Soon after its founding in 1990, the PCDForum received a request from InterAction, a consortium body of U.S. international relief and development nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that we provide a series of columns for its newsletter. We initiated the PCDForum Information Service on October 2, 1990 to produce and distribute articles and opinion pieces to a colleagues and cooperation publications to reproduct or reprint. Contributions came from members of the PCDForum’s Board of Contributing Editors and other colleagues from around the world.
The Donella Meadows Archive
Donella “Dana” Meadows was one of the most important thinkers and voices in the sustainability movement and a beloved friend and colleague. We are proud of the small role we played in helping make her ideas widely available.
The complete archive of Dana’s work is maintained by the Academy for Systems Change.
Reflecting our third world development history, during 1990 1991 and 1992 our focus was on exposing the flawed premises of conventional development wisdom regarding economic growth, foreign aid, trade, foreign investment, the Bretton Woods institutions, and related topics. Our offerings in 1993 reflected the transition in our focus on the failings of third world development to the failings of a corporate driven global economy.
An important goal of the Information Services was to strengthen the voices and legitimacy of what was then a small and often lonely band of heretics willing to accept the risk to their reputations and persons of challenging the legitimating ideology of development theories and practices that destroy people, communities, and nature–yet are embraced almost as religious dogma by those who head humanity’s most powerful institutions.
Our 1994 1995 1996 and 1997 offerings reflect our early thinking on the need for a deep restructuring of the global economy. We also introduced a collection of “Paradigm Warrior Profiles” on colleagues at the forefront of redefining the ruling development paradigm.
By 1997, the Forum’s once unconventional views had became defining ideas of a global movement that now aligns millions of people in a quest for alternatives to corporate globalization and its growth-at-all-costs vision of human progress. The PCDForum’s Board of Directors concluded that there was no longer a distinctive need for the PCDForum Information Service and it was discontinued to free resources for other initiatives.
The materials are of continuing relevance and are archived here by the year in which they were distributed. Except for items identified as from other published sources, these materials may be freely reprinted and reproduced without further permission.