Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
to a larger extent than in the past, activists from India and Asia sought to use
the WSF to educate international activists and to mobilize international support
for their struggles. This points to a particular advantage of the WSF process in
helping raise international awareness of the plight of marginalized groups whose
voices never reach international forums. Many international activists left India
far more informed about the injustices of caste, class and religious conflicts in
India. They certainly would have learned about the grievances of the Dalit, or
the 'untouchables', who were prominent on the forum's programme. They might
also have learned how the move of increasing numbers of well-paying information
technology jobs from the US and Europe to India affects Indian workers. The
Mumbai forum provided an opportunity for Indian hosts to honour a delegation
from Pakistan and to expand a Hindu-Muslim dialogue. For their part, by
interacting with a community of transnational activists well versed in the values
of participatory democracy, Indian activists (and the Brazilians before them)
were forced to be sensitive to some of their own exclusionary practices.
(2004: 416)
Although not without its critics, tensions and conflicts, the WSF articulates
possibilities for a distributed democratic global leadership through its commitment
to the belief that 'another world is possible'. Through the processes of dialogue,
discussion and networking, activist groups can break free from their sometimes
overwhelming sense of isolation and the seeming enormity of their aims. By 2005,
the WSF had secured a prominent presence and largely sympathetic coverage by the
world's news media, intrigued with its real-time/real world actions and debates,
supplemented and extended by innumerable blogs, online forums, links and websites.
However, as Smith (2004) notes, isolated groups still exist, and these often lack the
information and creative input needed to innovate and adapt in the face of concerted
repression, exclusion and ignorance. Nonetheless, the WSF's support of transnational
solidarity energizes and inspires many activists unable to attend the main WSF
meetings or global forum. Regional and local meetings act as focal points, expressing
the unity among diverse local struggles and encouraging activist coordination at
local, national and transnational levels.
The challenges of sustainable development are interlinked and politics is now
central in an attempt to reframe some key debates particularly with regard to the
recognition of the complexity and uncertainty that characterize the operation of
socio-ecological, economic and political systems; appreciating divergent notions of
progress and pathways to sustainability; and encouraging an open politics of choice
around possible directions for sustainable development and their attendant
distributional consequences. As Leach et al . (2012) write, such choices between
different social, environmental and technological pathways are inevitably political,
requiring top-down regulation, bottom-up mobilization, and alliances cutting across
government, business and civil society organizations North and South. This will
involve forging links between global science and local participation in decision-
making and implementation to create a '3-D agenda' for innovation encompassing:
• e direction of innovation towards sustainability;
the more equitable distribution of costs, benefits and risks;
the value of diversity in socio-technological systems and approaches to innovation.
 
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