Drawing on her experience as membership coordinator for Australian online campaign group GetUp during 2008-9, FDSD volunteer Sally Hill considers the rise of online activism exemplified by four organisations: MoveOn, GetUp, 38 Degrees, and GetUp. Case studies focus on the four organisations’ climate change activities. The discussion paper also discusses the implications of online activism for democracy and for effective action on climate change.

download
(1.12Mb)  

FDSD’s Halina Ward was in Copenhagen during the Summit, and she took the opportunity to ask a range of people their views on the relationship between democracy and climate change.

You can download and listen to the interviews by clicking on the links below.

We will be incorporating some of the ideas from these interviews into our project on the Future of Democracy in the Face of Climate Change to 2100.

Teresa Fogelberg, Global Reporting Initiative, Netherlands
3minutes, 12seconds; file size: 3.69MB

Professor Dr Atiq Rahman, Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies 
2minutes, 3seconds; file size: 962KB

Baboucarr Mbye, Stay-Green Foundation, Gambia 
1minute, 19seconds; file size: 619KB

Steve, medical student from Leeds, UK 
4minutes, 32seconds; file size: 2.07MB

Hannah Reid, International Institute for Environment and Development, UK 
5minutes, 40seconds; file size: 2.59MB

Marco Baravalle, Venice 
2minutes, 41seconds; file size: 3.10MB

Member, Democratic Alternative, Sweden 
5minutes, 15seconds; file size: 2.40MB

Varaidzo Dongozi, Zimbabwe 
1minute, 52seconds; file size: 877KB

Jody Boehnert, UK 
5minutes, 24seconds; file size: 6.21MB

Bolivian Klimaforum Participant 
4minutes, 45seconds; file size: 5.47MB (NB: Interview recorded in Spanish)

Give Your Vote is an offshoot from the campaign group Egality Now. The campaigners argue that:

“We think we can do better than a world where politicians from the strongest countries decide for everyone else.

The UK makes decisions about climate change, migration, poverty and war that directly affects millions around the world. There is no democratic means for those outside the UK to have a say in how these decisions are made.

Giving your vote is an act of solidarity with those who do not have a say in the decisions that affect them.

Decisions taken across borders should not mean decisions taken without accountability.

Give your vote is a call for a fairer and more equal world.”

Now I’ve often wished that I had a say in the election of the President of the US. And the campaign prompted me to think some more about my conflicted views on the importance of voting in a liberal democracy.

I admire the simplicity of the campaign message; and I’m pleased that the ‘partner’ countries have been chosen on grounds of their emblematic connection to some of the key challenges of sustainable development (Bangladesh to climate change; Afghanistan to human security and armed conflict; Ghana to poverty) . But in this coming UK general election, Give Your Vote encourages me to view my apparently legally unfettered ability to vote as a proxy for unenfranchised stakeholders as implicitly a more valuable choice than any other that I could exercise at the ballot box of my own free will.

Perhaps this doesn’t matter? After all, as the Hansard Society’s newly published 2010 Audit of Political Engagement points out, currently 25% of the public do not trust politicians at all and 62 “admit that they know ‘not very much’ or ‘nothing at all’ about the Westminster Parliament.

And yet… and yet… is there not a risk that promoting the idea that we can and should give our votes to deserving non-voters could further erode the regard in which collectively we hold representative democracy?

The Give Your Vote option isn’t about non-engagement though. Far from it.

Giving a vote calls for a high degree of pre-election public involvement on the part of the UK proxy. A look at the detail of the process makes this clear:

“Step 1. Finding out what the UK parties’ policies are on global issues

We are currently gathering questions from people in Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Ghana that they would like to put to the UK election candidates.

We will be putting the most popular questions directly to the main political parties, while also asking our UK participants to ask them at candidate hustings events.

For the month of April, people in Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Ghana will be able to text their questions directly through local FrontlineSMS-enabled hubs.

Step 2. Sending out the manifestos to Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Ghana and holding an election.

The questions and answers from the parties will be translated into local languages and be available online as well as broadcast on local radio and TV networks.

Global UK vote day will be held in Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Ghana five days before the UK election.

Participants in Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Ghana can vote by sending an SMS to a local number registering their preferred vote. There will also be one or two physical polling stations in each country.

Step 3 . Pairing up voters and vote-donors

We will do our best to pair people up individually. However, it’s more than likely we won’t have exactly the same number of people on both sides of this project. If necessary, we will calculate the proportions for each party, randomise who to send which result to, and fire out the emails/texts.

