 And we have a really interesting mix of academics and activists and practitioners. And today's session is going to be chaired by Kaylee Yen, who I first met when I started my project on Taiwan Green Party back in December of 2012. And Kaylee then went on to play a key role in the Asia-Pacific Greens Network and then to move on to be the convener of Global Greens. And I'm going to hand over to Kaylee now to chair today's session. Okay, thank you, because David will also be joining as a speaker, so he'll be switching hats now. Well, good to see all of you from around the world joining in. I see people with a lot of different backgrounds, which is great, because as David said, we have an interesting mix on the panel. Several of us are, all of us are activists in one form or another, but some of us came to this subject from more of an activist background, some from a purely academic and others from like me. Actually you'll find that there'll be a lot of different, there's a lot of knowledge and experience on this panel. So our challenge would be to stay focused and on topic. And what's the topic? The speakers are all published authors, so we'll be seeking to hear from them about their experience researching green politics, what motivated them, what challenges they faced in the process, both doing the research and in publishing and in distributing. So for those in the audience who are also thinking about researching and publishing, this is the subject for you. But there's also a wild card element. I invite all of the participants, even you in the audience, to pose questions around the subject of researching and publishing and around green politics. Write your question into the chat box, you'll see a little chat icon on your screen. For me it's at the bottom of the screen. I know on computers it's sometimes on the upper top side of the menu bar. And I'll have a look at the chat box. Just want to check it out, is there a volunteer helping you also keep an eye on questions as they get put into the chat box? Yes, yes. Okay, so then I'll be getting some questions sent to me from some support. And then after each speaker gives their presentation about their own research, they'll be invited to ask a question that they're curious about to the other speakers or to the audience members. And the next speaker will pick up on that question as well as answer the five main questions and will continue that way for the first hour. The second hour, it'll be really an open discussion with everyone in this call, including the audience. So you'll be again invited to ask questions. Raise your hand if you really want to, if you have a burning question, then I can call on you. But I hope this will be more of a dialogue. Fireside chat, we're all sitting in our different types of rooms in our house. So it's all very comfortable and relaxed. So the five focus questions are, why did we start researching green parties in the first place? So what motivated our research? Second, what research methods did you use in your publication? Three, who are you writing for? What's the audience that you're writing for? The fourth question is, what challenges have we faced in the process of doing this research and publishing? And five, how do we promote our work to a wider audience? So the speakers have about seven minutes to answer all those five questions, as well as to ask a question onwards. So the first speaker will be David. And I'll let you pick it up, and then I'll pick up once you're done. Take it away. Fantastic. Fantastic. Thanks for that, Katie. So I'm going to talk briefly about my experience of writing this book, Taiwan's Green Parties. It was quite accidental for me to actually start getting into this project. Previously, I'd written largely on mainstream political parties in Taiwan. I've done a little bit of research on Taiwan's smaller parties. But the key turning point for me was one of my students who happened to be a Green Party Taiwan candidate. And also, she was co-convener of the Green Party Taiwan. And she invited me to get involved in researching the Taiwan Green Party. So that led me to run a couple of focus groups in Taiwan that featured Green Party candidates, leaders, and activists. And as soon as I did those focus groups, which was where I first met Kailey, I was really hooked on the topic because the participants were just so different from mainstream party politicians that I was used to working with. It was a long process putting the book together. I started in December 2012, and the book only came out in March of 2021. So what I try and do in the book is answer a number of big questions that looks at the development of the Green Party Taiwan's first 25 years. So I looked at questions such as why did the party form? How did the party develop, particularly electorally and in terms of international engagement? Who is the Green Party? In other words, what kind of people have led the party and represented the party? And what kind of people have supported the party? And then much of the book really focuses on why questions. How do we understand why the party has changed in terms of the issues it focuses on? And how do you best explain the performance of the party? So many of these questions that I'm looking at are questions that the comparative studies on international Green Parties look at. Now, how did I get at the answer to those questions? Well, over those eight years of research, I tended to have very short research visits, often only about a month a year over those eight years. And the kind of research methods I was using were also much more diverse than in my earlier studies on mainstream party politics. I tended to use focus groups, for example, not only with elites, but also with party members and supporters. I did support interviews and support surveys. As with a lot of my earlier work, I'd also spent a lot of time looking at campaign communication, election advertisements, social media posts as a way of measuring party change. And lastly, as with my earlier work, I did a lot of interviews. But the difference here was that I was interviewing people multiple times over those eight years, rather than just a snapshot of interviews. In terms of the key findings, I try to show that we need to look at both party system but also inner party factors in terms of explaining the success and failure of the party. Essentially arguing that often it was strategic mistakes within the party's campaign that helped us understand the limited impact of the party. And one of the things that I also did that I hadn't done in my earlier work was to end the book with offering some suggestions for how the party could improve its electoral performance. A further question that I wanted to touch upon was the who we're writing for question. And what I try and do in the book is to write for multiple audiences. In other words, I'm trying to write for those that are interested in Taiwan's civil society and party system. But I'm also trying to write for people that are interested in comparative small parties and comparative green parties from a political science perspective, as well as those that support green parties internationally. And also I'm trying to make it relevant to the Green Party Taiwan itself. Now, I think there have been challenges for this project. One of them is the fact that because many academic books only come out or mainly come out in hardback. So it's not so easy for us to actually mass market these kind of books. So the way that I've tried to deal with that is a much heavier promotional campaign than I've done for my earlier books. In other words, doing a world online book tour in the US and Europe, radio shows, podcasts, fan page, seeking out book reviews. So I'm basically going for emotional crazy to try and increase the impact. But overall, I feel the results have been quite mixed. In other words, I think I'm reaching the Asian Studies academic audience, but I'm still struggling to break through into some of those target groups. And that's something that I want to try and improve on in the future. In other words, trying to run more diverse promotional events to try and reach out to do events in Taiwan and also to do events with Green Party members and supporters. And the other way that I'm trying to hit some of my target readership is I'm now working on a Chinese version of the book together with three former Green Party Taiwanese Green Party leaders and candidates. And that's the thing that I'm particularly excited about, looking ahead for the next year or so. And that's where I'm going to finish. Lastly, I have to say that this has been a really transformative experience for me. And it's definitely the most enjoyable research project that I've ever been involved in, partly because I really enjoy working with such idealistic individuals that make so many sacrifices for environmental and social justice. And I'm going to finish there. Thank you, David. I hope I was in on time. You're very good. Thank you. It's a good example. Well, next we'll have an early surprise. Ricky's having some troubles with his computer. So he asked that he go last on the list, which means that we'll now move to Arnie. Arnie, is that all right with you? Yes, of course. I hope you can hear me well. Yes, very well. So Arnie also has a very interesting background. He's a political scientist. He is an analyst and an advisor on green policy, specifically with energy and democracy and coalition governments, which is very exciting topics now, especially coming from Germany, as they are about to go into elections in September. So you can read more about Arnie's background on the SOAS website. He's also a member of the Green Academy, which is associated with the Einrich Bohl Foundation, a network of thinkers from the political science world. And he's worked with the Greens in government in Baden-Württemberg. So he just has a lot of experience. So Arnie, before you get into the questions themselves, can you tell us also a bit more about the context of the topics you research on? What are some of the publications you've made? So with that, take it away. Thank you very much for the kind introduction, Kelly. My pleasure to be here with all of you. I'm here based in Stuttgart in Baden-Württemberg in the southwest of the country. And I wanted to share some of my background or experiences on researching on the German Greens. Mainly this study is called German Greens in Coalition Governments. I did a successor then on the actual policy side of things on governing ecologically. So what have the Greens