Carron McDiarmid, Head of Policy at Highland Council

Sustainable Development and Best Value: Management perspectives from Highland Council

Carron is head of policy at Highland Council, an area nearly the same size as Belgium. In her presentation, Carron discussed the managerial perspectives of sustainable development and Best Value for the Council and how this could be developed in the future. 

Carron identified how the starting point for discussing sustainable development in the Council is the Community Plan which aims to grow the population, improve the area’s infrastructure and tackle inequalities. Sustainable development is currently a cross cutting theme, but will feature more prominently when the plan is revised in 2008. There will also be sustainable development requirements in the Best Value work being rolled out across agencies.

 Carron then illustrated the Council’s main areas of sustainable development work.

• Environmental sphere – including energy and carbon management and housing.   
• Social and Economic sphere – tackling disadvantage by addressing fuel poverty, housing issues and financial inclusion.
• Citizenship and Participation – approaches to community engagement and encouraging public feedback.  
• Links with Governance and Management of Public Resources – co-ordination between organisations, customer contact, regulation, performance management, more efficiency and transparency.
• Lessons so far – delivery requires leadership, resourcing, good performance measures and ultimately a change in behaviour.

Carron finished by identifying further opportunities. Internally these will include mainstreaming sustainable development and ensuring join-up between initiatives. Externally and in partnership these will involve identifying quick wins that we can deliver together and which will create lasting impacts.

The streaming audio file here allows you to sample key points from Carron’s full presentation. Her supporting slide presentation and the questions and answers that followed are also available here in Adobe Reader pdf format.