Step 4. Sending out the votes

On the eve of the UK election, participants in the UK will receive an SMS or email, indicating which party their partner in Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Ghana wishes them to vote for.

Step 5. Casting of the global vote

They then go to the polling booth, tick the relevant box and, if they wish, take a photo on their mobile phone to confirm the vote”.

My colleague Ian Christie recently argued in an email that “democracy is a social ritual as much as anything else – given the unlikelihood of your personal vote making any difference. If the social norms supporting this weaken, democracy has little to offer by way of benefit compared to [for example] consumerism…”

What could it mean to change the nature of the ritual in the way that Give Your Vote proposes?

For all that UK citizens complain about its health, we have a tendency to be rather complacent about the idea that we live in a democracy; however flawed. In contrast, people who know what it is to live in countries that are very far from democratic might take less for granted. For example, a close relative who grew up in Communist Poland sometimes reminds me that casting a vote in a general election is the supreme responsibility and expression of citizenship; one which must never be taken lightly. And indeed, 76% of the UK public believe that it is their ‘duty’ to vote.

When I once (I’m ashamed to write) forgot to vote in a particularly dull UK General Election, the first person I confessed to at work the following day was a dual-nationality UK/Zimbabwean citizen. With no discernable schadenfreude save for a slightly suspect glimmer in his eyes, he told me how he had once, at considerable time and some expense, temporarily given up and then reclaimed his UK citizenship to ensure that he could vote in a Zimbabwean election whose rules disenfranchised dual nationals.

But democracy is about much, much more than voting; a fact which many people fail to recognise. If the Give Your Vote campaign helps to highlight that fact by pointing to lack of fairness in global decision-making, perhaps I should stop being so precious about the idea that a few hundred or a few thousand pioneers are prepared to make a sacrifice to promote a more inclusive, more equitable, system of global democracy; a system of global democracy that is less rooted in outmoded ideas about the boundaries of the sovereign nation state and its citizens and more connected to the realities of Flawed Democracy’s impacts around the world.

Give Your Vote conclude their case for proxy voting with the argument that “with your help for the first time anywhere, ever, we will be taking democracy beyond borders”. Here, finally, they lose me; for I see clear signs of ‘democracy beyond borders’ in the countless transnational non-governmental decision-making processes that set expectations for behaviour in the public realm; the ‘global public policy networks’; the unusual partnerships and all the informal, multistakeholder setting of social or ethical norms that are a feature of our interconnected world. 

Give Your Vote is certainly thought-provoking. But the breadth of its vision of a fairer and more equal world has so far (so far…) delivered up a curiously narrow palette with which to paint the future of democracy across borders.

More prosaically.. there’s a lot to think about as I start work on Paper Three in our project on the Future of Democracy in the Face of Climate Change; which aims to review some of the existing literature on ‘the future of democracy’ and ‘the future of sustainable development governance’ respectively.

You can already download Papers One on ‘climate change and democracy: why and what matters’ and Paper Two on ‘what is democracy’.

Oh – and this time, I’m fairly certain I’ll remember to vote.

In this first paper from FDSD’s project on ‘The Future of Democracy in the Face of Climate Change’, Halina Ward outlines the range of links between democracy and climate change. The paper explores the range of reasons why it is important to explore the project’s central question: How might democracy and participatory decision-making have evolved to cope with the challenges of climate change by the years 2050 and 2100?”. 

Separate sections address democracy; the sustainable development challenge to democracy; climate science; the Copenhagen Climate Summit, and climate change and the wider challenges of preparing for resilient democracy.

The paper lays the ground for FDSD’s work throughout 2010 to develop scenarios for the future of democracy in the face of climate change.

download
(771kb)

The seminar will focus on the central question: what innovations are needed in democracy and participatory decision-making, if we want them to deliver the actions required to mitigate and adapt to climate change?

Priced at £75/Euro 85 for the one and a half day seminar, the programme has been designed for leaders and change makers in central and local governments, businesses, non-governmental organisations and communities, and anyone concerned with mobilising democracy to tackle climate change.

Places for the event are likely to fill soon so please book early to avoid disappointment.

You can read more about the programme, speakers and booking information on the Schumacher College  and Salzburg Global Seminar websites.

To whet your appetite further, you can also now download Halina Ward’s new paper Democracy and climate change: why and what matters.

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.

The paper is called “Corporate Social Responsibility: What Next?”, and it looks at the likely impact of the current recession on the practice and shape of corporate social responsibility in years to come.