achieved actually when they govern in Germany? And the motive, I mainly wanted to share my motives why I did that and how the research came together. It was mostly driven by personal experience. And as Kelly mentioned, I was involved with the Green Party before. I'm a member of the Green Party. I served as an advisor in the parliament on the national level and then worked as an advisor here in Baden-Württemberg where the Greens are the strongest party and are leading the government. And at the time here in Baden-Württemberg, I took the job as what is called a strategic advisor of the strategy unit. And it's exceptional for the Green case because that kind of unit in the state government, you only have in the state ministry, the central ministry. And this is the only state where the Greens are strong enough that they run the government, that they are in the center. So I was in a lucky position to do a job that no one else in the Green Party could do. But I also had to do things and tasks that I didn't really know how to do. So what I did at the time in 2013 was that I often called my former colleagues who I knew from way back then, who in the meantime joined also other state governments in other states in Germany. So in 2013, the Greens governed in nine out of 16 German states. So basically, I tried to access my network and asked my former colleagues, well, how do you do this when your parliamentary group doesn't move like that and it doesn't really fit to your agenda in the government? Or how do you manage conflicts with your coalition partner? And eventually, I realized that there's a lot of knowledge out there among my Green peers. But it's not really, it wasn't accessible. You could only access it randomly by just talking to some people and asking them. And it didn't take a long time that I stayed in the job. I quit the job for some personal reasons, but I realized then, for me, it was a fortunate timing that I realized I want to do this kind of research. I actually want to access and examine what are the experiences when the German Greens are moving from opposition party into government? And what kind of informal structures are being used, for instance, to solve coalition conflicts? Or what kind of informal structures does the party build to coordinate itself in government? And there's probably a very, very characteristic issue for Germany's political system because of the way our federalism works. So the Greens, on the national level, are an opposition party so far yet. The last time they governed was in the year 2005 on the national level. But as I said, on the state level, they govern in many states. And due to the federal character of the political system, they are an influential policymaker in national policymaking because they have almost a majority in the second chamber. And that's the reason why they formed a lot of informal coordination. So basically, my idea was to assess this and try to describe what has happened with the Green Party. I mostly had two target groups in mind, and they are both domestic. So this study was initially published in German. And I wanted to do it to assess this kind of knowledge for Green Party members, basically, for the next Greens to go in government that they would have something like a handbook. But I also wanted to contribute to the political science department debate. And my background, basically, I'm a political scientist myself. But basically, I'm a crosser. I'm a practitioner when it comes to politics. But I'm also a political scientist, and I know at least a little bit of the methodology. And so I wanted to combine that. And I wanted to use my Green network. As the speaker before mentioned, I also used as the main tool for my research, I used qualitative interviews. So basically, I interviewed four dozen Green Party politicians, mostly the party leadership on the national level and the state level, and then also some key advisors. And given my background that I'm part of the Green family, so to say, that made the access more easy for me, of course, that I was trusted by my interview partners that I would not abuse confident information, so to say. So I think it gave me an opportunity to get unique access to high-level decision makers and these advisors that I could lay out how the party functions, how policy-making functions. And I realized after finishing the study that this is something that all of the German parties who are in governing positions, they do have these informal party structures, for instance. Or they do have informal coalition mechanisms. But this is not really being published. So this study is somewhat a novelty in the German context because it gives insights that the parties usually hide. And that was the idea also by the Heinrich-Böhl Foundation, which is a think tank affiliated to the Green Party. And their aim was to contribute to making politics more transparent and to get a better understanding of where political decisions are being made. It's not in the formal bodies of, let's say, the parliament or the cabinet table, but the actual decisions are being made in other informal structures. So overall, I would say the study received some good reception in Germany. The English translation is somewhat a co-benefit. I think it offers some more insights into Germany's federalism and the policy-making here. And for me, last point, it was a unique opportunity. I'm now working on very different stuff. But I realized now coming to this election, as Kelly mentioned in the introduction, the German Greens are actually, we have elections in three months and the German Greens are in a very strong position and are likely to join the next national government. And basically, my study also provides for me a blueprint to do a similar research on the national level. And that is something that I'm considering and I'm slowly preparing. So I hope I could share with you some of the insights that are worthwhile to the discussion and I look forward to the discussion. Thank you, Aini. Yeah, you've had a busy pandemic time. You've been doing a lot of research recently. All of us have, it seems, it just occurred to me that I've been speaking quite fast because when I get excited about a topic, I speak even faster. So for any of the audience members, if we're speaking too fast, just tell me, put a little note in the chat box and I'll cut it and remind us to speak more clearly or more slowly. So thanks for the feedback in advance. So I now move to the next speaker, Kara. And she's, have a similar field of research as Aini. She's also been looking at the development of Green Parties but this time from a Canadian perspective. She's a lecturer of political science at the Simon Fraser University in Canada and she's published several works from a purely political scientist perspective, not as an insider as Aini has been, but from outside looking in at how has the Canadian Green Party evolved from a minor party to now an increasingly major party which is unusual in our first past the post electoral system. So that's quite different than electoral system than we have in Germany. So Kara will tell us more about her research. Over to you, Kara. And you're on mute, so just take off your mute. Yes, perhaps I can share one slide, yeah. And I noticed Aini has just posted in the chat box a link to his study. German Greens and coalition governments. Are you able to see that? Are you able to see that? Make a copy of that link for your records. Yes, Kara, I see your presentation. Excellent, excellent, good. Yes, the Green Party of Canada was founded in 1983. It won its first seat in 2011, but I became interested in the Green Party much earlier because around 2004 I noted that support for the Green Parties was growing considerably in Canada and especially where I reside in British Columbia. And so I, they hadn't elected anyone yet. This was a party that was historically considered a very minor party receiving only 1% of the popular vote. But in some writings in the elections, provincial and federal elections at the time, in British Columbia, support for the Greens was as high as 17%. Elizabeth May, as we know, was won eventually in 2011 with and was reelected again in 2015 and 2019. And so there was growing support. I also happened to be interested in the environment and in the relation between, I'm a political scientist, as Kelly said, I've done my doctorate degree at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario in Canada, postdoctoral with a fellowship from Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada to spend a year at the University of California, Berkeley. And then when I returned to British Columbia, I had been studying the rise of different isms. Environmentalism was one of them. And I was interested in that because on a personal level, I have a garden here, as you can see from the pictures, flower and vegetable garden. I grew my own food organically and locally. So I was in tune with what the Green Party was talking about. So I did some research and I was actually preparing a course at Simon Fraser to teach. And then I decided to approach the executive, the Green Party of Canada. The leader of the time was Jim Harris and was given full cooperation by the Green Party to conduct as a political scientist, the first ever academic survey of the membership. Of 2,900 randomly selected members who received a questionnaire, 802 returned them completed. My analysis of the results of this survey has produced two papers that I eventually published in academic journals. And this was one of the first, I was told actually it had not been much written on Green Party of Canada by academics, by political scientists. And so this was one of the first ones that was done. And I tested some of the theories used to support Greens in other countries, such as post-materialist thesis, new middle class thesis. These were theories that have been used to explain the rise of supportive Greens, for example, in Germany. Some of the methods that I've been using have been similar to the ones used by other people on this panel, other experts, mixed methods research design. So I use both quantitative and qualitative approaches. And I surveyed voters in the last federal election and an important survey, voters in British Columbia, which included over a hundred Greens and also have interviewed candidates in the lower mainland in Southern Vancouver Island, where they have earned more than 10% of the popular vote. I'm also analyzing textual sources, such as platforms and speeches that will help to validate the collection of