Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.
Discovered a new word “steenkolenengels” (“coal English”) which is the Dutch word for muddled half-Dutch half-English (think Franglais) and this excellent example from a football manager interview youtu.be/u01t49iAiCE (via Allerslimste Mens ter Wereld on @Play4_be)
A lire sur la “grande démission politique”, et la fin des carrières politiques de 40/50 ans. Chose plutôt saine, à mon avis, à condition que les partis sachent comment se rafraîchir. rtbf.be/article/vers-u…
The #GoodMove chaos in Brussels is something that should worry those of us who advocate for citizen participation, and those of us who care about citizen action on the environment. lesoir.be/473320/article…
For those not close to it, a series of traffic calming and car-excluding measures are being taken in Brussels to reduce car traffic and air pollution. They had a good, not perfect, but good citizen engagement process lasting over a year before anything was done.
The headlines are about yesterday’s meeting in the commune of Schaerbeek, where protests got physical with a group of men tearing down the new signs for the traffic scheme – the bigger issue is the political fear that is now freezing the tens of schemes in the pipeline.
Right now it looks like only Bruxelles-Ville and one of the projects in Schaerbeek are going to see the light of day any time soon, after this has been discussed for *years*. Let’s be clear, this is not banning cars. This is reducing their prominence in dense urban areas.
And yet violent protest from a tiny number and loud angry voices from a small minority is derailing schemes across the whole city-region. After, I say again, a good citizen participation project (realistic in scale and open in approach for the question it was trying to answer).
It’s particularly notable that some of the angry voices are mentioning the participation (300 citizens in Schaerbeek for instance) as being laughable and irrelevant. Because they disagree with the outcome, they disagree with the process.
So, are we wrong about citizen participation reducing the barriers to implementation of these sorts of schemes – or at least, is the level of engagement required to get general public confidence disproportionately large?
And can we involve citizens in these difficult climate decisions in the time we have left? I believe that the answer to both questions is yes, that’s why we’re working on @NetZeroCitiesEU, but I can’t deny a frisson of concern about what is happening in my city.
It’s worth noting that @elkevdbrandt and @PhilippeClose among others have been trying to give political leadership – but they have been rare bright lights in a general picture of uncertainty and backtracking.
I know that some people will see this and think ‘just have more citizen assemblies’ but 300 people in Schaerbeek did not make a difference to the angry voices, and it is the angry voices who are causing the problem.
I don’t have any easy answers myself. It’s something I’ll be thinking hard about as we move ahead with our work in 112 cities (including Brussels!) on reaching net zero.
Originally posted as a thread of 11 tweets on Twitter on 26 October 2022.View the original thread.
This is an excellent article about What Happens Next, with the psychological reckoning one of the biggest parts of it. amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/m…
Politique en Flandre : des avis négatifs rendus pour la mise sur pied d’un institut flamand des droits humains < aside from the fragmentation, the powers are not strong enough. rtbf.be/article/politi…
The New Yorker piece on the flood of new fiction is good, but I feel the same about policy articles. Most blogs should be a tweet, most articles a blog post, and most books a blog post. And still there would be too much to read.
I have many policy preferences (all of which are, I assure you, the inevitable logical consequence of whatever is leading the news cycle today), and yet I am reluctant to add to the flood.
I mean, “democratic innovation person favours democratic innovation”, “European social democrat favours greater European solidarity”, “person worried about climate change thinks we should do more on climate change”
“Extracted from my forthcoming book, Democratic European innovation for a fair climate change transition (590pp, €100).” Not only have you read it all before, you don’t even have time to read it.
And, I will not lie, I often put an article in the “skip” pile because I know the position of the person who wrote it and I assume it’s just arguing that position based on some current news hook.
And yet … I feel like if I *don’t* put something out there, I’m not contributing to the debate on the issues I care about, and I don’t have time to do something really beautiful or crafted that I would be proud of as a piece of writing…
It’s Publish or Perish: Policy DLC pack. Unanswerable I suppose, unless I start doing policy interventions as freeform dance expression.
Originally posted as a thread of 7 tweets on Twitter on 26 October 2021.View the original thread.
