Children, Youth and Environments 15(2), 2005

Local Environmental Initiatives Oriented to

Children and Youth:
A Review of UN-Habitat Best Practices

Darcy Varney
Willem van Vliet-
Children, Youth and Environments Center for Research and Design
University of Colorado

Citation: Varney, Darcy and Willem van Vliet--. (2005). “Local Environmental
Initiatives Oriented to Children and Youth: A Review of UN Habitat Best
Practices. Children, Youth and Environments 15(2): 41-52. Retrieved [date]
from http://www.colorado.edu/journals/cye/.

Comment on This Article

Abstract
This paper presents the results of a study of the objectives and methods of a
selection of child- and youth-oriented environmental initiatives around the world.
Its goal is to review how local communities and municipalities are working to create
physical environments that support the rights and priorities of children. To this end,
we use a child-friendly city framework in an examination of 101 "good," "best" and
"award winning" practices identified by UN-Habitat. We supplement these data with
responses to a self-administered questionnaire, sent to a subset of the cases in the
UN database. We provide profiles of several practices which promise to offer
valuable insights into the dynamics of community-based practices that are oriented
to the needs of children and which suggest directions for research to further guide
such practices.

Keywords: best practices, child-friendly cities, community-based

initiatives

This paper was initially commissioned by Save the Children Sweden.

© 2005 Children, Youth and Environments

Local Environmental Initiatives Oriented to Children and Youth… 42

After adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child by the U.N. General
Assembly in 1989, and starting with the World Summit for Children in 1990, a
series of world summits produced action plans that emphasized norms of social
justice and environmental sustainability. The resulting policy platforms focused
attention on population groups considered “at risk” and typically made special
mention of children and youth. In combination, the preparatory activities and
outcomes of these summits helped develop new policy frameworks concerning
children, youth and the environment. These new frameworks gave emphasis to
rights-based approaches and recognized children and youth as active agents with
entitlements and competencies.

One of these summits, the Second United Nations Conference on Human

Settlements (Habitat II), focused on living conditions worldwide. Among the
activities related to the summit was a 1995 international conference on best
practices for improving the world’s living conditions on a sustainable basis, hosted
by the Dubai Municipality in the United Arab Emirates. Subsequently, UN-Habitat,
together with the Dubai Municipality and other partners, established the Best
Practices and Local Leadership Programme, which maintains a database of best
practices submitted for the Dubai International Award every two years.1 UN-Habitat
defines “best practices” as successful initiatives that have a demonstrable and
tangible impact on improving people’s quality of life; are the result of effective
partnerships between the public, private and civic sectors of society; and are
socially, culturally, economically, and environmentally sustainable.2 This report
presents the results of an exploratory study of a sample of these best practices,
selected for their emphasis on child- and youth-oriented environmental initiatives
around the world.

A Content Analysis of Child- and Youth-Oriented Best Practices

The Best Practices Database now includes 1,581 “good,” “best” and “award-
winning” practices from 140 countries. Organizations that nominate their own or
another group’s initiatives provide a narrative summary and a description of their
work, explaining how the initiative came to be and succeeded in fulfilling its
objectives. One of the 18 possible categories for these nominations is “Children and
Youth,” and the database includes 164 “good,” “best” and “award winning”
practices in this category. Among these are 101 practices that have involved an
impact on the physical environment for children and youth, including attention to
water and sanitation, to housing and neighborhood conditions, to the physical
conditions within institutions for children, and to conditions that promote play and
recreation, or that ensure mobility and access for disabled youth. A content analysis
of these 101 narratives reveals activities on a number of fronts, some more
common than others:

1) The majority of the initiatives (69) involved specific changes or improvements to

the physical environment in response to the needs and concerns of children.
This included the establishment of schools, community centers, self-help
housing programs, or group homes for street children; also the organization of
community waste cleanup efforts, sanitation programs, or disaster-relief
campaigns that involved the reconstruction of housing and local infrastructure.
Local Environmental Initiatives Oriented to Children and Youth… 43

