Challenges, Prizes, Awards :

Challenges, Prizes, Awards : Invitation
to Dialogue

This page is in process. Thanks for not only for your patience but also your ideas.

Like many other proponents of socio-technical initiatives that promise to advance the sustainability and social justice agenda anywhere in the world, we have long been active supporters of the idea of high profile international recognition of outstanding accomplishments and examples. Happily , we are not alone in this, as the attached listing of related prizes to your left (incomplete) will bear out.

Moreover, since we were joinly honored with the City of Bogota for the Stockholm Challenge Prize for Environment in June of 2000, we have been giving this even more thought than usual. More recently a stint on the OECD EST (environmentally sustainable transportation) Prize jury provided more food for thought -- as did our parallel decision to do all that we could to secure some form of prestigious international award in support of the accomplishments of the City and the people of Bhaktapur for an international environment prize, at least on the order of importance of that which we received with the City of Bogotá and its mayor for the work we did together there on the preparation and follow-up of the Third World's first mega Car Free Day.

Against this background, we are now assembling background information and inviting comment, discussion and information on this topic - an international dialogue. As a first step, we have begun to assemble a repertory of background material on the leading international prizes which appear to cover all or some part of our area of interest -- i.e., socio-technical innovation that advances the sustainability agenda of ordinary people in day to day life. We are not on the lookout here for pure, deus ex machina "technology fixes" of the high tech sort, but rather remedial initiatives that are deeply embedded in the culture and environment of that place.

The first step in this process is to develop our prize repertory, and in parallel with that open up some sort of "framework for discussion". Once we have these two building blocks more or less in place, we propose to contact all the groups and programs identified, and invite them to comment on the list and dialogue which we are hoping to generate around this subject. The dedicated discussion framework for these exchanges will be the @World Forum under the Politics of Sustainability program. (Please have a look at the Welcoming Note for the Forum if you have yet to participate in one of these dialogues in The Commons.)

Throughout this process, we propose to develop and keep drawing attention to a dossier on what we are calling the "Bhaktapur Pedestrian Township" project (since they are freeing themselves of the cars in advance through social consensus and collective action), an extremely interesting process of socio-technical innovation which is spanning decades but is already showing extremely positive results. We have two motives for putting Bhaktapur into such a high profile in this case. First, we find it a rich example that helps us to understand that our Western concepts of time, money, machinery, and store-bought "portable wisdom" may not be the only path to sustainability. Thus, it will be useful as we see how the various prize groups react to something as 'un-Western' as this. And second, because we think that all those involved there, the people of Bhaktapur and those who have pitched in to help (and who are still very much there) do indeed deserve international recognition. Recognition of a sort that will allow them, will stimulate them, to do better yet in their high 900 year old sacred city. (And remind us in the West of how much better we would do if we could only understand that our towns and cities are sacred too, or at least should be. You see, once you realize that, it changes everything.)

PrizeDialogue@ecoplan.org