Twelve years ago this month, in April 2000, Bolivia drew worldwide attention due to the Cochabamba Water Revolt – a battle over who would control water: the people or a giant global corporation. Today the people of Bolivia are again at the center of a struggle over water, this one with even deeper implications for the nation’s future. Today the struggle is not over who will control water but whether some areas will have any water at all. Global climate change threatens Bolivia’s natural water systems like no threat that has ever come before. Today with this newsletter the Democracy Center launches a major new project to help people around the world understand in a much more real and direct way the impact that climate change is having on water – and what that means for people: Climate Change is About…Water.

Far too often today, the crisis of global climate change is dismissed as something abstract, distant or off in the future. The people of Bolivia do not have that luxury. In Bolivia, as in many other “early impact” nations around the world, climate change is real, immediate and urgent. That urgency can be found most intensely in the crisis over water. Or three crises actually: droughts, floods and melting glaciers.

Think of it like this. For thousands of years the planet’s water system has been relatively stable and civilizations have settled themselves accordingly. We live in some places and not in others based on water. We build houses in certain ways, grow food in certain ways and organize our lives in certain ways all based on expectations about how the world’s natural water systems behave. Climate change is rearranging that whole system in radical ways – and over the quick course of a few generations, not millennia. In few places are the disastrous effects of this more on display than in Bolivia.

To capture this story in a powerful and visual way the Democracy Center team has created a new microsite, Climate Change is About…Water.  Here is some of what you’ll find there:

The Story of Drought:

Droughts are about far more than dry ground and hotweather. We visit the town of Pasorapa and document the ways in which climate change-driven drought can destroy a whole community.

The Story of Floods:

What happens when the rains don’t stop?  We visit the city of Quillacollo and see how chronic flooding brings sewage into some homes, destroys others, and wrecks the lives and dreams of those who live in the water’s relentless path.

The Death of Glaciers:

Bolivia’s Chacaltaya glacier was once the highest ski resort in the world. Now the glacier is melted and gone and never coming back. What happens to the villages beneath a glacier when it disappears – and what happens to the vast urban center that depends on threatened glaciers for their drinking water?

Climate Change is About…Water bring you images and interviews with the people living on the front lines of the climate and water crisis. If you are interested in deepening your own understanding of what climate change means, or if you are an educator looking for a way to help students understand this crisis in a clear and meaningful way, have a look. If you are an activist, journalist or a researcher looking for something in-depth, you can dig even deeper into a resource full of original research as well as links to further information.

This new multimedia site is the start of several new climate projects the Democracy Center will be rolling out over the coming months, looking both at what climate change means and also what we, as citizens, can actually do about it. Stay tuned to this newsletter for more in the months ahead and also to the Democracy Center’s main Climate and Democracy page.

Jim Shultz
The Democracy Center

What’s New in ‘Getting Action’?

What you might have missed recently on Getting Action, the Democracy Center’s global blog on citizen action and advocacy. Have a look here or via the article links below for the latest!

Interview with Emily James – Doing It Justice: In the first in our new ‘Campaigning Creatives’ series we interview the director of climate direct action documentary ‘Just Do It’

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Our latest Getting Action post introduces the ‘Campaigning Creatives’ series. The role of creative media in highlighting, supporting, narrating and furthering campaigning and advocacy work is an important and fascinating one. As well as using Getting Action to let you know about new musical, cinematic, literary, visual and other kinds of artistic interventions in the fight for environmental and social justice, we will be talking to the people producing such work about what the role of that creative output is in our struggles, and how and why it can help the cause.

In March I spoke with Emily James, an award-winning documentary maker from the UK who has been making films with a conscience for several years. She had just returned from the San Francisco Green Film festival where she had been promoting her new feature-length documentary Just Do It. This ‘tale of modern-day outlaws’ takes us into the world of the UK’s climate change direct activists. Here she tells us about the film, and the difference that documentary can make.

Enjoy – and don’t forget to let us know what you think in the comments section below.

Mads Ryle – Democracy Center staff

If you know of a campaigning creative we should talk to, get them to write to us at maddy@democracyctr.org.

Interview with Emily James: Doing It Justice

by Mads Ryle

Borrowing and subverting one of the most famous brand no-logos of our time is an appropriate move for Just Do It, a documentary that features people dedicating themselves to overturning the status quo. Along with its clever use of animation and the ironic outlook of several of its main personalities, this gives a necessary playfulness to a tale of people who are essentially struggling for our collective survival. It reflects the sense of humour that has been gainfully employed by the UK climate movement to garner support and attention, as well as making the film incredibly watchable and engaging.

