Theme: Sustainable development
Articles in English related to this theme:
Front Page
Moving Toward a New World Governance
¤ Arnaud Blin,
Gustavo Marin,
Michel Rocard ¤ 6 July 2010
We are incontestably in a period in which we have broken away from a now vanished former order—insofar as “order” can apply to the Cold War—a period in which the world is seeking a new architecture of the world governance, seeking, in short, a governance yet to be found, that will be capable of apprehending the moment’s problems, anticipating tomorrow’s crises, and writing day-after-tomorrow’s history. In other words, seeking a governance system adapted to a henceforth globalized world, a “world (...) read more
World Governance of Civilian and Military Nuclear Energy
¤ François Géré ¤ 7 March 2010
Hell for humanity, bringer of peace and prosperity are the two sides of the nuclear coin. Managing them requires wisdom and foresight within a framework of good governance.
Which begs the question: What is “good world governance of nuclear energy”?
It simply means developing the nuclear-power industry in a way that ensures that the international community as a whole, and each individual member, live in peace and prosperity on our planet. This process implies taking into account the existence (...) read more
An Ecological Act: A Backgrounder to the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA)
¤ Natural Resource Management and Livelihood Unit. Centre for Science and Environment ¤ 16 October 2009
The paper makes a case for using the NREGA, in India, into an effective development tool. While listing its development opportunities, the paper flags off the many challenges for it.
The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005, or NREGA, in India, was brought into force by the Union government in February 2006. The Act is far-reaching in its intent and scope. It is the first nation-wide employment scheme that guarantees employment legally to India’s rural population. Naturally, it has (...) read more
China: Sustainable Development Strategy Report 2009
¤ 王毅 Wang Yi ¤ 27 August 2009
Climate change has become the most significant environment and development challenge to human society in the twenty-first century. Responding to climate change is the core task to achieve global sustainable development, both for today and for a rather long period of time from today. International negotiations on prevention of global warming and related actions not only concern the human living environment, but also have a direct impact on the modernization process of developing countries. (...) read more
What Brazil and What Amazonia Does the World Need?
¤ Cândido Grzybowski ¤ 21 May 2008
Facing the threat of a world organized by relations that destroy life and generate exclusion, inequalities, and violence, we need to think about how to build a fair, global society rooted in both diversity and solidarity. From the standpoint of Brazil, an emerging global power, but threatened by a huge social divide, and from that of Amazonia, the planet’s lung, which the market in its blindness is seeking to possess and wipe out, Grzybowski offers a few pointers for change based on (...) read more
Document Database
Youth and World Governance
¤ John Anugraha ¤ 2 November 2009
(Draft version, 2009 October)
Albert Einstein was only 25 years old when he wrote his famous theory of relativity. Gandhi was about 25 years old when he helped to found the Natal Indian Congress, which molded the Indian community of South Africa into a homogeneous political force before he moved on to fight for the freedom of India. Che Guevara was about 28 years old when he joined Fidel Castro’s revolutionary movement for the freedom of Cuba. Nelson Mandela was about 30 years old when as a (...) read more
WGI: World Governance Index
¤ Renaud François ¤ 21 May 2009
Developing a new world governance constitutes one of the major challenges of our times, perhaps the most important of all. With this in view, the Forum for a new World Governance launched a number of research projects intended to draw up a roadmap and a set a framework for our work. World governance, though touching upon several domains, is an essentially political phenomenon—in the noble sense of the term—as it ultimately concerns the collective organization of the management of the (...) read more
Agriculture, and Food Security and Sovereingty
Governance of the World Banana Trade
¤ Iain Farquhar ¤ 16 October 2009
With liberalisation of the global banana market and more intense price competition, it has become increasingly difficult for small producers to survive, while large intensive operations which can keep costs down by paying particularly poor wages and disregarding environmental controls tend to be favoured. Consequently, if the aim of governance should be to manage the planet sustainably, then current patterns of governance are clearly failing.
This paper will concentrate on those producers, (...) read more
People’s Food Sovereignty Statement
¤ People’s Food Sovereignty Network ¤ November 2007
Food and agriculture are fundamental to all peoples, in terms of both production and availability of sufficient quantities of safe and healthy food, and as foundations of healthy communities, cultures and environments. All of these are being undermined by the increasing emphasis on neo-liberal economic policies promoted by leading political and economic powers. This statement contains alternative proposals, in favour of the peoples’ needs.
Instead of securing food for the peoples of the (...) read more
Dossiers
The UN: Which Reforms for What Future?
