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Will the next wars be fought over water? [Live Webcast]

Sunday, March 20, 2011


That would be the title of the upcoming discussion panel to be moderated by the former Canadian Prime Minister Rt. Hon. Jean Chrétien. The discussion is a part of a larger event entitled  "The Global Water Crisis: Addressing an Urgent Security Issue" , at the High-Level Expert Group meeting organized by the Inter Action Council of Former Heads of States and Government.

Prof. Patricia Wouters will represent the Dundee UNESCO Centre at the above InterAction Council High-Level Expert Group (HLEG) meeting. She will give a presentation at the discussion panel on the topic: Can the history of international co-operation over water continue? The complete list of the panel will be:

Will the next wars be fought over water?
  • Moderated by the Rt. Hon. Jean Chrétien
  • Dr. Fabrice Renaud—Conflicts and diplacement: Water as a hazard
  • Bob Sandford—Global pressures on water: Have we reached a tipping point?
  • Dr. Patricia Wouters—Can the history of international co-operation over water continue?
  • Moneef Zou’bi—Water in the Middle East: Source of conflict or co-operation?

Now for the more good news: You can join the discussion through the live webcast and ask questions to the panel members! Click here to sign up. The page will become live at the World Water Day, 22.3.11, commencing at 10:15 a.m. ET..


 

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Legal Jobs at ILR Linkedin Group

Monday, March 7, 2011

 

 

 

 

 

 

Linkedin opened up its job feature:

LinkedIn has made some upgrades to the Jobs section of LinkedIn groups that will make it much easier for group members and group managers to share LinkedIn jobs specifically tailored to your group. Group owners and managers can set up a keyword based feed of LinkedIn jobs into the group. Group members can also share relevant jobs into the group.

Organic postings from the old Groups "Jobs" tab are now in the Career discussions section.


We are excited about these changes. Be sure to visit the jobs section of your group and set up a targeted jobs feed for your group today.

Best Regards,

The LinkedIn Team


And so, the ILR Linkedin Group used this opportunity for its members to broadcast their talent-hunt. Join the ILR Linked Group here, and start posting your firm’s job offers.



 

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PEW's Research: Transparency makes citizen happier, more engaged

Friday, March 4, 2011

PEW has just released its latest survey on transparency of governance in local communities. The result: if the government shares information well, they also feel good about their civic institutions. Following is the summary of PEW's findings (see p.2):


  • Those who think local government does well in sharing information are also more likely to be satisfied with other parts of civic life such as the overall quality of their community and the performance of government and other institutions, as well as the ability of the entire information environment in their community to give them the information that matters.
  • Broadband users are sometimes less satisfied than others with community life. That raises the possibility that upgrades in a local information system might produce more critical, activist citizens.
  • Social media like Facebook and Twitter are emerging as key parts of the civic landscape and mobile connectivity is beginning to affect people’s interactions with civic life. Some 32% of the internet users across the three communities get local news from social networking site; 19% from blogs; 7% from Twitter. And 32% post updates and local news on their social networking sites.
The relationship between transparency system and 'trust' is unsurprising. When information is concealed, people will suspect that those holding the information is hiding something. On the contrary, when information is disclosed, people tend to perceive that everything runs well.

Hence, transparency system can also be used to exploit the masses. This is not an argument for opacity, but only to note that 'disclosure' is not always equal to 'transparency'. 

Read PEW's full report here.

 

OECD announces new transparency and anti-corruption initiative – clean.gov.biz

Thursday, March 3, 2011

 

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OECD - Paris 3 March 2011

 

 

OECD announces new transparency and anti-corruption initiative – clean.gov.biz

 

 

The OECD is developing a new initiative to improve coordination of anti-corruption and transparency initiatives - first within its member countries, and then with all other relevant players, including governments, international organisations, NGOs and the private sector.

 

“We are developing a new initiative, clean.gov.biz, that will improve our own anti-corruption tools and reinforce their implementation,” OECD Deputy Secretary-General Richard Boucher said. “We then want to strengthen cooperation with all relevant players to ensure that our instruments complement those of our partners.”

 

Mr. Boucher discussed the initiative during the March 2-3 meeting of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, hosted at the OECD, underlining how many of its elements complement EITI work. EITI aims to improve natural resource management and reduce corruption by encouraging oil, gas and mining companies to publish the fees, royalties and taxes they pay and commiting governments to transparency about what they receive.

 

The OECD is at the forefront of global anti-corruption efforts. In 2010, its 34 member countries and leading partners including Brazil and Russia agreed to a Declaration on Propriety, Integrity and Transparency in the Conduct of International Business and Finance. The Declaration is based on OECD instruments including the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Entreprises, which since 1975 set standards for business behavior, and the OECD Principles of Corporate Governance, which set out broad rules to guide business conduct.

