April 2014

After the recently released Part II of the IPCC report and its alarming, no longer deniable findings, and in the run-up to COP 21, we have put the Alternatiba project in the spotlight (see article on the left) and salute it for its creative action to federate and mobilize European grassroots movements, building bottom-up pressure to weigh on the outcome of this critical “last-chance” summit expected to come up with a binding agreement on global environmental governance. One of the lessons we have learned in recent years is in fact that massive grassroots actions do not go unnoticed and can sway the outcome of a local or regional political/social situation, and given the truly critical stakes involved in COP 21, we encourage all our readers to join forces with Alternatiba or similar movements in other continents. Given that the thinking and proposals for environmental governance are far from new, we have also pulled our file on environmental governance from our records to feed your momentum to act with the wealth of this thinking. The article on citizen assemblies in Turkey highlights the force of this type of action, a world citizens movement is also in the making, and this is also a good time to underscore the importance of freedom of the press and access to quality education worldwide, perhaps simply as a reminder that all such crucial world-governance issues are intertwined. And if it were necessary to point out that bad governance leads to conflict and human suffering, we think you might be interested in taking the measure of governance in Ukraine and in Russia. Enjoy the read and feel free to send us your observations and comments!

FnWG Team
info@world-governance.org