Emily James at work. Credit: Amelia Gregory

Just Do It is the result of a year (2009-10) spent filming with people in the UK – most of them young – who carry out direct action on climate change, often by targeting those most responsible for causing it. The film follows this community as it attempts to shut down a power station, locks itself onto bank headquarters, lobs food to striking workers at a wind turbine factory, or takes part in various actions (and gets put in police cells) at the UN COP-15 in Copenhagen. Getting such prolonged access to a community of people who are by necessity secretive is no easy proposition, but director Emily James was able to point to a roster of previous projects that included films such as The Luckiest Nut in the World – an animated analysis of the injustice inherent in so-called ‘free market’ globalization economics – as well as production work on the climate feature film The Age of Stupid. Making Just Do It as an independent, partly crowd-funded project also made a big difference. “That was a real turning point,” says James, “because [the activists being filmed] were like ‘Oh. You’re not even getting paid to do this. Not only that but you’re taking risks yourself’.  It just became clear that I was doing it for the same reason that they were doing it. And I wasn’t an outsider in as much as I understood the politics, and not only that but I shared the politics.”

James was invited to film the shut-down of Stansted airport in east London by the direct action group Plane Stupid in August 2008. The footage she took on that day was all over the news for 24 hours – and then the story disappeared. It was this experience that motivated her to make something more long-lasting: “I was so impressed by what the people that I met were doing. And I was also very aware that their story wasn’t being documented in any kind of comprehensive way.  So [after Stansted] I went back to them and said ‘look if we filmed the planning around an action like this then I could make  a much longer film and that would have a longer shelf-life and reach a wider audience’.” The film opens with a critical glance at how climate activism is reported in the mainstream British press – a characterization that generally ranges from the doings of pathetic hippies to violent extremists – and this was something that the film sought to challenge. As James says, “When I did the action with them the thing that struck me was how these guys were nothing like you would assume that they were if all you did was watch the news. There’s something much richer and much deeper to what they’re doing. So I wanted to amplify their message and paint a portrait of them that I thought was more accurate than the one they were getting.”

James sees documentary as a medium uniquely suited to telling these kinds of stories, and getting meaningful responses from those who see them. “There’s a special thing about documentaries”, she tells me, “because they’re able to move you emotionally and intellectually at the same time. So you can have informational content and learn about the world – in the case of an observational film like Just Do It you have a window into a world you might not yourself be able to ever see first-hand. And in doing so you have a growing empathy with the people that you get to know there and so that changes your perspective on what they’re doing.”

UK Climate Camp activists find another use for a police van at a protest in central London. Credit: Kristian Buus

James rejects the idea that she’s trying to ‘radicalize’ people with this film – because she rejects such a framing of what is or isn’t ‘radical’. “I do think the film is trying to reposition culturally the things that are happening in the film,” she says. “We’ve kind of bought into this idea that these people are ‘radicals’ and that they’re extremists… I don’t want it to push people to the margins of our political debate.  I want to pull those people who have been pushed to the margins back into the centre of the debate.”

At any rate there’s no doubt that seeing the people in Just Do It following their ethical instincts and taking the risks that they do has a very strong effect on the viewer. “They’re heroes,” James asserts, “and the funny thing is that I didn’t have to over-egg that to make that the case. I just had to show them as they are and do a relatively straight-forward portrait and it’s incredibly inspiring and makes you want to go and join them.”

James has made a number of television commissions which automatically received audiences in the millions – including people who haven’t necessarily “come to you”. With an independent production like this things are somewhat different, and finding and reaching an audience necessarily depends on exploiting the networks of those close to the issue. But James doesn’t see this as a problem. “Even if someone is a left-leaning liberal who already believes that climate change is happening and something needs to be done about it, this isn’t not the film for them – this is exactly the audience.” She looked for “that sweet spot in between” an already committed activist audience, and people who still need convincing about whether climate change is even real. “It is a film for people– and I think this is a very large group – who understand that climate change is happening, who have probably already done most of what they can easily do to change their own behavior. And who most likely have got to the point of feeling quite un-empowered and depressed about the scale of the problem and what we can do about it.