 

The OECD Anti-Bribery Convention commits 38 signatory governments to establish bribery of foreign public officials as a criminal offence. OECD work on public procurement, public sector integrity, including on lobbying and conflicts of interest, as well as budget transparency is at the core of the reform agenda in a growing number of countries. “Political turmoil in highly corrupted regimes reminds us that citizens around the world will no longer accept corruption as business as usual,” Mr. Boucher said.

 

The OECD is also actively cooperating with the G20 in the implementation of its Action Plan on Anti-Corruption, which includes initiatives on foreign bribery, asset recovery, international cooperation, protection of whistle blowers, government integrity and public-private partnerships in fighting corruption. It will co-organise with the French Presidency and the support of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime a G20 conference in April 27-28 on “Joining forces against corruption: G20 business and government.”

 

For further information on the OECD’s anti-corruption work, visit www.oecd.org/corruption or contact the OECD Media Division (tel: + 33 1 4524 9700; news.contact@oecd.org).

 

 

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Public Affairs & Communications Directorate - Media Division

 

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Center for Law Information supports "Special Procedure on climate change and human rights"

Wednesday, March 2, 2011


11-02-28 CC Letter, ver 3 (1).pdf 

A group of world Non Governmental Organizations, including the Center for Law Information (CeLI), petition for the establishment of a  Special Procedure on climate change and human rights. The NGOs consider that establishment of a special procedure, such as that which provide a mandate to a special rapporteur, would be an efficient way to tackle the issue.

A letter was sent to diplomatic missions in Geneva urging them to "publicly call for the creation of a Special Procedure on climate change and human rights who reports to the Human Rights Council in a resolution to be adopted at the 17th Regular Session of the Human Rights Council in June 2011."

See attached letter for further information

 

Fwd: New Report on Global Governance of Nano-scale Technologies

Thursday, February 10, 2011

 

 

ETC Group News Release

10 February 2011

www.etcgroup.org

New Report on Global Governance of Nano-scale Technologies:

ETC Group's "Little" Contribution to the Big Conversation in Dakar

When activists, social movements and civil society organizations came together in Porto Alegre, Brazil for the first World Social Forum (WSF), governments had just begun pouring money into nano R&D. Now, a decade later, public investment has surpassed US$50 billion and averages $10 billion a year.  

Meanwhile, an estimated 50,000 people have come together to learn, debate and strategize at the WSF in Dakar, Senegal. ETC Group brings a new report – The Big Downturn? Nanogeopolitics – to that very large discussion. Executive director Pat Mooney explains why:  "An urgent topic in Dakar is the proper governance of emerging technologies and how society can best respond to threats – social, environmental, health – that new technologies may pose. Nanotechnology is a case in point, having been rolled out with virtually no government oversight or public debate."

Mooney adds, "Our first major report on nano-scale technologies, The Big Down, made its debut at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre eight years ago. We've brought The Big Downturn? to Dakar because nano commercialization and investment are increasing while the regulatory vacuum persists; nano's risks and impact need fuller discussion."

ETC Group's 68-page report, available for download from www.etcgroup.org/en/node/5245, provides a current snapshot of global investment, markets, governance and control, including patenting. Though the impact of tiny tech is especially difficult to discern given the lack of an agreed-upon definition for "nano" and the absence of labeling requirements, ETC Group's report finds:

  • Worldwide, there are more than 2000 nanotech enterprises researching and/or manufacturing nanoparticles.
  • Even while the majority of consumers remain in the dark about the existence of nano-scale ingredients in commercial products, the number of product lines far exceeds the 1500 or so that have been identified by publicly available market surveys.  
  • At least 60 countries have state nanotech initiatives, including newcomers Nepal, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. The United States' public and private sectors together spend the most money; China fields more scientists. Meanwhile, Russia has suddenly emerged as the biggest public spender.
  • While analysts tout a whopping $224 billion nano-market, the actual market figure is drastically lower – perhaps by more than ten times.

The Big Downturn? Nanogeopolitics surveys current regulatory forays (e.g., baby-steps toward mandatory reporting requirements), standards development, public engagement schemes as well as activity by the world's most generous awarder of nano-patents, the US Patent & Trademark Office.

The report concludes that even though the nano-industry is nervous about its health and environmental exposure and some governments are having second thoughts about their decision to fast-track nanotech, no one is willing to retreat from a technology they've claimed will help end the global recession and usher in a "green economy" – and rake in trillions of dollars in revenue.

