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Natalie Montecino: Cornell Center on Global Democracy

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:18:58 GMT

From: Cornell Center on Global Democracy

Natalie Montecino, Executive Director of the Climate Democracy Initiative, has been selected as a Non-Resident Fellow at the Cornell Center on Global Democracy. In this role, she joins a competitive global cohort of scholars and practitioners working to advance research, dialogue, and action around democratic resilience and governance. Her appointment reflects her leadership at the intersection of climate and democracy, where she focuses on empowering communities, strengthening civic participation, and developing equitable, locally driven solutions to complex environmental challenges.

Exploring Rural Resilience: How Tradition Shapes Community, Identity, and Innovation in Rural Japan

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:12:16 GMT

From: Fulbright Japan

Natalie Montecino is a program manager at a Denver, Colorado based non-profit called the Climate Democracy Initiative. She earned her bachelor’s degree in International Studies with a focus on Asia and minors in International Development, Political Science, Japanese, and French at Colorado State University. During her senior year, she was awarded a prestigious Fulbright scholarship.

As a Fulbrighter, Natalie explored development, sustainability practices, and local community engagement in rural Japan. She notes that her upbringing played a significant role in her research choice. “My rural background and my heritage were always important to me. I wanted to find a way to tap into my roots and connect with the countryside, while still studying all things international,” she says.

Natalie was hosted at Okayama University in southern Japan by Associate Professor Iwabuchi Yasushi. While in Okayama, Prof. Iwabuchi made her feel very welcome and integrated into Japanese life, eliminating many of the initial stressors and challenges of moving to a new country. “My host professor and host university were very dedicated to including me in all of their activities and helping me become a researcher for the first time,” she recalls fondly. “My advisor created an opportunity almost every single month for me to present to the community, and the turnout was always impressive,” she says.

Natalie adds that she had connected with Prof. Iwabuchi well before moving to Japan. She explains, “During my sophomore year of university, I received a Critical Language Scholarship for Japanese study, and Okayama University actually hosts this program.” While the trip to Okayama University as part of this program was canceled due to COVID-19, she participated in an online program where she had the chance to meet Prof. Iwabuchi. “I reached out to him and we started meeting online regularly one year in advance of applying for Fulbright. By the time I actually got to Japan, he and I had a very strong relationship,” says Natalie.

Despite the challenges of conducting field research in a foreign country, Natalie notes that it provided her a unique and holistic understanding of the state of rural affairs in Japan. “If there is a challenge that you're curious about, for example, rural resilience or the future of the countryside, the quickest way to better understand it is by talking to the people that are most impacted by it,” she says. “I gained the most insight by interviewing rural residents, taking the time to make connections, and seeing local experiences first-hand,” she adds.

Natalie participated in agricultural practices, notably harvesting sweet potatoes and rice, and making “mochi” (a type of Japanese rice cake) using the traditional method. These activities made her feel close to the local community and imbedded in the region’s history. Her favorite place in Okayama was Bizen city, famous for its traditional Bizenyaki pottery. She remembers taking intensive pottery lessons in Bizen city as one of her most enjoyable experiences in Okayama.

During her research, Natalie heavily focused on Yakage city due to its unique history. “The town has been working very actively for the past 20 years to bring youth back to the countryside and to create programs for international students to get involved in such as planting, harvesting, and cultural celebration events,” she explains. In her view, Yakage provides a new model for resilience that can be replicated in other places both inside and outside Japan.

In the future, Natalie aspires to address the rural-urban divide within the United States and abroad. She believes that it is possible for both city and rural people to work together, find common goals, and share values, which can help break down mental barriers against working with those from different geographic locations and help the world to become more resilient.

Offering advice to scholars who are interested in applying to Fulbright, she says, “I would recommend that they find a strong affiliate in their host country and build a relationship with them even before they're ready to apply for the program. Fulbright, or any study abroad is challenging and you shouldn't do it alone. You need to find a support network within your host country to rely on, just like you do in your home country.”

