This brochure offers decision-makers in the real estate and energy industries, as well as urban and municipal developers, a broad overview of the topics of decentralised energy generation and supply, and raises awareness of the goal of decarbonisation by 2050 at the latest. The advancing digitalization in the construction and …
EVEN AS the agitation in the United States, called Fifty Years is Enough, against World Bank (WB) activities continues, it has crossed into India. Here, the movement, started in May 1992, has emerged from the Narmada agitation, and is called the Campaign Against the World Bank and Destructive International Aid …
What led the HMS to join the environmental battle? We were aware of the growing environmental awareness in the industrial sector through our occupational health and safety programmes. We realised that workers' safety goes beyond the workplace and is closely connected with the environment. Workers have fallen ill and died …
THE work of Robert Chambers, an eminent rural sociologist, has influenced academics as well as field workers and NGOs. This book aims to enunciate a new work ethic commensurate with his commitment to rural development. Chambers critiques what he calls "normal" professionalism, the "thinking, values, methods and behaviour dominant in …
SRI Lanka's more radical environmentalists are learning the relevance of G Bernard Shaw's aphorism--There are 2 tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it - as they contend with the effects of a legal instrument they have long advocated: environmental impact assessments …
COMMUNITY participation in constructing and managing check dams and the use of water through lift irrigation has transformed the local ecosystem of 37 tribal villages in the Vansda taluk of Gujarat"s Valsad district. Cropping patterns, incomes, employment and even the social system have undergone remarkable changes. The villagers are now …
Rajasthan chief minister Bhairon Singh Shekhawat is emerging as the messiah of those disgruntled with the government's environment protection policies. Shekhawat recently claimed that the regulations of the ministry of environment and forests and lobbying by rabid environmentalists were responsible for crippling Rajasthan's economy. Addressing a meeting of industrialists and …
Women's groups in India are peeved about the draft country paper on the challenges facing Indian women, presented at the Asia-Pacific Inter-ministerial Conference on Women in Development, held in Jakarta in the second week of June. This meet was preparatory to the Fourth World Conference on Women to be held …
INTEGRATED development has changed the Hivare landscape in more ways than one. Check dams have raised the groundwater level, slowed down erosion and helped increase crop yields. Villagers like 67-year-old G D Gurav hope that water and fuelwood problems will be solved shortly. The villagers used to migrate to cities …
A BANK with no minimum deposits, no signatures, ridiculously low interest rates on loans and run by the depositors themselves: "It is not really a bank, but more of a thrift and credit scheme," says Sushma, a housewife living in Shankar Camp near Moti Bagh in the Capital, one of …
THE temporary check dams (locally known as bandharas) across streams, have made a huge impact on the agricultural system in Hivare, a drought-prone village 35 km from Pune on the Pune-Saswad road. Even a year ago, the villagers of Hivare wouldn't have dared to dream of watering their fields all …
THE Commission for Sustainable Development (CSD) will focus on strengthening the involvement of non-governmental organisations to ensure the implementation of Agenda 21. "We have to move beyond the classical notion of development -- of donor-recipient relationships -- into something where instead of compensations there are obligations arising from a joint …
MORE films are being made on environmental issues than ever before; films that closely document issues, as well offer different points of view on the growing global environmental crisis. Many NGOs, activist groups and individual filmmakers have been have being driving their points across through the powerful and seductive medium …
THE RECENT controversy over the national and global role of non-government organisations (NGOs), generated at the preparatory meeting for the United Nations-sponsored International Conference on Environment and Development (ICPD) in New York is seething with portents. It seems to be one more issue over which the North and the South …
THE British chapter of Friends of the Earth began with a blaze of publicity: opposing the fur trade and getting pictures on the front pages of newspapers by returning thousands of "non-returnable" bottles. From these beginnings, FoE grew steadily, recruiting student radicals and campaigning on everything from dirty rivers to …
WHEN German local and regional environment organisations formed the Bund fur Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland (German Association for Nature Conservation and the Protection of the Environment), their main objective was to strengthen their influence on the environment policy of the federal government. Today, BUND has become a major opinion leader …
AT ONE time, the Danish Society for the Conservation of Nature (Danmarks Naturfredningsforening -- DN) had more members than Denmark's political parties. Its large support base made DN the most powerful green NGO in Denmark, influencing decision-making at both the local and national levels. For example, an ambitious and costly …
THE logo of the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation (SNF), a peregrine falcon in flight, may not be the most imaginative. But in the minds of many Swedes, the symbol of the threatened predator suggests something honest, close to nature and authentically Swedish. One out of every 40 Swedes is …
Over the past 30 years, the environmental movement in the West has grown dramatically and moved from strength to strength. But little has been written about how this movement has been organised. The early heady days were full of writers like Rachel Carson, Barbara Ward and Barry Commoner, and of …
I AM happy that a large number of leading non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are meeting for a consultation with key development ministries. I had addressed a gathering of NGOs in December, 1991, where I had offered to withdraw the government from certain areas altogether, provided the NGOs take over the responsibility …
IT HAS taken decades of singleminded toil for the world's leading green organisations to move centripetally from what was considered the lunatic fringe to a position of such popular power and eminence today that governments disregard their opinions only at their own risk. This is civil society at its best: …
