Nicanor Perlas
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Nicanor Perlas is President, Center for Alternative Development Initiatives (www.cadi.ph), a think tank and technical assistance group based in Metro Manila, Philippines. He is also Co-Founder and Training Facilitator of PAG-ASA, a national spiritual-cultural movement active in creating a better Philippines. He chairs the Board of Directors of Lifebank, which together with Lifebank Foundation, provides financial support for the business initiatives of close to 80,000 (100,000 plus by end of 2007) micro-entrepreneurs among the urban and rural economically poor. He is co-founder and co-spokesperson of Karangalan, a series of national conferences highlighting important global and national innovations and achievements by Filipinos in many disciplines and fields. Karangalan aims to stimulate the creation of a visionary Philippines. He also co-founded the Global Network for Social Three-folding (Globenet3 or GN3) (www.globenet3.org), with more than 17 geographic and functional nodes in over 12 countries in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the United States of America. GN3 advances profound societal transformation towards integral sustainable development on the basis of socially-engaged spirituality and deep, substantive inner change. He also co-founded the Philippine Advancement and Renewal thru Threefolding Networking, Research & Service (PARTNERS), the Philippine node for GlobeNet3.
Mr. Perlas has written over 300 articles, editorials, monographs and books on a range of topics including spiritual science, globalization, societal threefolding, conscious evolution, civil society, multiple intelligence, creativity, cultural power, philosophy of science and biology, technological singularity, sustainable agriculture, appreciative inquiry, neurophysiology and consciousness, good governance, new politics, associative economics, and the integration of inner change and large-scale societal transformation, among others. His book, Shaping Globalization: Civil Society, Cultural Power, and Threefolding, translated in 9 languages, reached more than 12,000 readers around the world. He is Editor-in-Chief of and editorial writer for TruthForce! (www.truthforce.info), a national and global Internet-based news and analysis service, reaching thousands of subscribers and readers in over 60 countries. He was one of two technical writers of Philippine Agenda 21, the official blueprint for sustainable development in the Philippines and the technical writer of SIAD: Framework for the Localization of Philippine Agenda 21, now used by a number of local governments and civil society organizations to advance sustainable integrated area development in towns.
As a technical writer and key formulator of Philippine Agenda 21, as well as Co-Chair for Civil Society of the Philippine Council for Sustainable Development, Office of the President of the Philippines, he was invited to attend several UN meetings including the UN General Assembly on Sustainable Development (UNGASS) and the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, 6th Session, as Technical Adviser to the Philippine Delegation to the UN.
In addition to his writings and his extensive appearances in tri-media including many TV programs, Mr. Perlas has conducted hundreds of training sessions in the Philippines and abroad on a wide range of topics convergent with his writings above. In this context he has innovated and developed a new framework for advancing integral sustainable development through the harmonious weaving together of profound inner change and radical but peaceful societal transformation. He calls this new framework the Lemniscate Process, a framework that integrates all the subject areas he has covered in his writings and talks. Using this framework, Mr. Perlas integrates the substance of more than two dozen disciplines and fields, all geared towards unlocking human creativity, enthusiasm and commitment for creating a better world. He uses this framework in his training activities in the Philippines and globally. Among other venues, he gives in-depth theoretical and practical elaborations of the Lemniscate Process at the accredited Doctoral Program on Applied Cosmic Anthropology of the Asian Social Institute where he serves as a Professor and at the various training programs of the Gamot Cogon Institute (GCI) based in Iloilo, Philippines. Mr. Perlas is a board member of GCI and a resource person for its training programs.
Mr. Perlas has been keynote speaker in over 70 global conferences and events in over 20 countries on 5 continents and over 120 national conferences in the Philippines. He has provided consultancy work for several UN agencies, donor agencies and foundations, global civil society networks and organizations as well as many other business, government including the Philippine Senate, and civil society institutions. In addition to his wide-ranging speaking engagements globally, he served as a member of the Commission on Globalization established by Mikhail Gorbachev and a Creative Member of the Club of Budapest and was Co-Founder and Board Member of the Global Leadership Initiative, www.theglobalinstitute.org.
The speaking substance, writings and training approaches of Mr. Perlas are based on almost 40 years of active engagement in various efforts to create a better world. In his university days, Mr. Perlas was one of the key organizers of a university-wide education reform movement that resulted in changes in university policies. It was also during this time that he founded the first ecological society in the Philippines.
After graduation, he co-organized a successful large-scale global campaign, the first of its kind during his time, to halt 12 nuclear plants in the Philippines. He subsequently become a Technical Adviser to the Presidential Commission on the Philippine Nuclear Power Plant, Office of the President of the Philippines, where he was instrumental in stopping the operation of the fully constructed and operational Bataan Nuclear Power Plant, a $2.2 billion project plagued with design, construction, location, and corruption problems.
Shortly thereafter, he was appointed member of the national technical panel overseeing the regulation of pesticide use in Philippine agriculture. While in this capacity, he simultaneously mobilized and headed a national effort that resulted in the banning of 32 hazardous pesticide formulations in the Philippines. The ban triggered the creation of a P750 million government program to reduce the use of pesticides in Philippine agriculture. In parallel with these efforts, he pioneered the introduction of large-scale commercial bio-dynamic and organic agriculture in many provinces in the Philippines. All these efforts were a fruition of early advocacies in sustainable agriculture when Mr. Perlas was still an agricultural journalist and columnist at the Modern Agriculture and Industry-Asia, where he pioneered the first monthly articles on ecological agriculture in the Asian context. Mr. Perlas, together with colleagues at the International Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture (IASA), coined the term “sustainable agriculture” in 1983, a term which has received wide use and currency until today.
Mr. Perlas was also chair of several national civil society networks including the Green Forum Philippines, the Philippine Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, and the Civil Society Counterpart Council for Sustainable Development. It was during this time mid-1990s that he played a leading role in the nationwide formulation of Philippine Agenda 21 (PA21) as a creative response to the challenges of elite globalization. Having emerged from more than 26 regional and national consultations, PA21 was characterized by a former Philippine President as the most consultative policy document in post-martial law Philippines. Mr. Perlas had attended that Earth Summit in Rio as one of the official civil society delegates from the Philippines. It was out of this experience, among others, that he helped shape the process and substance of PA21, still officially the blueprint for sustainable development in the Philippines, although presently marginalized by the current controversial government of the Philippines.
It was also during this time that he received the mandate to be the chief negotiator for a network of national networks involving 5000 organizations that successfully stopped the agenda of radical and one-sided liberalization in the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation or APEC. He successfully introduced strong sustainable development language in the Leaders and Ministerial Declarations in APEC and constrained the Individual Action Plan of the Philippines to abide by sustainable development principles. The successful negotiations prevented, among others, the premature exposure and economic decline of 3 million Philippine rice farmers to subsidized and artificially cheap rice coming from other countries.
Mr. Perlas has received many national and global awards in recognition for the impact of his work, including the Outstanding Filipino Award, the Global 500 Award of UNEP and the 2003 Right Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize. He also received highest honors upon his graduation from Xavier University with a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture, major in Agronomy and minor in Agricultural Economics.
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- Shaping Globalization : Civil Society, Cultural Power and Threefolding (2000)