From The Salazar Center • Democracy Remade: Regeneration as Civic Practice

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:07:20 GMT

From: The Salazar Center

By: Natalie Montecino: Executive Director, CDI

An Inheritance of Disconnection
We are living in the age of broken inheritances. The systems we have received—political, economic, ecological—were not built for the world now unfolding. Every generation inherits a set of arrangements it did not choose, and ours has inherited their unraveling. Democracies fail under the weight of deep disconnection; ecosystems collapse under the strain of unrelenting extraction. What links them is not coincidence, but cause.

We have learned to separate what cannot be separated: economy from ecology, governance from the governed, human thriving from the health of the living world. These fractures, carried forward through centuries of conquest and control, have hardened into the institutions that organize daily life. We manage nature as though it was external to us and govern people as though they were interchangeable parts in an abstract machine. The result is a double erosion of the planet that sustains us and the democratic capacity that binds us together.

The same habits that degrade ecosystems—extraction, exclusion, control—also thin the social fabric of democracy. When participation narrows to a performance rather than an ongoing practice, when people lose agency over the places they inhabit, both civic and ecological commons begin to collapse. The consequence is not only environmental degradation but a quiet corrosion of meaning: a loss of shared purpose, of belonging, of the sense that collective life is something we shape rather than endure.

Too often, this dual crisis is misdiagnosed as a matter of policy or technology. But its roots lie deeper—in the relationships we have neglected, and in the systems that taught us to treat both people and places as expendable. What we face is not merely the decline of institutions, but the depletion of relationship itself. To heal one, we must learn to heal the other.

That work begins with renewal, by rediscovering reciprocity between people, place, and power. Sustainability once tried to name this effort, but the word has grown thin beneath the weight of compromise. What we need now is not preservation but restoration; not balance, but the capacity for continual revival. In a word: regeneration.

Regeneration is not the management of decline but the living practice of strengthening and rebuilding. It asks how societies can thrive by nourishing the systems, both natural and civic, that make life possible. Scholars have long recognized that such renewal cannot be imposed or easily quantified; it must emerge through collective imagination, through the reconstruction of futures that are both viable and meaningful (Robinson, 2004; Hammond, 2019).

This reorientation transforms both ideas at the heart of our crisis. Regeneration ceases to be a fixed outcome and becomes a continuous practice of reciprocity—among people, and between people and the more-than-human world. Democracy, in turn, becomes more than a mechanism for managing competing interests. It becomes the cultural capacity to negotiate the terms of our shared existence not once, but continuously, learning to adapt while remaining anchored in relationship. It is, as Hammond writes, “the only political system capable of enabling a culture of sustainability”—or what we might now more accurately define as a culture of regeneration.

A democracy capable of regeneration is not a luxury to be pursued after the planet stabilizes; it is the condition of stability itself. The question before us is no longer whether democracy can survive ecological crisis, but whether anything enduring can exist without it.

Toward a Democracy Capable of Regeneration
If regeneration depends on democracy, then we must ask what kind of democracy can sustain the culture of renewal our moment demands. The one we have inherited was designed for another age, one that valued order over adaptability, hollow representation over meaningful relationships. When communities are invited to participate in environmental decision-making—and so often they are not—they are asked to respond to questions already framed, within processes built to constrain rather than cultivate imagination. A public hearing scheduled midweek at two in the afternoon. A 300-page technical document awaiting a three-minute public comment. A survey that asks residents to rank preselected priorities. These are not practices of power-sharing; they are performances of legitimacy, carefully packaged to preserve the authority of those already in control.

A democracy capable of regeneration must begin somewhere else entirely. It must create room for public life to breathe, for deliberation to emerge before decisions harden, for meaning to be made collectively rather than managed administratively. This means engaging communities not as data points or distant stakeholders but as co-authors of the future, inviting them to articulate what they value, what sustains them, and what possibilities they are willing to build together.

When democracy begins from values rather than problems, participation takes on new depth. A restored watershed becomes more than an ecological victory—it becomes an expression of belonging, safety, continuity, and care. Environmental restoration and civic renewal are revealed not as separate projects but as parts of the same endeavor: the regeneration of relationship.

