We were established in 1983 as The Environment Foundation. In 2009, we adopted our new name, the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development, to mark the significance of the relationship between democracy and sustainable development in our work.
Humankind’s ability to cope with the sustainable development challenges of the twenty-first century is dependent on evolution in systems of democratic decision-making.
The Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development works with partners in the UK and internationally to identify pathways to democratic innovation in the face of the major environmental and social pressures that lie ahead.
We work to find ways to strengthen democratic decision-making for sustainable development.
There are other systems of decision-making currently in play around the world apart from liberal democracy. We don’t discount their significance. We will draw on positive insights from countries that may not be considered democratic because in principle good ideas and innovation can be found anywhere.
We do not suggest that democracy is a necessary prerequisite for sustainable development. A democracy first, sustainable development later prescription applied anywhere would be foolish as well as dangerous. But ideas about democratic decision-making and sustainable development are closely linked.
Sustainable development has always been closely bound up with thinking on rights of public participation and access to information. And sustainable development presents a basic challenge of democracy. The 2002 Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development which is one of the documents that emerged from agreements at the 2002 World Summit for Sustainable Development makes this case in language that is extraordinary for an intergovernmentally agreed document:
“.. unless we act in a manner that fundamentally changes their lives the poor of the world may lose confidence in their representatives and the democratic systems to which we remain committed, seeing their representatives as nothing more than sounding brass or tinkling cymbals.”
The Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development does not exist to spread democracy. But we are interested in democracy wherever it exists, in whatever form, and wherever it is possible to have a conversation about how democracy might need to evolve to meet sustainable development challenges.
We work on democracy because democracy is the only decision-making system that is able deliver respect for human rights on the scale that is necessary, ethically, to maintain the dignity of humankind.
What is democracy?
Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy suggests that the “wonderful thing” about democracy is that it “can mean anything you want it to mean”.
Democracy certainly appears in many different forms around the world. But it’s not quite so difficult to define as Arundhati Roy’s quote might suggest.
The central idea of democracy is governance of the people by the people.
Part of this basic idea is built into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which says, in Article 21(3), that:
“The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures”.
Democracy is to do with free and fair elections; it’s about the process through which people choose their representatives, and about the accountability and legitimacy of those representatives.
But democracy is much more than the processes of representative democracy. Democracy is also about the opportunities for people to participate in decisions between elections. And it’s about how people organise themselves to participate in decision-making on issues of public importance whether or not elected national, regional and local government representatives are there to represent them.
As we develop our work and our thinking, we’ll be revisiting these very basic ideas to build a more complete picture of what democracy means when it’s considered through the lens of sustainable development.
What is sustainable development?
Sustainable development is essentially about taking an integrated approach to decision-making across three main areas of concern: economy, environment and society. For these purposes economy means economic development not never-ending economic growth. Environment means environmental protection, but it is also about how we use our natural resources. And society incorporates ideas about social justice, fairness, and poverty reduction.
The definition of sustainable development that is most commonly quoted comes from the 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, which defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.
Clearly, sustainable development has not been achieved. Humankind has failed to tackle poverty and inequality on the scales necessary to ensure that we are able to meet the needs of the present generation. We are also compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs: collectively we are depleting resources, growing the world’s population to levels that threaten our ability to feed ourselves, and altering the climate in ways that could prove profoundly harmful.
