Headline: RIFS Blog

The BMBF-funded accompanying research project "Social Transformation and Policy Advice in Lusatia" at the IASS is coming to an end after almost four years. In seven theses, we spotlight some of the findings from our research in this stormy field.

The debate on “Kiezblocks” (similar to the concept of low-traffic neighbourhoods) in Berlin has so far been driven by civil society. Now, the engagement of more than fifty of them has got the new red-red-green government coalition in Berlin to anchor Kiezblocks in their coalition agreement. Even researchers and the public administration are starting to take the idea seriously. But how does an idea go from a demand to a democratically taken decision, and then to implementation? Are these processes a symbol of participative urban planning, or is their being taken up in the coalition agreement instead a top-down government programme? Does it even matter? In this blog post, we hope to shed some light on these questions.

If there’s one thing that we can all agree on, it’s the need for greater citizen participation – especially when it comes to protecting the climate. But how can we make participation work?

The SPD's success in the Bundestag elections is surprising, even though the polls predicted this outcome in the days and weeks leading up to the election. In July, polls by infratest-dimap and the Elections Research Group suggested that the SPD could win as little as 15-16 percent of the vote and a neck-and-neck race between the CDU/CSU and the Greens seemed likely. But things turned out differently, and now the Social Democrats are the victors, even though the SPD's 25 percent win is a far cry from the results returned by previous SPD chancellors.

On 29 April 2021, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court handed down a truly historic judgement when a complaint filed by nine young people against the Federal Climate Change Act (2019) (Bundes-Klimaschutzgesetz – KSG) met with partial success, with the court ruling that some of the provisions of the Act are incompatible with the fundamental rights of youth especially.

The world watched with astonishment and horror at the violence unfolding in and around the Capitol as Congress convened to confirm the results of the United States' presidential election. How is it possible, one wonders, that a country whose traditions of democratic government span more than two hundred and thirty years could fall prey to such chaos?

As part of a pilot project funded by the State of Berlin, the borough of Tempelhof-Schöneberg is currently experimenting with a new form of citizen participation: citizen councils. The IASS is supporting the process and helping to establish citizen councils as a permanent fixture in the locality.

On Berlin’s Karl-Marx-Allee a handful of parking spaces (173 to be exact) may soon be replaced by a green median. This has generated much public debate, with local politicians trading arguments on why these particular parking spaces are so worthy of protection. It seems that for some, parking spaces are still sacred cows.