material from the interviewees. The audience, the academic audience is primarily an academic one, but, and as I indicated, there has been little written on the Green Party of Canada in the past. And therefore the book that I write, I hope to finish will be one that will be perhaps useful in a course, in a political science course or other courses at university, but it could also be a useful resource for journalists and for others, for Green Party supporters as well, as well as those Greens outside of Canada in other countries where they're faced similar challenges, such as the first pass the post system. The biggest challenge right now in having us to heat wave and trying to keep all my vegetables warm but still not overheated. But in terms of challenges more recently, as I indicated here, I think I'll just talk for a while. I can't see anybody. What I will say is, here I go, is that I face several different challenges in terms of the process of writing the paper in the book. One has been that the perception that the Green Party is really irrelevant or the issue of relevance really comes up a lot among academics. I'm often told, well, why are you studying the Green Party anyway? They don't elect that many people or it used to be they didn't elect any. And the Green Party is often perceived as a single issue party. So other parties can also deal with issues of environment. So why do we need a Green Party and are already crowded first pass the polls to electoral system? But things are changing and there were some predictions that the Greens in this last federal election were going to win great many votes and seats, actually six or seven seats in the 2019 federal election. As a concern for climate change was growing and among voters. And this is why I hope to explore further in the book is why the Greens failed to take advantage of the growing awareness of climate change and other environmental issues when sometimes the environmental issues almost at the same level as the concerns about the economy. And another area that I'm exploring is how this book will, I hope appeal to a broader audience more than just people who are interested in explaining the existence of the Greens in Canada but also the general question of the role of political parties and the democratic system. The issue of participatory democracy is seen as something that is almost as dear as the hearts of many candidates, Green Party candidates who I've interviewed as climate change. The aim is to make the party more responsive to the grassroots, to a diverse set of interests. And I've thoroughly enjoyed reading Fid's book on the study of the Green Party in Taiwan where he applies and Megan's theory, for example, about the role that mainstream parties, other parties do in creating the environment for the Green Party to emerge or can be presented as an obstacle. So I intend to explore further these new theories that have been developed. Some of these theories have come out of literature in Europe and the German experience or French or English but also I'd like to look at what has been the experience of Greens in Australia and New Zealand which come out of the same British parliamentary system. And one thing that's really is coming out often is the fact that there is a party that is in the minds of many voters is also very Green focused and that is the NDP. And the NDP perhaps plays a similar role as the DPP in Taiwan. They often portray themselves as the environmental party as the party for the environmentalists support. But on the other hand, there's growing, growing alienation among environmental activists in the movement and growing strain between the labor union factions and the environmental factions within the NDP. The NDP is a socialist, that social democratic party. So I think that this book should be of interest to those who are studying the Canadian political system or who want to understand better what is happening to the Canadian political landscape who are even who are not political scientists but who are of interest in it. We've had a very interesting election and where there are new parties emerging both on the right and the left. And then also the Greens have had a very important leadership race recently. Elizabeth May has stepped down and there is now a new leader. But before this happened, there was a very extensive long leadership debate and differences in factions within the Greens party has resurfaced. Also there's been a discussion within the party as to what should be the best step forward to be more successful electorally and also to state true their principles. And there's a debate as to what they should stand for. How should they diversify in the minds of the public beyond just a single issue party? So that's one of their biggest challenges is that many people feel that it's a wasted vote. How can they show that there are unfairly perhaps because the Greens do have an extensive platform but most people don't read it. And so the leadership debate has brought out a lot of divisions but also a lot of issues in terms of what policies should they promote? Should it be cap and trade? Should it be carbon tax, environmental policy debates and issues about what the Green party is all about? I have some questions for the other panelists as well but I guess that will come later. Thank you so much for listening and thank you for the invitation. Thank you, Kea. It's interesting to hear some of the debates going on in the Canadian Greens because I've observed the similar debates in almost all Green parties around the world. There are about a hundred Green parties around the world and they all seem to, all parties seem to go through similar sort of developmental trajectory. So we'll hear more about that actually in our next speaker's talk, James Marshall. He is also a speaker from Canada, from the Vancouver area but he has a very different perspective from Kara. He's literally grown up in the Green party. His father is one of the co-founders of the federal Green party of Canada and so he's been marching on the streets probably before he could march but campaigning for Greens and later on became a candidate himself and he recently published a book called What Does Green Mean? The History, People and Ideas of the Green Party in Canada and Abroad. So he'll be taking us from a step back and looking at how Canadian Green politics compares from a global perspective. Over to you, James. Hello, how's everyone doing? Yeah, so this is my book, looks like that. I put cute cartoon pictures on it to try to attract attention from a more general audience. So yeah, like Kara and Arna both worked in a very, and Daphne had worked in a very academic, more from an academic background. And for me, I came from the opposite side which was a more, I suppose activist or participator background. For me, yeah, I ran in 2017. I put my name forward to actually run in an election. It was in an election for British Columbia which is the province of Canada that I live in. And the Greens in that election got three seats with about one in five people voted green. And because of our strange system that only resulted in three people getting elected alas. But we wound up in a minority government situation where the Greens had a lot more influence in governance than they'd ever had before in Canada. And so afterwards I was trying to figure out what I could do with the kind of leftover political energy that I had because I did not get elected. And so I decided to try to do some research on questions that had come up during the process of running. What I found while running, I've told people that running for politics really makes you realize how much you don't know about everything because you're asked all these questions that you are not an expert on and you don't really know the answer to and you have to go and try to figure out an answer. And for a lot of these I was trying to figure out what the answers were from a green perspective. And if the Greens had internally considered these things in different ways than other political parties, right? So if we're asked about environmental issues or democracy issues, these are things I knew a lot about. But if I was asked about economic issues or infrastructure or a lot of these other things that aren't normally directly associated with green ideological thought, I had trouble saying what the green position was as different from a liberal party or a conservative party or a social Democrat party. So I went trying to figure out if anyone had written this down and had basically created a book on this already. And as far as I could figure out no one had. And so I thought, okay, I'm gonna start trying to figure this out. And because I think that the best way to learn something is to be able to teach it to someone else. I thought I'm gonna write this down as if I was writing a book to teach it and that way I'll get it into my own head. And eventually I wound up getting so far into all this writing. I thought, okay, I'm gonna actually publish this as a full-on book. The original idea of the book that I was writing was to be something that would go to a very mass market audience, something that could be like on the local section of a bookstore that people could pick up and be like, oh yeah, I've heard of the green party but I haven't really considered them. I wanna see what they're all about and I'll grab this. As I continued writing it and working through it, it turned out to not be that. And it turned out to be something that was a lot more geared towards people who were already in green political activism and wanted to really get into like the deep down and dirty of the history of the party. And the reason I wound up writing it in that way was because as I was doing interviews with a lot of these people, I found out that a lot of them had stories that had never been written down in any sort of book. And since the greens are about 40, 45 years old as a party, a lot of these people can get quite elderly and I don't know if they were ever gonna have a chance to write these stories down. And so I thought, okay, if I don't write this stuff down, some of these insights and stories, they might never get written down. So it wound up being a lot more dense and a lot more, I guess, gritty than I anticipated. Something that I'm thinking about doing now is basically doing a revised version that's about half as long, that's about half as dense, that has a lot less stats, a lot less information that I think a general audience would not really care about and it would be more of a book of