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Forum:How to go beyond politics-as-usual

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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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(draft for posting to localsustuk discussion list)

How to go beyond politics-as-usual?

This question is to be put at the launch of Climate Safety (Nov 27 2008). But is it the right question?

If we're serious about finding a way to go beyond politics-as-usual, don't we first need to discover a way to go beyond civil-society-as-usual? Of course it's true that civil society is extraordinarily diverse, but are we as effective as we could be on climate change?

The tag line for Climate Safety - "No screaming, no panic, no doom, no gloom" perhaps hints at previous ineffective approaches?

Similarly from a recently launched campaign: "Get Fair is not Make Poverty History UK. It is not aiming to get millions of people wearing wrist bands, or fill Edinburgh, Birmingham or Westminster with 150,000 banner-waving activists, and it doesn't have Bob Geldof in the wings to organise another Hyde Park extravaganza."

Many commentators have noted how Barack Obama used the power of the internet, but was this less about the technology and more about giving supporters a genuine sense of involvement?

So, can civil society action on climate change find ways to fully involve ordinary citizens? Can we go beyond treating ordinary citizens as rally fodder? Can we go beyond suggesting useful but essentially small, limited and purely personal actions? And can we go beyond (worst of all) giving the impression that ordinary citizens only matter if they stump up some cash? Isn't it true that within civil society the many rather than the few are capable of much much more than just putting their hand in their pocket, changing light bulbs or flag waving?

Philralph @sca21 11:46, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Posted and awaiting moderation Philralph @sca21 16:02, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

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References

  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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