For more information, contact:

in Dakar

Pat Mooney mooney@etcgroup.org  cell: +1 613-240-0045

Diana Bronson diana@etcgroup.org   cell: +1 514-629-9236

local cell phone: + 221 + 77 487 5300

in the United States

Kathy Jo Wetter  kjo@etcgroup.org  phone: +1 919-688-7302

-----

For more information about our work, please visit our website at http://www.etcgroup.org/

Interested in supporting our work? Donate Here! http://www.etcgroup.org/en/node/5195

ETC Group is a registered Charity in Canada. ETC Headquarters are at:
431 Gilmour Street, Second Floor
Ottawa, ON K2P-0R5
Canada

To remove yourself from this list: http://www.etcgroup.org/index.php?q=civicrm/mailing/optout&reset=1&jid=112&qid=70939&h=21e3cd0bd5cb9222

 

International workshop - Dilemmas of choice: Responsibility in nanotechnology development (deadline March 31, 2011)

Monday, January 31, 2011

 
University of Padova 

CALL FOR PAPERS
 
International workshop
 
Dilemmas of choice
Responsibility in nanotechnology development
 
 Rovigo, Italy, June 6-7, 2011 (deadline: March 31, 2011)
 
More information and download here <http://www.ciga.unipd.it/index.php?pg=cms&amp;ext=p&amp;cms_codsec=73&amp;cms_codcms=1037>
 

The Centre for Environmental Law Decisions and Corporate Ethical Certification (CIGA) at the University of Padua and the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, organize an international workshop titled Dilemmas of choice. Responsibility in nanotechnology development, which is aimed at presenting and debating contributions from different disciplines on several issues concerning the relationship between nanotechnology innovation and responsibility.The workshop will be held in the Italian town of Rovigo on 6 and 7 June 2011.
The workshop scientific organization is supervised by an international Scientific Committee and will be composed of 4 sessions, of which two are open to abstract submission, while other two are devoted to the contribution of outstanding scholars on the topic of the workshop.
The two sessions open to abstract submission will focus respectively on: Session 1: topics concerning regulation and regulatory systems; and Session 2: topics regarding the role of responsibility in the management and the coordination of nanotechnology development. Abstract proposals should be sent to ciga@unipd.it <mailto:ciga@unipd.it> by March 31, 2011.
 
 
Introduction and background for the workshop
 
Policies formulation, academic research, business strategies, and civil society campaigns agree that nanotechnology development should be responsible. However, the notion of responsibility is extremely diversified in the public discourse of nanoscale technologies, shifting from specialized meanings, e.g. close to liability of industrial producers, or narrower definitions, focusing on toxicological aspects to be tested experimentally, to broader interpretations, considering issues like human rights protection, social cohesion and inclusiveness. The variety of these meanings is apparently dependent on the different normative and epistemic, even disciplinary, perspectives represented in the debate, on the heterogeneity of the social actors bearing such perspectives, and on the stage of the (nano)products life-cycle that is considered, on the plurality of technical fields that are associated with nanoscale science and technology, on the more or less .
Also, these different meanings suggest to commentators and operators different foci of attention and policy measures, ranging from radical appeals to precaution, to the experimentation of new procedures for rule-making, to the implementation of public understanding and/or public engagement activities, and to the development of tests, standards, and measures of exposition for humans and the environment.
On the one hand, the formulation and implementation of these policies are affected mostly by our capacity to conjugate what "responsible development" means for us in the future tense, i.e. with regard to the consequences of our actions onto future generations, but also with regard to the assumptions about future situations that influence our way of acting. On the other, assumption about individuals and their ties to broader social communities affect the solutions for developing nanotechnology responsibly: balancing safety and the legitimate pursue of knowledge or economic opportunities, individual freedoms and collective interests (in a stronger fashion, the "common good"), distributing costs and rewards, etc..
 
 
Goals of the workshop and thematic sessions
 
The workshop attempts to disentangle these complex meanings of responsibility in nanotechnology development by focusing on the following topics:
 
Session 1:
Responsibility and regulation under uncertainty
 
One of the most critical issues for regulation and governance consists in how to allocate the costs and burdens of the lack of scientific knowledge in term of responsibility. The use of the term "responsibility" instead of  "liability" corresponds - to the aim of this session - to acquire a global regulatory view of the way technological and scientific progress in nanotechnology will impact on the assumptions of risks both at the individual and collective choices levels (here a broad meaning of the term "risk" is intended, including ethical risks; social risks; health risks; occupational risks; environmental risks, etc.).
On one hand, the well known logic of "no data, no market" has already been advocated in order to support the development of precautionary measures in the different regulatory frameworks affected by nanoparticles. On the other hand, it has been noted that «without an adequate scientific framework there is no way to know what data to collect» while «progress in developing the necessary scientific knowledge often depends on having a lot of data on specific materials».
These 'dilemmas of precaution' intersect the concept of responsibility, which extends beyond the usual framework on risks and benefits and which implicitly calls for a broad normative reflection on possible technological impacts and future visions. Therefore, the uncertainty that characterizes nanotechnology seemingly requires an analysis of hopes and seduction around nano to be able to grasp the epistemic and normative challenges posed by these technologies. In order to discuss the delineated framework, this session welcomes papers that, among others, will consider the following questions: How regulation and civil liability interact in order to allocate risks and costs of innovation? Is it possible a real «coordinated approach» in circumstances of uncertainty? Confronting exposure risks evaluation at work to uncertainty challenges is the existing workers health protection regulation safe enough? Do the nanotechnology risks invoke a safer and more specific revision of the existing duties to protect health? What is the role of public authorities (e.g. US and EU agencies) and international or national agencies for standardization (e.g. ISO) that interact for developing standards of safety and sustainability as well as approaches for the maintenance of the highest level of safety in nanotechnology? How to address consumers' safety expectationswhen an innovative product is used? Is the process of information sharing effective (that is, e.g., used in cosmetics regulation) an effective way? How are these values interrelated? How is it possible to integrate responsibility into the thinking of emerging technologies? How should responsibility be linked to technological future visions?
 
