CITIZENS AND GOVERNANCE FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT CIGSUD 2006 http://www.mii.lt/CIGSUD It is widely acknowledged that sustainable development requires economic, environmental and social policies to be designed and implemented in a mutually reinforcing way. This implies in a need for a new management thinking to improve policy coherence and increase the role of knowledge in the formulation and implementation of policies as well as better communication with society and businesses. The sustainable development dimension should not be conceived as an additional requirement but as overarching principle, which governs the development processes. These issues and many others will be discussed at CIGSUD 2006, which provides a forum for researchers, politicians and the public and business sectors to encourage the integration of economics, ecology, management and social policies into interdisciplinary approaches towards a more sustainable world. The Conference will be held in Vilnius, Lithuania, on 28-30 September 2006. It is organised by the Baltic Environmental Information Dissemination System (BEIDS), National Commission on Sustainable Development of Lithuania (NCSDL), Mykolas Romeris University, Institute of Mathematics and Informatics and Vilnius Gediminas Technical University. It is supported by the European Reference Point for Technology Transfer for Sustainable Development (ERP, http://www.tutech.de/sd) and the Interreg IIIB Project "Castles of Tomorrow" (http://www.castletomorrow.net/). The aim of the conference is to encourage and facilitate interdisciplinary communication on sustainability issues as they relate to governance and citizenship. Specific research areas to be considered in the conference therefore include ecological modelling, ecological limits to growth, climate change, biodiversity, valuation of natural capital, and eco-tax reform as well as knowledge based policies, cross-sectional and multi-level co-ordination and participatory decision-making. CIGSUD 2006 continues discussing the issues of Vilnius Conferences on Sustainable Development (www.mii.lt/SDIS, www.mii.lt/SIID-2003). CIGSUD 2006 will give an opportunity for an efficient dialogue between the various groups working with related aspects of governance and sustainable development. Some of the topics of the event are: - Development of governance patterns to achieve sustainable development; - Mobilizing citizens and business for sustainable development; - Education for sustainable development; - Information communication technologies for sustainable development; - New approaches for risk management, "unsustainability" recognition; - Intelligent decision support systems in assessing sustainable development; - Globalization and cultural identity issues; - Changes of values towards sustainable development. Contributions on other topics of sustainability theory and practice are also welcome. The Conference Proceedings will be published in the award-winning book Series "Environmental Education, Communication and Sustainability", printed by Peter Lang Scientific Publishers in Germany. The guidelines for papers and an on-line system for registration and abstracts submission are available at: http://www.mii.lt/CIGSUD.
Prof Walter Leal, TuTech Innovation, Harburger Schlossstrasse 6-10, D-21079 Hamburg, Germany.
