‘There is no alternative to free market liberalism and managerialism’, is the orthodoxy of the twenty-first century. All too often, ordinary people across the world are being told that the problem of organization is already solved, or that it is being solved somewhere else, or that it need not concern them because they have no choices. This dictionary provides those who disagree with the evidence.

Using hundreds of entries and cross-references, it proves that there are many alternatives to the way that we currently organize ourselves. These alternatives could be expressed as fictional utopias, they could be excavated from the past, or they could be described in terms of the contemporary politics of anti-corporate protest, environmentalism, feminism and localism

‘Don’t Owe! Won’t Pay!’, ‘Get Rid of them All!’, ‘No Patents on Life!’, ‘Food Sovereignty’, ‘Another World is Possible!’ … The struggles against corporate power and the institutions of globalization grow more courageous and confident year by year.

Millions of people have already become active in rejecting corporate globalization and developing alternatives to it. Millions more know that something is terribly wrong and are ready to begin taking action. This book is for them.

Amory Starr is author of Naming the Enemy, a book that foresaw the emergent anti-globalization network nearly a decade ago. Here she provides, in concise and engaging style and with activist insight:

The dawn of the twenty-first century has been accompanied by an upsurge of anti-capitalist campaigning, challenging the very basis of the New World Economic order. Dramatic events such as the protests from Seattle to Genoa, have captured media headlines. But media headlines leave key questions unanswered, questions about the ultimate significance of the challenges posed by global social movements and the development of civil society, both South and North.

By the turn of the century more than half the world’s population will live in urban areas. This rapid pace of urbanization is forcing a rethinking of development priorities, and this book explores some of those initiatives.

The book opens with an introduction to the issues of urban development, taking a human development perspective as its central theme. Best practice in sustainable human settlements around the world is explored through an analysis of the nature of diversity in the city, organizational and participative issues, and the question of gender.

This work looks at how contemporary global economic policies are made: by which institutions, under what ideologies, and how they are enforced. The author reveals the central roles played by organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank in supervising the livelihoods of over 2.5 billion people. He shows that neoliberal economic policy is enforced by a few thousand unelected and unaccountable experts in the North and has failed to deliver tolerable living conditions for the poor.

This book seeks to advance the emerging field of international poverty law. While law and development discourse has dealt with international poverty, advocates of poverty reduction customarily operate within a nation-state context. The contributors to this volume, while largely, although not exclusively, relying on human rights discourse and United Nations, International Labour Organization and World Trade Organization initiatives as their primary legal sources, begin to position international poverty law as a legitimate field for transnational, multidisciplinary legal research and dialogue. While critiquing both legal theory and current policy, they nevertheless open up a constructive prospect of specific arenas in which the development of international poverty law can contribute to addressing poverty reduction.

In Our Common Journey, Paul de Jongh proposes a new model of cooperative environmental management that brings together government, business, citizens, and activists to work out long-term deals for achieving a sustainable environment and economy. De Jongh’s model is based on lessons learned during his leadership of the Dutch National Environmental Policy Plan (NEPP). Now widely seen as the international standard in sustainable development planning, the NEPP is inspiring a more effective environmental policy approach around the world. Drawing on his twenty years of Dutch and international experience, De Jongh describes the five key elements of cooperative environmental management:

• integrating environmental responsibilities into society as a whole
• providing clear information
• recognizing policy as a process with many different actors playing critical roles
• framing the debate in terms acceptable to all participants

Has feminism transformed development studies? What happens to feminist theory and practice within the development industry?

This book brings together a variety of feminist ativists and academics, from both North and South, engaged in development, to answer these questions. Each describes her project and its feminist rationale, and analyses it through three fundamental challenges:

the problem of making a feminist agenda work within development agencies, including the difficulties of finding funding and the constraints imposed by funders;
the ethical and methodological issues raised by feminism – including the differences between women and the legitimacy of studying ‘the Other’;
the challenge of international feminism: looking for new ways to work together for global change without imposing ‘Western feminism’ on Southern women.

Including feminist projects from the ‘South in the North’, the book explores how ‘global feminism’ actually works in a variety of ways, through both activism and academic research. It is a fascinating insight into the challenges and rewards of feminist theory in practice. As such it is necessary readin…

Trade, along with the free movement of capital, is at the heart of today’s international economy. But international trade is an intensely political and contested subject. In this book, Greg Buckman details possible future directions in global energy supplies and balance-of-payments imbalances. He argues that, just as current trading arrangements have been the product of past decisions emerging out of apparently unrelated considerations, so factors like future fossil fuel costs, global warming, and the economic imbalances between North and South are likely to impel a radical reshaping of the WTO and the principles enshrined in its agreements as well as the global trading system in general.

A key contribution to thinking about possible trade policy reforms are the reforms and alternatives – themselves not always agreed or sufficiently thought through — advocated by the global justice movement. This book outlines these diverse proposals to make global trade more sustainable in some detail.

This book has been written to be both informative and empowering. It is an important contribution to clearer thinking, more effective campaigning, and fundamental policy reform in the field of international trade.

In an increasingly integrated, globalised world with new cross-border threats to health, widening disparities in both health and access to health care, and an unacceptable level of human suffering and premature mortality in developing countries, civil society actors are asking, why is so little progress being made by global health actors?

Like its critically acclaimed predecessor, the second edition of Global Health Watch covers a comprehensive range of topics, including access to medicines, mental health, water and sanitation, nutrition, and war and conflict. Unlike other reports on global health, it also draws attention to the politics of global health and the policies and actions of key actors.

Global Health Watch 2 includes chapters on the United States foreign assistance programme, the Gates Foundation, the World Bank, the World Health Organization and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS,Tuberculosis and Malaria.

The enormously complex changes triggered by the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe were nowhere more ambiguous than in the heartland of the Soviet bloc, Russia itself. Here the population was divided on all the most fundamental questions of post-communist transition: economic reforms, the Communist Party, the borders of the state, even the definition of the Russian ‘nation’ itself. Russians also faced plummeting living standards and chronic uncertainty. In a matter of months, Russia was apparently demoted from ‘evil empire’ to despondent poor relation of the prosperous West. Yet the country also seemed alarmingly open to all manner of political outcomes.

Russia deserves our attention now as much as ever, because it raises so many of the big questions about how societies operate in the modern world.