an overview with ideas and a little bit of history, but more of the original idea I had for this book. As it is, it was super easy for me to get in contact with a lot of these people. A lot of the people I interviewed were folks who are not working in any political way anymore, but in the 80s and 90s served as the first leader of a regional part of the Canadian Green Party who worked on the ground in the time when there were no Green Parties to put it together and they had a lot of inserts about where they were getting their initial inspiration from. And a lot of that led me back to the German Green Party, which is why I wound up contacting folks like Arnie to chat about where did the German Greens ideas come from and I kind of charted this whole thing backwards to see where the ideological views of the Greens came from, how they made it to Canada, what the challenges were in Canada. And then I just wrote down a lot of the stories about the individual people who were involved because I think these people put in a huge amount of effort in building these movements and they didn't get a whole lot of like credit in the political history knowledge of the country, but we should recognize the effort that they put in. So that was very fun. Something I didn't get to do as much in the book as I would have liked and something that I'm working on now is to try to think more a lot about green ideas and what sets green apart basically from the other parties in a political system. That's something that Kara mentioned a little bit that a lot of people in Canada see the Greens as like a single issue party, which is not, I don't believe it's remotely true at all. And I think most people who work in Greens would believe it's not remotely true at all, but it's still in Canada. I think there's a concerted effort by other parties to cast the Greens as a single issue party so that they can kind of bury the green vote and try to take it for themselves. And so how can I challenge that and say there's a lot more to this. There's a lot more ideas that the Greens are putting forward that aren't being put forward by other parties. And I think it would be valuable to Canadians and people everywhere to really understand some of these ideas instead of this strict binary that we kind of have in Canada of like the left wing party versus the right wing party and everything else is just somewhere in the middle. I don't think that's an accurate way of describing politics. So I'm trying to now think of ways to describe how a political spectrum can be more of a triangle or a quadrangle or all these different variety of ideas. That's the question, by the way, that I posed to some of the other panelists here is what do you think in your countries the public knowledge and understanding of the stuff that Greens wanna talk about is? Like do they recognize the ideas that Greens talk about or are these ideas very foreign to people? And some of them I think during the pandemic have been coming forward more like the idea of universal basic income is something that Greens have been talking about for decades that most people had no idea about. And it was something that was not pushed by any of the other political parties in our political system in Canada. But now it's really gotten into the news a lot. And so I think it's good for Greens because it's been an idea that they've been pushing that's now gotten much more into the public sphere. So I think I'll stop talking there and happy to answer more questions as we go on. Thanks, James. Just to make sure I understood correctly. So the question you pass on is, can you say that in another way? Yes, the question I was passing on was in your country, do you think people understand who the Greens are in the way that they understand themselves? Like the ideas that Greens are putting forward in terms of what Greens see themselves as their place and what they're all about, do you think the public perception of the Greens matches that? Or do you think the public perception of the Greens is very different than what the Greens are actually trying to present? Okay, okay, so how much there is a difference between self-perception versus how the public sees them? Okay, good reflection. All right, we have one more speaker on our excellent lineup, Ricky Adachi. So he comes from Japan. So if you continue our journey on the world, just hop over the Pacific and then you'll find Ricky. He is currently representing Greens Japan in the Asia Pacific Greens Federation. So he has the role called a counselor. He has been involved in the Green Political Movement for 19 years, a long time. I met him about 12 years ago when I first got involved. He's also run as a candidate in the upper house, but in vain as well. So I'm sure there are many lessons learned from that experience. And he's published a book titled Green Thoughts to Build a Richer Society Without Economic Growth. So he's an activist, academic, researcher, man of many hats. So over to you, Ricky, to tell us about your research. Okay, thank you, Kelly. And thank you for having me here. And it's very excited. But it's 3 a.m. in the morning here in Japan, so I'm just kind of mad. And my PC went mad and I'm sorry for my troubles. So as Kelly introduced me, my name is Ricky and I've been involved in Green Political Movement for nearly 20 years or something like that. And I ran for the upper house in 2004 in one year before that I got involved in that movement. And then actually, well, as Kelly said, or we contested, we challenged the national elections for upper house in 2004, but in vain. And then after that, the Green Party or a political party like Green Party in other countries was dissolved once, but there's still remained the people with the same passion and same way of thinking and same ambition, then we reorganized again, ourselves again. And now after that, well, that's a long story, but anyway, finally, we attached down to officially a political party, which is called Greens, Greens Japan, now. And it was founded in 2012. It's because we were going to hold the national elections in next year, which means 2013. And it was founded in 2012. And it was founded in 2012. The National elections in next year, which means 2013. So I published my book, this one, called Green Thoughts, or actually what I made with my title is not exactly Green Thoughts, but it's kind of green philosophy or something like that. And this was published about four months before the voting day. And in that election, we challenged again to the elections for upper house, but actually it was really, really a tough fight. So I just wanted to contribute in any way. And I thought like, well, I'm originally an author of some books. Actually, I've been investigating a country called Costa Rica in social science, and I have some experiences to publish these kind of books. So I decided to contribute to Electric Campaign for Greens, writing a book about Greens, but how and what for or what kind of book would it be? And at that moment in 2012, 2013, the main political question in Japan, or maybe in the world is how do we have to deal with the nuclear problem or nuclear problem right after Fukushima disaster? And actually the elections in 2013 was the first one for upper house in Japan. So everybody was talking about the nuclear power plant in terms of policy. And it was so right after the incident that everybody said like, well, no to nuclear power plants, and everybody thought like that, everybody said like that. So from voters' point of view, it's like, so what's the difference? So then, for example, the ruling party said, well, well, not really. And the opposition party goes like, well, no, maybe in the long term, and the communist party no immediately or something like that. And so there was slight difference, but from the voters' point of view, it's kind of similar. And of course we say no, I mean the green say no, but the reason is different. And if the reason is different, when the situation changes as time goes by, their reaction or their policies might change. Actually here in Japan, for example, the communist party here in Japan once promoted nuclear power plant, and then they changed their mind in some way. Well, it was before the Fukushima accident, but anyway, so the policy would change as time goes by. So what we have to see, what we have to take into consideration is not just policies in the elections or agendas that the politicians and political parties are talking about, but also the values or let's say ideologies that each political parties have. Then I decided to focus on the philosophy or way of thinking or values of greens. So that's why I wrote a book titled entitled Greens Both or Green Philosophy or something like that. And this is all about so way of thinking or philosophy or what kind of values greens had. And first of all, I wrote, well, this book has like five chapters. And in the first chapter, I explained something like, it's like a theoretical part of the philosophy of greens comparing with capitalism and communism. It is very curious for me. Well, I'm gonna talk just later. And in the second chapter, I explained, I wrote about the six principles of global greens. And then in next chapter, third chapter, I wrote about the history of or racing history of or emerging green party in Japan. And there I, well, of course, I wrote something about how green party, which was formed, which was established in 2012, emerged. But I wrote in this chapter, I wrote my personal history very much. It's like half or two thirds of this chapter is about my personal history because I have such kind of ideology and I'm kind of green person. In my mind, there is green philosophy and then so I reflected to my book like how a green way of thinking or green philosophy was developed in one's mind. So that's a kind of personal history, but it's a kind of example of development of green way of thinking or green philosophy. And as I think I told you before about I am originally the investigator or scholar who is measuring Costa Rica. Costa Rica is very, very interesting country and it's a kind of very green country in a way. But more interestingly in Costa Rica there is no green party and in conclusion they don't need green party because most of Costa Rican has a kind of green way of thinking so they don't need green party. There are many, of course, political parties like right wing left wing or something like that. But in anime, for example, nobody said that we need armed forces to defend our country or we need to cut down the trees or more economic