¤ Stéphanie Ah Tchou ¤ 20 January 2009
The UN is currently under a lot of criticism. Upbraided and disparaged, the body that conveyed so much hope is now being berated. There is abundant literature on its subject, not to praise it but to point out its weaknesses, to the point of challenging its very existence.
How did this come to happen? Is such reproach warranted? How should the UN be reformed? What is its future? Should it really be abolished? This file contains info sheets organized according to a number of different (...) read more
Environmental Governance and Managing the Earth
¤ Germà Pelayo ¤ 24 September 2008
This file contains a series of discussions and proposals formulated in recent years around the environmental dimension of world governance. They have been categorized according to the following themes: reconstruction of the environmental balance; energy management, mineral and ocean resources; farming, food security, and sovereignty; sustainable development; and the relationship between humankind and the biosphere.
The crisis brought about by the accelerated pace and the probably (...) read more
Rebuilding the Environmental Balance
Small-scale Sustainable Farmers Are Cooling Down the Earth
¤ Via Campesina ¤ 5 November 2007
Current global modes of production, consumption, and trade have caused massive environmental destruction including global warming that is putting at risk our planet’s ecosystems and pushing human communities into disasters. Global warming shows the failure of a development model based on high fossil-energy consumption, overproduction, and trade liberalization.
Farmers - men and women - around the world are joining hands with other social movements, organizations, people, and communities to (...) read more
Expanding and Reinforcing the Objectives of the Kyoto Protocol: Inciting International Stakeholders to Engage in Greenhouse-gas Transparency
¤ World Team A. Youth Innovation Competition on Global Governance ¤ 14 July 2007
To face the inadequacies of the current approaches to the reduction of pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions, the establishment is proposed of a new institution, the International Emissions Organization (IEO). The IEO would bring together the various stakeholders in a concise framework streamlining the many existing and future initiatives. Complementary to current legislation and regulation, the IEO would need to be equipped with a number of tools, powers, governance mechanisms, and (...) read more
Conference for Climate Change
¤ Youth Innovation Competition on Global Governance ¤ July 2007
Our global cooperative system to control greenhouse-gas emissions is a system in the shape of an international agreement in several points. The objectives of this proposal consist essentially of two parts. First, searching for alternative ways of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions that are mostly from energy-related sources, and second, a method for monitoring the conduct of each country.
The authors of this paper seek to find a solution to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions without seriously (...) read more
Sustainable Development and the Humanity-Biosphere Relationship
Towards a Global Political-Economic Architecture of Environmental Space
¤ Ton Bührs ¤ November 2007
The concept of environmental space (ES) has been put forward as a means of operationalising sustainability. Based on three tenets, the recognition of environmental limits, a strong equity principle, and a focus on resource consumption, the ES approach offers a cognitive framework for a comprehensive and integrated approach to environmental/resource policy and management. With growing concerns about mounting environmental pressures and looming ecological and resource scarcity, it offers also (...) read more
Negative Growth or Sustainable Development?
¤ Guillaume Duval ¤ 5 December 2004
Extreme-climate instances are on the increase, waste is accumulating, groundwater is running out or is polluted, oil is going to become scarce, and controlling it is the cause of increasingly violent conflicts, whether in Iraq or in Chechnya. At the same time, the capacity of the current economic system to meet social needs is increasingly disputed.
Global inequalities are becoming deeper, and if part of Asia is coming out of underdevelopment, it is doing so by adopting a lifestyle that (...) read more
"Negative Growth": Rebirth of a Revolutionary Concept
¤ Mathieu Auzanneau ¤ 29 March 2004
The idea of negative growth dates back to the beginning of the 1970s, about 20 years before the emergence of the concept of "sustainable development." It is a radical critique of the principle of constant growth of global income, in other words GDP growth, on which the entire current economic order is founded.
