(02 October 2015) – The ECOLISE network welcomes the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by the UN on September 25, but underlines the need for these to be translated into legally-binding targets with appropriate financing instruments and an agreed monitoring process.
ECOLISE calls on the EU and its Member States to take a lead in turning these agreed goals into truly binding targets, and in pioneering a global process of resourcing local, community-led action. If this happens, then a genuinely transformative process could be engaged.
This needs political will and leadership, it needs institutional structures mandated to oversee the process and call governments to account for non-performance, and it needs substantial funds to drive the process over the forthcoming 15 years.
ECOLISE believes that the real drivers of this change process have to be local communities, which have demonstrated in projects and programmes across Europe how genuine sustainability can be achieved. Local communities have to be involved at every stage of the development process, from conception, to implementation to evaluation, in a transparent, participatory way.