Most of these built-environment interventions responded directly to the

observed needs and concerns of children and youth, providing them with safe
places in which to live, work, learn, and play. A few initiatives, such as the
Community-Led Environment Action Network (CLEAN) in India, and the Water
and Sanitation Extension Programme (WASEP), in Pakistan, describe their work
in terms of providing community infrastructure improvements that lead to
healthier conditions for children and all community members.
2) Children and youth were directly involved in 24 of these efforts to improve the
local environment. Several initiatives involved transforming neglected public
spaces into safe areas in which to play and learn, for example in the Rosario,
Argentina project described below. Others were focused on improvements to
basic infrastructure, such the project in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, through which
young people helped to improve and construct water supply systems and took
part in capacity building.
3) Another 20 initiatives involved children and youth not as active participants, but
in educational activities designed to help them think about ways to improve their
environments and incorporate sustainable practices into their everyday lives.
4) Some initiatives have involved changes to the structures and processes of
agencies to improve their capacity to respond to children. In Brazil, for
instance, a program to help working youth gain access to resources was part of
an effort to reorient the priorities of municipal governments toward the needs of
children and youth. The narrative describes a detailed process for reprioritizing
government actions and creating partnerships across agencies in a way that did
not exist before. These also include several policy-oriented initiatives which have
given children and youth access to government decision-making processes.
5) A few local government-based initiatives have led to the adoption of new laws
and regulations to provide better conditions for children, especially those in
poverty. A Uruguayan example describes a plan developed jointly between
UNICEF and the government of Uruguay to find solutions to the country’s high
infant mortality and other child health issues which provided a new decentralized
decision making structure and new regulations for state agencies.
6) Many of the environment-improvement programs initiated by municipal entities
and NGOs started by undertaking research or developing information gathering
systems that make it possible to assess local conditions for children. Such
community-based information gathering can be a valuable tool in negotiations
with local authorities to obtain support for community goals, as shown, for
instance, by the work of The Alliance in Mumbai, India.
7) Seventeen selected initiatives resulted in training packages or methodologies for
target groups focused on improvements of the physical environment for
children. In Himachal Pradesh, for instance, a waste survey and mapping
research project informed the development of a recycling program and a series
of trainings on waste management for local waste handlers, NGOs and others
involved in waste collection and recycling. Some of the initiatives that provide
training materials are aimed at mothers and other caretakers, such as the award
winning “Mother Centre International Network,” described in detail below.
8) Twenty-one initiatives mention the ongoing involvement of children, youth and
adults in spreading the word about the work and objectives of the initiative in
question. The Slums Information Development and Resource Centres
Local Environmental Initiatives Oriented to Children and Youth… 44

(SIDAREC) in Kenya, for instance, publishes a youth-produced magazine to

increase awareness of issues significant to slum dwellers, and also disseminates
information through other grassroots media. A transport-oriented
environmental-education curriculum in the USA describes how the program
informs youth about the impact of their transportation choices on the
environment, but also serves to raise decision-makers’ awareness of youth
transportation needs and priorities.

The analysis of these 101 initiatives reveals several noteworthy patterns and
trends:

