EU

In September 2015, 164 classes totalling 4 000 high school students participated in a half-year contest by Bankwatch member group MTVSZ culminating in December’s final event, where the top ten teams from around the country helped close the 2015 European Year of Development.

A Bankwatch film about Ukraine's nuclear sector and the controversial European public funding for it was premiered at the One World film festival in Slovakia.

Mega infrastructure projects are imposed in the North an in the South of the world in the name of progress and “development”. But what does development mean today?

Experiences of resistance to mega-projects have in some cases allowed to create new processes oriented at “building community”. What are such processes and how do they look like?

At an open assembly taking place in Avigliana, Italy on 29 November 2015 people who have made such experience will meet and collectively think about the meaning of building community.

Inspired by the toxic tours in Mexico, Ecuador and the United States, the Catalan organisation ODG organised the tour VOLT II, challenging large energy infrastructure that followed the fantastic experience of the Volt Oligotòxic in Catalonia in 2014.

by Alfons Pérez, Observatorio de la Deuda en la Globalización (ODG)

Now that the Sustainable Development Goals have been adopted by the United Nations, their implementation has to be discussed in depth and at a country level. Bankwatch member group Latvian Green Movement therefore organised a high level discussion about goal no. 10, inequality on 20 October 2015. The main task of the event was to find a starting point by identifying existing Latvian policies in the field of inequality reduction within and among countries.

Slovakia’s official stance in the upcoming climate negotiations in Paris Climate Summit is no progressive one. An argument often heard is that a small country like Slovakia plays only a little role. The handful of coal plants in Slovakia cannot “compete” with the CO2 emissions of economic giants like the United States or China. And we do not significantly contribute to migration caused by climate impacts. But that is not true.