TNI is mourning the terrible news that our beautiful, bubbly, funny, quirky, creative, smart and perceptive 'web gardener' Tessa Kersten-Zenger passed away on Saturday, February 17. She had turned just 43 years old the week before and was celebrating with a family weekend away when she died suddenly following an accident.

Bertha Zúñiga Cáceres talks about how her mother's example and a belief that ancestors continue to accompany our struggles helps her and the indigenous movement in Honduras to continue to mobilise against injustice, state violence and corporate abuses.

Medha Patkar of the National Peoples' Alliance shares her thoughts on how to build powerful movements based on three decades of campaigning in India against mega-dams and other forms of unsustainable and exploitative development.

Nonhle Mbuthuma talks about the resilience of her people in Pondoland, fighting for their land and livelihoods against corporate mining interests.

Transnational Institute (TNI) is launching the Transformative Cities Initiative in 2017. The initiative draws on the emerging wave of transformative political practices taking place at municipal level worldwide, by launching a unique award process that will ensure that the lessons and inspiration of these cities becomes viral.

Transformative Cities is an opportunity for progressive local governments, municipalist coalitions, social movements and civil society organizations to popularize and share their experiences of tackling and finding solutions to our planet’s systemic economic, social, political and ecological crisis.

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) trade deal under negotiation between 16 Asian countries would grant corporations exclusive rights to sue governments at international tribunals. This report reveals that investors have launched 50 lawsuits at secret international arbitration tribunals against governments negotiating the RCEP agreement for a total of at least $31 billion US dollars. These lawsuits provide a warning of the potential high costs of the proposed RCEP trade deal. RCEP will deepen the rights of investors and lock in place this system of privatised justice.

The European Union’s approach to bioenergy is shaped by contradictory policies. Climate concerns are highlighted in public discourse and assure broad public support for renewable energy, including bioenergy. Meanwhile, however, the EU’s corporate growth and trade agenda promotes the use of energy that actually increases the EU’s footprint on land elsewhere, with significant implications for environmental and social justice.

Europe’s young and aspiring farmers will face increasing barriers to entry as land is rapidly concentrated in relatively few big farms. Land is even more unevenly distributed than wealth. A steep decline in Europe’s small farms is underway with damaging consequences for food security, employment, and development.

Communities of small scale food producers are increasingly confronted by the grabbing of natural resources and systematic violations of human rights.

The UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on drugs – held in New York in April 2016 – was hailed as an opportunity for the international community ‘to conduct a wide-ranging and open debate that considers all options’. Although the UNGASS was characterised by many shortcomings and disappointments, it was nonetheless a critical moment for global drug policy reform.

For nearly two years, people in Lagos, Nigeria have been mobilizing to demand a public water system that delivers clean, safe water to all residents. Today, we’re thrilled to announce the next step in the campaign: the release of “Lagos Water Crisis: Alternative roadmap for water sector.” This book lays out a vision for how the city can solve its water crisis, with specific recommendations and action steps for the Lagos government.

This new report shows how the 'rights-based approach' to fisheries governance is in fact a mechanism for depriving indigenous and subsistence fisherfolk of their traditional waters and transferring them to corporations and economic elites. It must be replaced with a human rights approach.

The new publication ‘Connecting Smallholders to Markets’ supports advocacy efforts by social movements on market issues by making the recommendations adopted at the Committee on World Food Security more understandable and accessible.

Armed drones have created a top-down view of the world, in which military officials and politicians assert an ideology of inherent superiority over subjugated, racialised people — or even dehumanised non-people — far beneath the  drone's gaze. But as the technology becomes cheaper and accessible, activists are starting to use drones to turn the gaze back on the oppressors.

The voices of affected communities involved in the cultivation of coca leaf, opium poppy and cannabis plants are lacking in the global debate on drug policy reform in general and were at risk of being excluded from the United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) 2016 on The World Drug Problem.

The Treaty Alliance, an alliance of committed networks and campaign groups from around the world, is in Geneva for advocacy activities in support of a binding international instrument to address human rights abuses committed by transnational corporations and other business enterprise