I am in my house in Norway. I intend to enjoy the silence and loneliness, filling my nostrils with the smells from the pine and birch trees, and visiting the lake to see if some of the trout will swallow the colorful flies. But I will also share some of my thoughts with you, through a daily update....
During my years with the Danish Institute for Parties and Democracy (DIPD), one of the very intersting partners was the Bhutan Centre for Media and Democracy. BCMD was one of the first genuinely independent and outspoken civil society organisations established in Bhutan in 2008, when the small Kingdom in the Himalayas embarked on a journey of democratic transition, making it the youngest democracy of its time. When DIPD started to work in Bhutan in 2011, BCMD was an obvious choice for a...
The website of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is a good place to start for anyone interested in democracy support in particular. Carnegie offers a unique global network of policy research centers in Russia, China, Europe, the Middle East, India, and the United States....
The Bhutan Network for Empowering Women - BNEW - has been established as an outcome of the first-ever National consultation of elected women representatives organized in March 2012, and with support from DIPD....
The daily newspaper 'Information' has published 25 innovative models of how citizens "take back their world" - one of them is about the culture of coastal fishing. This offer a more productive view of Denmark than the superficial reference to 'the happiest people in the world'....
My experience is that the political and legal environment in which CSOs operate is of critical importance, both for the quality of democracy in general, but also for the delivery of services to the poor. Please read this new book on how bad things are!...
NO, secret money does NOT play the same role in Denmark as we see in many other countries. But this does not imply that Denmark is in the front regarding openness, transparency, regulation, clarity and honesty in the field of political party funding....
IWGIA - International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs - supports indigenous peoples' struggle for human rights, self-determination, right to territory, control of land and resources, cultural integrity, and the right to development....
For those interested in the development of democracy both in the short-term and in the much longer-term, what is called the V-Dem Institute website at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden is a must. ...
The V-Dem website offers a database of 177 countries, 117 years and more than 350 indicators, as well as 52 indices measuring varying aspects of democracy - a truly unique insight into the state of global democracy....