ICSP Tool

An Integrated Community Sustainability Plan (ICSP) is about integrating social and economic imperatives into the quality of place (the ecological imperative). The integration of people, place and economy into a single integrated plan over a long-term perspective is a critical process for achieving sustainable community development. In many ways an integrated sustainable community plan is a process of reconciliation, with the three imperatives of sustainable development brought together in an integrated policy planning and collaborative decision-making framework.

This tool for creating a plan was uniquely designed by the CRC research team in response to demand from several communities for advice about how to implement an ICSP. It describes both how a plan should be developed in concert with a community engagement process to build the plan, otherwise, it will simply develop dust on the shelf, further increasing our implementation gap.

This tool is a series of steps and questions for communities to build their own ISCP, and supports these steps with an introduction to a number of hyperlinked tools and techniques that are now available and readily accessible. Although uniquely designed for Canadian communities, the tools and technique described have come a wide range of planning and municipal governance contexts.

Two critical components for ensuring your plan implementation are designing an evaluation process for the plan, which includes embedding it into a bylaw and linking it to political accountability prior to each electoral cycle. Another necessary step is the integration of a community's official community plan with the ISCP, and further, thinking about merging disaster planning and emergency responses, climate change adaptation and mitigation into your ISCP, followed by bureaucratic realignment as well.

Another tool that may be of interest to you is the recently released, Policy Agenda for Canadian Municipalities.