One blindingly obvious thing that occurred to me as I was writing the paper was that there is a deep mismatch between an insistence that businesses adopt a longer-term time horizon when thinking about ‘the business case’ for corporate social responsibility; and a lack of commensurate pressure on governments to think long-term. Yet it is after all governments, or public policy, which provide a large part of the enabling environment for corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Climate change is the policy agenda that could potentially bring both sets of perspectives together most powerfully. But governments at the Copenhagen Climate Summit failed to rise to the challenge.

If you will forgive the breach of blogging etiquette, I reproduce below a couple of relevant passages from (my own) paper. It was written some little while ago, well before the Copenhagen Climate Summit. You can also download it in full.

“Increasing awareness of climate change has potential to bring an outbreak of longer-term thinking in OECD policy-making as well as more serious efforts to substantially decouple economic growth from intensive fossil fuel consumption. Whilst the obstacles are formidable, one consequence could be that emphasis on  falls away in favour of an increasing focus on the role of business as a vehicle for sustainable development…

…The financial crisis could help to spur more widespread longer-term thinking on the part of governments as they reflect on the extent to which lightly regulated capitalism itself may have been at fault. So too could government worries about the long-term potentially catastrophic impacts of climate change. But the risk, as with the potential impact of the economic recession on CSR more generally, is that quick fixes driven by short-term knee-jerk reactions may instead dominate – leaving CSR in ‘business as usual’ mode.

Governments in OECD countries must lead by example, showing businesses that long-term thinking for sustainable development is not only possible, but desirable for the overall good of society. The forthcoming 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit will be a litmus test; potentially the single most significant action on the part of governments, symbolically and in fact, to generate the kinds of shifts that are needed for ‘unusual business’.

The current economic downturn brings the [business] governance challenge of CSR to the fore. Whether this will be addressed in a narrow way or through a renaissance in interest in the role of public policy in directing business endeavour poses the core question for the next stage in the relationship between business, development and society. Efforts on the part of CSR practitioners and public policy makers to tackle the governance challenge of CSR must themselves emulate the long-term thinking and time horizons that CSR advocates often demand of business.

‘Business as unusual’ must be the goal”.

If governments fail to rise to the challenge we cannot expect CSR to provide a major part of the solution to climate change adaptation and mitigation.

We can hope that some business leaders will continue to do just that; lead the business field; but the real pressure for transformation now must come from ordinary people.

At the risk of sounding glib, ordinary people must demand ‘government unusual’ to ensure that elected representatives value long-term sustainability over short-term economic growth. And elected representatives in turn must make clear demands for business to play a clearly defined and responsible role in the transition to a low carbon economy, and they must find ways of doing so without passing the buck or developing an unhealthy dependency on business leadership for environmental and social change.

This seems to be what some people mean, however unhappy the terminology (personally I dislike it with a vengeance), when they call for governments to tackle climate change on a Rooseveltian ‘war footing’.

As we start work on our project here at the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development on ‘the future of democracy in the face of climate change‘, we’ll be reflecting on the big question: what next?

We’ll be looking, not just at the critically important coming twelve months, but beyond, to 2050 and 2100.

So in this blog post I highlight some of the ‘democracy and climate change’ themes that emerged in Copenhagen.

Public protest and climate change

One of the most headline-grabbing issues in Copenhagen concerned the methods used by Danish police to manage very largely peaceful protest.

The images of (mostly police) violence and mass detentions on the streets of Copenhagen run the risk of deterring many concerned citizens in Europe and North America from exercising their right to protest. That would be great pity, for it could stifle the birth of the kind of mass movement that politicians such as Ed Miliband say is needed  to support government leadership on climate change.

But those same images are just as likely to radicalise others, fuelling further scepticism over the political will of elected national leaders to take seriously the wishes of citizens who favour ambitious action to tackle climate change.

It’s clearly not just Danish police who worry about and cooperate on climate protest. There were plainclothes police officers at Harwich Port on Sunday to meet the ferry from the Danish port of Esbjerg; and there were dogs and lengthy searches on the overland border between Germany and Denmark when I travelled out on a coach organised by a UK-based action group.

Alliances between vulnerable countries and civil society

Another striking feature of the overall dynamics in Copenhagen was the strong links forged between global civil society present in Copenhagen and leaders of some of the most immediately vulnerable countries. The adulation and standing ovation given to President Nasheed of the Maldives when he spoke to a packed meeting at the ‘alternative’ climate venue, Klimaforum, and the chorus of tweeting that surrounded his public speeches during the conference, are a case in point.

