WORLD WIDE VIEWS ON BIODIVERSITY

On Saturday September 15th 2012, thousands of people around the world took part in a global event: “World Wide Views on Biodiversity”. It engaged ordinary citizens in as many countries as possible in the process of making policies to address the decline of biodiversity. About a hundred citizens in each of the 25 participating countries attended day-long meetings to learn about biodiversity issues, make up their minds about them, and express their views. They all voted on a set of predefined questions. The results of the World Wide Views survey were explained to policy makers at the United Nations COP11 meeting in Hyderabad, India, in October 2012.

As policy making becomes global in scale, new tools are needed in order to include and engage citizens worldwide in the political processes. The challenge is to close a widening democratic gap between policymakers and citizens and thereby increase the citizen’s sense of ownership to decisions made about current global issues.

Unlike traditional opinion polls, the WWViews method offers participating citizens extensive information on a complex subject, as well as time for face-to-face deliberation, before the questions are answered by each participant individually. Therefore the WWViews method facilities the opinion making process and ensures more qualified and well-considered answers from the participants.

The World Wide Views 2013 iteration on Biodiversity was sponsored by the VILLUM Foundation and the Danish Ministry of the Environment – to find out more about the project, including results, go to biodiversity.wwviews.org