The lessons learnt of Action Town are now presented in short videos. These attractive podcasts were produced to summarize core results and messages of small scale SCP projects conducted by the National Focal Points, but also about the overall Action Town project.

Here you can see and listen within a couple of minutes, how Janis Brizga from Green Liberty delineates how participatory Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP) policy assessment was organized by Green Liberty in Latvia. Ferda Ulutaş, Coordinator of Environment Project Group at Technological Development Foundation of Turkey (TTGV) outlines efforts to promote the development of SCP policies in Turkey, whereas Charles Carlos, Director of Management Systems at ECODES (Spain) gives a summary of developed indicators for Sustainability in Financial Products as well as the process and follow-up ideas. And finally, Nora Brüggemann, the Action Town Project Manager, explains in a nutshell the idea and work process of the EU-funded project in general.

For more information and the podcasts, please visit our library.

Under the motto „SMART CSOs“ the final conference of the Action Town project took successfully place in London on 14 and 15 March 2011. About 100 participants came together to not only hear about the results of the four exploratory actions conducted by Action Towns’ National Focal Points but also to discuss ways forward to foster more effective CSO strategies in the future.

Being in the process of finalising their small scale pilot project on SCP in their respective countries, the National Focal Points ECODES (Spain), TTGV (Turkey), Green Liberty (Latvia) and MAMA-86 (Ukraine) shared their initial project results. Key lessons learnt and potential follow-ups have been discussed. For more information watch this space.

In addition, conference participants looked at why CSOs should – and how they can – work towards a more holistic and systemic transition to a sustainable society instead of pursuing the narrow technical policy focus of many of today’s strategies (as the Action Town Survey Report has shown most CSOs still do). As already the outcomes of the Action Town Roadmap Workshop have shown, researchers and CSOs alike are here needed; both have also equally shown a high interest in discussing this topic. Conference participants decided to took current thinking to the next level and to develop practical ways forward. These promising discussions – enabled and kicked-off by the Action Town project – will be continued by a group of enthusiastic and engaged individuals. This is a huge success for Action Town in sustaining its activities on supporting the collaboration of CSOs and researchers.

For more information on the follow-up activities please see also www.smart-csos.org.

To download the program of the SMART CSO conference, click here.

Latvia is considered to be one of the greenest EU member-states, in the same time data show that household consumption pressures on environment are increasing. During the last 15 years per capita ecological footprint has more than doubled. The consumption clusters with greatest impact on environment are food, housing and mobility.

The project Participatory SCP policy assessment, carried out by Action Town partner Green Liberty in Latvia, aims to identify main driving forces behind our consumption patterns and propose policy recommendations to enable sustainable consumption and production (SCP) in Latvia. This is being done by bringing together environmental NGOs and scientific community from Latvia (at least 10 people from different institutions) and running series of participatory co-creation workshops to discuss the methodology, assessment tools and recommendations for SCP policy development.

Until now Green Liberty has carried out 2 workshops, discussing driving forces of consumption and policy tools for sustainable consumption development in Latvia. During these workshops experts have created mind maps with main driving forces in each of the three consumption clusters and indentified main policy tools for SCP. This will be followed with the third workshop focusing on the policy recommendations.

For the main driving forces for sustainable and unsustainable consumption, click here.

Watch this space for more information from the project.

The International Conference seeks to provide a unique 3-day arena for discussing
unmet needs of a wide range of organizations – including businesses, civil society
organizations (CSOs), social enterprises and funders – to measure aspects of their
work at the project level, and especially those which are based on human values.

A major driver for the initiation of this conference is the ESDinds EU research
project, which has exciting results to report on the development of values-based
indicators, trialed in the field with CSOs and businesses, and remotely by a further
50 organisations, some of whom will report at the conference. It was during this
project that the need for such a conference to bring together workers in the
different but overlapping fields of Indicators, Sustainability and Values became
apparent. Benefits of such interdisciplinary approaches are already emerging;
several groups wish to report on them and learn from each other. It is hoped a new
Community of Practice will emerge from these interactions.

Key themes
Values – The relevance of values to the success of businesses, CSOs and other
organizations, even when they are not themselves values-based, is becoming
increasingly recognized, and a theme of the conference will be the usefulness of
values-based indicators in that context.

Useful indicators for CSO projects – The development of useful indicators for any
type for civil Society (CSO) projects have always been problematic. At this
conference speakers from CSOs, funders and researchers will give updates on
challenges and emerging ideas.

Co-design and partnership in research – The importance of co-design and the
involvement of Communities of Interest for the success and appropriateness of a
research project will be explored.

Ethics and Sustainable Development – Major advances have been made in developing indicators, but challenges still exist at the project (or local) level, and in linking to ethical values.

An emerging Community of Practice in Indicators, Sustainability and Values
16 – 18 December at the University of Brighton
Registration is free (if you book before 1st December)

For more information, click here.

The Partnership for Education and Research about Responsible Living (PERL) and Action Town coordinator CSCP is organising a student film competition on sustainable lifestyles. Winning films will be posted on UNEP’S Creative Gallery on Sustainable Communications and presented at two international conferences in 2011. The competition is open from now till January 8th! Please find more information in this flyer or at the website www.perlprojects.org