Shifting negotiating dynamics

Then there were the visible shifts in the negotiating dynamics between the world’s richest countries and the so-called ‘emerging economies’ whose carbon emissions are set to rise rapidly as their economies grow. The EU was strikingly not one of the countries mentioned by President Obama when he announced in a press conference in the evening of 18th December that a base deal had been reached. It emerged that the core parties to the non-binding accord that was subsequently merely ‘noted’ by the UN were the US, Brazil, South Africa, India and China. 

Many of the world’s poorest countries remained politically marginalised in the official climate talks; but it was clear both that important shifts had taken place. New patterns of alliances are emerging within and out of the G77.

The decision of African group leader, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, to stand with France to support the EU-backed maximum two degree temperature rise (making a regional 3-3.5 degree rise the suggested likely reality for Africa) together with a ‘quick-start’ finance package of USD 10 billion fell far short of prior African demands. It was greeted with consternation and charges of a sell-out by many Africans including the Sudanese chair of the G77/China group, Ambassador Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping as well as African civil society groups.

Business gets on with it

Meanwhile, an entirely different tone was evident in reports of business events in the city.  These were abuzz with talk about the positive green business opportunities generated by the climate change agenda, and the technical detail of measurement, accounting, green technology and much more.

In contrast, the interests of those businesses that stand to lose from tough climate mitigation actions were far less visible. Yet these made themselves felt in cautious speeches from some government officials and politicians and, most fundamentally, in the failure to reach intergovernmental agreement on emissions targets during the conference.

City mayors talk positive

City mayors from around the world met at an event organised by the City of Copenhagen during the official talks; the Copenhagen Climate Summit for Mayors. According to an informal email from one participant: “This looked and felt like a team! They listened to each other’s plans, they openly encouraged plagiarism and replication, they fostered support for each other in a way that was uncontrived, open and positive. They discussed technical fixes, finance and resources, education and engaging citizens: they discussed mitigation and adaptation, economic opportunity and necessity: and they recognised they need to be leaders of substantial cultural change.”.

Official talks mirror wider international development concerns

In contrast, other events, more closely linked to the themes under discussion in the official talks, replicated core concerns of the overall international development agenda. International donor agencies such as the UN Environment Programme, for example, lobbied for their organisations to be home to funds committed to help countries to adapt to climate change.

Intense discussions over how the funds should be managed; and about capacity-building and ‘good governance’ for climate adaptation in developing countries (long part of the jargon of the international development agenda) took place; and longstanding arguments about the lack of transparency in global negotiations linked closely to economic interests and about the huddles of influential states in so-called ‘green rooms’ were aired; and aired in ways that were not markedly different to an international trade negotiation. 

Divide between ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ solutions

But one point above others stands out: the huge political and psychological distance between the key issues and solutions debated during the official negotiations at the Bella Centre (where the formal talks took place), and the belief in bottom-up locally owned and self-managed solutions that characterised many of the ‘unofficial’ side meetings for civil society at the Klimaforum  space and in a variety of other meetings spaces around the city.

Indeed, with the slow pace of progress in intergovernmental talks, it has become apparent that much more emphasis will now likely be placed on local level innovation to deliver climate solutions.

Already in the UK, commentators are paying renewed attention to the groundswell of community-based activism that has sprung up over the last couple of years away from the formalities of ballot-box decision-making or the stifling bureaucratic decision-making of some town halls. 

This renewed call to ‘community-based local solutions’ is both valuable in practice and laudable as prescription; the more so when it builds community ties and hence the ability to remain resilient in the face of climate change.

And yet, a note of caution must here be sounded on two grounds. First, because it was noticeable in Copenhagen that the vision of ‘bottom-up’ decision-making that was articulated in many side events was not accompanied by a seamless vision of the role of national government; or of the much-vaunted national level ‘leadership’ that became a war-cry of campaigners during Copenhagen (e.g. in statements of the ‘politicians go to fancy dinners; leaders act’ sort).

Related to this is the real-world fact that any failure of global democracy resulting from negotiating inequality between nations is necessarily also a failure of national government.

In the run-up to the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, governments encouraged so-called ‘Type 2′ agreements to be tabled and to become a formal part of the Summit’s outcomes. These were essentially voluntary agreements or partnerships between different stakeholders to tackle different dimensions of sustainable development. But there was a backlash from some potential ‘Type 2 agreement’ signatories, who accused governments of passing the buck to non-governmental actors instead of getting on with reaching a deal themselves.

