Water And The Millennium Development Goals: A Case For Collaboration
Friday, March 27, 2009
Session Description
Governments, international organisations and businesses struggle to achieve the MDGs for drinking water and sanitation. Join this vital, solution oriented discussion on how social entrepreneurs can contribute and collaborate in order to meet these goals. What are the most promising innovations? What is the role of non-state actors in global environmental governance and what questions of power and public / private authority do they raise? Finally, what are the ecological presuppositions of sustaining the water-related MDGs in an age of rapid climate change?
Time & Location
Time:
09:00 - 10:30, Friday, March 27, 2009
BST
Speakers
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Speaker
Environmentalist, People and Water
Michal Kravcík, Dipl Ing. PhD. is a founding memberand Chairman of the NGO People And Water (
www.peopleandwater.sk). He is a water management engineer (graduated at the Civil Engineering Faculty of Slovak Technical University, Slovakia). He worked for 8 years at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. He promotes sustainable programs for integrated river basin management in Slovakia, “Water for Third Millenium” and Blue Alternative. He is the author of publications including, “New Water Paradigm – Water for the Recovery of Climate” (2007),
www.waterparadigm.org”. He is an ASHOKA Fellow and recipient Goldman Environmental Prize from 1999.
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Speaker
University of Greifswald, Coordinator of the Social Entrepreneurship Research Group GETIDOS
Rafael Ziegler coordinates the Social Entrepreneurship Research Group GETIDOS at the University of Greifswald and the Institut für ökologische Wirtschaftsforschung in Berlin. The preparatory phase of this interdisciplinary group started in 2008; its main phase is scheduled to last from 2009-2012. Dr. Ziegler is a graduate of the London School of Economics (B.Sc.Economics and Philosophy) and McGill University (Ph.D. Philosophy). He is the editor of: An Introduction to SocialEntrepreneurship – Voices,Preconditions, Contexts (Edward Elgar. February 2009). Rafael Ziegler’s main interest is the contribution of social entrepreneurship to environmental sustainability(in particular drinking water provision and sanitation).
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Speaker
CEO & President, Gram Vikas USA
Joe Madiath is the Founder and Chairman of Gram Vikas. Joe has spent over 45 years working in the field of development among the poorest communities in Orissa, India. Drawn to Odisha in 1971 to help communities that had been ravaged by a cyclone and tidal wave, Joe stayed on as an activist focused on sustainable development. Founded in 1979, Gram Vikas utilizes a holistic model of development, based on Joe’s conviction that every family in a village needs to have healthy living practices for an improved quality of life. Gram Vikas works in the areas of renewable energy, especially biogas and solar energy. Totally inclusive water and sanitation is the flagship programme of Gram Vikas. This model has transformed more than 1200 villages and has successfully proven that the rural poor can and will pay for better sanitation and water facilities.
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Speaker
Research Fellow, University of Oxford
Chuks Okereke’s research interests lie broadly in the links between global environmental governance systems and international development. His current research focuses on the relationship between business climate strategies, government policies, and international climate governance. Chuks also explores the roles of equity norms and economic ideas in global environmental governance drawing from political philosophy and international relations theories. Before joining the Smith School, Chuks was a Senior Research Associate at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA). His recent books include Global Justice and Neoliberal Environmental Governance (Routledge 2008) and The Politics of the Environment
(ed.) (Routledge 2007).
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Speaker
President, Viva con Agua
Benjamin Adrion, a former German football league player, is the founder of “Viva con Agua de Sankt Pauli”. He established the drinking water initiative in Hamburg in 2005. Since then, more than 50,000 people in developing countries have been supplied with clean drinking water from Viva con Agua, for the most part by building wells. Adrion’s organisation won several prizes, amongst them national awards under the patronage of the president and the chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany.
