK's first comprehensive environment strategy (This Common Inheritance) in 1990. My interest was then developed through the award of a Nuffield and Leverhulme international travelling fellowship to consider impacts of transport planning and policy upon the environment. This introduced me to international perspectives including the institutions of the World Bank and UN and brought me in contact with the New Zealand Resource Management Act. I also had the great privilege of learning from the differing perspectives of my main academic hosts: Professors Charles Vlek (RU Groningen), Peter Newman (Murdoch University) and Art Rosenfeld (Lawrence Berkley Laboratories). I was fortunate to apply this understanding in developing post-Rio Summit changes to UK land use planning in 1994 and to share this in EU and international fora.

A move away from the central government perspective in Whitehall – first to the (now abolished) UK government regional office in the South-West of England and then to the newly devolved government in Wales from 1998 – confirmed my growing feeling that there was great potential in more participative and localized engagement and decision-making. These approaches could reflect local circumstances and opportunities in a way that was near impossible in my central Whitehall experience. They could help to bring people together to consider and debate concerns in the round rather than from a narrow perspective and they could be supportive of grassroots action.

The 20 years in Wales were particularly formative. Here was a new institution in the making where the idea of government working in partnership with civil society and the pursuit of sustainable development had been set as guiding legal duties.