Posted By John Lotherington
on 9 May, 2013
Early in March, Labour published an independent review called ‘Overcoming Short-termism within British Business’. The picture was not pretty: “Short-termism has become an entrenched feature of the UK business environment” that “militates against… the UK’s future economic prosperity”, it warned.
The ensuing debate, barely audible over the sound of no one listening, was gnarled by the semantics of how much and when to pay company bosses. But nobody thought to ask the preceding, more salient questions: what about future social prosperity? What about future environmental prosperity? What, in short, about overcoming short-termism in politics?
To the surprise of a scant …
Posted By Halina Ward
on 20 March, 2013
As a new Democracy and Sustainability Platform launches, rooted in a short Manifesto for Democracy and Sustainability, Halina Ward argues that democracy and sustainability are inextricably linked and that the time for action is now.
The case for action
Climate change, population growth, natural resource scarcity, rapid extinction of species – these intensifying challenges are among the most significant facing humanity. So much so, that in June 2012 the United Nations Environment Programme’s GEO-5 Global Environmental Outlook warned that “the currently observed changes in the Earth System are unprecedented in human history.”
But what impact could these crises have on …
Posted By Halina Ward
on 20 March, 2013
We cherish sustainability: meeting the needs of people now without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. But today, human activities have exceeded the earth’s natural limits. As a species we have created great inequalities and torn resources away from those yet to be born.
We cherish democracy: the rule of the people, by the people, and for the people. But democracy is undermined by decision-making that is democratic in name only. It is threatened by conflict, apathy, inequality, manipulation and corruption. It is failing to deliver sustainability.
Together, if we take immediate action, we have …
Posted By Halina Ward
on 20 March, 2013
PRESS RELEASE, 20 March 2013
www.democracyandsustainability.org
Sustainability agenda ignores democracy at its peril. World’s first people’s manifesto for democracy and sustainability sets out a global agenda for action.
World leaders have failed to make democracy fit for purpose to tackle the major environmental and social threats facing humanity. Climate change, population shifts, natural resource scarcity and the rapid extinction of species will put major pressures on democracy and on democratic institutions unless immediate action is taken.
If implemented now, a Manifesto for Democracy and Sustainability, which launches today with the support of a diverse group of founder signatories, could set …
Posted By Jyoti Panday
on 6 March, 2013
The UK government’s plans for management of nuclear waste have come to a standstill with Cumbria Council’s decision earlier this year to vote against Government plans to undertake preliminary work on an underground storage dump close to the Lake District.
Besides creating a stalemate in the country’s wider nuclear strategy, the decision illustrates the tensions that arise when balancing local versus national and present, and future interests.
The decision has been cheered by environment activists. Many feel that it marks a shift in decision-making with people locally and directly affected by decisions shaping and determining the outcomes. As Dr …
Posted By John Elkington
on 5 February, 2013
There are a handful of people who play such a key role in your life that it’s almost impossible to recall a time when you didn’t know them. For me, Helen Holdaway was one of those rare people. Both at the Royal Society of Arts and later at The Environment Foundation, she supported the leading edge of thinking and innovation in the worlds of environment and sustainability.
Hearing that Helen had finally succumbed to the cancer she had quietly, bravely fought for many years, I tried to think back to when she and I had first met.
Unintended consequence of …
Posted By Jyoti Panday
on 4 February, 2013
It is good to see the idea of democracy’s inextricable link to sustainability taking roots in international development.
Music to our ears, a recent news release from the Inter Parliamentary Union (IPU), headed ‘Putting Democracy at the Heart of Sustainable Development’ concluded that democracy and democratic governance should be at the heart of a new international development agenda.
Last week IPU, a focal point for world-wide parliamentary dialogue, hosting a round table in Monrovia, Liberia for members of the High Level Panel tasked by Secretary General Ban Ki Moon to develop a framework for a post 2015 development agenda. The …
Posted By Jyoti Panday
on 8 January, 2013
There is a magic that is created when ideas, imagination and vision come together. There is definitely something magical about the historic Schloss Leopoldskron-an estate by a calm lake with majestic view of the mountains. Man and nature coexisting in harmony.
