HCA Academy/ESRC Sustainable Communities Initiative: Co-ordinators' Final Report

The UK government has been central in leading the debate on the delivery of ‘sustainable communities’ as part of the wider goal of sustainable development. Within the UK, such communities are currently defined as “places where people want to live and work, now and in the future” but understanding of how they can be conceived, and how they can be created remains embryonic. One dimension of this has been an appreciation, identified most clearly in the Egan Report of 20042, that there is a lack of skills and more widely an understanding of which skills are necessary to deliver such sustainable communities. This Initiative adds to an understanding of how such skills deficiencies may be addressed, and assesses different ways in which skills, learning and knowledge for sustainable communities is and might be delivered.