The central argument of this critique: all the raw materials and the energy consumed today are lost for future generations. Rich countries must therefore consume a lot less in order (...) read more
Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead
¤ Paul Raskin,
Tariq Banuri,
Gilberto Gallopín,
Pablo Gutman,
Al Hammond,
Robert Kates,
Rob Swart ¤ August 2002
This path-breaking book presents a fresh vision for a sustainable world. It describes the historic roots, current dynamics, future perils, and alternative pathways for world development. It advances one of these paths, Great Transition, as the preferred route, identifying strategies, agents of change, and values for a new global agenda. The planetary phase of history has begun, its ultimate shape profoundly uncertain. Will global development veer toward a world of impoverished people, (...) read more
Environmental Governance and Managing the Earth
Global Environmental Governance: Elements of a Reform Agenda
¤ Adil Najam,
Mihaela Papa,
Nadaa Taiyab ¤ 14 May 2007
"Elements for a Reform Agenda" is the third and last chapter of the e-book "Global Environmental Governance: A Reform Agenda," published in 2006 by the International Institute on Sustainable Development. In this chapter, the authors suggest that there seems to be a consensus around five main goals in relation to global environmental governance (GEG): (1) leadership by outstanding and competent institutions commanding the respect and support of high-profile world leaders; (2) knowledge, (...) read more
Earth System Governance - The Challenge for Social Science
¤ Frank Biermann ¤ 19 July 2006
This paper introduces the concept of earth system governance as a new social phenomenon, as a political program, and as a subject of research. It then sketches the key problem structures that complicate earth system governance and derives principles for earth system governance both as a political project and as research practice, namely credibility, stability, adaptiveness, and inclusiveness. The main part of the paper introduces five challenges that lie at the core of earth system (...) read more
Managing Territories, Cities, and the Rural World
FASE’s Commitment to a Sustainable and Democratic Amazonia
¤ FASE ¤ 4 May 2007
This text systematizes the FASE experience while operating in Amazonia and aims to contribute to the debate and to the diagnosis, views, and collective proposals of sustainable and democratic alternatives for the region, together with FASE’s partners.
The purpose of this document is to analyze the future of Amazonia as a national and international challenge, the political debate over the destiny of this Region and the big issues and arguments facing its development. It introduces also the (...) read more
Trade, Money, and Finances
Global Calling-for-help Center
¤ Youth Innovation Competition on Global Governance ¤ May 2007
In the world there is a large number of local communities facing poverty problems that they cannot solve on their own. Existing institutions can only help a small percentage of these communities. There are many people in the world willing to offer their assistance, but they cannot find the proper places to offer their help because of the limits in information. At the moment, there is no mechanism that can connect people willing to give their help and people in need of help. The Global (...) read more
Bank of the South, International Context, and Alternatives
¤ Eric Toussaint ¤ 9 September 2006
The Bank of the South proposes to try to break the dependence of developing countries on international financial markets, channel their own capacity for saving, stop capital flight, channel central resources to priorities for independent social and economic development, change investment priorities, etc. It is designed as a public bank and as an alternative to the Inter American Development Bank and the World Bank.
The Bank of the South can grant credits with or without interest, as well as (...) read more
The Bamako Appeal
¤ World Social Forum ¤ 17 January 2006
More than five years of worldwide gatherings of people and organizations who oppose neoliberalism have provided an experience leading to the creation of a new collective awareness. The social forums - world, thematic, continental, or national - and the Assembly of Social Movements have been the principal architects of this conscience. Meeting in Bamako on January 18, 2006, on the eve of the opening of the Polycentric World Social Forum, the participants of this day devoted to the 50th (...) read more
Regulating the Public and the Private Economy
Kicking the Habit: The World Bank and the IMF Are Still Addicted to Attaching Economic-policy Conditions to Aid
¤ Oxfam International ¤ November 2006
Despite numerous commitments to reform, The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are still using their aid to make developing countries implement inappropriate economic policies, with the tacit approval of rich-country governments. These economic-policy conditions undermine national policy making, delay aid flows, and often fail to deliver for poor people. If the world is to make poverty history, this practice must be stopped. Aid must be conditional on being spent (...) read more
When World-regulation Experts "Play" the Regions ...
¤ Pierre Beckouche ¤ January 2005
After about twenty years of deregulation, it appears that we are moving beyond the era of dogmatic neoliberalism into one of re-regulation; the opposition between states and markets posited by neoliberal thinking is less and less convincing. This does not imply returning to a nation-state scenario. There is increasing convergence on the idea that new regulation will take place as much, or even more on the regional scale (macro-regions: NAFTA, East-Asia, Euromed, etc.) than on the global (...) read more
Managing Sea, Soil, and Energy Resources
The Water Manifesto for a New Global Contract
¤ World Water Assembly for Citizen and Elected People ¤ August 2006
Following the release of Riccardo Petrella’s "Water Manifesto," a series of meetings were organized in Lisbon around the issue of access to water in the world. These meetings led to the writing of a manifesto for a world contract on water. Since then, the text has become a reference for all movements acting or wishing to act to promote access to water.