There must be a risk that the same will happen now on climate change: that governments will seek to bring citizen and business-led voluntary action into a bigger intergovernmental tent at the expense of much-needed national level leadership.

That is not in itself a bad thing, but must not become a substitute for effective action at the national and international government levels.

Second is the reality that politics is nowhere more personalised; nowhere more exposing, than at the local level. Any move formally to institutionalise a prioritisation of local level decision-making needs also be accompanied by efforts to tackle marginalisation and social exclusion in local level decision-making; to ensure that minority views are given due weight.

Localism must not become a banner under which marginalisation or ‘business as usual’ decision-making by vocal elites become entrenched in public policy.

The apparent distance between local and global level solutions – a canyon or a rift at best – was made all the deeper by the Copenhagen organisers’ unforgivable failure, over at the official Conference of the Parties at the Bella Centre on the outskirts of the city, adequately to make provision for non-governmental observers of the Conference (including this one, who lacked the stamina of some to stand in a freezing queue for 6-9 hours on the last day that non-governmental organisations without ’secondary’ badges were allowed to exchange their pre-registration for entry badges to the venue. To add insult to injury, a later invitation to join an alternative venue for those Observers who had been excluded from the latter part of the event was itself only extended to those who had passed the initial hurdle).  

Civil society and climate change

It is now an established (and hard fought-for) maxim of environmental policy that environmental decisions – including at the international level – are best made with the full participation of  interested citizens.

At international level, this maxim (which goes further than any globally agreed text but nonetheless builds on Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration) has for some time supported participation of non-governmental organisations and civil society groups as observers in intergovernmental negotiations; briefing negotiators, adding technical expertise, and bringing transparency to otherwise obscure negotiations between civil servants as often as elected politicians.

This civil society participation has not been without its problems; there has on occasion been fear that the structures of non-governmental organisations around the world and the potential dominance of larger groups simply reflect wider imbalances of bargaining power between nations. But in the climate talks, there is a remarkable coincidence of interest between the calls of civil society for climate justice and ambitious emissions targets, and the headline interests of more vulnerable nations.

When the ejection of impressive news source Avaaz and of Friends of the Earth and Tcktcktck from the official talks coincided with the ‘Reclaim Power’ climate justice march on Wednesday 16th December, it appeared that an entire army of officials had just scored an own goal.

Battles that many NGOs considered fought and won may now need to be fought and won again.

Beyond Copenhagen, there is renewed pressure on civil society around the world to make its voice heard above the non-voting views of economic interests and politicians limited by short-term political priorities or (in some countries) crude opinion poll data. This is precisely the message that is emerging from the larger non-governmental organisations: “we don’t have a real deal, and we’re not done yet”, is the essential message.

To put it another way, ‘we’re all eco-warriors now’.

One thing is certain: action based on this insight will undoubtedly shape both the course of democracy, and the course of climate change, in the coming months and years. 

[A version of this post will also be cross-posted on the Local Democracy blog over at http://blog.localdemocracy.org.uk/]

Ian Christie considers lessons from the so-called ‘climategate’ affair in this short piece, written during the December 2009 COP15 negotiations.

download
(146 kb)

Meanwhile so-called ‘climate sceptics’ continue to publicise what they suggest amounts to muzzling of their legitimate questions inside the COP15 meeting space, and just one week has passed since Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Vice-Chair Jean-Pascale van Ypersele complained that “[w]e are spending a lot of useless time discussing this rather than spending time preparing information for the negotiators”.

 Climategate, Ian argues, teaches us that

1) climate science is not a ‘done deal’ and never can be;

2) the science is a human process and inevitably bound up with values, worldviews and interests;

3) climate science has implications of such scale and impact that debate and assessment of evidence must be as open as possible; and

4) those in the ‘climate consensus’ need to be far more sensitive to issues of social and cultural reception of their findings and to the poor level of media and public understanding of science.

You can read Ian’s piece below, or download it as a pdf file from the reports section of our website.

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‘Climategate’: a salutary episode

Ian Christie*

I am not a climate scientist, like the vast majority of people commenting on climate policy and its implications. We have to take a great deal on trust about climate science, since we are not competent to investigate and assess it in depth.

 Having read a great deal on the subject and spoken to many experts, I consider that the evidence and the modelling eminently justify urgent and radical action on a precautionary ‘insurance’ basis, and I regard much of the activity of so-called ‘deniers’ and ’sceptics’ as mischievous at best and deliberately mendacious at worst.

