As the international community looks for a successor to the Millennium Development Goals, which will expire in 2015, is the idea of Sustainable Development Goals - merging the divergent tracks of development and the environment - our best hope of ending poverty and saving the Earth?
As hundreds of thousands of people around the world prepared to take to
the streets throughout May 2012 as part of a global call for change, the
International ‘Global Spring’ Assembly released its first statement describing concrete suggestions for a
‘global change’.
Linking development and environmental objectives through policy initiatives is not an easy task. This Background Note sets out to explain why reconciling the two agendas has been so difficult at a practical level, and suggests how Rio+20 could start to bridge the gaps between the two. By Claire Melamed, Andrew Scott and Tom Mitchell.
Achieving sustainable development entails a global
transition—away from prevailing inequitable and ecologically
destabilizing patterns of development, to modes of development
based on shared prosperity and environmental protection. Global
governance plays a crucial role in this shift, says a report by IBON International.
What steps are needed to adjust the rules of the present
interest-driven, debt-based economy to the sustainable targets of our
natural, social and cultural commons? A series of 12 lectures explore the emergence of a commons-based economy, introduced by James B. Quilligan.
Aristotle’s economic philosophy needs to be recalibrated for the economic realities of
the 21st century, since household sufficiency doesn’t begin to describe
the many facets of the commons that we recognize today, writes James B. Quilligan.
Civil society groups have strong concerns about the growing influence of major
corporations and business lobby groups within the United Nations, and call for the UN to prioritise steps that
serve the public interest over
the creation of policies that result in profits for businesses. A joint statement from Friends of the Earth.
The question we ask is
whether today’s generation of protestors represent the harbingers of a new
emancipatory agenda, or whether the opposite is the case, that social
fragmentation and polarisation from above as well as from below could usher in
an even more dangerous and divided world. Or both? By Mary Kaldor.
Twelve women from social movements around the world share their vision of what the world can and must become, and show
us what they and their community are doing to build that world. A report by Beverley Bell and Other Worlds.
Consumption levels between developed and developing nations must be
rebalanced alongside a stabilisation of the world’s population by
voluntary methods, according to a new report from the Royal Society.
