E3G

Keynote Address to European Environmental Bureau

By Chris Littlecott

On Friday 22nd September, E3G Chief Executive Nick Mabey delivered the keynote speech to the annual conference of the European Environment Bureau. The speech, entitled ‘Europe’s continued prosperity requires leadership on sustainable development’ draws on Nick Mabey’s earlier paper ‘Elements of a new economic narrative’.

A pdf version of the speech, together with a copy of the EEB annual conference agenda, are attached. The text of Nick Mabey’s speech follows below.

Good morning ladies and gentlemen.

Firstly, I would like to thank John Hontelez and the EEB for inviting me to give this keynote address. It is both a great honour and a rather daunting prospect given the distinguished and highly knowledgeable audience I see in front of me.

Before I start I thought it would be useful to give a brief introduction to E3G – Third Generation Environmentalism – and to myself, as we are both newcomers on the Brussels environmental scene.

E3G is a relatively new organisation co-founded by myself, Tom Burke – formerly on the executive committee of EEB - and John Ashton who is currently on secondment to the UK government as their first climate change ambassador.

We don’t like to tie E3G down to one definition, because it is still evolving as an idea and organisation. But when pressed we call ourselves “change agents for sustainable development” or sometimes “entrepreneurial diplomats”. The focus of our work is to accelerate the transition to sustainable development. We do this by catalysing specific agreements between organisations who share our aims in all sectors: governments, businesses, NGOs and academia.

My own history exemplifies this cross-sectoral focus. I have worked in the energy industry, academia, the NGO sector and the UK government. I sometimes refer to this varied past as the “Zen approach to career planning” - though others have suggested I am just rather confused! Despite appearances there is a unifying theme to my personal journey. It has been an attempt to understand how decisions and changes actually happen to deliver the sustainable development objectives.

My last role before joining E3G in January this year was working in Tony Blair’s long-term strategy unit. This gave me a privileged top-down view of how political change works – or fails – across a range of critical sustainable development areas from fisheries to climate change to conflict prevention.

This experience strengthened my view that achieving sustainable development will take profound changes in our political, cultural, organisational and economic systems, and we currently have far less ability to drive this change than we will need.
This experience at the heart of the UK government also confirmed my view that Europe and the European Union is the essential global actor in achieving sustainable development.

Finally by way of a rather long introduction I must thank the range of politicians, policy makers and experts across Europe who have discussed, debated and helped develop these ideas over the last 18 months. E3G always aims to develop propositions through a process of engagement with the political and policy world, as we find this the best way to ensure relevance and rigour in our work.

I hope you will feel the same after I have finished speaking!