Josep Xercavins

Josep Xercavins I Valls is a professor at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC). From 1995 to 2002, he served as the first director of the UPC’s UNESCO Chair in Technology, Sustainable Development, Imbalances and Global Change and the first academic director of the Master’s Degree in Sustainability and the Interdepartmental Doctorate Program in Sustainability, Technology, and Humanism. From 2000 to 2009, he served as the first director of the UBUNTU initiative (World Forum of Civil Society Networks), whose main project was a global campaign for in-depth reform of international institutions. In 2010, he helped to create the World Democratic Governance project association (WDGpa), now the Catalan Associated Organization of the World Federalist Movement. He received a degree in physics from the UPC in 1979 and a Doctorate in Sciences in 1999.

GTI Contributions

Perspectives

We the People of Earth: Toward Global Democracy

May 2010

We confront daunting twenty-first century challenges hobbled by twentieth century institutions. In a world ever more interdependent, deepening global-scale risks—climate change, financial instability, terrorism, to name a few—threaten the planetary commonweal, even the continuity of civilization. Yet coherent and timely responses lie beyond the grasp of our myopic and disputatious state-centric political order. Closing this perilous gap between obsolete geo-politics and emerging geo-realities delineates an urgent political endeavor: constructing a legitimate and effective system of world governance. Key steps on that path involve reforming the United Nations and nurturing new venues for the meaningful exercise of global citizenship.