Joint Brazil-China-Mexico Session
The Challenges of Social -Environmental governance
November 21-27, 2003
Bras¨ªlia and Piren¨®polis - Brazil

Preparatory Activities

We are pleased to invite you to participate in some preparatory activities for the LEAD Session "The Challenges of Social-Environmental Governance". The purposes of the activities are to:
¡¤ Promote information-sharing processes on the themes of the Session
¡¤ Generate ideas and insights to help participants to prepare the member program presentations to be presented during the training session
¡¤ Encourage icebreaking, creating opportunities for participants to introduce themselves and interact with each other
¡¤ Encourage communication and interaction among the participants from the different countries
¡¤ Create conditions for networking and cooperation
¡¤ Produce a joint homepage about the Session, using a weblog

The proposed preparatory activities are:

1 - Member Program Presentations

The aim is to compare and enhance the knowledge of each group on governance and the institutional forms of managing environmental policy in each participant country.
The countries will make presentations on the subject of SOCIAL-ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE. We are, therefore, suggesting some questions which may serve as guidelines in preparing the presentations.
Suggested guidelines of questions on each country's presentation:
1- What does your group understand by governance and what are the elements which make up this concept? What are the main issues surrounding governance in your country today?
2- Which authorities are responsible for social-environmental governance, considering the different levels of government (local, regional, provincial, national) and the various social agents?
3- What environmental policy instruments are used in your country and how important are these instruments for environmental governance? To what degree do they serve as indicators for general governance?
4- Present some practical examples of environmental governance that may bring innovatory suggestions or highlight problems to be avoided. For example: environmental protection areas and the participation mechanisms of the federation states in public policies.
The group from each country will have an hour to make its presentation (including time for discussion) and may use resources such as a slide show (PowerPoint), transparencies (projector) and videotape. We recommend that the groups bring material to complement their presentation, such as maps and publications. There will be space available throughout the Session for the countries to display the material they wish to disseminate.

2 - Distance Activities

2.1 - Ice Breaker
The aim is to provide opportunities for participants to contact colleagues from other countries by e-mail during the next two weeks and answer the following questions:
1 - Who are you? (Talk about your professional and personal life)
2 - What are you expecting from the Session?
3 - Do you have anything to say about the last national regional session in your country?
To launch the event, we have organized the participants into 9 groups and assigned the role of facilitators to Brazilians, who should encourage the other participants to answer the suggested questions. The proposed groups are listed here.

2.2 - 2 - Joint Blog
During this event we would like to encourage the participants to share thoughts, impressions and ideas with the group by publishing news, articles and photos directly on the Internet, using a simple, easy tool called BLOG.
Blog is short for web log, and consists of regular news, links and photos posted chronologically on a website. A Blog is a very easy way of publishing content online and has recently been recognized as a cooperative web tool for disseminating information and supporting cooperative activities.
Our proposal is to develop a joint Blog involving all participants, publishing and commenting on news and images related to the themes of the Session and the reality of each country. As a participant, you can publish messages, for instance, on your expectations of the Session, stories or pictures from your country, comments on its environmental, social and economic problems, as well as curiosities etc.
We believe everybody will find the blogging process a relaxed, pleasant and interesting activity that will result in a collective product that will be useful before and during the Session. As you will see, blogs can be a powerful means of communication and sharing experiences with LEAD community or even with a broader audience, such as colleagues and acquaintances. This was the experience of Brazilian associates during the Mexico International Session on the web (http://www.leadbrasil.blogger.com.br/ ).
To start blogging you just need to:
1 - Join the Blog
Click on the invitation link on the Email we sent you to join the Blog
If you already have a Blogger account, you can join the blog immediately
If you do not have a Blogger account, click on the link and create a blogger account entering username, e-mail and password
Join the LEAD Join Session Blog by accepting the invitation sent by Email.
(You can find online support to post on blogs on (http://help.blogger.com/bin/topic.py?topic=16)
2 - Posting messages
To access the blogger editing screen and start posting you need to log in the Lead Joint Session Blog by clicking on the log in the box that appears on the blogger homepage (www.blogger.com) or clicking on the Blogger logo that appear s on the blog homepage (http://leadjointsession.blogspot.com/)
On the blog editing screen you can create new posts, find and edit old posts, and publish your blog. If you want to post an image just use the "upload file" link and select the image you want to post.
(You can find online support to post blogs on http://help.blogger.com/bin/topic.py?topic=17)
The address of our Blog is http://leadjointsession.blogspot.com/