Home to Salzburg Global Seminar (SGS), it is a place where thinkers and leaders convene seeking to understand and solve through just and humane values, the global challenges facing their societies and the world. And it was here that twenty-four international participants gathered in December 2012 over three days as part of the final leg of the consultation …
Posted By Nicolò
on 4 December, 2012
Manifestos are aplenty, nowadays. From Occupy, through business brands, to small and large online and offline communities alike, what was once exclusively the purview of political parties and intellectuals, has been adopted as a popular form of communication of an organization’s goals, a movement’s vision, or an individual’s frustrations.
As we continue our work towards a people’s manifesto for democracy and sustainable development, we ask ourselves a question. The document we’re developing will be short, open to sign-ons, and will contain a vision, principles, and actions. Within those boundaries, what makes for a good manifesto?
Based …
Posted By Nicolò
on 23 November, 2012
A year after Monti’s appointment as Prime Minister, we draw some lessons from Italy on the strengths and limits of unelected government. What does it mean for the status of Italian democracy? And what will its contribution be, if any, towards developing a long-term approach to decision- and policy-making in the country?
Europe. The same continent that, as a result of last year’s financial crisis, saw the first “crowdsourced” national constitution take shape, is also home to countries with a comparably much lower degree of citizen engagement. Among them, one with a quite peculiar government, called into power out of …
Category: Democracies worldwide, democratisation
Tags: democracy, economy, Italy, legitimacy, long-term, manifesto, Monti, political parties, reforms, short-term, technocracy
Posted By Halina Ward
on 31 October, 2012
Tory energy minister John Hayes’s off-message remarks about onshore wind in the UK have generated a fast-evolving case study of one of the thorny issues we’re trying to get to grips with as we consult on what should go into a manifesto for democracy and sustainable development.
Onshore wind farm developments are often subject to vehement opposition in communities where they are slated for development. But they also have plenty of supporters, and they form an important part of the UK’s overall approach to meeting its renewable energy targets.
The issue for our manifesto, in the abstract, is this:…
Posted By Nicolò
on 25 October, 2012
The UK Autumn conference season’s Labour Party gathering at the beginning of October featured an unusual guest speaker: contemporary philosopher Michael Sandel. The Harvard professor and rock-star moralist dazzled the Party crowd with a lecture on the moral limits of markets, which is also the subject of his latest book “What money can’t buy”.
Sandel’s belief in an active democracy emerges clearly in the book and takes in the form of a call for engaged citizenry. His hope is nothing less than to enrich public debate on what should or shouldn’t belong to the marketplace, as opposed to what …
Posted By Nicolò
on 4 October, 2012
A few weeks ago, we attended the annual conference of Friends of the Earth here in London. A sold-out event, the conference is the major annual gathering of local group members, staff, volunteers, and guests. Our friend Anna Watson was kind enough to share with us a table in their stalls area, so we were able to gather more input on our Manifesto through fascinating discussions with FoE members.
We put together a short video of the day, to give you a feeling of the kind of issues the FoE community is passionate about. Enjoy!
…
Posted By Nicolò
on 11 September, 2012
Nicolò Wojewoda is Consultation and Research Officer at FDSD. This post was originally published on the blog of Otesha UK.
Imagine this. You’re merrily queueing at the local coffee shop for a shot of espresso, while grinning from ear to ear about the sunny weather outside and how it is indeed a perfect day for a bike ride. When it’s your turn, you place your order, and the cashier says “that’ll be £1.50, plus £5 from the gentleman who came before you – which makes a total of £6.50”. Congratulations, you’ve just been the unhappy beneficiary of a whatever …
Posted By Halina Ward
on 8 September, 2012
Democracy is the world’s dominant political system. But it’s poorly equipped for intergenerational challenges like climate change, resource scarcity and ageing or expanding populations. These challenges could even put democracy under great strain around the world; an argument that we regularly deploy here at FDSD to make the case for our work.
