SOFIA REPORT
From November 12 - 15, 1998, a Conference on European Sustainable Cities occurred where 292 participants from 34 countries took their in the process of developing and implementing Local Agenda 21. GREEN TABLE, as the one of the NGOs present on the Meeting, actively contributed to the work by attending all four categories of workshops:
Local Agenda 21 - process and approaches
workshop: Public participation in LA 21
workshop: EU accession - overview on local implications and access to environmental information
workshop: Improving large housing estates
and by discussion on partner forum:
workshop: Make use of external funding
Apart from participation in workshops where we transferred our experience of collaboration with local authorities in developing and implementing LA 21 and getting a new approach to the different solutions from the good practice examples and case studies presented on the workshops, we succeeded to implement our stand into the Sofia Statement. The GREEN TABLEs addendum to the final document has been accepted and built in ( see Sofia Statement, chapter II, paragraf II.2, 6th row, last sentence ). We consider this achievement a major success that clearly displays possible influence of Yugoslavian NGOs to international fora. We sincerely hope that NGO community in Yugoslavia can be built up as a strong and important stake holder of contemporary democratic social development.
We used the opportunity of such international meeting to promote our activities but also activities of the all environmental NGOs from Yugoslavia. The particularity of the Conference was the fact that there has been present 19 participants from Yugoslavia what is far the greatest number of attendants to any international conference of similar kind that has occurred in last few years and we were present to. This is encouraging. Most of the participants were from local authorities but they are crucial part of proper implementation of LA 21, one of the three pillars of local sustainable development ( Local authority, Local NGOs, Local business ).
As a follow-up we are planning to develop LA 21 program with Vracar county in Belgrade since they expressed considerable will to make steps forward to it. We will also inform local NGOs on results of this Conference - what we anyway do whenever we can after international meetings we participate ( please see our web site ).