We come from Africa, Latin America, North America, Asia, and Europe. We gathered together in l998 with no other legitimacy or (...) read more
Alternative World Water Forum
¤ Claude Drouot ¤ 31 March 2005
The second Alternative World Water Forum (Forum alternatif mondial de l’eau) (Fame) was held in Geneva from 17 to 20 March 2005, with new goals compared to the goals considered to be priorities in the first Forum in March 2003.
The global water policy implemented by the World Water Council, a spin-off of the World Bank, is based on three major principles. Firstly, water must be considered to be an economic good, a product like petroleum or corn. Secondly, access to water is a vital need, not (...) read more
Oil slicks: An Ocean of Profits
¤ Roseline Vachetta ¤ 19 December 2002
If there is a sector which, both in its organization and in its results, can be seen as the poster child for capitalist globalization, it must be maritime transportation. Roseline Vachetta, a member of the Regional Policy Committee for Transport and Tourism at the European Parliament, discusses this issue here.
There are some “trash-container” ships which concentrate all the ingredients and all the opacity of capitalist globalization. For example, in the case of the Prestige, we find: an (...) read more
Sustainable Forest Management
¤ Luis Felipe Cesar,
Olivier Ranke ¤ October 2001
Proposal Paper containing different definitions of the forest, an analysis of the conflicts between forest and other land uses, with special focus on the economic and environmental impacts of increased use of land for agriculture.
Discussion in this Proposal Paper on the forest and on the different socioeconomic dimensions of forest management is conducted along three main lines. First, is considered the problematic existence of forest areas in relation to other uses of land. This point (...) read more
Citizens’ Reappropriation of Politics
Final Declaration of the Sixth World Parliamentary Forum - Caracas 2006
¤ World Parliamentary Forum ¤ January 2006
The Sixth World Parliamentary Forum met in the city of Caracas within the framework of the Sixth World Social Forum from January 24 to 29 2006 and was attended by parliamentarians representing the five continents. This declaration results from the Forum at the end of the sessions of 26 and 27 January 2006.
Claimed to be in keeping with the World Social Forum Charter of Principles and with the commitments adopted in the forums of previous years in the firm belief that "another world is (...) read more
The Nature of Work and the Globalization of Social Rights
Basic Food Income: Option or Obligation?
¤ Rolf Künnemann ¤ January 2005
Basic food income is a universal payment by the state unconditionally to each member of society with an amount sufficient to cover elementary food needs. It is not a level of income but a state program, by definition. Minimum income describes a certain level of income, but may not be sufficient to provide access to food. Basic food income is an innovative idea. State programs can introduce "smart forms" of targeting.
Indeed, how should the human right to food be guaranteed to households not (...) read more
Types of Goods and Producers
The Right to Water as a Human Right
¤ Michael Windfuhr ¤ September 2003
Over the last two years, the right to water has received considerable attention both within the United Nations human rights system as well as within the work of non-governmental organizations. On the whole, the debate surrounding the content of obligations derived from the right to water is still in its early stages. Nevertheless, important progress has been made.
The committee on economic, social, and cultural (ESC) rights derives the right to water as much from the right to food as from (...) read more
Conflict Resolution and Sustainable Peace Building
The Post-modern State
¤ Robert Cooper ¤ April 2002
The post-modern-state system has broken down national borders and rejected force for resolving disputes. The EU is the most developed example of this, but not the only one. On the other hand, the pre-modern state may be too weak even to secure its home territory, let alone pose a threat internationally, but can provide a base for non-state actors who are potentially dangerous to the post-modern world. Consequently, a new form of voluntary imperialism is needed for the world. The author (...) read more
The Legal Principles of a New World Governance
The Extraterritorial Scope of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR)
¤ Rolf Künnemann ¤ October 2001
While investigating the extraterritorial scope of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), this paper introduces the threefold classification of internal, external, and international obligations applicable to all Human Rights treaties. Moreover, it emphasizes that most Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) are duty-bound under Human Rights treaties and suggests steps to operationalize the related obligations of states. This paper looks at some relevant (...) read more
Universal, Plural and Quality Education, and Citizen Education
Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future
¤ Edgar Morin ¤ October 1999
If we want the Earth to be able to meet the needs of its human population, society must undergo a transformation. Thus, tomorrow’s world must be fundamentally different than the one we know today. We must therefore work toward building a “feasible future.” Democracy, equality and social justice, and peace and harmony with our natural environment: these must be the key words for this future world. In this context, UNESCO asked Edgar Morin to express his ideas in the very essence of future (...) read more