Sitting on East Croydon station, train delayed, feeling travel dislocated, and a welcome blast of Belgitude pops up in my feed (reportage from the World Shrimp Peeling Championship). rtbf.be/info/insolites…
Going to keep the football stuff mostly to @totalfriteball but if you want to know why I’m enjoying the hijinx and up and coming stars of the Pro League the @BelgianPodcast season preview is worth your time. twitter.com/totalfriteball…
Does the @ProLeagueBE have Messi and Ronaldo? No. Is the defending often a bit slapstick? Yes. But it has clubs with history, great new emerging players (and some returning greats @SimonMignolet@VincentKompany), a deep football culture and,
most of all, it’s got the challenge of trying to make Belgian football successful when its league covers just 11 million and can’t hope for the money in the Prem or La Liga. Plus frites sauce carbonnade.
Thought provoking evening last night at the launch of @PEHumaine #PourUneEchelleHumaine (For a Human Scale) in Paris. It’s a collection of essays by a group of 89-generation (so, 30something) activists and politicians. 1/x
The core of their ideas is a three-point approach covering ecology, democratic renewal (this being France, they used the word republicanism) and altruism. They are also very post-party-politics, though you’ll guess from the topics that it’s broadly left/green. 2/
The three point programme I mostly like. It’s self-evident, to me at least, that without some kind of common programme around just transition, democracy and quality public services parties to the left of centre can’t win. 3/
I also liked that there was real practical experience in the room. Politicians and activists who had done things on estates, not just policy position taking. Respect for that. Politics is action on the ground, not rinsing your enemies on Twitter. 4/
Another strong point was their narrative about democratic renewal and citizenship, on which deputy mayor of @nantesfr, @3asseh has a great track record – again, concrete work not theory. 5/
I also liked the (overall) youth and energy of the group. Many of them will be in the next or next but one round of political leaders and they are definitely preparing now for the challenges of 2030/40. 6/
Naturally, I had some things I didn’t agree with. “Altruism” was I thought quite a weak word for the third element of the trio. It has echoes of 19th century liberalism to me, and made me think of Attlee’s description of charity as “a cold loveless thing” 7/
Why not “empathy” or “justice”? I get the aim – an effective state with a strong moral core focused on justice and good public services – and I understand the need to set this up outside a statist or technocratic argument, even in France. But “altruism” is surely just part of it
It was a much more geographically mixed group than a lot of Parisian policy events, but it was still extremely Franco-français. Europe as a geographical entity got a couple of mentions, Europe as a political entity was invisible. 9/
I understand why – and of course my work is in Brussels so I think about the European level more than most – BUT these battles have to be won everywhere or they will be lost everywhere and I would have liked to see an idea for how this spreads beyond France.
There will also be a challenge to make this approach additive not subtractive. At a time of culture wars (Zemmour, a probable far-right presidential candidate) politics is a conversation about splits and differences. Is eco-demo-justice strong enough to unite
Particularly when it comes to the trade offs on climate and public services between different groups? You can see the fault lines – urban/rural, climate/industrial policy – which can be waved away for now, but not for ever.
I also – and this is perhaps the fact that I am very very old – wondered about how their narrative of democratic renewal connected with their clear desire to stay away from party politics. Traditional parties and politicians were dunked on, as usual, but
I don’t know how you avoid engaging with them if you want to get things done, or hold power. A thousand community actions is good, but even a strong associative layer will struggle if it doesn’t have a method of taking elective political power.
Maybe elective politics will go away (I had a very enjoyable debate with @ClaudiaChwalisz about this over dinner after – I suspect she is right that it’s doomed in the medium term, but I don’t want to give up on parties quite yet)
However it’s not going anywhere for bid, and I wondered what this group hoped for. I didn’t know whether it was intended as a ginger group, to put the fear into centre-left pols and get them to be more radical. It certainly wasn’t an offer to the left parties
But more of a bracing challenge. A little bit of it felt quite En Marche-y – innovating a political party out of an intersection of political views that work. As we’ve seen, though, these personalised parties are mayflies and find it hard to implant locally
It would work for a national campaign but if they want a street-by-street remaking of French politics and policy it will only be through local action and local politics.
But these are generally quibbles. The eco-demo-justice trio is a strong start. I would personally have liked to hear more about power (power/agency and climate transition are all of politics in the next ten years, I think).
But I respect and admire the effort of putting this together, and there is a lot here to like. Keep an eye on what happens next with @PEHumaine and I commend it to my Brussels friends in @PES_PSE@GreensEFA.
Plus on a personal note it was a huge pleasure to be back at an in-person political event again. That’s the sort of échelle humaine everyone can get behind.
There’s some absurdism and even dark humour in this piece but, behind it all, corrupted politicians stoking hate and fear for political gain. They are entirely unfit for public office. nytimes.com/2021/04/10/wor…
