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Freedom and Security in a Complex World (2021 edition)

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Context

People all over the world are taking their future back into their hands. Together, they are taking initiatives in the fields of renewable energy, local food production, sharing tools, and so forth. This is the most hopeful movement of our time. Where the market and state fail, people are taking action. As free citizens, they are reinventing the collective, with open partnerships where personal development and social engagement go hand in hand. This observation seems to contradict what we experience every day. The system errors of our society model fill the newspapers: climate crisis, unstable banks, refugee flows. Accepted wisdom is that uncertainty is increasing. But both trends are happening, not by coincidence, at the same time.

 

Objectives

While examining the two interlinked concepts of Freedom and Security, this publication suggests that the answer needs to be the transformation into a socioecological society in the 21st century. It argues for the realisation of a societal project that strives for equal freedom for all people to flourish in security, within the boundaries of the planet, and proposes concrete steps towards it.

 

Download

Available in English here.

Available in French here.

Available in German here.

Available in Hungarian here.

Available in Spanish here.

Available in Macedonian here.

Available in Greek here.


This report presents a new and updated take on the 2017 version (Please see the English, French, German, Hungarian and Spanish editions from that year, which were part of the transnational project “A green transformation: Freedom and Security in uncertain times” ).

The 2021 report was developed in partnership with Oikos and with financial support from the European Parliament to the European Green Foundation. 

SDG 5 – Achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls

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This publication has been produced as part of the GEF project on the  Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and focuses on addressing some of the progress as well as challenges in achieving the SDGs in Hungary.

The publication is a compendium summarising the discussions that took place in Hungary, at an event exploring the SDG 5 – Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.

Transforming Our Country, Transforming Our World – SDG 3 & the Challenges for 2030

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This publication has been produced as part of the GEF project on the  Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and focuses on addressing some of the progress as well as challenges in achieving the SDGs in Hungary.

The publication is a compendium summarising the discussions that took place in Hungary, at an event exploring the SDG 3: Good Health and Wellbeing, and the status of its implementation in the country since the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in 2015.

The event took place as part of a series, implemented by our partner Ökopolisz Alapitvany, which has so far covered the first five out of 17 SDGs since 2016.

Real Democracy in Your Town: Public-Civic Partnerships in Action

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Real Democracy in Your Town: Public-Civic Partnerships in Action explores the potential of public-civil partnerships (as opposed to the conventional public-private partnerships), as an opportunity to provide basic public services within societies without the privitisation of public goods and making them subjects of the free market.

It particularly focuses on the power of municipalist and local citizens’ movements and highlights successful case studies in Europe from which to draw inspiration from.

Download your copy here. 

This publication is also available in Serbian, Hungarian & Spanish.

 

Unlocking the Job Potential of Zero Carbon – Full Report

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This report is the result of the Green European Foundation transnational project “Strengthening Climate Targets, Creating Local Climate Jobs”, conducted with its partners Green House Think Tank (United Kingdom), Ecopolis (Hungary) and Green Foundation Ireland.

Meeting the challenge of climate change requires structural changes to the economy so that it is no longer dependent on fossil fuels: we need to reduce overall energy use and ensure that all the energy that we do use is from renewable sources. This will require the creation of a large number of new jobs.

The Green European Foundation, with the support of Green House Think Tank, has developed a model to estimate the number of jobs that would be created in key sectors of the economy, to not only demonstrate that a transition is achievable but to also show where those jobs will be.

This model has been applied to the United Kingdom,  as well as to Ireland (with the support of Green Foundation Ireland) and Hungary (with the support of Ökopolisz Alaptivány). The methodology used in that work and its results are presented in this report.

Download your copy here.

This publication is also available in Hungarian, which can be read here. 

The appendix can be accessed here.

A summary of the report can also be found here. 

Following on from the work conducted for this report, GEF’s partner Green House Think Tank conducted further research into climate jobs modelling for regions in the UK, which can be found on their website here.


 

Freedom & Security in a Complex World (2017 edition)

By Uncategorized

Context

People all over the world are taking their future back into their hands. Together, they are taking initiatives in the fields of renewable energy, local food production, sharing tools, and so forth. This is the most hopeful movement of our time. Where the market and state fail, people are taking action. As free citizens, they are reinventing the collective, with open partnerships where personal development and social engagement go hand in hand. This observation seems to contradict what we experience every day. The system errors of our society model fill the newspapers: climate crisis, unstable banks, refugee flows. Accepted wisdom is that uncertainty is increasing. But both trends are happening, not by coincidence, at the same time.

 

Objectives

While examining the two interlinked concepts of Freedom and Security, this publication suggests that the answer needs to be the transformation into a socioecological society in the 21st century. It argues for the realisation of a societal project that strives for equal freedom for all people to flourish in security, within the boundaries of the planet, and proposes concrete steps towards it.

