Second GreenWin-TARA workshop in Delhi a success!
WP7 India Workshop II
On April 19th 2017, the Autonomous University of Barcelona together with TARA (Technology and Action for Rural Advancement) and Development Alternatives met at their world headquarters in New Delhi for Second National GreenWin Workshop on Win-Win Solutions and green business models. The building itself - a cutting edge prototype that showcases environmentally and economically sound solutions for reducing carbon footprint of construction - embodied the very message that day. Check DA work at DEVALT website.
The goal of the workshop was to develop new forms of collaboration to learn and support integrated solution-oriented approaches able to link climate actions -delivering immediate gains to users or providers- with sustainability goals in the Indian context.
Thanks to Dr. Ashok Koshla, and with the great support of Manisha Mishra and Arpita Goyal, a total of 7 speakers joined an active audience of 42 participants from 35 institutions on green business models already set in motion in rural India. The talks also included the ample experience and insights of TARA’s Vice Presidents and CEOs Zeenat Niazi and George Varughese, as well as Eva Majurin (Specialist on Enterprise Development of the International Labour Organisation, Chana Chatterjee (National Coordinator, International Union for Conservation of Nature) Vaibhav Rathi (TARA Environment Manager) and Karthik Chandrasekar (Founder & CEO, Sangam Ventures).
An important part of the workshop was devoted at looking at the role of win-win solutions in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals. The workshop looked at how to create market green products and services at community level with new forms of green entrepreneurship with a focus on poverty alleviation and improving resilient livelihood.The role of improving capacities leading to Climate Resilience, especially in the context of accelerated warming of some regions in India was underlined.
At the end of the workshop a participative exercise was carried out brainstorming further ideas of attendees on existing cases and win-win solutions already being developed in India. Among of the initiatives and people attending included also CKinetics-Accelerating Sustainability.
A very engaged audience allowed to sharpen our understanding on the opportunities and how to overcome barriers to green businesses and win-win solutions in India. A recurrent plea from the audience was ‘not to waste the waste!’.
Researchers visited various sites in the development of renewable energy in Bihar to investigate the enabling conditions under which renewable energy transforms rural communities into resilient ones. We hope that the lessons learned will enable the replication of the impressive transformations witnessed to other communities for a greener and more resilient world.
Based on the insights gained during this workshops and fieldtrips in India, Indonesia and South Africa, J. David Tàbara and the whole GreenWin WP7 team are now operationalising and further identifying the requirements to implement a possible ‘Restorative Economy’ (RE). That is, economic activities and solutions which do not only aim to doing less harm, but mostly, which contribute to restorind social, natural and economic capitals and to create a different kinds of transformative interactions between economic agents with the broader social-ecological systems. We hope to construct a robust narrative on RE and produce several knowledge products which should be useful to policy makers and community practitioners.