Local Agenda 21 Seremban

I was invited to facilitate the drafting of Local Agenda 21 Action Plan of Seremban on Tuesday. The participants have divided to 3 groups, namely social development, environmental protection and infrastructure development. Each group, then identified the prioritised major issue for further deliberation.

The group on social development selected the youth as main focus. I personally think it is a good starting point as this category of age group can be easy entrance for stakeholders' participation. When it comes community issues, more than often the response from community members are poor as many might not share the same vision and interest. Youth and or children are pertinent focus group as all residents share the same interest of educating their children. Everyone likes to inculcate good value on the children.

The group on environmental protection has selected rehabilitation of Sungai Temiang as their case study. The river flow through the city centre becomes an eyesore to the people as the quality of water was deteriorating. It was mentioned that rubbish and waste water discharge are the main culprit. I reminded the group that in fact human is the mother of all problems. Our actions and greed are the cause of problems. We are the one to not taking care the river, we throw rubbish into the river and etc. In order to improve the water quality, we need to engage three multiple approaches, namely pollution reduction, rehabilitation and community participation. While engineering solutions is a must, without full and committed participation of various stakeholders especially the people, the solutions might not be sustained. And, we are talking about sustainable development. For getting people to be involved, civic science encompasses awareness raising, knowledge and skills acquisition, actions and changing of habits have to be applied.

For the group of infrastructure development, they were given 13 issues to select, and have difficulty to choose one. I told them to revisit the identified issues, and perhaps to combine some issues as many might be too small to have owns action plan. Importantly is to get input and cooperation from all stakeholders to share the ideas and actions for implementation. It is a plan for all and not the local authority alone. More than often, we have stakeholders pointing finger to others to deliver, and in the case of LA 21, the local authority to deliver rather than delivery by all according to everyone expertise and resources. For instance, community members to maintain the public space in front of their house rather than waiting for the service provider to do it. This is social responsibility at large that we tend to forget.

In total, I found the forum is refreshing and that my ideas was shared and accepted in good spirit. I hope similar spirit can be sustained for effective implementation. Cheers.