growth or something like that. So the way of thinking, their way of thinking is very, very kind of greeny and that's really interesting. And I studied philosophy in that country and going back to Japan I was a little bit frustrated because no politicians nor political parties talked like that. Let's say no matter which side you are for example in the right wing or left wing or whatever everybody talked about the economic growth like 2% or 3% this year in terms of GDP or something like that and I was a little bit frustrated and then after Fukushima incident 2011 everybody said it's a kind of natural reaction to say no after such kind of disaster incident. And then I have I thought that I need to make clear what's the difference between no from political party A and no from political party B and no from green and the difference is based on the philosophy or way of thinking ideology and going back to the first question, ideology I noticed through the investigation on Costa Rica capitalism and communism may have the same goal which is the eternal economic growth and from green perspective or from the perspective of ordinary Costa Rican that is something weird or something that we have to doubt. So those two communists and capitalist way of thinking are treated like kind of one set of antagonistic a a theme or ideology but from our point of view it's kind of same it seems like same from green perspective. So that's the difference from my perspective. So that's what I wrote in this country. And then lastly I introduced a little bit about green movement all over the world because it's also curious for me as a social scientist that green movement first or rose up in many places in the world spontaneously and simultaneously that's really interesting because in modern times many political movement or ideological movement rose up in one place at some time with a strong leader or something and from there that ideology or way of thinking spread all over the world by strong leadership but green is not such a case so it's very spontaneous and it's very simultaneous and when we notice that well seems like we have many friends who are thinking like us and then they made up a network called global green so that's that kind of development of political movement is really interesting so that's how that's what I wrote at last I think I talk very much but some lastly this is just an introduction for Green Party for green way of thinking for voters because I published it before the elections so it's just for the contribution mainly to the electoral campaign but now it is used for study for newcomers to Green Party or candidates from Greens or something like that I think that's all I think I talk too much I'm sorry Thank you Ricky you raised some really interesting points it reflects and I'm seeing amongst all the speakers that your your research reflects your own personal struggle to understand what is green thinking which is also a struggle that the voters have as well so our work continues to contribute to the definition or the clarification of what is green politics but nevertheless as you remark there is a growing it's a green movement it's there's a huge line of requests applications to the global greens by groups wanting to form a Green Party in countries that are new democracies and countries where there was no Green Party before so that's a really interesting development from the global perspective so now we move to our discussion section and I'm already seeing lots of questions in the box and some of you have already mentioned a few already but I think I'll just start from Dolphins which came first and was very specific he posed a question to Arnie Dolphins would you like to actually take the microphone and ask it yourself Yeah thanks Kelly so I mean one of the challenges that I think this applies to a lot of Green Parties is losing politicians to other parties but also who just give up politics so one of the things that's troubled me in writing the Taiwan book was about how to retain that kind of talent and also how to bring back lost figures and so the points that Arnie made about sharing that experience of different generations of Green Parties I thought was really interesting whether there were any kind of answers to this question about holding on to and bringing back talent I think it's a bit of a tragedy the way it's often lost in Green Parties Okay I wonder if I have a good answer to that and maybe I think probably James has a better observation of that because he knows some of the German story and knows how to maybe apply it in a different political system because when I hear you guys share your experiences and the experiences of Green Parties in other countries I realize of course that a lot of the success that the German Greens are building upon is within this framework of proportional voting system and basically what the German Greens managed to achieve was a step by step success of growing bigger and bigger but initially they played to an audience of 5 to 10% of the electorate and if you want to reach that kind of support or audience you can specify your political goals your agenda, your communication towards that audience and try to mobilize that for elections and if you manage to do so that's a big success and this kind of success fuels the party it gives it energy and I don't have a good answer what is such a much different environment with the first post system where you have to aim for the majority from such a small level it's just very difficult very different to do so I mean to make a long story short I think what we see in the German case there has been a long time professionalization of the party sticking to the core principle of the climate issue of environmental issue I think that's one of the key successes of the German Greens of not overarching of aiming for too much and saying we are a party to solve everything I think that's the internal observation or the internal aim as well but in terms of maybe connecting that as my last point to the issue that James has raised the question of self perception and public perception I think the German Greens make the case that they do want to offer for all issues and solutions but they are very much aware of how they are being perceived and that they try to perform to that perception and they try to fulfill expectations and so I think more than ever it was much weaker before but more than ever the ecology and fighting the climate crisis is at the core of the Green Party in Germany and that's actually other parties that have issues becoming bigger and bigger that it's hurting them and they have like the German Conservatives they are paying right now a hefty price for having ignored the issue for such a long time Do you want me to jump in so go ahead Yeah go ahead Sure just because Arne threw it to me a little bit there See I think the difference between a proportionally elected system and a first pass I think on our system it's just demoralizing loss after demoralizing loss because the system is built to do that and something I point out which is really strange always for me Kelly you're in Sweden and Sweden has or I guess had the Greens in government until last week but the Greens I believe in the last Swedish election got 5% or something like that and elected a solid group of MPs who then joined the government to make a success in order to get into a position of government there in my province of British Columbia in the last election the Greens got almost 20% so almost the party was almost four times as popular as say the Swedish Greens or even the German Greens in a lot of states in which they participate in government but in that last election we elected two people and got completely shut out because it was a really difficult thing to ask of someone because we have 87 individual districts in BC and in maybe a dozen of those districts did we consider ourselves competitive so we maybe had six candidates that were realistically running an election to be elected and 80 candidates that almost certainly knew that they were not going to be elected but still had to take a month off of work to get the incredible nastiness of attacks by other political parties which in Canada is quite bad and so trying to attract people who are willing to sign up for that type of punishment for what they believe in is really hard and it's something I think in the Greens we've suffered a lot and I think we also tend to attract in BC some interesting folks because the kind of people who are willing to do that sometimes you take whatever help you can get and later on you realize perhaps we don't actually want to associate ourselves much with some of these people so it's a quite difficult thing that we have to put up with here and I don't know if that's the case in proportional systems or if it's just a lot more positive and they attract a lot of people that are willing to stick around more. Kara, I see you have your hand up. Still muted Kara. I should know after teaching Zoom what James has been saying and aren't he also and there's one other aspect that I've been reminded when I was doing the interviews with the candidates and leaders as that of the Green Party and something that was fortunate for the Green Party of Canada and NBC was that they set up the regulations on party financing and in other countries you have public subsidies for party financing. In Canada we had temporarily here at the time was covered enough to encourage people to vote for the Greens saying this will help to increase our coffers $1.75 per vote but unfortunately then we had a change of government and the Conservative Party at the time removed the per vote subsidy but the Greens were still able to carry on raising enough money to keep going so that in itself is an important institutional and it creates a dynamic whether some parties can make it or not. The other thing is the role of the media and the social media now we've had social media come into it but the access to the leaders debates when candidates and leaders can access and so these are two and that's one of my questions for the panelists especially in his excellent discussion of the development of the party and the thresholds which Van Holt first developed and then he exported further and improved upon it and I just thought we could add another couple of characteristics their thresholds is being able to raise enough money is one of the other thresholds and having being part of the discourse in the media on a regular basis it's still a challenge for the Greens sometimes they make it