Atlantic Magazine Article About the Clinton Foundation and Sustainable Cities
One of my former students, Sara Greenbaum, who works for the Clinton Foundation, pointed me to a recent issue of Atlantic monthly magazine that has a great story about the Foundation. The story is called "This is Not Charity?" by Jonathan Roush (October 2007), and describes a fairly new way of thinking about the intervention of the nonprofit or NGO sector in affecting market forces (see www.theatlantic.com). To put it succinctly, the philosophy is about finding ways of aggregating otherwise dispersed or under-developed demand for what Bill Clinton calls "social goods and services" that can and would be provided by the private sector. Since one of the major social goods areas that the foundation is interested in is climate change, it has gotten involved in the sustainable cities and climate change activities of specific cities (see my May 17, 2007 posting for more information about this).
Read the article and let me know what you think about the prospects for defining a broad sustainable cities strategy around this type of philosophy. Where could it work? Where would it have difficulty? Are there areas where governments would have to play a significant or even a lead role? This is a discussion whose time has come.
