ABSTRACT
The neighborhood of BEDZED in the UK may be a model for ecodesign. The city of Grenoble’s ZAC de Bonne may be an admirable eco-neighborhood copied elsewhere that offers answers to the environmental and social challenges faced by dense urban areas. It is at international level that many governance issues need to be addressed with speed and decisiveness in order to tackle major problems at the required scale. Finally, a specific challenge of collective intelligence (CI) for international governance is the increased complexity of the task simply because participants are unlikely to share the same language and value base, level of trust, understanding of cultural norms, and other factors that make collaboration and risk taking at local level easier. International governance reminds us powerfully how CI is not simply a “brainy” process, as the word “intelligence” or the technicality of prediction markets or crowdsourcing technologies might suggest.