unfortunately for the wrong reasons when there's as there is currently right now some inter-party fighting and I had another question which relates to the other comments that have been made and that is I've been reading it actually an article in the Golden Mail by a written by the one of the first founders of the Green Party of Canada Trevor Hancock who's a professor at New Vic and he said that the Green Party is a very important part of the Green Party and he says we're losing a bit of a plot as to what Green Party is about as you know you might have heard about the recent couple about the foreign policy positions of some of the elected officials and our leader and that has really taken over discussion when here we have the heat wave and go back to their the foundation core of their and he said what we need to explain what means to have one planet economy one planet society how do you live within the limits of the planet and do so in a way that is socially just it's good to have these other issues but maybe to have the essence of climate change in the middle of it and so I'm very interested in the book of Ari's book on governing ecologically and the Greens governing because here in Canada in BC we just recently had the BC Greens and the NDP in form of a common supply agreement which unfortunately fell through and they're no longer in government the Greens but they were for a while and I wanted to explore in my book looking at what they've what did they accomplish and how they worked with the social democratic party and the possibility they could have worked actually with the BC Liberals which is more of a center right party but I know reading some of Ari's work that in fact the Greens can work with either and that's what makes the Greens so fascinating they're neither left nor right but what are they and I think that perhaps some of these Green parties like the one in Canada can approach Thank You Thanks Kara I'll just add a little side note about the Swedish Greens the Greens are still in government but the hot news today the headline is that the Prime Minister step down due to a vote of no confidence so the next step is that the Speaker of the House will try to facilitate a new agreement amongst the eight political parties that are in part Sorry, yes, we still have power and we may still as well because a new election is the last thing anyone wants really. So it's exciting times, but I can't mentions an interesting question about, you know, what sort of research is needed now? And I noted that in the chat, Leah cut, who is the founder of the Green Party in Pakistan asked the question about how, how could we help this sort of research develop in other countries where there is a lack of formal academic work being done, like in Pakistan, there are no courses or research that he's aware of that is doing a sort of research that you're doing in green politics. So it's an open question to any of you, what do you think the world needs next in terms of our work, our research, our skills, our publishing and see Daphid's head and hand going up over to you, Daphid. Yeah, I mean, in response to that one, I mean, that's often a great opportunity, the fact that we have this kind of gap that no one's really done this kind of research before. So that can be really exciting. And the possibility of looking to see whether these kind of theories or frameworks have been developed, mainly in European cases, actually work for, for example, Asian cases and maybe how we need to adjust those theories or frameworks, I think can be really exciting. And it means that studies in these kind of emerging countries can actually talk a language that makes sense to political scientists, for example, in European or North American cases. It's something that really enriches our field and it kind of builds on that kind of, it's kind of international nature of green. So I think that's, for me, that's really exciting. Yes, James? Yeah, so yeah, there was a bunch of ideas in there that are interesting. And in terms of like the academic literacy in other countries, I'm not sure what comes first, either the literacy about green issues among academics or the literacy about green issues among the media. I've spent a lot of time thinking about it in the media. Something I wrote about in my book was that in the last election that we did, there was only one person in the media covering the selection that had actually read the green platform and that everyone else who was trying to cover green issues in any way routed their questions through that one guy who is a lovely man, but I don't know if he fully understood the green issues well enough to basically be our spokesperson, which is kind of the job that he got put into because he was the only person in the media who was bothering to take the time to kind of understand what we were talking about. And so I don't know if we need to try to push literacy of the media pundits to try to get people who understand these issues into places where they're talking on the talk shows and stuff like that. And if that will maybe drive research interest or if it's the other way around where if we can get research scientists, like I know in Canada in the past couple years we got the first person to be officially assigned the Canada Research Chair in Ecological Economics. We didn't have that as a research chair before. Now that we have that, I'm hoping that maybe the media will pick up on some of the things that are coming out of that, you know, elevated a bit of academic interest or whatever. See, I don't know which way it goes, but probably both pushing each other. Okay, Kara, do you want to pick up on that? Yes, I think one of the reasons perhaps is one is that, as I said, this fact that some of the other parties and some of the pundits, unfortunately, are also involved in this and they have biases, favorites. And so they feel that the end of period of liberals are the other progressive parties are good enough. And the other part of it is that there is a desire for, which is a good thing, to talk about the environmental issues from a very objective standpoint. And the Greens have been associated with the environmental movement. And so they're thinking of them as these hippie fringe people that climb trees and they don't see them as a serious entity. And that was the other question I had. I found it very interesting. I'm rereading James Marshall's book and I've enjoyed it now more than once since I, it's a great pleasure. And because he has, he certainly has done a very thorough discussion with some of the people who started the party in BC, for example, and at the federal level. And I wanted to know more. I was a question I had for James as well. What is the, because it's, as David said it, for the case of Taiwan also, it's a very ambiguous relationship, the relationship between the environmental movement and the party. And there's all this literature about movement parties. Well, how does that work in Canada? What is it like? Is it the right relationship? Oh, yeah, I'll jump in there. It's very strange in Canada because of our electoral system. The environmental movement, then the various environmental NGOs, I have noticed, tend to align themselves with parties that have their goals a lot less than the Greens do. Like, we'll see, there'll be some requests that come out of environmental movement and the Greens will say like, yes, yes, yes, we are on board with all of that. And then we'll see this environmental movement throwing their entire weight behind one of the bigger parties that have said no to half of their demands. And that's because from a strategic standpoint, there's always this thing that's going on in the environmental movement to try to figure out, you know, should we go for the, and then, you know, put our neck out for a party that's probably not going to win seats, or are we going to put our neck out for one that probably is, but that isn't following what we're actually asking them. And I don't know if that's the case in Germany, where the Greens do win seats, but in Canada, it's a bizarre, self-reinforcing cycle, I think, where the Greens aren't treated seriously because they're believed to not be serious and now that just keeps going in circles and there's got to break it somewhere and I don't know where that happens. So, yeah, I'd like to ask Aaron actually about that, about environmental movements. Yeah, that's a complex relationship and it most often depends also on the constellation of other Greens in government or in the opposition. Yeah, so when I was an assistant on the national level in the Greens governed on the national level in Germany from 1998 to 2005, and back at the time, they were like a five to eight percent party, so they joined a center-left government being the very small partner, basically being responsible for environmental issues, such as the nuclear phase-out, renewable energy, ecological tax reform. Those were the major projects for the Greens and once they, it was the first time they enter government and they raised huge expectations in the environmental movement and they failed miserably, so to say, yeah, so there was a big disappointment time and alienation almost with the environmental movement and the Green Party. Now, this is 20 years ago and we are now in a situation where the Greens have a strong governing record on the state level, but we have also a new generation of activists. The Fridays for Future movement is very strong in Germany, is very active and is putting a lot of pressure on the issue and is raising the issue to become the number one issue for most voters, actually, so they have a huge impact, I think, the new generation despite the difficult conditions during the pandemic, but we will come into a similar situation. We will come into a situation that the Greens are likely to enter government as a 20% party, but joining a centre-right coalition this time with the Conservatives, maybe, who are around 30%, so basically the Greens cannot pursue their agenda to 100% and there will be compromises within the government and it will be a big challenge for, you know, to put in it single-sidedly onto the movement, the challenge, but the challenge will be basically that you have one actor in government trying to pursue or push through the agenda and another one pushing from outside, you know, and how do you organize that relationship to be fertile and that the criticism outside does not, you know, put the actor in government down. This is what happened 20 years ago, basically the movement was disappointed, they