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Forum:A role for ordinary citizens in UK sustainable development

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2009

  • Great council websites aren’t enough. We need 1% for open data. 13 October 2009 [1]
  • September 2009 32 per cent of respondents were involved (through membership or regular donations) with at least one of 15 selected major third sector organisations concerned with the environment, compared with 42 per cent in 2007. [2] A sizeable decline in a short time. Contrast this decline with the growth of alternatives which tend to be much more participatory, such as Transition towns or Project Dirt for example.
  • 19 ways to make the UK more sustainable. Sustainable Development Commission identifies 19 "Breakthrough ideas", including "Mobilising collective action – scaling up the active networks and organisations for change blossoming around the UK, including the Transition towns network, Green Voice, and South London’s Project Dirt", July 1 [3]
  • Lipservice and localism, June 29 [4]
  • Place Survey - based on more than 500,000 people's views and perceptions about where they live - demonstrates the importance of listening to local people and what they want for their local area, Communities Secretary John Denham, June 23 [5] Less than half of people say they are satisfied with their local council. Only a quarter of people feel they can influence local decisions, as many again would like to be more involved.
  • "Another idea is to take the key themes of Transition towns - communities thinking about the future and taking action to deal with big issues - and apply this to the way central and local government work with communities. The role of government should not be to dictate ("I'm a bureaucrat and I know what's best for you") but to facilitate - to provide communities with resources and support" May 30 [6]. / Sounds like Local Agenda 21 before the government ditched it in favour of bureacrat dominated community planning? Philralph @sca21 17:15, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
  • Please tweet for service, June 2 [8]

2008

  • "The best mechanism to confront the challenge of climate change are not market mechanisms, but conscious, motivated, and well organized human beings endowed with an identity of their own." Evo Morales Ayma, President of Bolivia, November 28, 2008
  • "...his (Obama's) only real hope in dealing with the tremendous challenges the country (world) faces will be to harness the collective ingenuity of citizens on a massive scale. In other words, he must enlist a level of participation in generating and acting on innovative solutions that has no obvious parallel in history." Anthony D. Williams, wikinomics, November 7 2008 / topic, topic
  • A Wiki for the Planet: Clay Shirky on Open Source Environmentalism, wired.com, August 20, 2008
  • "We're going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, "If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?" And I'm betting the answer is yes." Clay Shirky at a Web 2.0 conference, April 23, 2008. / Inspiring Quotes 2, topic

2007

  • "Government must do more to help people take green action", FoE, August 24 [11]


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This is a draft for posting to the current Defra wiki


The idea of an environmental contract may open up possibilities. Expressed as an understanding between government and citizens, it explicitly involves the latter. Whether or not it genuinely opens up possibilities depends on what type of role the government can envisage for citizens.


Since the contraction of Local Agenda 21, the field of sustainable development in England seems to have been dominated by professional and expert, remote and establishment elites.


To ordinary citizens and community groups interested in sustainability, recent government and establishment initiatives can seem like forever rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. No matter how cleverly experts talk amongst themselves, there won't be enough progress till there's genuine involvement and inclusion of ordinary citizens.


This is most apparent at local level, but the good thing is that it's here that there's probably the greatest potential to turn things around.


There's been a lot of rhetoric recently about devolution and localism, but much practice can seem to remain top down - however much people may object to that term. (Perhaps people object to it because it hits the nail on the head?)


For ordinary people and community groups to get genuine involvement and so achieve genuine influence, there must be fewer and fewer no-go areas - specifically the joined-up and the strategic. Because genuine sustainability must be about both of these, shallow, superficial, single-issue, piecemeal, tokenistic, short term or otherwise unsustained community involvement initiatives just won't be enough.


"Our central recommendation is that communications should be redefined across government to mean a continuous dialogue with all interested parties, encompassing a broader range of skills and techniques than those associated with media relations. The focus of attention should be the general public" - Recommendation no. 1 of the Phillis report, January 2004.

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References

  • The Phillis report can be accesssed via Cabinet Office news
  • The original version of this article was first published on the Sustainable Community Action wiki.
  1. ↑ Mash the State, 13 October 2009
  2. ↑ Communities and Local Government, September 23, 2009
  3. ↑ Sustainable Development Commission, July 1, 2009
  4. ↑ Living with rats, June 29, 2009
  5. ↑ Communities and Local Government, June 23, 2009
  6. ↑ The Strategist, May 30, 2009
  7. ↑ Living with rats, June 3, 2009
  8. ↑ Living with rats, June 2, 2009
  9. ↑ University of Copenhagen, March 12 2009
  10. ↑ BBC News, October 28
  11. ↑ Friends of the Earth August 24
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