CHAPTER 3: OUTLOOK FOR A SUSTAINABLE AND JUST FUTURE – FROM BUSINESS-AS-USUAL TOWARDS TRANSFORMATIONAL CHANGE


Box 3.6: Community Practitioners Platform: multi-stakeholder collaboration and sustainability


Led by the Community Resilience Campaign of the Huairou Commission, the Community Practitioners Platform operates at a global level as a formal mechanism for engagement by local communities and indigenous communities in the UN International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) negotiations and policy-making spheres. It also functions as a mechanism at the regional, national and local levels. The Platform ensures that policies and programmes effectively reflect community priorities and directly represent their voices. This mechanism aims to tackle the issue of ineffective representation of women and local communities


as public advocates by focusing on their values, actions and proven successful strategies to affirm their agency and, in particular, women’s empowerment as a priority in long-term sustainable development. In Honduras, for example, the national agency for disaster management has signed an agreement with Afro-indigenous women’s organizations through which it will provide technical training to refine community access to, and understanding of, risk information. Three hundred community volunteers will be trained on emergency preparedness, providing a concrete example of an institutional partnership for technical and financial assistance with a view to grassroots resilience priorities.


Source: Huairou Commission (2015)


Revaluing traditional knowledge: The value of indigenous knowledge systems and practices is slowly receiving more recognition in international environmental fora, including in the wording of the COP21 Paris climate change agreement (Meyer 2016). The traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples is of paramount importance for environmental conservation and sustainable development (Chanza and DeWit 2016; UNIASG 2014). Just as feminist scholars have shown the gendered specificity of western science and associated models of knowledge, indigenous knowledge is also gender-differentiated, and knowledge held by women and men may be complementary, but is usually different (Harding 2006; Dankelman 2001).


Recognizing the value of citizen science: Citizen science, as described in the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2016, “is increasingly seen as a tool that could enable a more participatory democracy by empowering individuals and communities to analyse, understand and ultimately take ownership of the issues that affect them, enabling them to propose concrete and actionable solutions to decision-makers” (World Economic Forum 2016). Such “factivism” (Bono 2013) or evidence-based activism can create new ways to engage grassroots women’s organizations and keep authorities and private sectors accountable. It can also contribute significantly to transparency and inclusiveness.


An example of citizen science is the Open Seventeen Challenge, which operates in conjunction with the SDGs. Activists may use open source data to verify progress towards the SDGs at local, regional or global levels. Such tracking can be carried out with the help


of crowdsourcing, which accelerates the analysis of large amounts of data such as images or documents through collective efforts on the Internet. The Open Seventeen Challenge (a joint initiative of the research organizations Citizen Cyberlab and GovLab, The ONE Campaign, and the open-source company SciFabric) aims to transform grassroots activism on the Internet into new open knowledge that can help achieve implementation of the SDGs.


Moving beyond the gender binary in order to “leave no one behind”: Gender identities do not start or stop with “women” and “men.” Many individuals and recognized subcultures live outside this binary. Understanding environmental impacts and agency, and the relationships of cultures to the environment, will be incomplete if only gender binaries are recognized. In environmental analysis, categories of sexual orientation or alternative identities are rarely included despite considerable advocacy by LGBT communities of interest and statements by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who has described discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity as “one of the great, neglected human rights challenges of our time”.


Moving beyond the gender binary is not only or primarily manifested at the level of the individual. In the Asia-Pacific region, for example, there are recognized gender non-binary groups such as the whakawahine in New Zealand, the fa’afafine in Samoa, the mahu in Hawaii, the waria in Indonesia, the bakla of the Philippines (Gaillard et al. 2015), the Aravanis (also known as Hijras or Jogappa) in India (Pincha 2008), to name only a few. These groups have distinctive


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