“A lot of people’s response is to put their head in the sand and just try and get on with their lives. And the thing that really inspired me about the people in Plane Stupid, Climate Camp and Climate Rush was that they didn’t do that. Their response was to go out and get really engaged and do something really bold and dramatic in order to try and create a real shift in the situation. And to do that against all odds, whether or not it was going to work. And I think that’s really important – to do things because they’re the right thing to do, not just because you’re going to get the desired effect at the end.”

In terms of getting results, Just Do It finishes by highlighting a number of campaign successes achieved over the period – including the halting of a third runway at Heathrow Airport. But in the film when James asks Marina and Rowan – two of the featured activists – whether what they do is ‘doing any good’, it is their attitude that she feels to be just as important as these tangible wins: “At that point in the filming none of those successes had happened, and they were doing these things anyway. And the answers that they gave, that’s what I was looking for – essentially a statement of: if you do nothing, then you’re definitely not gonna win. So you have to try.” Seeing the tenacity of the activists she worked with was inspiring: “Being unwilling to give up the fight…The people in the film, it was almost like they knew they were fighting an unwinnable battle. They were OK with that on some level. They would rather go down fighting than be the people that just stood by and watched it happen. And those are incredibly important core values…that I think as a society we’ve lost sight of to a really harmful extent.”

When I ask James what she saw as being strategically effective during her time with the movement, she tells me that she’s “not a direct action purist”. In other words, she does think it’s “totally valid to do stuff in order to get media attention or political attention.” And from that point of view, “what you do is important if it’s bold and arresting, but I think the tone with which you do it is almost more important. So I really like the Climate Rush stuff because it’s always very playful. And I like that Marina [another central character in the film] always stays polite and always keeps her tongue in her cheek a bit. And I think that makes it much more palatable for people to come to. It’s important for the individuals involved as well to get a sense of community and have a sense of play and a sense of fun about what they’re doing.”

Lily, one of the documentary's featured activists, helping set up Grow Heathrow. Credit: Kristian Buus

That sense of community is one of the overriding impressions that Just Do It leaves the viewer with, one of the key ingredients in making you want to get out your seat and head down to join the squatters and local residents in their community garden at Grow Heathrow. As James says, “We can’t underestimate the personal and psychological value of participating in these kinds of things. Once you see what’s going on, sitting back and doing nothing is more psychologically damaging than going out and working with other people. There’s something so rewarding about being surrounded by people who share your values and who are engaged in a common effort to try and do something to make the world a better place.”

Visit  http://justdoitfilm.com/ to find out more, watch the trailer, read the accompanying blog and newspaper, or get involved with helping to organize a screening where you live.

From insurance companies lording over our health care to global conglomerates taking control of our water, corporate giants wield more and more influence over our lives and our environment. So how do we fight back? How do we take on corporate power and actually win?

The Democracy Center recently published a new resource for citizen campaigners that looks up close at the strategies that communities are using worldwide to tackle corporate giants. We call it Beating Goliath and you can download yourself a free copy here (the booklet was written by the Democracy Center’s Kylie Benton-Connell). Meanwhile, in this issue of Democracy Center News we bring you a brief look at three strategies people have used successfully to take on corporate Goliaths, an article that also ran last week in one of our favorite magazines, YES!.

At end of this issue of the newsletter you will find a new feature, What’s New in Getting Action. This includes a list and links to some of the recent articles on our global blog on citizen action. Be sure to have a look!

Jim Shultz
The Democracy Center

Three Strategies for Beating Corporate Giants

As Occupy and other movements across the world take up anew the question of how to combat corporate power, here are three good lessons from the frontlines. Action campaigns aimed at single corporations do not replace the need for structural reforms to limit the overall power that corporations have in our lives and in our political systems. But if such action campaigns are aimed well, they can accomplish a good deal.

1. Make it Personal: The Battle Against Bechtel

In 2000, under pressure from the World Bank, the government of Bolivia privatized the public water system of its third largest city, Cochabamba, and leased the water to a subsidiary of the California corporate giant, Bechtel. When Bechtel raised rates astronomically within a few weeks, the city rebelled in the now-famous Water Revolt and forced Bechtel to leave. The following year Bechtel struck back, filing a $50 million demand for lost profits against the people of Cochabamba, in a trade court operated by the same World Bank.