• Most of the initiatives involve a variety of stakeholders rather than one

agency or organization. At least 82 of the 101 narratives specifically point to
the fact that partnerships made the initiative possible. Since partnership is a
criterion of the Best Practices programme, however, this characteristic may
be an artifact of this database, rather than a routine feature of environment-
focused efforts for children.
• The issues and concerns addressed by these initiatives often build on one
another. A good example is the “best” practice, Slums Information
Development and Resource Centres (SIDAREC) in Nairobi, Kenya, which has
involved the assessment of local conditions for children, the improvement of
the physical environment through grassroots action with young slum
residents; the publication by local youth of the “Slums News” magazine and
the construction of information and resource centers for youth. They have
also developed training materials to help youth serve as peer counselors and
public speakers; and have developed ongoing monitoring systems and
indicators to evaluate the quality of the environment for youth, including the
incidence of crime, HIV/AIDS contraction, drug use, teen pregnancy, school
leaving, and other indicators. Although other initiatives do not demonstrate
this breadth of activity, most of them are involved in at least three or four
areas. Some combinations are much more common than others. For
example, the formation of partnerships happens more often around
environmental improvement than in capacity building for or monitoring of
practices. Likewise, participation by children and youth occurs much more
frequently in environmental improvement activities than in bringing about
legislative or regulatory changes.
• These initiatives show regional variations that may merit further research.
Most noticeable is the apparent significance of the UN Convention on the
Rights of the Child (CRC) in the Latin American and Eastern European
initiatives. Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay, and particularly Brazil, have
developed child-focused municipal-level activities designed to fulfill the letter
and spirit of the CRC, emphasizing both children’s rights to have a voice in
matters that affect their lives and sustainable environmental actions that
safeguard child health. The Eastern European and Asian countries of the
former Soviet bloc, including Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Macedonia, Moldova,
Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Uzbekistan, and Yugoslavia, have taken on CRC-
focused projects in response to decentralization and social need, with NGOs
focusing on creating participatory opportunities for youth and improving their
Local Environmental Initiatives Oriented to Children and Youth… 45

environments, often by reclaiming public space for youth. More predictably,

there are also clear differences between the practices in lower and higher
income countries. As youth in Africa and Asia speak out against the lack of
municipal attention to waste disposal, traffic congestion, overcrowding, and
child labor, and manage problems in their immediate environments, youth in
Western Europe and North America are more likely to be learning about
global environmental concerns and working to increase sustainable practices
in their communities.
• Successful initiatives often “scale up” to other parts of the city, to other
cities, or even other countries. For example, among the practices reviewed
in the next section, MCIN/AG has spread from Germany to more than 700
communities elsewhere in Europe, Russia, Africa and North America;
Rosario’s “The City of Children” has been shared with and taken off in other
Argentine cities; MYSA started in a Nairobi slum and now has members in
more than 50 communities across Kenya; and the CLEAN network has
expanded to cities throughout India. The replications tend to maintain a
specific geographic focus, possibly suggesting that regional similarities may
be important to successful scaling up. Capacity building appears to be an
important factor, initially for success at the local level and subsequently to
promote its transfer to other communities.
• Very few initiatives mention monitoring systems to assess program
effectiveness or the development of indicators to evaluate the quality of the
environment for children or to assess the impacts for children of municipal or
community actions. Only four initiatives specifically mention carrying out
impact assessments. One of these was the WASEP project in Pakistan, which
aims to reduce water-borne diseases, and assesses its impacts through
observation and survey formats implemented fortnightly. Such extensive
tracking of program results is rare among the initiatives in our study. This
apparent lack of attention to monitoring and impact assessment may be a
consequence of the Best Practices reporting format, which does not
specifically request details about ongoing monitoring and evaluation of
interventions. A reporting format specific to children and youth, incorporating
the criteria derived from child friendly cities principles, could elicit more
information about whether and how initiatives continue to meet the needs of
young people.

The Follow-Up Survey

Of the 101 best practices, 22 were selected for further follow-up, based on regional
distribution, available contact information and impact of the initiative on local
governance or the built environment. The follow up survey, sent by email to the 19
that listed an email address, and by regular mail to all 22, consisted of a self-
administered questionnaire on the continued operation of the initiatives and the
lessons learned. Eight email messages came back as undeliverable, and, in the end,
responses were received from only five initiatives, one of which was no longer in
operation. It is hard to know whether this poor response is a reflection of the
average life span of even highly regarded initiatives, or whether it is a case of the
busy staff of successful programs lacking the time to respond to such surveys. The
information gleaned from these four organizations did not yield any new insights,
Local Environmental Initiatives Oriented to Children and Youth… 46

but confirmed the importance of a community focus and a strong community base.
While initiatives aimed to improve environments primarily for children and youth,
all served the broader population as well.

