Response to Consultation on Everyone’s Involved, NI Sustainable Development Strategy

We welcome the framing of this draft document as a ‘participatory instrument’ as building a sustainable society is the job of many partners beyond central government.  However, central government has to send a strong political message and create a robust policy and legislative framework to create a context for change to happen.

This draft document, as it stands, is too vague to drive the kind of change and the kind of participation that is needed. The choice is not, as the document states, between a high-level, enabling document and a finely detailed, technically based document that is difficult to understand, but rather between one that is high level and vague, and therefore commits to little in terms of outcomes and one that actually states what specific strategic outcomes are being sought.  Targets and milestones can then be developed to take us there. These elements will not necessarily be delivered by individual departmental action or implementation plans. Nor will the three-year timescale of departmental plans be appropriate to articulate the kind of long-term sustainability targets necessary. If this document is not made ‘SMART’er then an additional document is needed setting out specific cross-cutting, high level objectives to which departmental plans can then clearly contribute.