Beneath the national radar, the relationship between citizens and government is undergoing a dramatic shift. More than ever before, citizens are educated, skeptical, and capable of bringing the decision-making process to a sudden halt. Public officials and other leaders are tired of confrontation and desperate for resources. In order to address persistent challenges like education, race relations, crime prevention, land use planning, and economic development, communities have been forced to find new ways for people and public servants to work together.

The stories of civic experiments in this book can show us the realpolitik of deliberative democracy, and illustrate how the evolution of democracy is already reshaping politics.

Beneath the national radar, the relationship between citizens and government is undergoing a dramatic shift. More than ever before, citizens are educated, skeptical, and capable of bringing the decision-making process to a sudden halt. Public officials and other leaders are tired of confrontation and desperate for resources. In order to address persistent challenges like education, race relations, crime prevention, land use planning, and economic development, communities have been forced to find new ways for people and public servants to work together.

The stories of civic experiments in this book can show us the realpolitik of deliberative democracy, and illustrate how the evolution of democracy is already reshaping politics.

Citizens expect their governments to lead on sustainability. But from largely disappointing international conferences like Rio II to the U.S.'s failure to pass meaningful climate legislation, governments' progress has been lackluster. That's not to say leadership is absent; it just often comes from the bottom up rather than the top down. Action--on climate, species loss, inequity, and other sustainability crises--is being driven by local, people's, women's, and grassroots movements around the world, often in opposition to the agendas pursued by governments and big corporations. These diverse efforts are the subject of the latest volume in the Worldwatch Institute's highly regarded State of the World series. The 2014 edition, marking the Institute's 40th anniversary, examines both barriers to responsible political and economic governance as well as gridlock-shattering new ideas. The authors analyze a variety of trends and proposals, including regional and local climate initiatives, the rise of benefit corporations and worker-owned firms, the need for energy democracy, the Internet's impact on sustainability, and the importance of eco-literacy. A consistent thread throughout the book is that informed and engaged citizens are key to better governance. The book is a clear-eyed yet ultimately optimistic assessment of citizens' ability to govern for sustainability. By highlighting both obstacles and opportunities, State of the World 2014 shows how to effect change within and beyond the halls of government. This volume will be especially useful for policymakers, environmental nonprofits, students of environmental studies, sustainability, or economics--and citizens looking to jumpstart significant change around the world.

Although the field of deliberative civic engagement is growing rapidly around the world, our knowledge and understanding of its practice and impacts remain highly fragmented. Democracy in Motion represents the first comprehensive attempt to assess the practice and impact of deliberative civic engagement. Organized in a series of chapters that address the big questions of deliberative civic engagement, it uses theory, research, and practice from around the world to explore what we know about, how we know it, and what remains to be understood. More than a simple summary of research, the book is designed to be accessible and useful to a wide variety of audiences, from scholars and practitioners working in numerous disciplines and fields, to public officials, activists, and average citizens who are seeking to utilize deliberative civic engagement in their communities. The book significantly enhances current scholarship, serving as a guide to existing research and identifying useful future research. It also has promise for enhancing practice, for example by helping practitioners, public officials, and others better think through and articulate issues of design and outcomes, thus enabling them to garner more support for public deliberation activities. In addition, by identifying what remains to be learned about public deliberation, practitioners and public officials may be inspired to connect with scholars to conduct research and evaluations of their efforts.