Another Community Joins the Slow But Critical Work of Transformation

Meyrin, a city in the canton of Geneva, Switzerland, adopted a climate emergency charter last week. Meyrin was not the first Swiss city to sign up. It joined 31 other communities, representing nearly 20% of the country’s population, and thousands of other communities globally, in recognizing a climate emergency and committing to act upon it.

Entitled la “Charte pour le climat et l’énergie des villes et communes” signatories to this charter recognize a climate emergency and commit to undertaking action in response. Signatories commit to the 2015 Paris Agreement and achieving a net-zero economy by 2050, but also to the adoption of targets closer to home, such as reducing energy consumption from 3000 watts to 2000 watts per person.

These are important steps toward a social transformation that creates an enabling environment for social and environmental, economy-changing efforts to grow, if not flourish.

Citizens and representatives of communities, like Nyon in the neighboring canton Vaud are using the declaration as an opportunity to advance community-based dialogue and political action on the future of the city. This kind of action helps to cultivate more for change in the opening provided by declarations like the charter.

These are important steps toward a social transformation that creates an enabling environment for social and environmental, economy-changing efforts to grow, if not flourish.

What are your favorites? Who’s innovating in your world?

Also seeking to build such space and catalyze systems change by engaging communities in re-weaving civic fabric around shared values and purpose are a growing legion of enabling organizations dedicated to the task. The work of Civocracy, a platform service that channels community energy into action, has helped cities like Lyon in France to gather thousands of citizens around shared climate change concerns. DEAL a spinoff of Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics is creating a resource-learning-action space for those seeking change particularly in communities. Muni-Digital, a government e-services provider based in Argentina also deploys its tools to help bring citizens closer to their city through tracking trees and assisting in reforestation. There are many more. What are your favorites? Who’s innovating in your world?

New civic engagement is an essential step in creating space for regenerative and synergistic economies at the municipal, state, and national levels

These efforts may not be thrilling, but this is how much of policy innovation happens. The declaration and associated patterns often follow such trajectories: a gathering, a declaration, and then through hard work the debate and adoption of action community-by-community.

Meyrin’s declaration, along with the efforts of citizens and businesses that form the connective tissue of new civic engagement is an essential step in creating space for regenerative and synergistic economies at the municipal, state, and national levels.

They don’t yet rise to the level of fundamental change called for in the UN IPBES Global Assessment report which calls for “transformative change across economic, social, political and technological factors” in response to impending massive, climate-driven, extinctions, but they are an essential step. An environment as we know it today — much less one that many of us took for granted in earlier decades — along with the new businesses and civic organizations of our dreams cannot flourish without these efforts.

Building the connective tissue needed to make these transformations is painstaking, thankless and underfunded. Yet, slowly such efforts will tilt the social and commercial playing field toward these goals and provide a more fertile environment for innovators in business, finance, and social wellbeing to provide for our needs in ways that are consistent with thriving communities and countries.