Sustainable Development Goal 16: Governance

Sustainable Development Goal 16: Governance

You’re probably familiar with the United Nation’s (UN)Millenium Development Goals (MDG), adopted in 2000, for improving well being for the world’s poorest. They carried the tagline, “we can end poverty.” It’s estimated that roughly 40% of the eight goals, listed at...
Democracy and a Better Planning System

Democracy and a Better Planning System

“There remains a democratic deficit within planning.” -Five Radical Ideas for a Better Planning System A group at University College London’s Bartlett School of Planning, led by Professor Yvonne Rydin, has proposed five radical ideas for better planning, with two...
First ever Environmental Democracy Index

First ever Environmental Democracy Index

The Access Initiative and the World Resources Institute are launching the first ever Environmental Democracy Index (EDI) on May 20th. EDI is the first index to measure how well countries’ national laws protect environmental democracy rights, namely, the right of the...
The Climate Knowledge Brokers’ Manifesto

The Climate Knowledge Brokers’ Manifesto

Climate Knowledge Brokers (CKB) Group is an emerging alliance of leading global, regional and national knowledge brokers specialising in climate and development information. They launched a Manifesto on September 17th 2015, to better acknowledge the critical role of...
New online tools

New online tools

Recently Techpresident has covered a couple of new online tools that might be applicable to people working in democracy and sustainable development. The first tool is The People’s Lobby, which is a process for structuring citizen participation to make it more...
A Carbon Tax on Me

A Carbon Tax on Me

No taxation without representation, right? So one way of guaranteeing a carbon tax is to impose one on yourself. That’s just what David Lawrence did and he tells the story over on The Energy Collective in his article “a Carbon tax on me: one person’s story of a...

Wind farms, the national interest and local democracy

Halina Ward argues that a core challenge is to balance national strategic priority-setting with local community engagement. Using the example of on-shore windfarms, she sets out the questions that need answering: what processes of deliberation?, how far can local...

FDSD at Rio+20: panel session on defending the public

FDSD co-organised a workshop session in Rio de Janeiro as part of a two-day event Fair ideas: sharing solutions for a sustainable planet hosted by IIED and the Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC) The event was held at the (PUC) together with The...
The Future of Democracy in the Face of Climate Change

The Future of Democracy in the Face of Climate Change

The Future of Democracy in the Face of Climate Change was a piece of research which ran from late 2009 to early 2012. It resulted in five reports which explore the question of: How might democracy and participatory decision-making have evolved to cope with the...