What makes this form of democracy regenerative is not its outcomes but its practice. It thrives on reflection, reciprocity, and the slow work of rebuilding trust. It is less about choosing between fixed options than about cultivating the shared capacity to adapt, to revisit assumptions, to learn, and to evolve together without losing coherence. A regenerative democracy understands that the health of a society lies not in the perfection of its institutions but in their permeability, in their ability to respond to lived experience and to make meaning in common. In such a system, citizens do more than participate; they shape the very conditions of participation itself. They become co-authors of the rules, narratives, and relationships that allow democracy to live and breathe.

Yet even this vision cannot endure without a reimagining of inclusion itself. Regeneration depends on more than opening the gates of participation—it requires changing the channels through which influence flows, so that knowledge and authority circulate freely rather than pooling in the same familiar places. Equity, in this sense, is less about access than permeability: the continual movement of power between institutions and the people they claim to serve. For young people in particular—those coming of age amid climate crisis and civic collapse—participation must carry real consequence. It must offer the authority to set priorities, direct resources, and reimagine the systems they will embody. Only then can democracy become a site of genuine belonging rather than performance.

A regenerative democracy, then, must hold both reform and reinvention at once. Existing institutions can evolve, but they cannot remain the sole custodians of public will. What is needed instead is an ecosystem of democratic practice: interconnected spaces where people deliberate, experiment, and build civic capacity together. Within this ecosystem, intermediary organizations play a vital role. They serve as translators between local knowledge and institutional process, making space for new voices to enter and for old systems to listen. Their purpose is not to supplant governance but to make it porous again—to restore the flow between people and power, between decision and the life it shapes.

In some places, that flow is beginning to return. Along the edge of a Vancouver inlet, a quiet experiment in climate democracy is revealing how inclusion and stewardship can reshape both civic life and the water itself.

Where Democracy Meets the Tide
The tide moves quietly through False Creek, a restless seam between the city’s glass and the sea’s salt. Pilings are rimmed with barnacles, herons stand in the shallows, and beneath the surface, small schools of anchovies have begun to dance again, offering a shimmering silver light show to passersby. The silent sediment looming below remembers decades of industry and neglect, a story it sputters out each time boats slow to moor. This waterbody is a place of quiet insistence, a whisper saying I’m alive.

False Creek is also a place defined by contradiction—a living estuary entangled in layers of jurisdiction and history. Once the site of Sən̓aʔqʷ, a Squamish village, it became one of Vancouver’s most polluted inlets, its tidal heart dredged and its cultural memory buried beneath concrete. Today, multiple levels of government and agencies share authority over its waters, yet few share a cohesive vision for its renewal. The result is a kind of civic stillness: an ecosystem caught between care and control, between what it was and what it might yet become.

I first met the leadership of the False Creek Friends Society in May during a “Creeky Cruise” organized for participants of the Salazar Center for North American Conservation’s Symposium for Conservation Impact in Vancouver. As we moved slowly through the inlet, they spoke of the difficulty of moving beyond advocacy and education toward collective vision. Since then, the Climate Democracy Initiative and the False Creek Friends Society have been working to imagine a different way forward. The aim is not to fix a singular problem already defined, but to create space for the community to define what renewal itself might mean. This is the heart of the False Creek Climate Democracy Initiative: a living experiment in how democratic regeneration can enable ecological regeneration.

In September, we held the first of what we hope will be many participatory workshops. It was a small but remarkable gathering of Indigenous representatives, business owners, educators, nonprofit leaders, and residents each bringing a different connection to the inlet. We did not begin with policy or plans, but with values. Participants spoke about belonging, reconciliation, and the hope of seeing salmon return and children play safely by the shore. They mapped shared assets and relationships, exploring what collective action might make those values tangible. By the end, every participant committed to stay involved—a quiet affirmation that connection, once rekindled, has the power to grow.