A Closer Examination of Five Practices

Several of the initiatives (none of them those that responded to the survey) present
persuasive cases for further study, based on their innovative approaches to
involving children and youth in local decision-making processes; their dedication to
providing safe, healthy places for children to live and play; and their sustainability
and transferability.

Rosario: The New Citizenship Landscape (Best Practice, Argentina)

As part of its Municipal Decentralization Program to reduce bureaucracy and
increase the effectiveness of local government and the participation of citizens, the
Municipality of Rosario created “Rosario: The City of Children” in 1996. The project
is a partnership with UNICEF Argentina and involves children in two primary ways:
on Children Advisory Councils or as “Planner Children” in the city’s Decentralization
Districts, taking part in the urban planning and design of public projects. The two
most significant physical-environment projects to result from the participatory
process are a five-hectare “Childhood Farm,” the purpose of which is to “connect
nature and culture, theory and practice, and integrate children, youngsters and
adults in the building of a new ‘ecological thought’;” and a “Children Garden,” which
“is a permanent space for people of all ages” that “offers games, adventures,
mysteries, constructions, and poetry” in a non-formal education format for children,
families and school groups.

The goals of The City of Children project are to enable children and youth to
participate in the design of public spaces, to develop strategies by which to reclaim
public spaces for leisure and recreation, and to create campaigns that transform the
environment based on a concept of social ecology. “The heart of the matter is not
to govern for the children but to govern with them in order to improve life
conditions for the whole community,” the program’s narrative states.

Young people are elected to the Children Advisory Councils (CAC) by their peers in
their home district. The voting process takes place in local institutions, giving all
youth the opportunity to cast their ballots. CAC members meet weekly throughout
their two-year terms. They coordinate activities with their peers, other residents of
their neighborhoods, government representatives, and NGO staff members, as
needed according to the projects at hand. The project has resulted in the creation
of several child-led community campaigns and events, and has succeeded in
building both youth participation and community pride in Rosario. Rosario has
shared its City of Children concept with other Argentine cities through the
development of training courses for students, teachers and government
representatives around the country.
Local Environmental Initiatives Oriented to Children and Youth… 47

Mathare Youth Self-Help Slum and Environmental Cleanup Project (MYSA)

(Best Practice, Kenya)
The Mathare Valley in Kenya is one of Africa’s largest and poorest slums. In 1987,
a group of young leaders from a church in the area worked with an adult adviser to
organize boys’ soccer (football) and volleyball leagues and a girls’ netball league.
At that time, the situation in the community was dire. As MYSA’s narrative
explains,

the Mathare Valley and neighboring slums were home to several hundred
thousand poor people living largely in shacks with little or no water, electricity,
garbage collection, sanitation or security. Although over 70 percent were
hardworking women and innocent kids, the news reports focused on problems
like thuggery, drug dealing, illegal beer brewing, glue-sniffing street kids and
prostitution. There were no youth or community development projects by the
government or aid agencies. The major sport for boys was soccer played with
home-made balls.

To give Mathare youth “a sporting chance,” the young MYSA leaders had to help
them overcome the challenges inherent in a poverty-stricken community, including
a lack of adult leadership, a prevalence of substance abuse, a dearth of playing
fields, rampant gender prejudices, and the absence of funding. The result was a
new “youth self-help” model of activity that has since yielded great returns for both
the young people and their community.

Soon after coordinating the first sports leagues in the area, the youth leaders
pioneered an innovative link between sports and the environment, working under
the motto, “healthy athletes need a healthy environment.” They created an
initiative that awarded league points for each garbage cleanup project completed by
a team. In 1988, the youth organized MYSA as an official NGO run by volunteer
youth leaders and coordinated by a small staff, and built on the sports-environment
connection, coordinating weekly cleanup projects to clear accumulated garbage and
unclog storm drains. A decade later, MYSA acquired two garbage trucks of its own
to aid in the ongoing cleanup process.