The global campaign against Bechtel’s anti-Bolivia lawsuit was based on one key principle: make life miserable for the corporation’s namesake and CEO, Riley Bechtel, and other company officials. Corporations are designed to shield their top executives from accountability. Anti-Bechtel campaigners gave Mr. Bechtel no such luxury. They bombarded him with emails to his personal account. They lambasted him by name over and over again in the media. Protesters shut down access to his San Francisco headquarters and in Washington picketed the home of one of his subordinates.

In January 2006, Bechtel officials flew to Bolivia to sign an agreement dropping their case for a token payment of thirty cents, the first such capitulation ever by a major corporation in a global trade case. The lawyer who represented the Bolivian government in the negotiations, when asked by the Democracy Center why the company had capitulated, said, “The CEO told the lawyers to make the case go away.” In the end the damage to Bechtel’s reputation outweighed what it hoped to win from the Bolivian people.

2. Add Humor to Your Protests: Switching off Coal Plants in the UK

In 2006 E.On (a German energy company) announced plans to replace a coal-fired power station in Southeast England, with yet another climate-threatening coal-fired power station. A two-year campaign was waged by grassroots groups and climate activists to stop the company’s plan. Campaigners took actions ranging from online pledges, to mass civil disobedience, and at one point completely shut down the existing power plant.

It was the addition of humor, however, to their protest actions, which helped gain the campaign widespread positive public attention. Activists dispatched a team of ‘cleaners’ to scrub coal clean outside an E.On office (to call attention to the company’s claims of ‘clean coal’) and invaded a company office with a posse of Santas delivering coal to “naughty” company officials. Finally, the campaign ‘occupied’ a company-sponsored replica of the coal plant at Legoland, unveiling a banner saying “STOP CLIMATE CHANGE” down the length of the tiny tower.

In 2009, under mounting public pressure, E.On announced that they were shelving the plans for the new Kingsnorth power station. The UK government also announced that it would not approve the development of new coal-fired stations without ‘Carbon Capture and Storage’ (a promised future technology that has not yet been successfully implemented in any working power plant.)

3. Go After the Shareholders: Taking on Occidental Petroleum in Colombia

In the early 1990s Occidental Petroleum set its sights on developing a set of major oil fields in Colombia’s biodiversity-rich cloud forest, home to the indigenous U’wa people. The indigenous community’s opposition to Occidental’s drilling plans was rooted in a spiritual belief that oil is the blood of mother earth, and the knowledge that oil infrastructure in their lands would become a magnet for armed violence and the country’s FARC rebels. With the Colombian government eager to support the project, the U’wa, alongside international allies, undertook a global campaign to block Occidental’s drilling plans.

With dreams of vast profits dancing in their heads, Occidental executives seemed immovable, so Amazon Watch and others mobilized for a companion strategy – target the oil conglomerate’s current and potential shareholders. Campaigners staged protest actions at Fidelity Investments in Boston, a major Occidental stockholder and sponsored shareholder resolutions against the project. The targeting of investors coupled with the unshakable dedication and unity of the U’wa people helped convince the business community that Occidental’s oil plans in the cloud forest faced too much opposition to be a good business investment.

The campaign eventually took its toll on Occidental. Fidelity, the target of 75 protests in just 6 months, withdrew $400 million dollars of its investments in the oil firm. Eventually Occidental announced that it would return control of its main exploration site to the Colombian government, claiming that it had failed to find the oil deposits it had expected. Whether Occidental cared to admit it or not, the U’wa and their global allies had won.

Read more about these anti-corporate advocacy campaigns and others, as well as find links to a treasure trove of campaigning resources in the Democracy Center’s new campaigner’s resource, Beating Goliath.

What’s New in ‘Getting Action’?

Here is what you might have missed recently on Getting Action, the Democracy Center’s global blog on citizen action and advocacy. Have a look here or via the article links below for the latest!

Getting Action: Fighting eviction with occupation Destry Sibley reports from Springfield, Mass. on how local families facing foreclosure and eviction shut down Bank of America.

Getting Action: Crowdsourcing to the rescue! Looking for the Charles Lindbergh of sustainable development Our colleagues at the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) are challenging the world to find ways to develop sustainably. Can you help?

Getting Action: Citizens to Governments – Show me the Money! Michael Lipsky of DEMOS writes about the global movement for budget transparency.