 

Download

Digital version in English is available here.

Digital version in French is available here.

Digital version in German is available here.

Digital version in Hungarian is available here.

Digitial version in Spanish is available here.


This report was part of the transnational project “A green transformation: Freedom and Security in uncertain times” . An updated version from April 2021 is available here. 

Creating a Peoples’ Europe [VIDEO]

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“Creating a People’s Europe” was produced and scripted by John Gormley, Irish Minister for the Environment (2007 – 2011).

The film is a project of the Green European Foundation for the Greens/EFA Group in the European Parliament. It was realised in cooperation with the Heinrich Boell Foundation and with the financial support of the European Parliament.

Subtitles available in Catalan, Czech, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Polish, and Spanish.

The Guide to EU Funding on Migration and Asylum

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In the absence of a common European response that treats migration as a human phenomenon and manages it as such, the task of welcoming and accommodating migrants and acting as their first personal contacts has mainly been taken on by local and regional authorities, non-governmental organisations and activists, who continue to play a key role in providing initial reception and access to services and fundamental rights for migrants and refugees. In this context, this guide builds on the idea that the best practices of how to welcome refugees and asylum seekers and work towards successful integration can be found in local communities and initiatives throughout Europe.

Therefore, the objective of this guide is to actively support the work of these local actors, organisations and institutions with a one-stop source of information on additional financial assistance offered by the EU. This guide provides a quick and easy overview of the relevant EU funding opportunities, with key information and practical inputs in regards to accessing them. Special attention is given to projects that foster integration, social inclusion and a better quality of life for migrants, refugees and asylum seekers.

A hard copy of this guide can be ordered by sending an email to: info@gef.eu

This publication as a PDF file is available for download in following versions:

Class of 2014: New Green Voices in the European Parliament

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Back in 2009, when the Green European Foundation and the Heinrich Böll Foundation gathered, for the first time, the ambitions of newly elected Green Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in a yearbook, the European Union was a different type of affair. The effects of the financial and economic crises were not yet in full swing, austerity measures had not yet become the buzz-word of the political agenda, and the climate summit in Copenhagen was still preserving the hope that the European Union would deliver on its promises to be the world’s climate champion. Although clouds were on the horizon, the general mood in European circles was still very much business as usual.

Five years later, we are faced with a different scenario. The effects of the economic and financial crises, as well as the social impact of the austerity-driven response to these crises, had raised existential questions about the future of the European Union. Euro-scepticism reached unprecedented levels, and parties campaigning on explicitly anti-European platforms made gains across the Union. Citizens’ movements reacting to austerity measures imposed by “Brussels” made clear the popular disenchantment with a political establishment that seemed keener on bailing out banks than safeguarding jobs and welfare. There were times as recent as two years ago when the European Union seemed to be facing “make it or break it” types of challenges.

Even though this urgency has passed for now, the crisis is far from over. This is the background in which the newly-elected Green MEPs will be working over the next years.

New challenges, new voices

In a context where anti-European debates are likely to be placed in the spot-light, the challenge for the new Green Group will be to articulate their criticisms to the various EU policy approaches that venture off the paths of sustainability, equity, democracy and respect for fundamental rights, while keeping an overall pro-European narrative. Among this new Green group, there are many new, first-time parliamentarians. They will need dedication, imagination and an understanding of the need to reach out to civil society and grassroots movements to come up with successful policy approaches to the difficult tasks ahead: setting ambitious climate targets; tackling energy security and energy poverty; bringing prosperity back to the EU; ensuring a humane migration policy, and responding to new geopolitical realities.

The articles that make up this collection detail the new MEPs’ ambitions, expectations and analyses of the opportunities and challenges lying ahead in their specific policy fields. The articles discuss both the visions of the EU that they are bringing to Brussels, by reflecting on the messages picked up during the elections’ campaigns, as well as how these visions translate in a Green working project in the European Parliament. The contributions describe the biggest challenges for the upcoming years on topics such as greening the economy, transforming energy policy, building a democratic EU, creating a human-rights based migration policy, positioning the EU as a strong and fair global player in areas of trade, agriculture, foreign affairs – to mention but a few. Finally, the authors reflect on their ambitions from the various policies they’ll be focusing on and note their expectations for their parliamentary mandate.

 

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Class of 2014 EN 1.75 MB 45 downloads

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Class of 2014 FR 2.39 MB 99 downloads

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Class of 2014 DE 2.41 MB 47 downloads

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Read articles in other languages

Parts of the articles are available also in the respective native languages of the authors: Catalan, Croatian, HungarianSwedish and Spanish.