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The Future of Sustainability: Have Your Say! Week Four - “Shaping the Future”
Dear Participants This is the final week of the IUCN discussion forum Future of Sustainability: Have Your Say! The theme this week is “Shaping the Future” and I would like to focus on 3 key topics: engaging the next generation; the role of social movements and governance in developing fully democratic, socially-just and sustainable societies. But you should feel free to introduce other topics too. Engaging the next Generation Firstly, I have some special questions for young people: Some people tell me that the younger generation is not interested in the environment any more. The environment is a dead issue. Kids in cities are so divorced from nature that they don’t know where milk comes from or how vegetables grow. On the other hand, a recent article in the American consumer magazine Vanity Fair, claimed that the environment is in fashion again and that “Green is the New Black”. I would like to hear from the young professionals around the world registered in this forum what they are hearing from their friends and colleagues about nature, the environment, sustainable development. Has the language of sustainable development become so outdated that it doesn’t resonate with your friends anymore? Where is the next generation of young green activists? Are they more likely to be art students, designers, or architects rather than ecology students? A new generation the world over is increasingly connected through mobile phones, instant messages, and the internet. The success of websites such as My Space and YouTube as well as interactive TV programmes (MTV) shows that young people increasingly use new media to share their opinions and messages. This sharing is creating new social networks that go beyond culture and country undreamt of a generation ago.
Role of Social Movements Shaping the future of sustainability is about harnessing citizen action and making sure that social movements influence policy makers, and lead to greater accountability. As A shok Khosla’s noted earlier in this e-forum, the sustainability debate goes well beyond the environmental movement which has too often been content with preaching to the converted. It calls for changes in production, distribution and consumption patterns - or - to put it simply - the way we live and define wealth and success. Business as usual is not an option. In both the South and the North, s ocial movements involving indigenous peoples, environmental justice, and landless peoples’ groups are playing an important role in bring about social and environmental change – from the ground-level up. This new “Environmentalism of the Poor” challenges traditional environmentalists to question their actions and to take a new look at the way they deal with the thousands of local-level natural resource conflicts that are taking place worldwide. Key to this is civic mobilization and self-empowerment, making sure that solutions to problems are based on local experience and knowledge, combined with modern techniques, and locally managed. T he long-term success of many efforts to improve the status of people and the environment depends on the quality of the social networks underlying them. Many of them may serve as building blocks for scaling up efforts sustainability and for the shaping of international policy and institutions.
Governance, Policy Impact and Mainstreaming Sustainable Development Building sustainable solutions at the local level is vital, but the impact may remain limited until local communities, advocates and practitioners can better influence policy and governance at all scales. Civil society institutions and representatives of historically disadvantage people must work out ways to forge new alliances, mobilize to elect truly representative governments, and become better organized, decisive and strategic. I would like to hear your views on the institutional, policy and governance frameworks, at various levels, that hinder or help the scaling-up of local-level efforts. In what way can we strengthen multi-stakeholder alliances that can boost sustainability at different levels? We welcome comments from participants who have experience in translating local ideas into action on a wider scale, and their thoughts on ways to build broader coalitions. How best can we link local and national efforts with regional and global processes to create policy and institutional conditions for sustainable development?
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