Achievements and Highlights

One of the key components of sustainable development is a conscious consideration of the needs of future generations. We have found that by far the best way to engage young people is to give them the opportunity to work on the issues with international leaders in the field. Through the Young Canadian Leaders for a Sustainable Future program, IISD has placed 219 young interns—including 34 in 2003–04—in exciting sustainable development positions around the world. We continue to be in touch with about 80 per cent of our interns, watching their progress as they take on increasing levels of responsibility and influence within governments, international agencies and business. Some are forming new relationships with IISD as Associates working on our projects. Click here for more information.

We have begun to expand our training work to include young professionals from other Arctic countries, South Africa and Brazil. Our advice on the development of training programs has been requested by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the Arctic Council, NetCorps Canada/International and others. Through our work with IFC, we have developed a new model for the delivery of training to young professionals in emerging markets, involving a combination of distance education and fellowships to study abroad. We hope to move into a pilot program with this model, with both IFC and the Arctic Council this coming year.

IISD'S Knowledge Communications team continues to work toward establishing networks as effective models for sustainable development policy development and implementation. Most network practitioners now acknowledge that working collaboratively has real transaction costs, and is not necessarily either more cost effective or time saving. Our book, Strategic Intentions, remains one of the few publications about effectively establishing and managing networks. However, major operational issues need more attention: planning and monitoring; communications and influencing strategies; internal governance; and external transparency and accountability. We are currently working on these issues with a number of important players in this field: the Global Public Policy Institute, the Global Action Networks Net, IUCN, IDRC and the Global Knowledge Partnership. Click here for more information

"Through the Young Canadian Leaders for a Sustainable Future program, IISD has placed 219 young interns—including 34 in 2003/04—in exciting sustainable development positions around the world."

In 2003-2004, IISD continued to support the involvement of young people in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Declaration of Principles and Action Plan. Through partnerships with TakingITGlobal (TIG) and the Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP), more than 70,000 young people from around the world became involved at the national, regional, or international level in deliberations and activities about the information society. These activities resulted in the inclusion of the strongest paragraph on youth to ever be included in a nonyouth related UN declaration (see Article 11 of the WSIS Declaration of Principles, available at http://www.itu.int/wsis/). At the Geneva Summit in December 2003, IISD staff presented 12 youth projects with the inaugural GKP Youth Award recognizing outstanding accomplishment in using information and communication technologies to achieve more sustainable development. With more than 1,600 young people now involved in the Youth Creating Digital Opportunities (YCDO) Community, we are only at the beginning of seeing the potential impact of youth-led ICT-powered development.

Aside from the specific project work outlined above, Knowledge Communications works with all of IISD's programs to increase IISD's impact and effectiveness, and to help other organizations move the sustainable development agenda forward. We do this by researching and experimenting with new communications and partnership approaches and by helping IISD program staff to influence those in positions to effect change, through planning targeted communications strategies; tracking our key relationships with decisionmakers and influencers; delivering the Institute's knowledge products; and engaging the media.