The organization’s main objective is to “create opportunities for physical

development, personal development and community development in Mathare and
neighboring areas.” It is run by youth, for youth, and most of those involved are
younger than 16 years old. Within the slums, MYSA boys and girls also take part in
AIDS prevention training and educate their peers about how to avoid contracting
HIV/AIDS. Outside of Mathare, MYSA youth conduct other community service
projects, such as providing lunch for young inmates of the Juvenile Court prison
and renovating the prison cells and toilets.

MYSA youth have excelled at sports, community service, leadership, and peer
mentorship. Both boys’ and girls’ football teams have won national championships;
their athletic prowess and community leadership have served to ameliorate the
image of the Mathare area, once considered a “social cesspool” by outsiders. The
youth participants’ accomplishments include excelling in sports and sportsmanship,
Local Environmental Initiatives Oriented to Children and Youth… 48

preventing AIDS, creating gender partnerships, changing images of the slums,

helping jailed and refugee children, and monitoring water quality in the area. As of
1998, MYSA had members in more than 50 villages and housing estates and was
planning to decentralize, sending staff and equipment to 16 different areas around
Nairobi. More research is needed to learn whether and how the organization has
managed its growth and change since the posting of its Best Practice narrative.

Children and Young People’s Participatory Budget Council (Good Practice,

Brazil)
In Barra Mansa, Brazil, 35 percent of the population is younger than 19. To better
represent young people’s needs and interests in the city budget, Barra Mansa
officials invited thousands of youth aged 16 and older to participate in the planning
of the municipal budget in 1997. Youth have taken part in the process since then,
and in 1999, children and youth aged nine to 16 began to participate in their own,
parallel budget-planning process. Designed to develop citizenship, solidarity and
leadership capacity among children and youth in the city, the participatory process
has helped inculcate a sense of ownership and democratic pride in the youth who
have participated—37 percent of the total youth population of the city. Other
purposes of the participatory process are to “educate the children about the
municipal budget, how it works, how it is managed and how decisions are made
regarding public spending when the population is involved,” and to give youth the
opportunity to discuss their neighborhood needs and their priorities for the city.

“One hundred and fifty thousand reais (approximately US $84,000) each year [have
been] made available in the municipal budget for the children and youth to apply
where they [consider] it a priority.” The children and youth have shown their wide-
ranging concerns for their communities by allocating funds for improved sanitation,
education, healthcare, transportation, recreational facilities, and safety measures.
Funding constraints have forced the city to scale back the youth budget funds,
spending the available funds only on recreational facilities and improved lighting for
safety in “dangerous” areas.

Barra Mansa officials have created a training package for youth participation and
have collaborated with other municipalities on the development of similar
participatory processes. “In a culture where political and economic corruption are
almost considered normal, the Participatory Budget process is an instrument of
democratization and transparency,” states the program’s narrative.

Community Led Environment Action Network (CLEAN – Delhi) (Good

Practice, India)
Through the coordinated efforts of NGO staffers and groups of schoolchildren, the
CLEAN-Delhi program has succeeded in raising popular awareness of environmental
hazards and issues, and mobilizing residents to participate in the assessment,
cleanup, maintenance and monitoring of their environment. The program, now
expanded to cities throughout India, aims to create opportunities for learning
through community service and scientific exploration.
Local Environmental Initiatives Oriented to Children and Youth… 49

