One of the most important principles of Agenda 21 was an explicit call for increased participation of local representatives, including local governments, NGOs, indigenous peoples and grassroots organisations, in initiating, designing and implementing policies that promote development while maintaining healthy environments. Chapter 28 of Agenda 21, denoted as Local Agenda 21, explicitly called for local authorities to develop local strategies for sustainable development through participatory processes (Coenen 2009). Within less than ten years of its formulation, over 6,000 local authorities in more than one hundred countries had formally committed to Local Agenda 21 (Stelljes 2010). Initially, most of the activities were in Europe and in settings where there were already national commitments. However, they are now found across the globe, including in São Paulo (Xavier et al 2019), Durban and many other cities and countries (Pozo-Llorente, Gutiérrez-Pérez, and De Poza-Vilches 2019).