Ian Christie is a writer, researcher and local government policymaker. He was joint head of environmental and economic policy at Surrey County Council.
In the first decade of the 21st century there were fears that the post-1989 surge of democratisation had ended and could go into reverse. Now, in 2050, forms of open
I admire Anthony's superb post-election essay on The End of Thatcherism. Some of the thoughts it prompts are these.
1) None of the parties won the election, but
The United Nations climate-change summit is a vital moment in the world’s effort to avert catastrophe. openDemocracy authors reflect on what needs to happen and how much Copenhagen can achieve.
The drowning of New Orleans is a disaster that will scar bodies, minds and landscape for many years to come. Like the Asian tsunami of December 2004, it has transfixed
Few things in life are more fundamental than the food on our plates or the lack of it. Food is associated with family, with celebration, with guilt and shame, and
Michael Lind’s fine article in the April 2003 issue of Prospect magazine sees the diplomatic debacle in the western alliance and the EU over Iraq as far more than
When working at the Henley Centre for Forecasting in the mid-1990s I developed a set of three scenarios based on an analysis of changing values and political faultlines. All three
The hyper-motorway is coming. Just as Ken Worpole inaugurated openDemocracy's transport debate on the virtues of walking and the vices of what John Adams calls hypermobility, officials at
In 1947 George Orwell published an essay entitled Towards European Unity. In it he surveyed the bleak state of the post-war world, in which the advent of nuclear arms, the
Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) have been one of the success stories of civil society and democracy for two decades. They have brought together issues of social justice, the environment and sustainability.
