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Photo by Jose Schreckinger (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu).
New Democratic Practice–Global Challenges Guidelines Elevate Social and Environmental Justice
The Democratic Practice Program will focus more resources on the Amazon River Basin going forward.
Since its last program review in 2017, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) Democratic Practice–Global Challenges program’s guidelines have emphasized bottom-up empowerment, not just top-down institutional change to address shared challenges. Over the past seven years, the program’s work has taken place in an increasingly volatile and uncertain context driven by two trends: a historic explosion in global output and an associated rise in life-threatening carbon emissions. This accelerating human activity is contributing to food insecurity, biodiversity loss, and the spread of disease. The resulting competition for resources has led to a rise in violence, forced displacement, and open war. Much of the Global South now views the patchwork of global governance institutions with cynicism. Though crisis is nothing new, this polycrisis—multiple and simultaneous interacting economic, social, political, and environmental crises, with cascading trigger effects—arguably is.
Given the complexity of making large-scale change amid these cascading crises, the program homed in on collaborative, cross-border initiatives to challenge the expansion of the global fossil fuel industry, make rules governing global trade and investment more equitable, and codify the basic interdependence between humans and nature in governance and legal systems.
RBF grantees and their successes illustrate how meaningful change can stem from new ways of working and new bases of power:
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Photo by Bora Chung, courtesy of Project Survival Media.
In 2022, Equinor, Norway’s state-owned energy company, abandoned oil and gas developments in the Bay du Nord and the Arctic Wisting oil field. The Norwegian government also announced a moratorium on further frontier oil and gas exploration. RBF support to the Energy Transition Fund (ETF), a project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, created in 2019 to pool resources and build a network equipped to phase out fossil fuels, has led to regional citizen organizing coalitions slowing new gas and oil development.
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Photo by Lode Saidane, courtesy of Friends of the Earth Europe.
On March 1, 2024, the European Union (EU) brokered a deal for withdrawal from the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT), often used to protect fossil fuel investment in Eastern Europe, by the end of spring 2024. Multiyear grants from the RBF helped trade campaigners like Climate Action Network Europe connect with climate campaigners like Friends of the Earth Europe, who evolved into a coalition aiming to educate EU parliamentarians, commissioners, and the public on the ECT.
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Photo courtesy of GARN.
In March 2023, an Ecuadorian court handed a victory to the rights of nature movement, ruling that a copper mining concession in Ecuador’s Tropical Andes had violated the local communities’ constitutional right to prior consultation as well as constitutional provisions that protect ecosystems’ rights to exist, evolve, and be repaired when harmed. Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN), a project of Pachamama, provides support and resources—including legal clinics in Ecuador—to organizations around the world working to advance the rights of nature.
The RBF Democratic Practice–Global Challenges program remains committed to funding based on the principles of flexibility, trust, and responsiveness that helped its grantees achieve these concrete wins. New program guidelines affirm this approach, with a revised goal that more clearly emphasizes the program’s commitment to social and environmental justice.