Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development » Barack Obama

The Decade of the Citizen

Halina Ward — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 12:43:27 +0000

Adding to some of the themes explored in an earlier post on the idea of the ‘consumer citizen’, this post from guest blogger Jules Peck, over at Citizen Renaissance, argues that the mix between consumerism and citizen action for sustainable development needs to be reconfigured in favour of the citizen.

The entry is also posted here.

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By Jules Peck

As we remain firmly rooted in our Western economic bath-tub and emerge from the dusts of Copenhagen, it seems ever clearer that Citizens are the missing link for 2010.

Politics continue to fail us and fail to recognise, let alone confront and overcome, the greatest challenges of our time.

The message we put out starting 18 months ago with Citizen Renaissance, is now being taken up by the business community. Even the relatively conservative World Business Council for Sustainable Development is reporting on the need for a shift away from rampant consumerism to more citizen-centric values.

The Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World 2010 report, just out and widely reported in places like CNN and Scientific American, is titled “from Consumerism to Sustainability” and echoes the Citizen Renaissance call for an end to consumerism. The report says “Many of the environmental and social problems we face today are symptoms of a deeper systemic failing: a dominant cultural paradigm that encourages living in ways that are often directly counter to the realities of a finite planet.”

But surely the idea of green behaviour change is nothing new? We seem to hear continually from governments how if we will only change our light bulbs everything will be ok. But seeking merely to consume differently or ‘greener’ won’t make the grade.

George Monbiot has written that “Our power comes from acting as citizens – demanding political change – not acting as consumers.”

Confronted as we are by the Scylla and Charybdis of Climate Change and Peak Oil and with, at best static levels of wellbeing, change is badly needed. But micro-level policy and incremental tweaks of business-as-usual will not suffice.

As Professor Tim Jackson of the Government’s Sustainable Development Commission has shown, to reach a peak level of 450 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere by 2050, bring 9 billion people out of poverty and keep to our current growth rates, the carbon content of economic output would need to be reduced to just 2% of the best currently achieved anywhere in the EU.

Clearly this is an impossible task. And those figures are based on a 450ppm target which is now agreed to be far too high if we are to hope to remain below 2 degrees global warming. Many suggest 350 ppm would be the highest safe limit for 2050 peak.

In ground-breaking work, WWF’s Dr Tom Crompton has shown that, apart from being entirely inadequate in scale of response, green consumerism and appeals to shallow, short-term individualistic extrinsic values also undermine a more sophisticated appeal to citizen-centric intrinsic values which could bring about sustainability and the flourishing of all.

Copenhagen serves as both a historic watershed and a powerful metaphor for the failure of our current systems. Entrenched political positions, inertia and vested interests mean that we must now re-focus hope and enlightenment on ourselves. We the citizens will need to lead the way.

Johann Hari’s article in The Independent in late 2009 offers a stark and powerful warning: “buried deep in our subconscious, there still lays the belief that our political leaders are collective Daddies and Mummies who will – in the last instance – guarantee our safety.” That illusion is now surely ending. Leadership has been – and will continue to be – democratised and trust earned on multiple levels from multiple sources. We can no longer look to the top of an elitist pyramid of political authority, when the pyramid itself is crumbling. We, the citizens, have the power both to grant trust to those who earn it from us, and to pressurise those who fail us – and to remove our trust in them altogether.

Many of our politicians have failed also as citizens. Der Spiegel’s Christian Schwägerl wrote, post-Copenhagen, that “Obama has neglected the single most important issue for an American president who likes to imagine himself as a world citizen, namely his country’s addiction to fossil fuels and the risks of unchecked climate change”. And yet it was Obama himself who ushered in, at his inauguration, “a new era of citizenship and responsibility”.

Here lies a dichotomy and contradiction that needs to be urgently addressed. The world needs Obama to deliver his vision into reality.

Citizenship and Responsibility are happy and vital bedfellows. Doyenne of the eco-activist movement Tamsin Omond commented in January 2010 that “Copenhagen failed because the politicians still don’t accept that climate change is the defining issue of our generation. What Copenhagen told me was to stop focusing on trying to change the politicians and start winning over the general population. The revolution will not happen unless everyone is invited.”

Now, in 2010, as we enter a new year and a new decade, more and more voices are joining up and calling for a shift away from individualistic consumerism to collective citizenship.

The message is echoing around the developed as well as the developing world, with a January 2010 article in the Times of India saying “Indian needs to avoid repeating the West’s mistakes. Only enlightened citizens can show the way towards a more viable economy by putting pressure on government, stressing India’s success should not be measured by GDP growth rates and spending habits alone. Nor should it aspire to become like the US or China.”

I strongly believe that 2010 will be remembered as the start of the Decade of the Citizen. New sets of citizen-values will come to the fore and help usher in a shift to a post-growth wellbeing economy wellbeing economy. The Transition Town movement is just one example of where this is already happening. My hope – and belief – that this will become a movement of scale and open to the many, not the few. Another organisation to watch is the now four million-strong www.avaaz.org citizens’ movement, which has declared 2010 ‘The Year of People Power.’

In late December 2009, Brian Davey echoed this call, saying (in response to the failures of Copenhagen) that “climate change calls for a mobilisation of the population that alters our structure of motivations. It requires an eco-informed citizenry. Eco-citizenship will have to be a lifestyle choice of large numbers of people – or humanity has very little chance of surviving”.