turned away from the Greens and the Greens were performing weaker and weaker in the government. I mean, they would describe it differently today, but just to make it short. And so I think it's not, it's quite a task, actually, to find a good way of job-sharing of how you can, you know, combine forces from within parliament and outside. Something that some of the German Greens told me while I was doing research that I thought was very funny was they found it easier from a political perspective to work with the center-right parties as opposed to the center-left parties because the expectation was just so much lower amongst the public. Like when they worked with the CDU, the public thought, oh, the Greens aren't going to be able to get anything done, whereas when they worked with the SPD, the public said, all right, everything's going to happen. And they, you know, so there was just a lot less expectation put on them and that was a bizarre experience for them. Yeah, I think this connects well to a question Arnie put on the chat box as we speak about external forces influencing the Greens, the destiny of the Greens or how we understand the Greens. Arnie, could you ask that question yourself about the right wing populist movement that was posed to other speakers? Yeah, so what I observe in Western Europe and in the United States, the countries that I follow most is obviously in the last years there has been a rise in populism and mostly right wing populism and in political systems like Germany, this also comes with a fragmentation of the political system now. So today we have six parties established in the parliament, a fragmentation and the big 10 parties have become much smaller. And within the Germany systems, the Greens basically have moved to one side of the spectrum and the opposite side is the right wing populist party, what is called alternative for Deutschland and somewhat, I mean, there are underlying factors of this political shift underneath, but in general, like the cheap conclusion or the cheap observation that I have is that the Greens actually in Germany benefit from this because unlike the big 10 parties, the Greens have a very clear profile today, they are refugee friendly, they're pro-European, they're fighting the climate crisis, they see a strong role for the government, while the right wing, the right extreme has the opposite program. And the other parties are moving in between different wings within their own parties. So for the Greens, it's not like a gift, but they somehow benefit from this new constellation. And I'm just curious how this must be playing out differently in other political systems where you have mostly, you have mainly two parties or maybe three parties, but I'm just curious how it affects Greens in other countries. Yeah, I think for the Green parties in the Taiwan case, the populism issue is a relatively new one. More of a challenge has been that right at the start, post-democratic transition, there already was a mainstream pro-environmental party. So there already was a anti-nuclear party on the party system. And how do you kind of gain ownership of that environmental issue when you already have a mainstream party that has that kind of position? Of course, when that mainstream party comes into office, then you get that kind of alienation that the army talked about. But it's still an issue. And then even today, we have quite a lot of competition, not only from that mainstream party that is actually currently in power, but also other kind of movement parties that are competing for those kind of votes. So in many ways in the Taiwanese system, it's actually become much more competitive, even though public opinion has actually moved in the same direction. So in many ways, the Greens have won the argument on issues such as same-sex marriage or environmental consciousness. But the market has just become so much more competitive. Thanks. I see Karen James have also put their hands up, but I want to ask Ricky what's he noticing in Japan? Is there a rise of right-wing populism there? And if yes, how is it impacting the Greens? Well, yeah, actually, we can observe very big, how to say, increase of such kind of right-wing populism by ruling parties. So that's kind of weird, not like AFD in Germany or something like that. But such kind of movement, I mean, the ruling party, the LDP, Labor Democratic Party here in Japan, is kind of supporting such kind of ultra-right way of how to say thinking, for example, attacking China or Korea or something like that. So the problem is that we're here in Japan, at least here in Japan, and we're still living in the Cold War era. So first of all, the atmosphere is like, first of all, we have to fight with communism or we have to fight with communism China or something, they are enemy or something like that. So the interesting thing is, for example, when I ran for candidate, say, in 2003, 2004, I had some questions from such kind of sectors. Like, how do you think about the human rights violation in China, in Tibet or something like that? And I say, of course, it's not good, because it's obvious that the human rights violation is not good in anywhere in the world. Okay, so then you are our friends like that. So I was really welcomed by a certain such kind of populist or ultra-right group. But on the other hand, at the same time, I was labeled like ultra-leftist or something like that, because I was a little bit popular for famous for studying Costa Rica, which abolished the army and which sounds like very leftist or something like that. So the people here in Japan still think or still are stuck into the cold era way of thinking. And so I think it doesn't, Japanese case doesn't really match to this kind of discussion or the situation is completely different from my part of view, or it's more complicated or let's say it's more primitive. It's not the, it's not 21st century here in Japan. Different context. Yeah. Next, Carol, do you like to comment? That was a very good question that we posed. And then we have the People's Party of Canada just ran a few candidates in the last federal election that would be on the right, far the right, as well as their elements within the conservative party. And actually, in the case of the Canadian, Canadian Greece, I would say it was hurt them. And that's because of the politics of fear that works. And the way that with this negative strategic voting that we have in Canada, because of the electoral system, people are afraid that these elements could take over if there are not enough support for the larger progressive parties on the left. So unfortunately, it has has dammed enthusiasm for the greens. Even though the greens can portray themselves as those who are most committed to science, and to a more ethical governing approach process, in contrast to the populace who are not. But this has not really worked in near their advantage because of people that are fearful of wasting their votes or taking away votes from making it possible for a majority, a conservative majority to come in. That would have a right wing populist agenda that would be counter the environment and counter would bring in a policies that are perhaps against women's rights or anti immigration. James, do you like to ask about? Yeah, that was a good analysis by Kara. The politics of fear is I think really big. There was a polling result that came out after one of the last provincial elections in which they asked people, did you primarily vote for the candidate you wanted? Or did you primarily vote to block the candidate you really didn't want? And a majority said that they voted out of fear to not to try to block whoever they didn't like. And so I think if you look back at Canadian elections, the Greens do better whenever there's not a very scary conservative that's out there. And certainly in my circles, most people are motivated by fear of what a certain party could do. And the Conservative Party in Canada still to a large extent has captured the populist right as part of them. As Kara said, we do have the People's Party, which is a new party in the last election formed by a disgruntled conservative leadership candidate who they got about 3% elected no one. So most of that energy is still inside the mainstream Conservative Party. And I think that scares a lot of people away from voting green and they say, oh, I have to vote liberal or whatever this time, and then I'll vote green next time. And we hear that a huge amount. My other random little funny anecdote is when this one disgruntled Conservative left to form this new populist party, he became an independent member of parliament, not associated with the party because it was just the one of him. And the Greens in our parliament are also not an official party because you have to have a certain number of people in order to qualify for that designation. And so the alt-right party leader and our green party leader were sat next to each other in parliament for about a year and a half. And I talked to her a bit and like he'd lean over and show her things that he was working on and she'd just be so exhausted from having to sit next to this guy. And in the same case, during the last election, we had debates for local candidates. And for instance, we had one in my area specifically on environmental issues. And for fairness's sake, they had to invite the populist right wing party, which I thought was very strange because her position was that there are no environment problems. And inviting someone to an environmental debate who's just going to yell about how we shouldn't be having this debate was it pretty much derailed the entire thing. And there were people walking out because just nothing was getting done because of this disruptive influence there. So yeah, it's frustrating. Looking at the question from another angle, David, David wrote in the chat box a question on how has immigrant communities impacted green parties? David, do you want to clarify your question, Kenny? Yeah, because in one of the comments James mentioned the fact that there is such a large Indian community in in Canada. So that kind of maybe think about this because it does it is something that applies to I think all the cases that we're looking at in in Sweden in Germany, even in Japan and Taiwan, we have a growing immigrant community. And we often do see kind of anti immigrant rhetoric, even in in some of our Asian cases. So is this an opportunity for green parties and another kind of related one that also so I think I picked up in James's book was about