Bolivia has an indigenous, farm union leader, peasant President, Evo Morales. This is far more significant for democracy than designed-to-fail Obama administration.
http://permaculture.tv/evo-morales-at-alba-alternativ-rally-in-copenhagen/

Via Campesina/MST are doing a lot to convert peasant farmers to ecological agriculture, and Tony Andersen from Klimaforum09 and many others are working with them to make this happen.
http://permaculture.tv/organic-via-campesina-cooling-the-world-klimaforum09/

For the Global South, its quite reasonable that they have some growth in consumption and emissions. Many are way below a reasonable global quota of 1 tonne C02/year. And so, its totally understandable and just that they insist on growth.
http://permaculture.tv/save-the-planet-with-permaculture-tony-andersen-of-klimaforum09/

For the Global North Energy DECENT is required to a stable and just level, say of 1 tonne per person per year.

For the Global South its Global ASCENT.

Also, for the Global South, good old fashioned RESISTANCE is more important than RESILIENCE.

The Indigienous people of the Andes or the Amazon where/are world leaders in resilience, but it didnt help much when the Consquistadores and the Corporations came, killed them and took there world away. They have found Resistance is the first step in a Global South Transition.

I am not talk about violence, but I am talking about political activism that involves a serious political critique of global neo-liberalism. Not words in the TTT vocabulary.

Perhaps as the UK-based Transition Movement does more with towns and localities that do not have the rich, white, educated, privilidged demographic you might discover that for the many in the Global South in the UK things much the same.

Although the UK is far more equitable society than the USA *I have spent considerable time in both in 2009* many locales, other than Totnes, are more like scenes from The Children of Men than from the Transition Movie

I applaud you for hiring a Diversity Transiton person, perhaps they could blog too ?

http://transitionnetworknews.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/diversity-project-coordinator/

I’ve started to swap some ideas with Neil Chadborn and perhaps we could share some thoughts over the email. Mine is nickudonatgmail-com.

Nick

What this means politically for the South is that, in order to reach sustainability, our countries first have the obligation to “develop” (emulate what the north already did), thereby “finishing up the job” of environmental, cultural and social destruction.

What most struck me when I first heard of the Transiton movement is how clear you are as to all the negative aspects that are inherent within the dogma and praxis of economic and material growth.

Howeverm when I mention such things to most people in “the free” South America, they just look at me as if I lost my mind, or if I am just a heretic. Most capital-oriented democracies have convinced people that we must directly (and blindly) “jump into the train of development”, and very few dare to question this.

So the concept of “sustainable development” must really be completely removed from the picture (and documents) if we are to achieve anything globally: the big institutional ecological players must admit that it was a misleading historical mistake, which of course can be corrected.

Secondly: In order to have hopes for sustainability and self-sufficiency, the development that IS needed is the DEVELOPMENT OF MINDS. That is how we can all learn from each other, understand each other and eventually generate true hopes foe healing the world. This might be related to the call for “awareness” that was mentioned in the conversation, if I understood well.

Instead of “free trade agreements”, we need free cooperation, knowledge and training agreements.

The irrational and harmful carriage of goods from one extreme of the world to the other can be reversed to some degree by the spreading of initiatives such as transition. On the other hand, transfer of knowledge, awareness and clarity of mind ought to be intensified, as well as resistance to domination by the media.

The twinning idea is brilliant,absolutely.
One example from years ago was to twin environmental groups im EAST and western Europe.
( I got the idea after doing some work for the Ecologist Mag)
I put Groups in Ukraine,Lithuania, Romania and Slovakia in touch with British groups and I know, for sure that, The Womens Environmental Network, who twinned with Mama 86 in Kiev( looking after Chernobyl children)had a very succesfull collaboration.

So now we can start with North South links ,group with group and through all the levels ie parish/ local/county council etc etc

I’m doing some work in France with Transition and The Council of Europe where the twinning idea has been very well received.

Anything I can do to assist?
I will follow the posts.
Warmest greetings
Danielle

I liked the twinning idea too. I’d be happy to follow up this idea from here in Liverpool, UK! Can we email? nchadbornatyahoo-co-uk? cheers Neil

The Twinning concept could be applied to communities as well as possibly institutions and organizations working on transition initiatives.

I think the observations made in the discussion about the Global South wanting to know that they “are not alone” and the need for the Global North to be able to “listen to and hear” other parts of the “system”, are very important and something we could easily build on.

I live and work in the Global South (Laos/NE Thailand) on poverty reduction programs and would be keen to explore this twinning idea in practice with the Transition movement in the Global North. Anyone interested? Could Transition Culture facilitate this?