Quote 1:

We do not make demands from governments … or parliament members, which some of us see as illegitimate, unaccountable or corrupt.

Quote 2:

We demand … free and universal access to health, education from primary school through higher education and housing for all human beings. We reject outright the privatisation of public services management.

From Occupy’s “manifesto”.

Armed with their billions, these NGOs have waded into the world, turning potential revolutionaries into salaried activists, funding artists, intellectuals and filmmakers, gently luring them away from radical confrontation, ushering them in the direction of multi-culturalism, gender, community development-the discourse couched in the language of identity politics and human rights…

Arundhati Roy, via Casper TK. Read the whole thing.

It is useful to think of sustainability in the metaphor of an athletic game: It is possible to “lose”–that is, to become unsustainable, as happened to the Western Roman Empire. But the converse does not hold. Because we continually confront challenges, there is no point at which a society has “won”–become sustainable in perpetuity, or at least for a very long time. Success, rather, consists of staying in the game.

- Jospeh Tainter, author of The Collapse of Complex Societies, in a 2009 talk you can read here.

Where the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit had seen the EU and its partners badly outflanked by a low ambition consensus of the US and the BASIC countries (leading to a voluntary pledge-and-review approach rather than the binding targets-and-timetables approach that the EU wanted), it appeared at the 2011 Durban summit that a new dynamic might be emerging – based on a partnership between the EU and low income countries who were not only increasingly focusing on global mitigation scenarios, but also increasingly prepared to break ranks with the G77 and speak out about the need for emerging economies to do more to reduce their own emissions.

The surprising spectacle of the EU managing to gets its act together will have made many US and emerging economy policymakers sit up and take notice. But all of them will also have been wondering whether the EU and its partners would manage to build on this initial success and turn it in to an inflection point on the global climate agenda, with the new alliance not only maintaining political momentum, but also converting it into design principles for future climate policy.

Alas, the signs now emerging are not good if this Reuters piece today is to be believed:

The European Union recommitted to providing 7.2 billion euros ($9.4 billion) for the Green Climate Fund over 2010-12, according to draft conclusions seen by Reuters ahead of a meeting of EU finance ministers next week. But after that, how much cash will flow is unclear as the text, drafted against the backdrop of acute economic crisis in the euro zone, states the need to “scale up climate finance from 2013 to 2020″, but does not specify how.

The article goes on to detail that EU ministers are arguing over how much of the money should come from public and how much from private sources – needless to say, many ministers would find it a lot easier to exhort the private sector to do more than to do pony up the cash themselves.

Although the article doesn’t name names on which countries are causing the problems, it’s a fair bet that Poland figures prominently among them, especially given that Poland vetoed plans for the EU to adopt a 30% (rather than merely 20%) emissions reduction target by 2020. In the background, there’s the further problem that Italy and Spain – two countries who in the past tended to side with calls for more ambitious action – are likely to fall away as their economies implode.

Although the Green Climate Fund is far from being the biggest issue on the climate negotiating table, it matters a lot to many low income countries. If the EU looks like it can’t be trusted to stick with them on the issues they really mind about most, then it’s hard to see an EU-low income country alliance setting the pace on the larger global climate agenda over the next couple of years – and we can look forward to lots of crowing from emerging economies made gleeful by the opportunity to argue that this is what happens when G77 solidarity is allowed to fracture.

Dear oh dear! Amid all the excitement about what happens after 2015 and so on, all of us somehow managed to overlook the small fact that it was Global Dashboard’s fifth birthday last month. Here are David and my very first posts on the site, back in March 2007. (We seemed to be a lot less wordy back then.)

Big thanks to all our contributors, readers and retweeters - here’s to the next five years!

All the current furore about the doings of US Secret Service agents is likely to cause a few chuckles among their sister services in other countries, who tend to regard their American counterparts with a mixture of respect and deep irritation – the latter on the basis of a rather full-on approach to their protection duties that can, now and again, come across as perhaps just a little arrogant.

The best story I heard about this tendency, told to me by a close protection officer from a different country while I was at an intergovernmental meeting, goes like this:

During President Bush’s 4 hour visit to Uganda in 2003, he and President Museveni went to visit The AIDS Support Organisation (TASO), which is a regular fixture on the itinerary of any dignitary visiting Kampala. The whole place was mobbed, and at one point President Museveni got detached from President Bush while working the crowd.

Showing that quiet tact and diplomacy for which the Secret Service is famed, US agents pitched in to help reunite the two heads of state. As they cleared a path for Museveni through the crowd, one of them was heard to bellow, “Out of the way please! The Local President is coming through!”

Completely unconfirmable, obviously, but too good not to share…