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“The Occupy movement is truly inspiring, but when will it have some real objectives and targets?”  That is the question that ran through a good number of activist circles last fall as the Occupy Wall Street movement gathered steam and garnered headlines worldwide.  In this post a young activist we have long admired, Destry Sibley, writes about how the sentiments of the Occupy movement can be converted into something real and concrete – helping families in western Massachusetts take on the Bank of America to keep their homes.  The housing rights movement in Springfield began long before protesters descended onto Zucotti Park and it is a good example of how to move from generally aimed protest to serious, strategic and concrete action.  Read on!

Jim Shultz – Executive Director

People facing foreclosure and eviction in Springfield, Mass. come together to shut down Bank of America

On November 21, 2011 a group of people facing foreclosure and eviction from their homes, alongside their allies and supporters, shut down a Bank of America branch in Springfield, Massachusetts. More than 400 people gathered from across the state to march, rally and protest, while 15 of us occupied the bank, forcing it to close for the day.

Credit: Kelly Creedon

The campaign

This action didn’t happen in a vacuum, and it wasn’t a product of the Occupy Wall Street movement alone. It was one tactic in an ongoing local campaign to fight the Big Banks’ abuses. In 2010, a group of community organizations, organizers and attorneys formed the Springfield No One Leaves/Nadie Se Mude Coalition. We dedicated ourselves to supporting former homeowners and tenants to stay in their homes by fighting the Wall Street banks in the courts and on the streets. Families facing foreclosure and eviction soon organized into the Springfield Bank Tenant Association. Together they decided to set aside their fear, stand together, and fight Goliath.

Inspired by the eviction-defense campaigns of City Life/Vida Urbana, we began to organize around two demands:

1. For underwater homeowners – that’s homeowners with mortgage debt greater than their house’s value – we demand that banks reduce their principal to reflect their house’s current market value. (Principal is the remaining unpaid amount of a mortgage, excluding the interest). During the housing bubble, banks deliberately and artificially inflated home prices. They forced homeowners into bad mortgages with adjustable-rate interests. When the bubble burst, they begged for – and won – a $700 billion bailout of taxpayer money. Since then, they have systematically refused to modify loans, even when homeowners could afford to pay for the real value of their houses. Over and over, we have watched banks foreclose on middle-class families with solid incomes. More experts are agreeing that principal reduction has been one of the best things that banks could do to jump-start the economy – the whole economy, not just the housing market – and yet instead they choose to push families out the door.
2. We demand that banks stop evicting families after foreclosure without just cause. In Massachusetts, tenants have the right to continue living in their building after it has been foreclosed. Banks have to prove just cause in order to evict them. We want the same rights and protection for former homeowners. When banks evict families, they uproot social, economic and community systems. Houses become abandoned, which leads to crime. Neighborhoods become blighted, which leads to lower home values and, in turn, lower City tax revenues. And, most tragically, families become homeless, which leads to vicious cycles of poverty. In contrast, when families stay in their homes – even as tenants after foreclosure – they continue to invest in their houses, properties, neighborhoods and communities. And so we demand that the banks let families live in their homes and pay rent as tenants, or sell back their houses to them at the current market value.

Credit: barryscottphotographs

For months we protested foreclosure auctions. We made our demands and called attention to the banks’ abuses. They often repeatedly postponed foreclosures, hoping to avoid bad press. In the courts our team of lawyers dragged out legal battles, making eviction proceedings time-consuming and costly for the banks. At City Hall, we successfully organized for an ordinance to force banks to mediate in person with homeowners before foreclosure.

The Bank Tenants’ Association grew, forming a powerful base of middle- and working-class families and people of color. As momentum built in Springfield and other cities across New England, we ramped up state-wide actions. We protested Bank of America in Boston in March and September of 2011 – the latter as Occupy Wall Street was erupting – and each time our numbers grew. Wanting to draw attention to our own city – which was already notorious for blight, and which logged the highest number of foreclosures in the state – we planned a state-wide protest against Bank of America in Springfield.

The Action

Bank of America was the clear target. It would have been sufficient that it was one of the worst perpetrators of the financial crisis. But it had also been the most egregious in foreclosing on, evicting, and abusing residents of Springfield. Every week we saw the bank use lies, misinformation, and fear mongering to manipulate residents into prematurely leaving their homes. Every day we passed by decrepit and neglected houses, boarded up and graffiti-covered, under Bank of America’s control. And we watched Bank of America spearhead a lawsuit against the City of Springfield for passing our homeowner-protection ordinance.