Democracy as practised over the past two hundred years or so has been a means to deliver ‘more’. At the same time, the environmental pressures and impacts of the human thirst for ‘more’ are becoming ever-clearer: in the opening words of the summary of the authoritative 2012 GEO-5 …
Posted By John Lotherington
on 23 May, 2012
In his review of Stephen Gardiner’s A Perfect Moral Storm: the Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (LRB, 24 May), Malcolm Bull airs a much needed discussion as to how far democracy can respond at all adequately to the challenge of climate change. He discusses, for instance, ‘the tyranny of the contemporary’, whereby democracy is concerned exclusively with the rights and interests of a present generation, future generations not being represented, their needs therefore neglected.
He considers two ways to escape this quandary. There is a Burkean ‘virtual representation’ of those dead and those yet to be born, connecting a …
Posted By Halina Ward
on 16 March, 2012
Paragraph 57 of the so-called ‘zero draft’ (the first, un-negotiated text) of the document to come out of this year’s UN Conference on Sustainable Development, The Future We Want, refers to the creation of an Ombudsperson or High Commissioner for Future Generations.
Currently the draft would commit states only “to further consider” the establishment of a High Commissioner for Future Generations “to promote sustainable development”.
The text is further weakened by that niggling doubt about whether it’s proposing as alternatives an ‘Ombudsperson to promote sustainable development’ or ‘High Commissioner for Future Generations to promote sustainable development’; whether the Ombudsperson …
Posted By Halina Ward
on 13 January, 2012
It’s been good this week to see lots of debate over how best to bring the needs of future generations into UK democracy. The discussion has been triggered by the publication of Alliance for Future Generations member Rupert Read’s new paper, Guardians of the Future: a Constitutional Case for representing and protecting Future People.
The paper has been published by the new think tank Green House as a discussion paper for the Alliance for Future Generations, which was itself launched in March 2011 (not this week, as a blog post in The Telegraph incorrectly claimed).
Rupert Read’s proposal …
Posted By Joe Short
on 19 November, 2011
In preparation for Universal Children’s Day on 20th November, we’ve posted up a home page for a fictitious “Ministry for Future Generations”. It paints a somewhat rose-tinted picture of how the world could be improved if such a ministry were called into existence. No more fossil fuels, education for all — all kinds of global problems miraculously solved.
Okay, the web page is not real. And in the real world, another traditionally-structured Government ministry probably isn’t even the right solution. But we are in fact very serious about the possibility of reforms to our democratic and political systems specifically …
Posted By Joe Short
on 26 October, 2011
PRESS RELEASE, 26 October, 2011
On a day when the Cabinet is coming under fire for being split on green issues [1], the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) has published a report [2] warning that business as usual may rule the day at the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development next year.
Halina Ward, Director of the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development (FDSD), whose written evidence [3] has been extensively referenced [4] in the EAC report, said:
On the EAC report:
“There is a real risk that Rio + 20′s green economy theme will deliver …
Posted By Halina Ward
on 19 October, 2011
New think-tank the Intergenerational Foundation (IF) landed with a big splash today as they launched their new report Hoarding of Housing. The big headline is that there are now 25 million unoccupied bedrooms in British homes.
Meanwhile, the government is proposing a radical shake-up to the English planning system, to get the country back to growth by making development easier whilst tackling the housing crisis. So extreme is the government’s prescription for housing sickness, however, that even The Telegraph has been moved to campaign against the possible loss of greenness in our pleasant land.
IF’s report argues …
Posted By Halina Ward
on 8 July, 2011
So the News of the World is to gasp its last this weekend. And in pubs and parks, in living rooms and at dining tables up and down the land people mull over the significance of the latest revelations over phone-hacking and more.
We can picture ourselves in our minds eyes as targets too. We can imagine, if we choose to go there, how we might feel if the kinds of conversations we might have in the middle of some personal horror or tragedy were breathed in by persons unknown. We can, if we want, make links to whatever …
Posted By Halina Ward
on 7 June, 2011
A new Natural Environment White Paper was launched today.
I still can’t quite believe that the government thinks it can ‘mainstream’ sustainable development across government, as it has said it will do, without a sustainable development strategy. And that’s even leaving aside the question of whether it can be properly transparent and accountable to the public about its approach to ‘mainstreaming’ sustainable development without a strategy.