 However, in some ways I welcome the uproar over the emails stolen from University of East Anglia, and I think that ‘Climate-gate’ carries some salutary lessons for proponents of radical action and for the majority of climate scientists who back the theory of man-made global heating.

 These lessons are that:

1) the science is not a ‘done deal’ and never can be;

2) the science is a human process and inevitably bound up with values, worldviews and interests;

3) climate science has implications of such scale and impact that debate and assessment of evidence must be as open as possible;

4) those in the ‘climate consensus’ need to be far more sensitive to issues of social and cultural reception of their findings and to the poor level of media and public understanding of science. 

1) The science is not a ‘done deal’

The claim is often made that ‘the science is in’ – that is, there is no room left for debate about the facts of climate change. This is true up to a point. There is no dispute at all, or should not be, about the basic science of the greenhouse effect and the interactions of greenhouse gases, ecosystems and climate. The chances of our injecting vast quantities of GHGs into the biosphere and not having any impact on the climate system are zero.

Nor is there any doubt that atmospheric concentrations of GHGs have gone up, and that this rise is correlated with industrial development and emissions from it over two centuries. Nor is there dispute about the many observations of local heating around the world.

 But to put all this together into a coherent and correct picture of global change is not ‘normal science’. It depends on a mix of observations, complex and difficult historical reconstructions of climate and GHG concentrations, and extremely complex modelling and scenarios for future climate-emission interactions. All this depends on many contestable assumptions.

The reason we can have confidence in the analysis is the global peer review process, a highly conservative one, culminating in the assessment reports of the IPCC. But having confidence in the analysis is not the same thing as having certainty. Our understanding of the climate system is provisional, given its complexity; our models are limited by this.

The science cannot be a ‘done deal’, because if we postpone action until our knowledge is far better we will very likely have left it too late. The science is good enough to justify precautionary action on an insurance principle; it will never be good enough to give us 100% certainty about what we should do and what threats we face. A conclusion from this is that proponents of climate action should be suitably modest about the degree of certainty we can draw from the science, and argue from the insurance principle, that given what we know and have good reason to suppose, it is overwhelmingly rational and sensible to take preventive action.

2) The science is a human process

‘The scientist’ in public, media and political imagination is a boffin who does experiments and deals in ideas that are either 100% right or 100% wrong. In reality, and especially with climate science, the answers to questions are not a bald Yes or No but rather ‘It depends’.

The scientific analysis is bound up with values, worldviews and interests. The ’sceptics’ make much play of the potential vested interests of climate scientists, as if they have none of their own, but of course all science is conducted in a social and economic context and is an all-too human process.

 The climate-gate emails show this: the scientists in question are (of course) not emotionless about their work, are convinced of the dangers humanity is courting, and are stung by the tactics of the sceptic movements. The risk for them is that their inevitable emotional commitment to their work and its implications leads them to defensiveness and evasive tactics – a gift to their opponents, as it has proved to be.

None of the emails indicate fatal flaws in the evidence base or modelling, but some indicate a defensive and embattled mentality that can play into the hands of the unscrupulous parts of the sceptic camp.

 3) The implications of the science make great transparency an imperative

The science is solid but the prescriptions that can be drawn from it are highly contested. How can it be otherwise? It challenges the worldview, economic models and consumption habits of an entire civilisation. It is no surprise that not only the implications but the core science are contested by people with something to lose and by politicians with votes to win and defend.

Taking the science seriously has vast implications for production and consumption; changes of great magnitude need consent, especially in democracies. The price tag for action is huge, dwarfed only by the probable price tag (if it is payable at all) for failing to act in time. It is essential to win consent and build consensus, and given the implications of action plans, there needs to be as open and frank a debate as possible. The in-group peer review process is not enough, given what is at stake. Sceptics need to be won over or defeated in open debate and assessment of evidence, not ignored or sidelined. 

4) Those in the ‘climate consensus’ need to be far more sensitive to social and cultural context

Climate science is part traditional ’solid’ experimental work and part ‘post-normal science’, as described by the philosophers of science Jerry Ravetz and Silvio Funtowitz two decades ago: that is, science that is intrinsically bound up with uncertainties, modelling, scenarios, implications for values,  and assumptions about how human systems will respond and act.

Scientists need to get better at acknowledging this and facing the implications for how their work and its meaning are communicated. Climatologist Mike Hulme is a leading proponent of this view and his recent book Why We Disagree About Climate Change (Cambridge, 2009) is essential reading on the cultural and social dimensions of climate science.