What is emerging in False Creek is still fragile, still forming. But it gestures toward a democracy spacious enough to hold complexity. Here, ecological regeneration and democratic regeneration are unfolding together: each strengthening the other, each teaching what it means to live responsibly in a shared place. It reminds us that renewal begins wherever people choose to act together, and that every community holds the possibility of democracy remade.

An Invitati on
The questions and ideas raised here are not only for False Creek, or for those of us already working in the space between democracy and the environment. They belong to every community that has ever wondered what it means to live well with one another and with the places that sustain us.

Wherever you are, there is a conversation waiting to begin about the futures we want to shape together. I invite you to start it. And if we can be a partner in your journey, we would be honored to walk alongside you.

Acknowledgements
My deepest thanks to the Salazar Center for inviting me to contribute to this inaugural essay series, and for making my participation in this year’s International Symposium for North American Conservation possible through their generous support. It was through that gathering—and the Salazar Center’s gift for bringing people and ideas together—that I first crossed paths with the False Creek Friends Society. From that chance meeting has grown a partnership rooted in shared care for community and place, one that continues to remind me of the quiet power of connection. I am deeply grateful to the False Creek Friends Society and to every participant in our first civic workshop for the generosity of their time, their stories, and their imagination. This work is still unfolding, and I carry immense gratitude and anticipation for all the learning, listening, and reimagining that lies ahead.

References
Giddings, B., Hopwood, B., & O’Brien, G. (2002). Environment, economy and society: Fitting them together into sustainable development. Sustainable Development, 10(4), 187–196. https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.199

Hammond, M. (2019). A cultural account of ecological democracy. Environmental Values, 28(1), 53–72. https://doi.org/10.3197/096327118X15217309300891

Newig, J., & Fritsch, O. (2009). Environmental governance: Participatory, multi‐level—and effective? Environmental Policy and Governance, 19(3), 197–214. https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.509

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CDI at the Skoll World Forum • April 21 – 24, 2026 • Oxford

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:57:31 GMT

Climate Democracy Initiative (CDI) will join global leaders, innovators, and changemakers at the Skoll World Forum—one of the world’s most influential gatherings focused on advancing social impact. Held annually in Oxford, the Forum brings together a diverse community working at the intersection of climate, governance, equity, and systems change.

For CDI, this moment comes at a critical time. Across the United States, communities are navigating rapid environmental, political, and economic shifts, often without the institutional trust or civic infrastructure needed to respond effectively. The Skoll World Forum offers a unique opportunity to engage directly with organizations and leaders who are tackling these same challenges from different angles around the world.

Why This Forum Matters

The Skoll World Forum is more than a conference—it is a space for alignment. Leaders from across sectors come together to share ideas, test strategies, and build the relationships needed to drive long-term change. As conversations around climate increasingly intersect with questions of governance, representation, and public trust, CDI is eager to contribute to and learn from this global dialogue.

Our work is grounded in a simple belief: climate solutions are only as strong as the democratic systems that support them. Without inclusive decision-making, community trust, and local leadership, even the most well-funded climate initiatives can fall short. At the Forum, we will be engaging in discussions that explore how to strengthen these systems and ensure communities have a meaningful voice in shaping their futures.

What CDI Is Bringing

As we head into the Forum, CDI is focused on sharing insights from our work supporting community-driven climate action across the country. We will be highlighting:

How local leadership can transform climate outcomes
The role of civic engagement in building long-term resilience
Strategies for rebuilding trust between institutions and communities
The importance of centering those most affected in decision-making processes

We’re particularly interested in connecting with organizations that are experimenting with new models of participatory governance, youth engagement, and cross-sector collaboration.

Looking Ahead

While the conversations at the Skoll World Forum will span a wide range of topics, one theme is clear: the challenges we face are interconnected, and so must be the solutions. Climate change is not just an environmental issue—it is deeply tied to how decisions are made, who gets to participate, and whose voices are heard.

CDI is heading into the Forum with a focus on listening, learning, and building relationships that can accelerate this work. We’re excited to bring new ideas back to the communities we serve and to continue strengthening the link between climate action and democratic participation.

