The Local Government Association (LGA) has urged public sector bodies to 'ditch the jargon' and use words that people understand. On the face of it this is surely a good thing: people are more likely to access public services if they understand what is on offer.

But a quick glance down the list of banned words and their proposed substitutes, and you start to wonder where the LGA bought its thesaurus – for example ‘capacity’ doesn’t mean the same thing as ‘ability’; ‘strategic’ definitely doesn’t mean ‘planned’; and while I agree that ‘coterminous’ isn’t a particularly accessible word, it certainly doesn’t mean ‘all singing from the same hymn sheet’ (which in itself is hardly a multicultural metaphor). Anyone who knows anything about climate change will also disagree that ‘upward trend’ means ‘getting better’ – the upward trend in CO2 emissions is anything but an improvement.

What’s rung alarm-bells here, though, is finding the words ‘sustainable’ and ‘sustainable communities’ blacklisted as jargon; the LGA offers as substitutes ‘long-lasting’ and ‘environmentally-friendly’.  That’s years of emphasising that sustainable development is about living within environmental limits AND ensuring social justice – the twin objectives at the heart of the government’s sustainable development strategy – potentially undone with one swipe of a bureaucratic pen.

It’s saddening that the LGA still doesn’t understand sustainability, and this suggests it can’t be pushing the agenda very hard with its membership. Forum for the Future works in partnership (excuse the jargon) with many organisations in the public sector to push forward sustainable development (SD), and we would be worried if local authorities started to see SD in those terms.

But rather than (just) berate the LGA for its ignorance of government policy and failure to grasp what sustainable development is all about, we ought to ask ourselves why ‘sustainable’ is seen as jargon, and why the sustainable development movement has failed to get people to understand the term better.

We need to work harder to explain the benefits of a sustainable approach and how it can make lives better.  Kirklees council, for example, has set out a strategy for ‘affordable warmth’, which aims to “Make a difference to the energy efficiency of homes, affordability of energy and health and welfare of Kirklees residents”. This strategy, with its explicit win-win-win for residents (environmental, social and economic), is being achieved through a coalition of the local authority, the NHS, national and local charities, Kirklees Energy Services, and tenants and residents groups. This is a genuinely sustainable approach – and one which is about a new way of working, going beyond what might be understood by the reductionist idea ‘environmentally-friendly’.

It’s not that the LGA is wrong particularly – ‘sustainable’ really does mean ‘long-lasting’.  But oversimplifying sustainable development runs the risk of ignoring the underlying causes of unsustainable development – why we’re in this mess in the first place.

If there’s one thing the last 18 months of banking collapse and credit crunch have shown us, it’s that just because systems function and provide economic growth they won’t necessarily endure in the long-term.  Our understanding of what happens when you build a system on short-term thinking – bonuses based on quarterly performance for example – is now surely at an all-time high.

This should be a great moment for those of us working and thinking about sustainable development to make the case that by taking a long-term approach to systems, such as how we assess value in financial markets, we are more likely to create more sustainable, i.e. enduring, outcomes for people and the planet.  Maybe that does need a new word: we definitely need to be able to communicate the case clearly and keep people’s eyes on shaping what emerges from this current crisis.

One thing we wholeheartedly support is the LGA’s call for public service providers to stop using the words ‘customer’ and ‘client’ and use ‘person/people’ instead.  A lot of ink has been spilled on the shift in public service delivery to a consumerist model, and this is a great moment to ditch the idea that citizens are consumers, and move back to the idea of serving people.  A sustainable approach to public service delivery asks just that.

Putting people’s needs at the centre of the picture, while understanding that environmental resources aren’t unlimited and need to be managed in order to support our ongoing survival – all against a backdrop of dwindling financial resources – those are enormous challenges facing public sector bodies right now.  We call the solution sustainable development.  We don’t mind what the LGA calls it, but it’s a tough ask and that’s where the LGA should be focusing its support to local government.