One important factor in the current situation is the legacy of the political, economic and social liberalism of the past 50 years in the West. Deference to authority has greatly reduced as people have become more affluent, individualistic and autonomous. This has reduced the trust and confidence reported in churches, unions, traditional authority figures of all kinds ; and science is not immune, especially when its findings and discussions fail to  provide the clear-cut results many people associate with ’science’ – as with exasperated media and public responses to what are depicted as ever-changing results and prescriptions about nutrition.

In conditions of low trust, as we find in much of the democratic West, scientists must expect the same kind of cynical scrutiny from the mass media that other authorities receive, all the more so given that climate science leads to unwelcome messages for so many economic interests.

To counter this cynical scrutiny, scientists need to understand the social and cultural environment in which they operate, be open and honest about their own values, and face up to the challenge of doing not just ‘normal’ but contested ‘post-normal’ science.

Future of Humanity grants are awarded following an annual competition for proposals from scholars undertaking research at a macro level that is directly related to better understanding the factors affecting the long-term future of humanity.

The 12-month FDSD project will develop scenarios around the question: “how might democracy and participatory decision-making have evolved to cope with the challenges of climate change by the years 2050 and 2100?”

The Foundation for the Future award comes as the relationship between science, democracy and climate change enters the media spotlight as never before.

With the UK public bombarded with a media and internet storm over the stolen emails and the scientific evidence at the heart of what has been dubbed ‘climategate‘, the risk is that public trust both in scientists and politicians will plummet. 

But what could this mean for democracy in the UK and elsewhere, and how could it shape the next stages in the relationship between democracy and climate policy? 

Climategate brings even greater unpredictability to the Copenhagen Climate Summit, already beset with challenges as governments such as that of the US struggle to get public and political backing for measures to decrease the carbon intensity of their economies. 

We welcome your views on ‘the future of democracy in the face of climate change’. And we’ll be at the Climate Summit in Copenhagen to talk to participants about how they think the issues could play out.

If you’d like to let us know your views, please post a comment or drop us a line at info@fdsd.org.

The first is a Guidance Note of the Secretary General on the United Nations Approach to Democracy. This has emerged out of consultations within the Inter-Agency Working Group on Democracy of the Executive Committee on Peace and Security, and sets out ‘the United Nations framework for democracy’.

The second document is an ‘advanced unedited copy’ Report of the Secretary General on climate change and its possible security implications. The summary of the latter identifies ‘democratic governance’ as one of the ‘threat minimizers’ which can help to lower the risks of climate-related insecurity. 

Our own open letter to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, four days later on International Day of Democracy, unconsciously served to shine a spotlight on the links between these themes.

However difficult might be for the United Nations to work collectively on democracy given its diverse membership, it is good to see concrete signs of progress both in terms of elaborating an acceptable UN approach to democracy and democratisation at the national level, and in terms of its linkages to the most pressing sustainable development challenge of our time.

On the occasion of the second International Day of Democracy, FDSD Chair John Elkington and Director Halina Ward write to United Nations Secretary-General Mr Ban Ki-moon on the subject of equipping democracy for resilience in the face of climate change. They warn that unless the world’s nations take meaningful and decisive action to tackle climate change, democracy itself may be a casualty, and ask that in future years International Day of Democracy become an opportunity to reflect on the democratic challenge of climate change.

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FOUNDATION FOR DEMOCRACY AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

PRESS RELEASE

Climate Policy could threaten democratic freedoms, warns NGO

EMBARGOED TO 00:01 GMT, 15th September 2009

In an open letter to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon published on their new website today, the second International Day of Democracy, UK-based non-governmental organisation the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development (FDSD) warn that unless governments step up immediate efforts to tackle climate change, the result could be significant incursions into future democratic freedoms.

As the UN and supporting organisations around the world celebrate democracy today, they know that there are some formidable environmental and natural resource challenges just around the corner—and that climate change is the biggest of them all.

FDSD Director Halina Ward says:

“There is a real risk that as the decision-making implications of huge social challenges like climate change begin to bite, politicians will be tempted to tighten the reins on our democratic rights and limit our access to public decision-making on difficult issues“.

“We need politicians to take really tough steps to tackle issues like climate change, but they have to find ways of doing so with public buy-in, support and active involvement. And the longer they wait to take decisive action, the more likely it is that our democratic freedoms could suffer as the cost of preventing the worst outcomes of climate change increases“.

