Local authorities are increasingly encouraged to implement sustainable development. This is in line with a wider trend where corporate and other organisations (including state governments) are to contribute to the social, environmental and economic issues put forward at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) of Rio, in 1992. Local authorities are major actors in contributing to sustainable development. The extent of their competences meets the variety of the challenges concerned, as does the role they play in animating participative democracy and local collective action. Local territories are essential frameworks for the designing of locally relevant solutions to global issues, thanks to the proximity of different players whose action has to be coordinated. In the French territorial organisation context, the specialisation and the combination of the different local authorities levels' competences makes inter-institutional collaboration necessary. No local authority or other player possesses, in fact, the knowledge and competences required for facing alone the stakes of sustainable development. The Rio Agenda 21 enjoins local authorities to implement local Agendas 21, which are local strategies and action plans consistent with the issues stressed by the UNCED. In France, the diffusion of local Agenda 21 as an innovation has required a translation process throughout a network of heterogeneous actors, in parallel with its difficult institutional emergence. Well defined in theory, local Agenda 21 remains a rather marginal voluntary approach. Existing projects only partially take account of its various procedural and substantive stakes. The French National Strategy for Sustainable Development has an objective of 500 local Agenda 21 in 2008, raising the question of evaluating these projects and approaches. Consubstantial with local Agenda 21, evaluation remains a major difficulty for local authorities as well as for third parties. We preferably see evaluation as a process continuously anchored in the strategic management of local authorities. The relevance of the identification of their priorities and key sustainability issues by local authorities appears to be a major issue in this context. Thus the question of the "normalisation" of local Agendas 21 arises, as regards its legitimacy, relevance and practical terms. We propose to adapt the SD21000 approach, which originally addressed businesses, to local authorities. Issued from a large consensus, this methodology offers a great compatibility with other guidelines to local authorities, while being operational and likely to intervene at a strategic level (contrary to other limited and isolated existing tools). Developing such an adapted methodology required the identification of sustainability stakes and stakeholders specific to local authorities, and necessitated an evaluation process in three distinct areas: the internal one (corresponding to the "social accountability" of local authorities), the institutional one (corresponding to their specific and regulatory competencies and policies), and the one of strategic territorial coordination. Through our research and field work, local authorities and third parties are led to base the identification of local sustainability priorities (significant stakes) upon a rational, systematic and open process; to identify the projects' profile according to their performance in three areas mentioned above; to identify and take into account stakeholders' interests and expectations in a systematic manner, as well as their influence over the achievement of collective stakes' management at the territorial level. Ways for headways are thus identified as regards these different aspects, giving evaluation an aim of pedagogy and continuous improvement. Three local authorities consisted of fieldwork ground for intervention where we tested and ameliorated the methodology proposed. The approach developed contributes to the conceptual framework for evaluating and running local Agendas 21, internally and by third parties. It stresses the need for methodologies relevant to local authorities and strategic territorial management and governance, in a wider movement of converging principles and tools between public and private organisations, to which sustainable development seems to be contributing. The methodology developed consists of an operational aid for decision-making, running and managing, which is likely to be further upgraded and aims to be used in parallel with other relevant tools, allowing local authorities to better define their choices and implement their action.
