This document provides recommendations and requirements to project developers, decision-makers and managers responsible for authorising, promoting, financing, planning, designing, procuring, managing, reviewing and implementing a project or programme. The recommendations and requirements aim to ensure that a project or programme adds value by aligning its development and implementation with a community’s own or externally directed sustainability strategies and objectives and the requirements of ISO 37101.

This document supports both a top-down approach, where the community has implemented ISO 37101 and expects the developers to meet the standard’s requirements, as well as a bottom-up approach, where the developer wants to meet the ISO 37101 framework principles whether the community has or has not implemented the standard. In both situations, it is recognised that implementing this document ensures that the project will contribute holistically to the sustainability of the community.

This document:

—    recognises that there are several types of communities and stakeholder organisations that are charged with implementing ISO 37101;

—    offers practical guidelines to all types of developers on initiating, planning, implementing, monitoring, managing and continually improving sustainable development activities for a specific project or programme at all its stages in a way that is both inclusive and holistic and in accordance with ISO 37101;

—    in referencing the six sustainable development goals (SDGs) of ISO 37101, establishes a framework for the evaluation of the relevance of a project or programme in the context of the sustainable development of a community, the community’s strategy and objectives, its management capacity, and its management systems for quality, the environment, health and safety, and governance;

—    supports mainstreaming the actions and interactions of a multitude of independent decision makers to enhance the global impact on sustainable urban development that results from a wide variety of urban strategies, plans and programmes.