Mega-infrastructure plans and financing and investment policies to promote private investments in the energy, transport and water sectors are on the rise. This publication provides recommendations to policy- and decision-makers on how human rights and environmental benefits can be maximized.

Media images of desperate African refugees fleeing to Europe dominate the European news. This edition will help to shed new light on aspects of the movement of African migrants that have remained on the margins of discussion, and to place the pressures experienced in Europe within a broader perspective.

This report is being issued as  an alert to governments, civil society organisations and grassroots movements. It points to how gene drives, while promoted as a tool for medicine and conservation, will find their real use in food and farming by agribusiness.

The instruments of bi- and multilateral nuclear disarmament and arms control are in a state of despair. Under the label of N.EX.T. (Nuclear Expert Talks), fifteen scholars from Europe, Russia, and the United States gathered in Berlin in November 2016 to discuss the current state of disarmament and arms control.

Climate change mitigation scenarios are important instruments for developing pathways towards a climate-friendly world. This short study shows that neither the use of CDR technologies is as indispensable as shown in the scenarios, nor is an overshoot unavoidable.

Limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial is feasible. This publication is a civil society response to the challenge of limiting global warming to 1.5°C while also paving the way for climate justice.

The conflicts, social and political turmoils we have witnessed in the western Balkans in the last three decades were, in the minds of many leaders and participants, centred around collective identities whose differences allegedly could not be settled in a nonviolent way. And still, more then 20 years after the wars, patriarchal, homophobic and exclusive tendencies are dominating in the region, shaping a climate of intolerance, of exclusion, of the radical negation of all things humane and rational.

This issue of Perspectives is dedicated to climate change mitigation in the Western Balkans, because of both the global need to limit global warming but also because mitigating climate change, as the articles show, goes hand in hand with development both in terms of economic growth and in terms of health, wellbeing and societal development. With this context in mind, the articles before you shed light upon some of the commonly overlooked aspects of it but also point to solutions which are good starting points for any future changes in how we think of energy, development, and public good more broadly

On this issue of Perspectives, you will find stories written by citizens in the true meaning of that word. They describe what the “right for the city” means to them. Why they perceive their activism as fighting for a common rather than an individual right, and why they choose to fight for one of the most precious yet most neglected of human rights. Reading them, one learns also much about the perfidious ways those in power limit people’s right to the city.

The Alliance 90/The Greens Party has succeeded in taking over governmental responsibility in the majority of the 16 federal states. In this study the political scientist, Arne Jungjohann, has analysed Green government participation of previous years.