The Decade of the Citizen

by Jules & Robert on 26,January, 2010

As we remain firmly rooted in our Western economic bath-tub and emerge from the dusts of Copenhagen, it seems ever clearer that Citizens are the missing link for 2010.

The Citizen Renaissance message for 2010 is this: Be the change. Aspire not to have more but be more. Do more. Together.

Politics continue to fail us and fail to recognise, let alone confront and overcome, the greatest challenges of our time. The message we put out starting 18 months ago with Citizen Renaissance, is now being taken up by the business community. Even the relatively conservative World Business Council for Sustainable Development is reporting on the need for a shift away from rampant consumerism to more citizen-centric values. The Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World 2010 report, just out and widely reported in places like CNN and Scientific American, is titled from Consumerism to Sustainability and echoes our Citizen Renaissance call for a end to consumerism. The report says “Many of the environmental and social problems we face today are symptoms of a deeper systemic failing: a dominant cultural paradigm that encourages living in ways that are often directly counter to the realities of a finite planet.”

Meanwhile, the 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer, published today, confirms the need for a new social, political and economic contract that addresses the realities of a genuine stakeholder society – and places ‘common good’ as an absolute determinator and driver for change in business and politics alike. Continue…

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Looking Again at The State We’re In

by Robert Phillips on 25,January, 2010

I have been doing a lot of reading and thinking around the subject and nature of Trust, as we prepare to launch the 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer in London and in Davos this week.

It will come as no surprise to many to learn that – as with the interim Barometer, published in the summer of 2009 – the nature and levers of Trust are themselves contextualized by the continued shift from a shareholder to stakeholder society. And it was in this vein that I re-visited Will Hutton’s seminal 1995 work ‘The State We’re In’ and its closing chapter and paragraphs on Stakeholder Capitalism. Continue…

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Copenhagen – a gathering of the peasants of the earth

January 5, 2010

So we didn’t get a deal. Yes, this is a catastrophic failure of the thousands of negotiators, media, world leaders and informed experts who crammed into the Bella Centre for two weeks in December. But this is a failure too for civil society, and not only those who travelled to Copenhagen formally (as NGO representatives, [...]

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Inverting The Power Pyramid

December 4, 2009

Preparing some notes for a panel session at next week’s CBI forum on Climate Change, I am struck by how top-down the world still really is and suddenly alarmed that I remain in a narrow minority of those wishing and willing to embrace bottom-up democracy and ride the chaos of new networks.
The CBI intro blurb [...]

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Vampires squids and supermarket bitches

November 4, 2009

The other day I heard someone singing to a friend on the tube. The song was from the hilarious Bill Bailey sketch where he talks about turning down money from Asda because of their reputation on human rights and other issues.
This is one more example of where sustainability issues are becoming deeply embedded in popular [...]

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Debunking the Tragedy of the Commons

October 29, 2009

One of the final myths holding us back from a much needed updating of corporate-consumer-growth-capitalism has now been debunked with Professor Elinor Ostrom becoming the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Economics.
Ostrom’s work won the prize for the way it debunks The Tragedy of the Commons which has long been used as a [...]

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The Genetic Mis-Disposition of Airmiles Andy

October 26, 2009

If the Republic Blog’s reporting of Andrew Windsor’s speech about Bankers’ Bonus’ is accurate, then his words simply beggar belief:
“I was brought up to do this sort of work. It is training, experience and genetics. We offer consistency and regularity. We have been around for a long time and will be around for a long [...]

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Aspire not to have more, but to be more

October 22, 2009

The above quote is from Archbishop Oscar Romero. It has recently become a bumper-sticker in the US for fans of steady-state economics.
Romero was a hero of the Central American Liberation Theology movement and someone I heard about as a child because my stepfather was a Liberation Theologian and writer and was active in Central and [...]

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Project Cameron – in search of an idea?

October 15, 2009

In a thoughtful recent New Statesman article, Dominic Sandbrook berated the politics of our age saying that above all “one thing is missing, perhaps the most important thing of all: the big idea…there is little evidence that the general public has lost its appetite for big ideas.” And of Cameron he said “it is almost [...]

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President Dave and His Goats

October 6, 2009

The fundamental re-alignment of British politics, the death of the two-party system and the reform of both the House of Lords and even the monarchy could be an accidental by-product of British voters not understanding what the Conservative Party actually stands for.
Latest Edelman Trust and polling data, carried out by Populus for discussion at this [...]

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