As in other urban areas in the developing world, buildup of solid waste, emission of
noxious chemicals from industry and traffic, and pollution of drinking-water systems
plagued Delhi at the start of the CLEAN project in 1996. Delhi is still the third most
polluted city in the world—Development Associates, an Indian NGO, organized
CLEAN as a participatory project with youth in the area to help create sustainable
environmental change. The CLEAN narrative explains, “The programme banks on
children as the prime agents of change. The approach adopted was to train school
groups and equip them to monitor the local environment, share the results on its
status with local communities and encourage joint action for its amelioration.” The
children used water- and air-quality monitoring field kits at specified stations over
three seasons. Convinced of the need to clean up the polluted environment, the
children then took part in campaigns to set up recycling and composting stations,
contributed to the “greening” of the city by planting native trees and shrubs,
launched campaigns against littering and the use of polluting polythene bags, and
conducted public events to raise popular awareness of a variety of environmental-
impact issues.

CLEAN has enjoyed great success, with the children’s efforts resulting in the
support of the Chief Minister of Delhi and other government leaders, the
widespread installation of composting and recycling units, the establishment of
permanent water and air monitoring systems around the city, the installation of
water filtration systems at schools and in municipal water treatment plants, and
other accomplishments. “The impact of the programme at the policy level was
profound,” the CLEAN narrative states. “Once all stakeholders joined together for
implementation, they got involved in issues like pollution, environment degradation,
solid waste disposal, depletion of tree cover, proper utilization of waste paper,
cleanliness drives, etc.” The program has also resulted in baseline and seasonal
environment data to inform policy initiatives.

The initial Delhi-based CLEAN activities provided a springboard for further

development around the country. “Starting from a small nucleus of the core
teachers and students, the programme expanded to train other students within the
schools participating in Nature/Eco Clubs.” Thus, through this initiative Delhi youth
become scientific researchers, environmentalists and trainers.

Mother Centre International Network/AG International, Stuttgart (Award

Winning Practice, Germany)
The Mother Centre International Network resulted from a grassroots women’s
movement in Germany in the early 1980s following a German Youth Institute
research project that focused on the conditions of parenting in contemporary
society. This project prompted the German government to fund three model
mother centers and led to the publication of a book that documented their success,
in the form of mothers’ own stories. The concept spread rapidly throughout
Western Europe—neighborhood-based, cooperatively owned mother centers were
soon providing low-cost child care and services for women and children. They
became hubs of social activity for both mothers and children, and served to
democratize access to local opportunities. The Mother Centre International Network
now includes more than 700 centers in Europe, Russia, Africa, and North America.
Local Environmental Initiatives Oriented to Children and Youth… 50

Mother centers

address the needs of women and children and recreate family and
neighborhood structures in the community where modernization in the West
and totalitarian systems and war in the East have destroyed them, states the
program’s narrative. They empower mothers and create new channels for
female participation and leadership in communities and local
governance.…They are melting pots in the community for women of diverse
class and ethnic backgrounds to meet and join forces to deal with everyday
life issues, to create community services and to [reorganize] resources to the
grassroots level.

By aiding mothers and providing a space for social activity, mother centers also
bring children into the life of the community. “Mother centres create an opportunity
for children to meet and interact with other children.…For the children the centres
mean an expansion of their social and physical space and experience.” In Western
Europe, mother centers have typically received a combination of public and private
funding, taking advantage of grants available for family self-help groups. In
Central and Eastern Europe, public funding is more difficult to obtain and usually
comes in the form of in-kind donations of meeting space or land on which to build a
center.

A survey by the German Youth Institute found that mother centers can have a
direct impact on the built environment of their communities:

• 47 percent of respondents saw improvements to the local infrastructure as

a result of mother center participant activism;
• 46 percent of the mother centers are represented on municipal councils on
urban planning and development.

Mother centers around the world have succeeded in creating “public living rooms”
for parents and children, initiating grassroots activism, validating motherhood,
enriching neighborhoods and creating social cohesion, offering a platform for the
issues of parenting to be linked to national campaigns, reducing poverty and social
exclusion, creating partnerships for ongoing training and dissemination of the
concept, and more.