And so my first look at the Natural Environment White Paper (which covers England only) was a simple word-search experiment.
I searched, across the 80-odd pages, for phrases including the words ‘sustainable’ or …
Posted By Halina Ward
on 19 May, 2011
The House of Lords Reform Draft Bill and accompanying White Paper were presented to Parliament by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg on Tuesday 17 May.
The documents set out long-awaited options for a reformed House of Lords.
The Bill is grounded in a smaller, 80%-elected House, retaining (controversially) the Bishops. The White Paper indicates that a 100% elected upper House has not been ruled out.
One striking feature of the proposals is that they have nothing at all to say about the functions of Westminster’s upper house. In fact, the White Paper’s summary of the proposals states that …
Posted By Halina Ward
on 12 May, 2011
The UK Coalition government’s approach to sustainable development looks increasingly like a Potemkin village. Its smart websites and fine rhetoric hide the misery of the social fallout from cutbacks in our age of austerity, slow progress on environment, and the impoverishment of democracy.
Most recently, the coalition government’ s Red Tape Challenge makes utterly laughable its aspiration to be ‘the greenest government ever’; its reassurance that sustainable development will be mainstreamed across government; and the forgotten second pillar of the coalition’s government alongside the Big Society: a ‘new horizon’ to eliminate political short-termism.
It’s long, so I’ve also posted …
Posted By Halina Ward
on 10 April, 2011
FDSD has learned with very great sadness of the death of Sir Geoffrey Chandler; friend, former trustee, co-conspirator and mentor. John Elkington opens a set of reflections on his life and our work with him.
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There is a certain class of Englishman that you can hear coming up the stairs from three flights away, from a New York street block away, and Geoffrey Chandler could so easily have been one of those. You could certainly hear him coming several flights down, but your heart leapt in anticipation that you were about to be treated to displays of erudition, affection …
Posted By Emma Woods
on 14 February, 2011
On the back of my previous post (Atmosphere: exploring climate science…), which raised questions about the value of science in a social vacuum, I’ve been thinking more about the space occupied by science in society.
As a science graduate myself, I’ve always favoured scientific research for scientific research’s sake. Many of the natural sciences’ most pragmatic societal applications have been the outcome not of applied, but rather of pure, scientific research. An obvious example would be Faraday’s curiosity-driven experiments on electricity, which into the bargain led to the electric light replacing the candle in our everyday lives.
So far, so …
Posted By Emma Woods
on 7 February, 2011
With Paper Four (Climate Change: an overview of science, scenarios, projected impacts and links to democracy) in our project on The Future of Democracy in the Face of Climate Change posted to the FDSD website, Halina (FDSD’s Director) and I decided to reward our hard work with a trip to the Science Museum and its new Atmosphere gallery.
How has London’s famous Science Museum gone about communicating climate science to its visitors?
In our own work, Paper Four aims to uncover links between the current state of climate science on one hand, and democracy on the other. As with …
Posted By Emma Woods
on 20 January, 2011
I came across this audio clip among the online media for the 2009 International Climate Conference ‘4 Degrees and Beyond’. Professor Bertrand Guillaume of Troyes University of Technology presents ‘Avoiding a 4+°C world: a challenge for democracy’.
Drawing on the Stern Review, he outlines the current state of the Earth’s climate, before addressing the scale and timing of mitigation necessary to stabilise greenhouse gases at 450 parts per million.
The biggest stumbling block to successful mitigation, he insists, is the human condition: people value smaller rewards soon over larger rewards later, and perceive the future as ontologically weak; unreal. Neither …
Posted By Emma Woods
on 10 January, 2011
Video courtesy of Ian Brown
With the so-called ‘Ruggie process’ drawing to a conclusion, we are pleased to post an interview with Professor John Ruggie, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Business and Human Rights. The interview was filmed in February 2009 during a three-day event on ‘Democracy and Sustainability in Emerging Economies: India as a Case Study’. The event, which took place in New Delhi, was organised by FDSD (at that time known as The Environment Foundation), in collaboration with the 21st Century Trust, Salzburg Global Seminar, Paul Hamlyn Foundation, and in association with TERI’s 2009 Delhi …
