The "Society Commitments" is an online platform where each individual, society and public organization can publish how they will contribute to the sustainable development in the Czech Republic. The platform is run by the Ministry of the Environment, that is the main organisation responsible for realization of the sustainable development in the national context. Each commitment is assigned to one or more of the SDGs and also to one of the key areas of the Strategy "Czech Republic 2030" (the national version of the 2030 Agenda).

There are three main objectives.
1) Involving the public and business will ensure long-term implementation and policy coherence of the sustainable development in the Czech Republic, that will be independent on the governmental changes or the actual political preferences.

2) Activity promotes the sustainable development to the public and shows that it is a matter of each of us, providing a platform to act. The platform can serve as an inspiration with endless possibilities of participation.

3) Activity enables better communication and cooperation of the state sector and public sector for the future matters.

The challenge we are facing is
1) How to ensure that all the commitments will be fully met.
2) How not to prevent that the whole activity turns into a "greenwashing" and a PR campaign of commercial subjects.

That is why we are now updating the registration system. Every registered actor will sign a unilateral memorandum stating his commitment, with the signature of the CEO of the organisation, that should bring more accountability into the process.

Implementers of this activity can be any individual person, commercial society, non-governmental organization, public organization (e.g. municipality, Ministry, educational institution...) that decides to make a change of their behaviour in favour of the sustainable development. As a reward for the registration the subjects can use the logo Czech republic 2030 and they can participate in our events and workshops for them.
Methods of engagement: Social media campaign and personal address of the selected organisations and individuals through the network of the Council of the Sustainable development and its committees.

The project started in November 2018, inspired by the similar activity of the government in Finland that was launched in 2015.

At the moment we are collecting individual Society Commitments.
The commitment may last from several weeks up to one year. After the set deadline it will be evaluated. The first round of Evaluation will be done in autumn 2018, when we want to collect feedback from the participants, how the implementation went for them and whether they encountred any obstacles. The results and best practices will be presented in November 2019 on our annual conference Forum of the Sustainable Development.

The expected results of each individual Commitment are stated on the webpage of each Commitment (e.g. employing 50 % more of elderly people than until now, reduction of plastic of 30 kg per year).

The long-term result of this activity is to boost sustainable development into every day actions of people, business and public sphere.

Enabling factors - as a ministry we can provide to the companies better cooperation with the state sector. As one of the organizers of the SDG Awards in the Czech Republic we have also access to the pool of companies and organisations that want to be active in the sustainable development. However, with this activity we want to also target those, who never heard of a "Sustainable development concept" or "SDGs" and want to show them that everyone can participate in the process.

Constraints - it is not easy to convince the individuals and companies to make them commit unilaterally to something, as it may seem as an extra work for them.

This activity is very cost efficient because for our department it does not imply any substantial costs except for conducting the PR campaign and the administration of the webpage. For the registered subject it might imply some initial costs at the beginning of the commitment (implementation of a new technology etc.) but in the long-term they will profit from the sustainable approach. Most of the subjects tend to naturally choose a way that can also save them money (reducing packages, less consumption, etc.).

This activity is a new way how to engage the public and the business sector into the sustainable development. In the region of the Central and Eastern Europe it has not been tried before. It should impact positively the perception of sustainable development within the society and ensure a long-term stability in its implementation.

The Society Committments platform can be found here: https://www.cr2030.cz/zavazky/