We knew that corporations like Bank of America would only pay attention when we affected their bottom line, so our goal was to shut down the bank for business. We would have to do this repeatedly to be effective, but this action was already part of our ongoing anti-foreclosure, anti-eviction campaign, and it was a start. There was no better moment, either: by that time, Occupy protests had spread across the country, and we capitalized on their momentum.

Credit: barryscottphotographs

On November 21^st, 400 protesters marched up Springfield’s Main Street in opposition to Bank of America, while 15 of us nonviolently occupied the bank. Holding a sit-in in its lobby and ATM, and blocking its entrance, we unfurled a banner stating our demands. Each group read a statement, declaring “We are nonviolently occupying Bank of America…,” and explaining our reasons for doing so. The protest continued as we were arrested, put in a paddy wagon, and taken to jail.

The Results

We successfully closed Bank of America, not just while occupying it, but for the rest of the day. (After we were arrested, the bank posted signs that it was “closed for service and repairs”). The protest was covered by Democracy Now! , Reuters, the Chicago Tribune, the Raw Story, and a host of local radio, newspaper and television outlets.

Since then, the fifty states’ Attorneys General have reached a deal with Bank of America, Ally Financial, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo over their shady mortgage practices and foreclosure mishandlings. They will pay $5 billion in a settlement and will reduce principal on underwater loans by $17 billion. While this deal is hardly the far-reaching measure we need to restore the housing market, it is the first time that principal reduction – one of our demands – has entered the national conversation in a serious way.

Further, this past week the New York Times published a story about the benefits of letting families stay in their homes after foreclosure – another of our demands, and another first for national news.

Our Next Targets

However, Ed DeMarco, acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has refused to consider principal reduction as a strategy for underwater mortgages – even though Fannie and Freddie are 98% publicly-owned and own or guarantee over half of the mortgages in the country. (DeMarco also refused to include Fannie or Freddie in the Attorneys General settlement negotiations). Moving forward, we’ll pressure Fannie and Freddie into fulfilling thepromises that they have already made – to work with homeowners, to reduce principal, and to modify loans.

Here in Springfield, our campaign continues to evolve. We keep protesting foreclosure auctions and defending against evictions. If a bank tries to throw out one of our families, we’ll be there to block them. And we’re thinking of creative ways to build our power by responding to the twin ills of homelessness and blight. The November 21^st protest was a successful example of resistance to Wall Street banks, but it is powerful only as one action in a larger, ongoing movement for widespread change.

A friend reminded me recently that organizers started the Montgomery Bus Boycott almost ten years before the passage of Civil Rights legislation. I’m inspired by their vision, and excited to see where we can take this movement.

For more information about Springfield No One Leaves, please visit www.springfieldnooneleaves.org or find Springfield Noone Leaves on Facebook.

About the author: Destry Maria Sibley is a community organizer in the North End of Springfield, Massachusetts and serves on the steering committee of Springfield No One Leaves. She is an alumna of the School for International Training in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where she hopes to return soon.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this piece in our comments section below. Our comments policy.

The Democracy Center’s working relationship with the United Nations began five years ago in Montenegro, where I did a series of advocacy trainings for the staff at the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). These were folks wickedly committed to development that is equitable, environmentally responsible and economically competitive, and were involved in helping save their nation’s beloved Tara River from development.  One avid and able UN campaigner is Milica Begovic Radojevic, who I have been fortunate to work with since. In this Getting Action post we bring you an article, and call for participation, that Milica wrote for us about how the UNDP is using an old strategy reborn — “crowd sourcing” — as a way to generate new ideas on how to make global development sustainable in the face of climate change.  We hope you enjoy this post from the Balkans, and look forward to hearing your ideas!

Jim Shultz - Executive Director

Crowdsourcing to the rescue: looking for the Charles Lindbergh of sustainable development

By Milica Begovic Radojevic, UNDP in Montenegro

In 1919, famed New York hotelier Raymond Orteig offered a $25,000 prize for anyone who would dare fly solo across the Atlantic. It was a bold dare. In accepting the challenge, Charles Lindbergh paved the way toward transoceanic air travel and proved that crowd-sourcing can be a powerful method for reaching out to people in the hope of finding solutions to the most difficult problems facing humanity.

Almost a century later in the run up to Rio+20, where world leaders are meeting to renew their commitment to sustainable development, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is preparing to crowd-source a challenge relating to sustainable development. Are the challenges of (un)sustainable development as important as our inability to fly across the ocean 100 years ago? Infinitely more so and here is why.

