Deeply shared. Public spirited. Open. Good listeners. Energetic. Networked. Complementary. Flexible. Opportunistic. Committed.

The Kyoto Cities Challenge has from the outset been organized as an open collaborative project stretching across borders, disciplines and politics. The partnership/associate component works at several interacting levels and emphasizes this taste for diversity and creative interaction:

1. The 20/20 Action Plan: An aggressive Outline Program Proposal and Strategy for practical, high impact, short term, explicitly targeted array of remedial actions to be studied, adapted and deployed at the level of your city starting in 2005, supported by ...
2. The International Advisory Council: Bringing together a distinguished panel of outstanding individuals whose work is shaping the sustainability agenda in cities around the world.
3. The Working Partnerships, Associations & the Working Clusters: (This page.)
4. The Bridge: The state-of-the-art multi-level Information and IP Communications Platform bringing together low cost high quality internet tools available to knit the Panel, the resources, the network more generally, and the interested cities together.
5. The Operational Clusters: In parallel with the Council, the Partners and through the The Bridge, a number of informal working groups are springing up with common regional, sectoral or city foci to help lay the base for more and better city projects.

Working Partnerships: NGOs and City Groups

With the first defining components of the project starting to be in place we are now entering the next organizational phase: wherein we take contact with a relatively small number of groups and programs - NGOs, environmental and city groups -- whose work is closely associated with the objectives and working style of the Kyoto Cities program, and who are well placed to put these ideas to work in the field. Almost all of these groups have objectives, time horizons, institutional bases, resources and levels of support which are far broader than what is being targeted by Kyoto Cities. Think of all the things they are doing and the tools and means at their disposal as a large quiver - to which the 20/20 project can possibly offer one more arrow. That is the spirit of the cooperative enterprise we propose here.

The driving idea behind these flexible alliances is to create an informal series of efficient working and information links with a selection of leading innovative NGOs, environmental and city groups around the world, whose programs relate closely to what we are trying to do with Kyoto Cities, and who find it useful to consider working with this approach, network and toolset as a practical extension of their own activities and tool kits.

An important tenet of this independent group project is that all this underlying collaboration and mutual support is carried out in an informal, highly flexible, pragmatic, fully collegial manner. This aspect of "we do it because we want to" is fundamental to the spirit of the whole cooperative exercise in all its parts, as is the matter of volunteer participation. This is citizen democracy in action. There are no bosses nor hierarchy. If there is a single phrase that sums up the prevailing attitude of all this, it is good neighborly behavior. Even if the neighbors are at the other end of the planet, or next door. After all, here we are already well into the 21st century. It's ours to win.

Our activities and competences here in the Kyoto Cities program are very different from those of our more established working partners, who in all case have much broader ranges of competences, challenges and interests, with in all cases continuing long term involvements with the issues. What we bring to the table is by contrast a very specific short term program with a single focus: very sharp CO2 and traffic reductions within a target period of two years or less. And that's it!

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Our contribution - and how we fit in

The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing.

As you will see if you click to Kyoto World Resources link you will see more than five hundred groups and programs thus far identified as working in this or at least related areas world wide: each in their own way, in their chosen own target area, with their own time focus, with their own tools and goals. And, if they are lucky, with resources to do the job. In which case it's a fair question to ask: why should we as an informal world citizen consortium with no assigned institutional mandate dare to think about adding with our own efforts to all that? Might it not be preferable for us just to get out of the way let all these other people simply get on with the business at hand? Hmm.

Certainly no one thing is unique about the Kyoto World Cities Challenge, other perhaps than the fact that like the Greek poet Archilochus's hedgehog we know only one thing: the need for dramatic, effective, short-term, no-excuses action in our chosen target area of transport and sustainability in cities. Against this backdrop here are the defining factors that in our view combine to make Kyoto Cities a potential winner, certainly different from the rest, and quite possibly a good partner for you and your colleagues.

1. Single focus: a) Traffic in cities, (b) CO2, (c) very sharp targeted decreases (20%?), (d) in a very short period of time (20 months?). That's it!

2. But is it only CO2 and Kyoto? Not by a long shot. We chose CO2 reductions as an initial target since they are a strong surrogate for the overall challenge of transport dysfunctionality. Cut CO2 and you cut traffic, pollution, accidents, costs, time abuse and the list goes on. Most of the world's cities lie in countries that have no legal Kyoto thresholds. But their needs in this respect are even greater.

3. Geographic coverage: Program coverage is world wide (but can only work if it takes on one city at a time). This is above all a city project, a city decision, a city action. It does not depend on international treaties, other levels of government to foot the bill; it works within the city, its existing asset base, quality of leadership and degree of public support. In that city!

4. Open targeting: You take up the challenge, do your homework and then set the targets that are going to do the job in your city. And then you either succeed or you fail. And all that firmly in the public eye. (No place to hide.)

5. Big House/Open Doors: Invites enormous diversity of disciplines, backgrounds, geographies and competences, reaching way beyond the 'normal' transport or even environment groups, enriches the perspectives. Both for the Kyoto program overall and at the level of each city.

6. Strong female leadership and participation. In large part motivated by dissatisfaction with traditional male dominance and the values that appear to go with it.

7. Car-like mobility: This may surprise, but quite frankly we do not see democratic pluralistic societies agreeing to accept large downgrading of their mobility arrangements. Which gives us our target: as good or better conditions of transit than they are getting our of their cars under present arrangements.

8. International peer support network: The personal engagements, combined with the very high quality and great variety of backgrounds of the distinguished individuals who have agreed to support the International Advisory Council. Members have both an international support role, and also are helping to create "clusters" to support discussions and initiatives in their own city.

9. Working partnerships: Organized from outset as an open international partnership project, working links are being set up (a) with international and national groups with broader sustainability agendas, and (b) at level of individual cities informal working groups are being created to lay the base for their local 20/20 programs.

10. Comfort Zones (and lack thereof): Many programs and almost all committees seek to achieve "Comfort Zones" in which all interests present of lurking in the background come to a general agreement as to priorities, what needs to be done, how to do it, etc. Kyoto Cities seeks quite the reverse: a large number of competing ideas and points of view, plenty of room for internal contradictions and conflicts, and a good and continuing dose of cognitive dissonance as a means for accommodating all this necessary variety.

11. Supporting context of intensive technology-based IP networking: The state of the art, practical, user friendly The Bridge holds the underlying key to brining the pieces of the puzzle together and thereby making the whole thing work.

12. Culture change: This project is above all about governance, democracy and citizenry in the 21st century. In its own way it proposes and tests a new model. Once a 20/20 project has been carried out and the results assessed, your city will never look again in quite the same way at their transport, environment or other problems of governance and quality of life. Bringing up the interesting question: what next?