Alexander Juras is Stakeholder Forum’s New Chairperson

Revising this Blog

As my life continues after Stakeholder Forum I am revising  my online presence  This blog will be updated much more regularly and will focus on the post 2015 development goals, the follow up to Rio+20 and the main issues of the day on sustainable development as well as some of the new areas of work I am engaged in. As part of the revision my web site (www.felixdodds.net) will also be revised and should be ready for November 7. It will focus on some of consultancy services I will be offering and will keep an update on my publications.

The photo above is from an event at Ramapo College promoting The Widening Circle from the 18th of October.

TWC recognises that civil society has become severely fragmented. Therefore, it has become more a reactive force to a prevailing agenda than being a proactive agenda setting force. This has diluted the impact of civil society.

Part of the problem has been the lack of vision of understanding where we might join together to walk a more sustainable path. The excellent work of the Tellus Institute in the last ten years building scenarios that might lead us to a Great Transition (GT) also provides us many answers on how we might be able to  move towards sustainability.

The GT recognizes the role of a missing actor in getting us there; we urgently need a framework to enable the coalescence of a diverse popular movement of engaged citizens the world over, a movement that weaves together these many themes and projects into a holistic vision and strategy. However, the crystallizing of such a Global Citizens Movement (GCM) cannot be imagined happen by itself. Awakening the movement requires a catalytic campaign which we call the The Widening Circle (TWC).

TWC is one of the most exciting proposal currently available to build collective civil society synergies. TWC plans to adopt a strategy of learning from the past experiences such as world social forum, the civil society engagements at UNCED to Rio+20, population conference, women conference, habitat conference, etc. It’s demonstrated ability to rally groups like we did at Rio+20 around the Peoples Sustainability Treaties (www.sustainabilitytreaties.org/) also provides us more hope that the mission is not impossible.

The responses we are receiving from networks and groups resonating with the ideas of a great transition are very encouraging. The dual strategy of TWC to shape both a long term agenda as well as impact short term agenda is also key to attracting a diverse movement.The core structure of TWC is built on an expanding set of globally-allied semi-autonomous territorial and issue circles linked through representative global circles.

While the operational circles consists of Issue Circles (IC), Territorial Circles (TC), Circle of Representatives (CoR)  and a Coordinating Circle (CC), a set of support circles as in the Circle of Allies (CoA), Circle of Counselors (CoC) and Circle of Funders (CoF). (Details are provided in the attached TWC 2.0 Strategy Paper).

TWC is under the able leadership of Uchita de Soya who has worked for over twenty years on sustainable development issues at all levels and was the instigator of the Peoples Sustainability Treaties for Rio+20.