Skip to content

Friday, May. 15, 2020

Does the UN’s ‘Agenda 21’ call for regionalization of urban government?

Jay Appleton, Gigafact
no

”Agenda 21” was the theme of a 1992 United Nations conference on sustainable development. The agenda outlined various measures to address the challenges of poverty, health and other needs. It called for international cooperation to "support and supplement" national and local efforts, in line with usual U.N. efforts acknowledging the sovereignty of member governments. In 2015, the U.N. General Assembly adopted an updated "agenda" for 2030.

The ”Agenda 21” term has lived on in the U.S. among opponents of efforts to improve policy coordination across major metropolitan areas. Supporters of a 2013 lawsuit to block regional planning efforts in the San Francisco Bay Area claimed the U.N.'s Agenda 21 lay behind ideas to increase housing density and otherwise "take control" of private land use. The lawsuit was dismissed in 2019.

Sources

About fact briefs

Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by Gigafact contributor publications.

See all fact briefs

Between 2020 and 2022, under close editorial supervision, Gigafact contracted a group of freelance writers and editors to test the concepts for fact briefs and provide inputs to our software development process. We call this effort Gigafact Foundry. Over the course of these two years, Gigafact Foundry writers published over 1500 fact briefs in response to claims they found online. Their important work forms the basis of Gigafact formats and editorial guidelines, and is available to the public on Gigafact.org. Readers should be aware that while there is still a lot of relevant information to be found, not all fact briefs produced by Gigafact Foundry reflect Gigafact's current methods and standards for fact briefs. If you come across any that you feel are out of date and need to be looked at with fresh eyes, don't hesitate to contact us at support@gigafact.org.

Learn More

Latest Fact Briefs

Be a Friend of facts

Help us fund more great fact briefs like this one.