 
 
 
Session 2
Coordinating responsibility in nanotechnology development
 
Recently, a renovated regime in tecnoscientific governance "taking seriously" technology development as a collective experiment, has been proposed to democratize technoscientific expertise, as well as to take more robust and legitimate in a situation whose characteristic features are epistemic uncertainty, normative plurality, diverging interests, and public unease.
The public engagement strategy advocated by this model of 'collective experimentation' has to cope with the dilemma of inclusion/exclusion in (participatory) decision-making and the corresponding struggle to define the boundaries of what instances, groups, knowledge, values, behaviours are relevant for the purposes of the process and to transfer the legitimacy gained by decisions from the groups and constituencies involved in the deliberative processes to the groups of the ones that have not been involved.
This tension between 'insiders' and 'outsiders' symmetrically applies to responsibility: Who is responsible? What is the extent of this responsibility? To whom? What are the criteria, arguments, and mechanisms tracing this boundaries and determining insiders and outsiders? What are the strategies to define and allocate tasks and duties? How do the meanings of responsibility change across product life-cycles, temporal horizons and sites of innovation? How are tasks and duties to pursue what is variably defined as 'responsible development', allocated? How do farther and closer temporal horizons dynamically interact? How do engagement mechanisms perform coordination? What is the influence of social representations in mutual relationships between actors participating to innovation processes?
 

 
Submissions, deadlines and practicalities
 
Papers focusing on other emerging technological fields (e.g. Biotechnology, Bioinformatics, Energy technologies, Information technology, Material Sciences, Robotics) are welcome as they provide exemplary cases and valuable lessons for nanotechnology. All abstracts (maximum 1000 words) should be prepared and sent in electronic form (.doc or .pdf) to: ciga@unipd.it <mailto:ciga@unipd.it> by March 31, 2011.
The file submitted should contain:
* ·                Authors' identification (name, position, affiliation, postal and email addresses)
* ·                 Thematic session title
* ·                Abstract title
* ·                Abstract text (approximately 1000 words)
* ·                Contact information of the corresponding Author (for co-authored abstracts)
*  

After a blind review process, communication of acceptance will be sent by April 15, 2011.
 

Attendees are not required to pay any registration fee. Financial support for travel and accommodation is available for speakers in thematic sessions. Inquiries and applications for financial support to: ciga@unipd.it <mailto:ciga@unipd.it> .
 
Important dates:
Abstract submission: March 31, 2011
Notification of Acceptance/Rejection: April 15, 2011
Workshop: June 6-7, 2011
 
For information on the workshop:
www.ciga.unipd.it <http://www.ciga.unipd.it> or ciga@unipd.it <mailto:ciga@unipd.it>
 
Venue
 
The workshop is held in the Italian town of Rovigo, an ancient town in the Veneto Region, strategically located 45 minutes from Venice and its airport. Further information on Rovigo are available on these websites:
http://www.veneto.to/web/guest/rovigo
http://www.rovigoturismo.it/changelang-eng.phtml
 
 
Scientific Committee
 
Antonio Da Re, CIGA, University of Padua
Guillermo Foladori, University of Zacatecas
Armin Grunwald, ITAS-Karsruhe Institute of Techology
Federico Neresini, Dept. of Sociology, University of Padua
Elena Pariotti, CIGA-University of Padua
Mariachiara Tallacchini, Faculty of Law, Catholic University of Milan
George Michael Tyshenko, Institute of Population Health, University of Ottawa
 
Local Organizing Committee
 
Simone Arnaldi, CIGA, University of Padua
Luca Grion, CIGA, University of Padua
Giorgia Guerra, CIGA, University of Padua
Mariassunta Piccinni, CIGA, University of Padua
Daniele Ruggiu, CIGA, University of Padua

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The CIGA initiatives are supported by


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CIGA Centre for Environmental Law Decisions and Corporate Ethical Certification
University of Padua

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