Figure3-3-15 Outline of the Land Use Zone for Minamisenrioka Community Development Project (plan)

businesses should proactively cooperate with each other as partners, that mean “Collaboration” is important. In order to do so, capacity building of duty bearers of sustainable regional development by such collaboration has also become a big challenge.

(a) Environmental community development

Higashimatsuyama city, Saitama prefecture, is famous for advancing community development by concluding an “agreement” which includes contents of mutual cooperation with equal rights of the administration and civil groups. The city has concluded an agreement not only for the purpose of coming to an agreement, but also to focus on each essential entity to unite with other entities to proactively play its role.

For example, the market expansion of recycled products, made in workplaces for the physically challenged, has been quite difficult to achieve only through relationship with the welfare participants, but as they participated in an environmental event, their soap made from waste oil, which had not been sold at all, flew off the shelves. Subsequently, the organization for people with disabilities has participated in the agreement after they participated in the waste food oil collection in the model area.

Thus, the agreement was studied as a reciprocal rule based on collaboration through actual activities, and the agreement was concluded by confirming the result of the study. It’s worth noting that the rule that should have only a weak binding force, on the basis of equal rights under the agreement, will demonstrate high strength in each area, regarding specific segregation of duties.

(b) Approaches towards a sustainable community development in Osaka prefecture’s “Nishiyodogawa ESD Commission”

Under the “United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development,” initiated by Japan’s proposal, countries across the world are progressing their approaches. The Ministry of the Environment implemented the creation of practical ESD models in local communities for a period of three years starting in FY2006, and through public advertisements, the Ministry selected areas as models to engage in the implementation of ESD aimed at creating sustainable communities.

A model area, the “Nishiyodogawa ESD Commission,” in Osaka prefecture, is working on a project aiming to realize a sustainable community development. Nishiyodogawa high school in Osaka, an ESD Commission member, has made an approach to the “Nanohana Project” (a sound material-cycle project in which students cultivate rape blossoms, cook foods using the oil extracted from the plants, utilize the waste oil from the cooking for driving cars and to let rape blossoms absorb the $ CO_{2} $ emitted by cars) (Figure3-3-16) in the compulsory subject classes of “The Environment.” After school, the high school students voluntarily conduct club activities, and have extended the scope of their activities by collaborating with other commission members. Members of the collaboration include the Center for the Redevelopment of Pollution-damaged Areas in Japan (The Aozora Foundation), a foundation which aims to redevelop pollution-damaged areas and plays a central role, local universities and junior high schools, the local administration, social education facilities, community associations and Girl Scouts. In this way, synergetic effects have been created that community