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The Week of Global Action against Debt and IFIs is an initiative of the different movements and organisations in the International South North Campaign on Illegitimate Debt. It was born at the World Social Forum in Nairobi, in 2007, and this year is calling for its 3rd edition, from 12 to 18 of October 2010.

Movements and organizations all over the world to join forces in this call for action, uniting the struggle for freedom from debt domination and market fundamentalism with the struggles for climate justice (October 13), rural women and debt repudiation (October 15), food sovereignty (October 16) and poverty eradication (October 17).

Today, it is commonplace to say there is a crisis in world governance. As citizens all over the world are fully aware, tensions, conflicts, and wars are persisting, and national, regional, and international institutions are powerless, even when limiting their role to avoiding the permanent deterioration of people’s living conditions and means of subsistence. The conceptual and ideological foundations of existing global institutions are based on international relations among nation-states, referring to an idea of the state that emerged in seventeenth-century Europe. This model makes no sense today unless nation-states themselves are built on new foundations, and their role, operational structures, and methods of interaction with other political structures are redefined.

The "slow" philosophy has crossed the national borders very soon. The wish to live with slower rhytms, discovering and heading for the quality of life,has introduced the Cittaslow in all Europe. So it was born an international network of Cittaslow,small centres which decide together to get experiences,starting from a shared code of concrete and verifiable behaviours,paying attention to the good cooking,to the quality of welcome,services and urban scope. Actually the Cittaslow network is present in 16 countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Italia, New Zeland, Norway, Portugal, Poland, South Corea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales).

Our purpose is to invent, to share, and to practice new forms of collective action, from the local to the global scales, so that together we can exercise more control, together and with Nature, over the future of an increasingly complex and interdependent world. The challenge of the Alliance is to favor unity within diversity by proclaiming our societies’ capacity to understand and assess the complexity of situations, the interdependence of the issues, and the legitimacy of all the different geocultural, thematic, social, and professional viewpoints, and to encourage them all to act accordingly.

We humans are Creation’s most daring experiment with reflective consciousness. This gift is the source of our distinctive capacity to choose our future as an intentional collective act. For some 5,000 years, we have demonstrated our ability to use this capacity foolishly at an enormous cost to ourselves and to other living beings. We must now take the step to a new level of species maturity and demonstrate our ability to act with collective wisdom and foresight.

All his books at: http://www.davidkorten.org/books

TNI is an international network of activist-scholars committed to critical analyses of the global problems of today and tomorrow, with a view to providing intellectual support to those movements concerned to steer the world in a democratic, equitable and environmentally sustainable direction.

In the spirit of public scholarship, and aligned to no political party, TNI seeks to create and promote international co-operation in analysing and finding possible solutions to such global problems as militarism and conflict, poverty and marginalisation, social injustice and environmental degradation.

Webpage on the Financial Crisis and alternatives. You will find articles ready for download by Marcos Arruda from ALOE, plus a wealth of good analysis and proposals from authors based in different continents. You will also find reference for YouTube videos, debates and interviews on these subjects.

An international and intercultural project on the notion of responsibility.

You can download the World Human Development Report 2007/2008 of the UNDP: "Fighting Climate change: Human solidarity in a divided world"