Stay tuned as we share updates and reflections from Oxford in the weeks ahead.

More info on Skoll here

Statement on EPA’s Rescission of the Endangerment Finding and Repeal of Motor-Vehicle Carbon Standards

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 14:42:10 GMT

For Immediate Release: February 13th, 2026

Denver, CO — In rescinding the Endangerment Finding and repealing motor-vehicle standards for carbon pollution, EPA has chosen to disregard Supreme Court precedent, and to ignore science and logic. The agency’s sweeping rationale that it lacks authority to regulate carbon pollution is contrary to the Supreme Court's 2007 decision explicitly confirming such authority. And EPA's rationale goes far beyond motor vehicles, such that these errors overlay a profoundly anti-democratic approach: EPA is seeking not only to forgo use of the Clean Air Act to address carbon pollution during this Administration, but also to foreclose such avenues for all future Administrations. EPA thus aims to eliminate all meaningful opportunities for national limits on U.S. carbon pollution – even though the U.S. is by far the world’s largest cumulative emitter of the carbon pollution that causes climate change.

EPA additionally claims that it lacks authority to regulate carbon pollution from new motor vehicles because their emissions are too small to matter – disregarding the fact that the U.S. is currently the second-biggest emitter of carbon pollution annually and even though transportation is the U.S.’s largest source of carbon pollution. By this logic, virtually no sources anywhere in the world would warrant regulation. EPA also falsely claims that repealing the passenger-car regulations will save money. In doing so, the agency disregards abundant evidence that the regulations would have avoided some $13 billion in annual health costs, as well as $46 billion in annual fuel costs and nearly $16 billion in annual maintenance costs for drivers.

The agency’s rationales are deeply flawed, and will not stand the test of time.

For questions, please contact:

Contact: Kara Lamb, Program Manager

‍Phone: (970) 215-9545

‍Email: kara@climatedemocracyinitiative.org

Climate Democracy Initiative Selected as a 2026 Regional Resilience Fellow by Open Future Coalition

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 14:50:39 GMT

For Immediate Release: November 26th, 2025

Denver, CO — The Climate Democracy Initiative (CDI) is proud to announce its selection as a Regional Resilience Fellow in the 2026 cohort of the Open Future Coalition, joining a global network of community-led organizations advancing social, ecological, and economic resilience.
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CDI is one of 14 organizations, networks, and locally driven projects chosen from around the world. Together, these groups operate across more than 50 countries, currently serving over 150,000 community members and projected to reach more than 800,000 people within the next three years through shared learning and collaborative practice.

This Fellowship recognizes CDI’s leadership in strengthening democratic participation in climate decision-making and its commitment to supporting communities in shaping equitable and resilient futures. The Open Future Coalition highlights organizations playing a crucial role in stewarding local resilience, fostering collaboration, and advancing community-led solutions.

“This Fellowship recognizes the power of community-led climate solutions and affirms the importance of strengthening democratic participation in this moment of compounding climate challenges. We are grateful for the opportunity to learn from peers around the world who are innovating in real time, and we look forward to applying those lessons to help frontline communities and local governments build more equitable, resilient systems.” said Natalie Montecino, Executive Director of the Climate Democracy Initiative.
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As part of the Fellowship, CDI will engage in a year-long global learning cohort focused on developing and sharing practical tools that expand meaningful community participation in climate policy and planning. CDI will contribute to and benefit from a living library of community-sourced solutions that includes tools, templates, curricula, and stories designed to help communities adapt, scale, and replicate effective approaches to resilience.
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Through the Fellowship, CDI will strengthen partnerships, deepen its technical assistance offerings, and bring new insights to the local governments, grassroots groups, and community leaders it supports across the United States.
To learn more about the 2026 Regional Resilience Fellows, visit: https://www.openfuturecoalition.org/fellows

For questions, please contact:

Contact: Kara Lamb, Program Manager
‍ Phone: (970) 215-9545
‍ Email: kara@climatedemocracyinitiative.org