Indian research report

RESEARCH REPORT: Phase II
Study on the Civil Society Actors in raising the voices of Climate Equity in India

Chapter 1: Introduction

Climate Change issue poses challenge to both Northern and Southern countries. There is a significant threat to the achievement of MDG, National Poverty Eradication and Sustainable Development. The world has to find ways for all the people in developed and developing countries to create well-being in the limits of globe's bio and atmospheric capacity. Without numerous sustainable technological and social innovations, the new well being is not possible. This is a special added challenge for developing countries as the negative effects of climate change as well as economic globalisation tackle first and worst the weakest and marginalised people.

So far, the developing countries have not had climate change issues on the top of their priority lists. Urgent action is needed to adopt climate strategies that reduce the vulnerability of their populations and improve adaptive capacity of societies. Climate change mitigation must not be viewed in isolation from other highly important challenges such as equitable access to energy, clean water, alleviating poverty and achieving economic growth in emerging markets.

The existing international political processes created to address the climate change issue and to create new global future are often highly bureaucratic and far from the hands of common masses. Marginalised groups do not get their voices heard and especially women and adivasis are set aside of the processes that deeply influence their lives.

No political process can fully succeed without a significant participation of civil society and it is widely understood that sustainable world can be created only if all the citizens of the globe are able to contribute to the decision making process both politically and through their everyday life.

The civil society has a strong role in United Nation's decision making in theory. Control and monitoring of the processes is expected to be done by civil society and civil society organisations. There is a need for capacity building in developing countries about participation in UN processes.

In this project, the main aim is to collect the best practices to enhance participation of marginalised voices into the UN decision making processes. This pilot project aims to collect information and test new sustainable forms of participation in United Nations Climate Change processes. This pilot project will then feed concrete ideas to promote the establishment of the Global Civil Society Fund.

In this particular research project, climate change issue is taken as an example and efforts made by the civil society organisations in India, especially in five states, where Citizens' Global Platform members have their chapters active, are documented.

As first phase of the research, a base line survey was conducted to identify the civil society actors actively working on the issue of climate change.

The second phase of the research focused on the in-depth study on the understanding of how far civil society organisations are aware of the issue of climate change and how participatory they are in the local, state, national and international policy and decision making process. The in-depth study also focuses on assessing the level of information the general public have got and the cross cutting issues on climate change and who influences or take a lead role in climate policy at different levels in the country.

CGP India believes climate change is a global issue with concrete local solutions if there is a political will to hear the unheard voices of the marginalised majorities all over the world.

The whole report is attached - see link below:

 

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