Headline: RIFS Blog January 2020

As part of a pilot project funded by the State of Berlin, the borough of Tempelhof-Schöneberg is currently experimenting with a new form of citizen participation: citizen councils. The IASS is supporting the process and helping to establish citizen councils as a permanent fixture in the locality.

On Berlin’s Karl-Marx-Allee a handful of parking spaces (173 to be exact) may soon be replaced by a green median. This has generated much public debate, with local politicians trading arguments on why these particular parking spaces are so worthy of protection. It seems that for some, parking spaces are still sacred cows.

In 2019 the public debate on climate change shifted markedly, yet little was achieved in terms of concrete action. What developments can we hope to see in the year ahead?

In December 2019, twenty-five experts from Germany, Austria and Switzerland gathered at the IASS in Potsdam to tackle an ambitious project: The development of a common statutory standard based on leading sustainability reporting standards.