Implications
The UN-Habitat Best Practices Database is a rich source of information about
practices that directly or indirectly affect the physical environments of children and
youth around the world. It is evident from the variety of issues and concerns
addressed by the initiatives that many different approaches to improving the living
environment for children and youth exist.

However, there are also some similar trends and patterns. These successful
practices typically:
Local Environmental Initiatives Oriented to Children and Youth… 51

• adhere to multiple child friendly principles, with activities in one category

building on and reinforcing activities in other categories
• involve children directly in environmental improvement activities
• are part of more broad-based approaches that include other population
groups, policy domains, and program areas
• rely on community-based approaches
• include a variety of stakeholders, rather than a single organization or
government agency; and
• “scale up” to other parts of the city, to other cities, or even other countries

Also common to the initiatives, however, is the fact that monitoring and evaluation
appear to be rare, as is the use of child-impact assessments.

In most cases, the data on these successful initiatives pertains to just the year
when the nominating organization submitted its report for evaluation by the Dubai
Award Technical Advisory Committee, or a period of a few years prior at best.3
More focused follow-up research could shed light on whether and how practices
adapt to changing conditions over time and which practices lead to long-term
sustainable child friendly cities.4

Many questions remain: How do youth who are active participants in their local
communities transfer what they have learned to younger age cohorts, that is, what
mechanisms are in place to foster the intergenerational sustainability of initiatives?
How do funding sources and partnerships influence the decision-making process
with regard to children and youth, and how do privately funded projects differ from
publicly funded projects? How have successful initiatives changed over time? What
lessons have the adults and youth involved learned, and what would they suggest
others add or avoid to make similar projects successful?

Perhaps the most significant lesson that emerges from these initiatives is their
relationship to broader-based community efforts. It is clear that environmentally
focused projects that benefit and involve children and youth can improve living
conditions for all community residents and help create sustainable environments
that include these characteristics which children and youth need. It is important to
recognize that programs that improve children’s environments are not a zero-sum
game with costs incurred by other population groups. Environments that improve
children’s safety and health generally also benefit the safety and health of others.
By the same token, it is equally and perhaps more important to recognize that
there are opportunities to improve children’s environments through programs and
policies that originate in other concerns, in particular those related to livelihoods
and poverty alleviation, safety, and health. An important challenge, therefore, is to
identify, promote, and create arenas for action in which children’s needs converge
with those of other population groups.
Local Environmental Initiatives Oriented to Children and Youth… 52

Endnotes

1. The Best Practices Database and more information about the Dubai Award and the Best
Practices Local Leadership Programme are available online: www.bestpractices.org
2. From the Dubai International Award for Best Practices to Improve the Living
Environment, submission guide and reporting format for the year 2004:
http://www.blpnet.org/blp/awards/.
3. In some cases, “best practice” and “award winning” organizations submitted updates of
their information for inclusion in the Best Practices Database. However, this is the
exception rather than the rule.
4. See also: Rakodi, Carole, Fiona Nunan, and Douglas McCallum (2002). Sustainable
Urbanisation: Achieving Agenda 21. Nairobi and London: UN-Habitat and UK
Government Department for International Development. Available online:
http://www.sustainabledevelopment.org/blp/index.html.

Darcy Varney is a student in the Ph.D. Program in Design and Planning at the
University of Colorado, and is director of special projects for the Children, Youth
and Environments Center for Research and Design.

Willem van Vliet-- is a mental laborer with undefined skills. He has a Ph.D. in
Sociology (University of Toronto), etc., etc. He became immersed in children's
environments and housing problems by birth, below sea level in an aporphyrogenic
bunker in the postwar shortage-ridden Netherlands. A.k.a. El Capitán, he is in
possession of an uncertified but authentic and persistent lunatic streak, evinced,
inter alia, by his editing of the Encyclopedia of Housing and a growing stockpile of
more and less odd ends. Since coming to CU, he has retained an abiding interest in
heather morning glory and rock gardening.