Like many other active supporters of socio-technical initiatives that advance the sustainability and social justice agenda anywhere in the world in meaningful ways, we have long been active proponents of the idea of high profile international recognition of outstanding accomplishment for these people and places. Happily to say, we are not alone in this. However, since this is an increasingly popular topic, both for discussion and in actual practice, we may do well to indicate here what we regard as being among the most important qualities that such projects and accomplishments should have in order to achieve their greatest impacts.

Preamble: What Should an International Prize Be Trying to Do

There are basically five "pillars" of our prize philosophy which we set out here in the hope that we may somehow "infect" others with these same values. In brief and in order, they touch on matters of social justice, local initiative, potential for self-replication, they way they handle time, and their potential for making good things better yet.

Social Justice: The first pillar of our award philosophy is a firm belief that the final crux of any such prize worth its name must be its contribution to social justice, both in the place where the concept has been successfully demonstrated but also its potential for achieving such impacts in other places where it might be replicated. It will be important to single out initiatives that have more than proportionate positive impacts on the lives of those people for whom life is clearly harder in many respects: because their incomes are very low, their days hard, their health not what it might be, their education under par, their social integration and economic opportunities not fully assured. Any project which does not make a fierce effort to ensure that these less favored elements of society are not major beneficiaries of the new arrangements is not, in our view, worthy of consideration for such a prize.

Local Initiative: Secondly, we consider it absolutely vital that any such accomplishment be above all based on local initiative, inputs and partnerships. If the project is simply parachuted on a basically passive place and driven by external experts, finance and... values, then we cannot give it our vote.

Self-Replication Potential: Third, to our mind the initiatives that deserve to be singled out in this way are those which have a definite 'self-replicating" potential. By this we mean concepts or approaches which are so demonstrably superior to prevailing practices that they lend themselves to rapid replication elsewhere. This, in fact, is the real acid test of success.

To make sure that we get our precise point across hers, we would like to contrast the kinds of approaches we have in mind for such recognition from some of the others that often get media attention and large gobs of public funding. The first are those projects or approaches which attain their success as a result of "throwing dollars at the problem". By this we mean those projects which owe their accomplishments above all to a considerable and continuing flow of public funding, and which therefore cannot be thought of as "naturally self-replicating". Again, in this regard, we need perhaps to point out that no matter how admirable may be the accomplishments of such privileged enclave projects, given their special financial character they probably offer little if anything to most of the people and places on this planet who simply do not have money to throw at their problems, at least not on that scale.

Sense of Time: The fourth pillar has to do with a mature handling of the time vector. Getting anything of value accomplished in a complex, in many ways fundamentally inertial social and human environment (that being the nature of man), requires in the final analysis not so much a quick fix or once-off solution as a process, which may be long, laborious and problematical. The advantage of a process that spins out over of time is that it gives us the possibility to learn and adapt, to learn from failure as well as success, and to "grow" organic solutions packages of many parts and with many people and groups behind them.

Reenforcement:Finally, we would like to stress our firm belief that one of the goals of such a high profile reward should be, not only to draw the attention to the world of this great way of doing things -- but also to provide support for all those in the city or group that has won the award to stride ahead and do better yet. Success in these challenges is never easy, and the achievement is inevitably 'work in progress'. So if we can use these international awards to encourage and support the recipients in their quest to do better yet, than we will have make a final, very important contribution.

Some Useful Prize Links

• Stockholm Challenge
• Bremen Initiative Award
• Cities for Peace
• Global Junior Challenge
• Goldman Prize
• Greenwash Awards
• OECD EST 2000 Awards
• Rolex Awards for Enterprize
• Sasakawa Prize
• Think Bhaktapur
• UNEP Best Practice

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