The International Forum on National Sustainable Development will bring together 72 participants, representing government and economic leaders, nongovernmental organizations and civil society groups, to make recommendations to the World Summit about how to police progress with sustainable development on a national, rather than international, level.

The forum will focus on developing principles and characteristics for a National Sustainable Development Strategy (NSDS), a planning process that hopes to transform goals into action, according to the provisional agenda.

The strategies are meant to take commitments from the 1992 United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development and turn them into policies that can help individual nations define and implement their own sustainable development priorities.

Integrated decision making is the subject of Chapter 8 of Agenda 21, the global action plan for sustainable development that came from the 1992 UN conference in Rio.

The forum is also slated to discuss improved use of existing national capacity to help a growing sustainable development strategy, and an improved system for monitoring the progress and implementation of the strategy.

The findings of the international forum, which will be held November 7 to 9 this year in Ghana, will be compiled into a set of recommendations and give to the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002.