Democratic Practice–Global Challenges

Growing connectivity through cross-border flows of capital, goods, people, and communications are producing increased volatility, deep interdependencies, changes in power relations, and dramatic new risks and opportunities.

Public engagement in decision-making across all levels of governance must contend with powerful global forces, actors, and institutions that pose profound challenges to democracy. Concentrations of wealth and power erect barriers to participation, while social media empower and complicate groups’ efforts to build and shape domestic and global public agendas. Economic interests have largely overshadowed democratic practices, social equity, and environmental concerns in the evolution of global institutions, and multinational corporations often escape public scrutiny or effective regulation at the national level. Thus, although the impact of global forces on daily life is growing, people face enormous impediments to both defending their existing rights and collectively engaging to meet new global challenges.

At the same time, cross-border, citizen-based coalitions are finding innovative ways to frame and address global problems. Evolving understandings of planetary limits and the drivers of climate change have given rise to citizen groups that press for economic and environmental justice. Common experiences of discrimination, deepening inequality, and the erosion of democracy have led to demands for change in how rules governing national and global economies are written—and in whose interest. New technologies and ways of organizing undergird citizen networks working across languages, geographies, and cultures. These combinations of grassroots, professional, public, private, intergovernmental, and nongovernmental organizations are analyzing global processes, articulating alternatives, and building practical solidarities to address global challenges.

This work requires direct, translocal, and transnational citizen engagement built on shared values, vision, collaboration, and solidarity. The RBF focuses its Democratic Practice–Global Challenges grantmaking on initiatives to address the environmental crisis, the rules governing global commerce, and frontiers of ecojurisprudence.