The way global economies have been developing is no longer a viable option – for people, for the economy itself and for the environment.

To a large extent, this is the case because we can’t shake the addiction to dirty energy. The price we pay for it doesn’t reflect the cost it inflicts by polluting the air, water, and soil, depleting natural reserves, not to mention the cost to human health.

On top of this, governments subsidize fossil fuels, sending all the wrong signals and creating many unintended consequences. One such consequence is that keeping prices low provides the least benefits to the poor who, for example, are not very likely to live in large homes and do not therefore consume as much energy.

The other by-product is the scientific link between greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and extreme weather events. By subsidizing fossil fuels and incentivizing their use, governments around the world are contributing to the increase of frequency and intensity of these extreme events. It is usually the poorest and most vulnerable communities that suffer the most from this consequence, being generally more exposed to the effects of e.g. droughts and flooding, and also the least prepared to cope.

And for all the subsidies, domestic energy prices continue to rise. McKinsey’s Resource Revolution argues that this trend is likely to continue because:

1. There is an interlinked relationship between the resources – you need water to generate energy and grow food – so a stress on one resource will be transferred to another.
2. With up to three billion people projected to join the middle class, we can no longer say with certainty that the traditional supply of resources can satisfy our appetites for more without additional risks, costs and consequences. And guess who suffers the most when the price of food, water and energy go up?

So not only are subsidies increasingly ineffective in keeping the prices artificially low, they are chipping away at the Governments’ ability to invest in social programs and create new jobs. This is all the more critical today as an increasing number of people are facing malnutrition, and a lack of access to basic services. This traps people living in poverty, as they are unable to make the changes necessary to build better lives for themselves.

Does the compulsion to subsidize fossil fuels play a role in rising inequality? This could be the topic of a whole other blog, but what we see today is that the world is indeed becoming less equal. And what we do know is that more inequality leads to more social problems, such as higher rates of infant mortality, homicide, imprisonment, and lower life expectancy, math and literacy, and trust within the society.

But I digress. Back to fossil fuel subsidies – they act as a barrier to investment in clean energy, in universal access to, and efficient use of, resources.

Out of 1.3 billion people globally who don’t have access to electricity, at least 3 million of them live in transition and OECD (Organization for Economic Development and Transition) countries. Can you imagine a life without electricity? Telling a bedtime story to your child – only by the light of a candle! How do you fight poverty without electricity? You don’t, or rather can’t.

So this is a shout out to engineers, urban planners, investment managers, research and development groups, and economists.

Renewable energy use in Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States is among the lowest in the world. Heavy reliance on fossil fuels, 88 percent of the primary energy supply according to Human Development Report 2011, is not good news for health.  Armenia, Bulgaria, and Romania lead the world in deaths from outdoor air pollution. So, now you are poor and sick.

We are calling out to the scientists, meteorologists, engineers, mechanical and electrical technicians.

Europe and CIS is the world’s leader in energy inefficiency – one euro of GDP takes more energy to produce than in any other part of the world. This means more pollution and more subsidies. We are on the look-out for the behavioural experts, marketing gurus, architects, and the technology innovators.

So, to wrap up. Fossil fuels that drive our economies are bad for our health, bad for the environment, bad for society (inequality?) and increasingly bad for the economy itself. Subsidizing fossil fuels prevents investment in renewable energy, energy efficiency, and energy access for those who badly need it.

The scale of the problem is overwhelming and the solution goes beyond the capacities of any single government or private sector company. It goes beyond the civil sector, any one individual or development organization. It requires collaboration and the convergence of knowledge, resources, and commitment.

So what do we do? Well one thing we can do is try to draw out the expertise buried in the crowds. And this is what UNDP is attempting to do. Our first mission: to frame a good challenge that will effectively address an aspect – or aspects – of un-sustainable development.

One possible challenge candidate asks: What is the solar power equivalent of a $100 laptop? Access to inexpensive information technology revolutionizes education in poor countries. Access to inexpensive solar power would revolutionize development as we know it.

So as we continue in the quest to frame this challenge, maybe you could help out with some good ideas? Just remember, we are on the look-out for the Charles Lindbergh of sustainable development! And stay tuned….

Can you help Milica and the UNDP develop an effective challenge to find solutions for sustainable development? Please leave your ideas in the Comments section below (see comments policy) – and encourage your innovative friends to read and participate.