“We are calling on the UN to encourage its members to reflect deeply on how they can make democracy work to deliver effective actions on climate change. It’s no longer just a question of policy measures and institutions – democracy itself will have to adapt.“

Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development Chair John Elkington adds:

“Climate change is coming at our societies at an underestimated and accelerating rate—outpacing the capacity of democratic systems to respond. If democracies are to retain a commitment to inclusive decision-making, they must innovate fast.“

“The key question, as in times of war, is how to take the necessary decisions when they so often cut across the short-term interests of industries and citizens. That is where leadership—and vision—come in. And the challenge is made harder by the fact that the centre of gravity of the global economy is shifting towards Asia, where greenhouse emissions are rising fastest—and where the institutions of democracy are often weakest.“

ENDS

Note to editors:

FDSD’s Director Halina Ward, and Chair John Elkington are available for media interviews and comment. The full text of the open letter to the UN Secretary-General, embargoed until 00:01 GMT on 15th September 2009, follows.

Press enquiries: press@fdsd.org; Skype: halinaward; Telephone: +44 (0)20 7022 1848

Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development (www.fdsd.org) is the new name for The Environment Foundation, a UK-based charity founded in 1983. FDSD’s mission is to develop resources to equip democracy to deliver sustainable development.

Halina Ward is Director of the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development. Before joining FDSD, she was Director of the Business and Sustainable Development Programme at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in London. She has also worked as a Senior Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) and as a solicitor practising commercial environment law.

John Elkington, a world authority on corporate responsibility and sustainable development, is Chair of the board of trustees of FDSD. John is Founding Partner and Director of Volans. Volans, launched in April 2008, aims to find, explore, advise on and build innovative scalable solutions to the great global divides that overshadow the future. John also co-founded the consultancy and think-tank SustainAbility in 1987 and was its Chair from 1995-2005. He has authored or co-authored more than 17 books, the most recent of which, The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World, was published by Harvard Business School Press in 2008.

The International Day of Democracy was declared by United Nations General Assembly in 2007. The Day is meant both to celebrate democracy and to serve as a reminder that the need to promote and protect democracy is as urgent now as ever. September 15 2009 is the second International Day of Democracy.

COP15, the fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and MOP5, the Fifth meeting of the parties to the Kyoto Protocol, will take place in Copenhagen from December 7-December 18 2009.

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FULL TEXT OF THE OPEN LETTER: EMBARGOED UNTIL 00:01 GMT, 15TH SEPTEMBER 2009

H.E Ban Ki-moon Secretary-General United Nations
New York
NY 10017
USA

15th September 2009

Dear Mr Secretary-General

Equipping democracy for resilience in the face of climate change

We send warm greetings on the occasion of this International Day of Democracy, a day on which it is appropriate not only to celebrate the spread of democracy, but also to pause to consider what might lie ahead; to reflect on how this ‘least bad’ political system might need to adapt for the future: for democracy is the only system that has thus far proven capable of fully respecting the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

There are many threats to democracy. Indeed, we are mindful of the fact that some analyses indicate that fewer than half of the world’s people live in democracies. But as members of the United Nations finalise preparations for this December’s COP15 UN Climate Change Conference, we write with a specific concern: unless the world’s nations take meaningful and decisive action to tackle climate change, democracy itself may be a casualty. For as the costs of mitigating and adapting to climate change rise, it will be increasingly difficult for governments to avoid taking steps that not only interfere with the personal freedoms of their citizens, but also risk alienating citizens, whether or not they vote.

We believe we must now take urgent steps to secure the resilience of our democracies in the face of the social and environmental challenge of climate change. Indeed this, Mr Secretary-General, is the task to which the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development is committed.

You may be assured of our support for the International Day of Democracy. And we ask that you consider our respectful request that in future years the Day also become an opportunity for reflection on the democratic challenge of climate change; for this is at once one of the most significant failures of democracy to date, and one of the greatest challenges that the world’s democracies have ever faced together.

We are keen to support the United Nations in taking the steps needed to equip our democracies, as systems of decision-making, to tackle the climate challenge. As citizens, we must empower our elected representatives to embrace longer-term objectives, even if that sometimes impacts upon short-term self-interests. In this task, we are confident that the United Nations will play a central role in catalysing the necessary interchanges and negotiations between nations and their citizens.

Yours sincerely

John Elkington (Chair) and Halina Ward (Director)

Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development
3rd Floor, Downstream Building, 1 London Bridge, London SE1 9BG, United Kingdom