Thursday 25 July 2013

The Importance of Community

Rachel Armstead did some wonderful work interviewing colleagues around Melbourne - she has since left to do further work in the UK. Some of her thoughts follow...

The local community is becoming increasingly central as a focus for sustainability action in Australia. There are numerous recent sustainability initiatives and policies that address the unit of the community; the CSIRO Sustainable Communities Initiative, the Green Building Council Australia’s National framework of Green Star Communities, and the Australian Government department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency’s Community Energy Efficiency Programme (CEEP) to name but a few. 

Community as a key theme of current academic research and technical papers was also highlighted during the ICLEI annual Thriving Neighbourhoods conference held in November 2012.
These initiatives frame the community both as the beneficiary of sustainable development and as an agent of such change.

The community as a beneficiary of local government sustainability initiatives reflects more a change in terminology than in practice as local government is by definition in place to serve the local community. However, the local community as agent of sustainable development presents an interesting shift. 

Prof. Chris Ryan, speaker at the 2012 Thriving Neighbourhoods conference stated that a key characteristic of thriving societies is that communities are producing, not just passively consuming ‘[i]n the critical areas of life – in the provision of food, water, energy, mobility, shelter, information as well as in the power to shape development – thriving will see a shift of citizens to active roles in production and governance, a reversal of current trends that define the role of citizens as ‘passive consumers’.


For the average person who may not be particularly engaged with sustainability and self-sufficiency, the role of producer is a new one. In addition the act of working as a community rather than an individual – self-sufficiency where the self is a collective may also be a novel concept for many. Encouraging and coordinating such action is for many local governments and many communities unchartered territory and a there is currently a big learning curve being embarked upon.