On the one hand this is a scary concept for many of us. Instead of waiting for big business or big government to ‘sort things out’ we have to get off our backsides and collectively become the catalyst and agents for change.

But it’s also a really empowering and exciting prospect for the new decade.

What to do? Well my advice would be to get together with your local community. Join a network of souls with like-minded, shared interests. Join a Transition group – or even better start your own for your street or your village. There is a mass of things going on out there, from which we can all learn.

The Citizen Renaissance message for 2010 is this: Be the change. Aspire not to have more but be more. Do more. Together.

Ecologically viable civilisation now hinges on the workings of the US Constitution

Ian Christie — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:54:07 +0000

The signs are that expectations for the Copenhagen climate conference are being seriously downgraded. There is so much disagreement still, and so much uncertainty about when and whether the USA will make substantial commitments, that a binding global deal at COP15 seems out of the question.

The summit is being redefined as a way-station en route to a proper binding deal with targets and funding attached, sometime next year or 2011.

The evidence and modelling of climate change indicate the great urgency of action now to enable GHG emissions to peak in the coming decade. If not, we risk very major climate disruption and mounting costs at best, and calamitous disruption to economies and societies at worst.

The main barrier to a deal has been the USA, for many years now.

Why has the USA been such a block and drag on the process of taking meaningful action to avert climate dangers? One obvious reason is the massive dependence of the economy on fossil fuels, and the presence of many vested interests in oil-propelled business as usual. But there are other factors, constitutional and electoral.

The USA was designed by proponents of ’small government’, determined to avoid over-mighty executive agency and to put in place checks and balances to prevent emergence of any authoritarian power. This system could well be dysfunctional in dealing with challenges on the scale of climate change and low-carbon transition.

To a large extent, the fate of ecologically viable civilisation now could hinge on the workings of the US Constitution and the ability of US legislators to rise above the vociferous and often fiercely irrational lobbying from vested interests and right-wing media.

There are grounds for real alarm:

1) The Constitution was designed by C18th century liberal federalists to hinder ‘big government’ and makes the passage of radical nationwide changes in law extremely hard. American legislators and Presidents have been trying to pass healthcare reforms for a century and are still floundering. The New Deal of the 1930s was the exception that proves the rule, but that faced vicious opposition and got through only because the economy and employment had collapsed and the US was in deep crisis.

If we take the view that climate disruption demands coherent and radical action led by states – ie it is a Big Government task – then the last country you’d want to rely on to take the lead is the USA. The evidence is that the USA can only rise to this kind of challenge and overcome its own legislative self-hindering if crisis is completely unignorable. Yet if we wait for that in relation to climate, the chances are that it will be too late for meaningful action.

2) The US polity is now split very evenly between Right and Centre/ Centre-Left on a national and (in many cases state and local) basis. So competition for marginal votes becomes very strong. Many of these are on the Right, and over decades the Right has developed a formidable mass media machine.

Hence the utterly disproportionate influence wielded by far-right radio voices such as Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck, who would attract perhaps 10% of the vote, if that, but who can make fearful Republican politicians dance to their tune.

There is a risk that Obama has just a year left to get his health and climate laws passed, because he could lose the House to the Republicans in the atmosphere of ‘culture war’ created by the talk show hosts and Fox News etc.

There are grounds for hope for more enlightened self-interest, rationality, civic virtue and less extremism in US politics. First, the demographics of the USA mean that the Right cannot hope over the medium to long term to win with the extreme, confrontational agenda it now advances, and probably someone like Sarah Palin could not win even if Obama is fatally undermined in the next few years. Second, federal failure on climate policy in the medium and long run is probably ruled out, as so many US cities and states and corporations will be pressing for action and taking steps unilaterally, as they did under Bush. Third, Obama’s political capital and clout are very far from being exhausted, and even the Republicans in their present desperate state are capable of some bipartisanship and good sense.

I expect there will be a Climate Act in 2010 – wholly inadequate in the near term, but a lot better than nothing, and maybe enough to help secure a belated post-Copenhagen deal.

Democracy and climate change

Halina Ward — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 12:09:10 +0000

In the US, opposition to the Climate Bill has shown just how hard it can be to get popular support for much-needed measures to put economies on track to head off the worst effects of climate change.

The US model of democracy within which President Obama must work is itself partly to blame. As a recent op-ed from the UK Observer Newspaper suggests:

“The structure of the US Senate makes the passage of complex legislation difficult… One hundred senators have the power to halt legislation…

…Last week in Houston, 3,500 people, many of them energy industry workers, attended an anti-climate bill programme. More are expected in 19 states in coming weeks. This atmosphere does not tolerate complexity. Yet everything about climate change, from science to policy, resists simplification”.

At our February 2009 meeting in New Delhi on Democracy and Sustainability it was very clear that climate change is not yet a major concern for most Indian voters. And yet, if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fourth assessment report is even half-way right, climate change is likely to generate extraordinarily profound impacts on entire societies.

The real risk is that it will be poorer and more marginalised people who bear the brunt of the negative social impacts of climate change. Social justice and sustainable development both demand powerful steps to head off these risks.

The conundrum gets to the heart of some of the weaknesses both of democratic decision-making and of sustainable development approaches that ring-fence existing economic growth models, seeking social and environmental innovation at the edges rather than systemic change.

Just as pressing is a need to find ways to bridge the divide between scientific evidence, and the headline-grabbing simplifications of supercharged policy debate and activism.