indigenous people and the way that green parties I think have a really important role to play in terms of protecting the rights of indigenous peoples. And I know that Taiwan's party has tried this, but it's it's varied again over time, depending on the kind of the make up for the party. And at certain times it has been more successful. So I was curious about whether others had any thoughts on these two kind of dimensions, the indigenous one, but also the the the potential for attracting immigrant communities. One. Would you like to put your hand up first? Oh, your microphone, Kara. Sorry, I'm actually looked at some of the data that I received in terms of voters and and supporters and the greens. Unfortunately, I've compared to the other parties, very small, much smaller percentage of people from new immigrant communities as yet. They are developing this. They are making inroads and Ontario, for example, they have had new high profile candidates who are from Indian descent. But one of the to start with is that new immigrants in Canada. Many of them are not involved in politics of any kind. They're busy with other things. They're not as well integrated yet. And so the green parties is even something even newer that they will not know what it is, especially if they come from a country where they haven't had the green parties of high profile. And the other thing is that they are very fearful that the greens will mean a tanking economy that will threaten the economy. And so if the green party wants to succeed and there was quite a discussion actually in some of the recent conventions here in BC, I'm sure James will talk more about more clearly on that is that they have to show that one can have a strong economy as well as a more healthy environment that the two count I hand in hand. Because here in Canada, we depend on a lot on unfortunately still on the non green economy on the development resource extraction. And there there has been the greens are been the ones that are been against the pipelines and was pronounced and against the LNG, the natural gas shipments to out to out the staples economy out to Asia out to other parts of the world. And they're more focused on the local economy. But that is going against the what the bulk of the Canadian economy is based on. Now the green economy is developing. And actually I found from my survey of members that many of the greens, that's how the greens in Canada differ perhaps from other greens in other countries, including Germany is that we have more self employed and more people employed in the private sector, but in the small businesses, the new startups that are in the or their organic farmers or their people employed in advanced technologies, green building. And so they support the green party because the green party is they hope going to influence the other parties to bring in policies that are more supportive of a green economy in Canada. But the green economy is actually quite small still in Canada. And for the second point about the indigenous people, that is true that they have been supportive of indigenous rights, but not in the non indigenous people are in favor of our are more there's there are indigenous groups that are want development and very quick development because they're they have a lot to to invest in their infrastructure and their their economies. And so they want to go ahead with the traditional non green, more petrol, chemical focused, which goes on as with what the greens want to do, which is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And so there are sometimes are at odds and not all greens and indigenous people are together united. Thanks, Cara. I put my hand up because this is a topic that I was passionate about when I was working with the global greens. I really saw the potential for green parties to work together to to talk to their populations, both at home, but also in the countries where they've immigrated to. And that I wanted to see a robust international secretariat of each green party, which consisted of people of different nationalities who could speak to the different immigrant communities in their own language, in their own culture, and who could help interpret how the issues in their new home country could be understood through a context of the country they came from. So to help make that connection internationally. So that's a project I would love to see continue to develop. It was quite a complex web of connections, but I definitely think it's possible and the global greens and the green green parties are the best, I guess, set up for that because we're so global, globally connected to start with. So if anybody wants to join me on that project, just get in contact. Great, James. All right. So I see Ricky has had his hand up and I also note that we are about 15 minutes to the end of our two hour session. Time flies and you're having fun. So I wanted to just sort of end with a little kind of discussion, short discussion about where to from here. What are your thoughts about future projects, opportunities for working together, opportunities to strengthen this field in the future, invitations to the world to help you on your passion. So that's a round of questions I'll ask to all the speakers after Ricky. So first over to Ricky. OK, well, regarding the immigrants, first of all, I think here in Japan, we can observe very different aspects because Japan is such an exclusive country and actually we accept many immigrants from other countries, especially from Southeast Asia, but the government never gives them the voting right. It's almost a slave contract. It's really, really bad. But I'm thinking of that. We noticed that we have such kind of problem of the difference of international difference in terms of economy or society or something like that, and which we didn't. We did never notice before we accept the immigrants because in Japan has been so close, exclusive country that here in Japan, many Japanese people believe that here in Japan, only Japanese people live. And now we can see many nationalities, people from many nations, many nationalities who have many nationalities all around our country because they are mainly working in a convenience store, which is all around Japan. And some of them noticed the importance or the meaning of diversity for the first time in Japanese history. So that's one of the contributions. Like this, right? And the other thing is that there are some green members abroad here in Japan. So it's a very little thing, but there is very little international exchange experience here in Japan. For example, I have friends from New Zealand Greens, and I have another friend from French Greens around here. And they contribute so much to develop what is green, I mean, the ideology or philosophy of greens to the members of Greens Japan, because the Green Japan, the members of Green Japan is like a group of civil movements or something like that. So they have their own specific issues like no wars or no nuclear power plants or something like that. But it's not integrated so much in terms of philosophy or something. So such kind of international friends gives us the integrated image of philosophy, a way of thinking of greens. So that's kind of a little bit of contribution. But so as I said, we're still in the primitive era. So at first we have to understand what the diversity is. So that's kind of first step and they don't have voting rights. So we had to, as a Green's, we had to fight for their rights. Right. That's the first thing for Greens. And to close my statement or my argument. Well, actually, Greens in Japan is not treated as a political party officially because to be treated political party officially, we have to we have to get at least two percent of the total votes in latest elections, which means more than like one million votes or we have to have at least five MPs, which is not possible. So it's very tough. And as we are not treated as an official political party, even though we we resisted as a political party, people don't recognize that we are political party. And if some candidates, some members of city councilors grew up and they they got the position of mayor, for example, they suddenly stop called themselves Greens and they called they started to call themselves as independence because it's better for the elections. So what I'm thinking about is to establish in this in this society, Japanese society, to establish the politics by political parties, which had each of which has some kind of ideology or philosophy of a way of thinking, not bothering with your current issues, like, for example, now, Olympic or pandemic or something like that. But we have to have long term ideology or way of thinking of something like that. So that's what I wanted to ask with my book. Thank you very much. All right. Thanks, Ricky. And I believe Ricky's on the International Secretariat of Greens Japan. So if you want to get in touch with the party, you can also contact Ricky to help build them up. All right. A fast maximum two minutes per speaker. Just a wish to the universe or statement about what you want to work on next in this field or what you want help on. We'll start with James. Sure. What I'm working on now is how to translate green ideas to kind of a mass market audience and how to reach different groups of people who have maybe never considered some of these ideas before. We don't have time. I was going to talk about the immigrant one just because I think it's really interesting how we communicate these ideas to people from various different cultural backgrounds. And so if anyone has insights on that, I know we had a few people from India Greens. I think there's a lot of interesting context in there in the history and even religion of Indian culture that has green connections. We have a lot of people here from Taiwan studies. I think there's a lot probably that exists, perhaps in Taiwanese and Chinese history, including, I think, especially in Taoism. I've been reading a lot about, you know, some of the green connections that exist in this because a lot of the time when we talk about our green ideas, we're doing it from a very kind of Christian centric background because there's been so much green development in Europe where there's a Christian minority. So a lot of just the ways we talk about our ideas are filtered through our own cultures. So I'm quite interested in how other people can communicate these things. And specifically, if there's terms and ideas that people understand that don't exist in English, but that would really mean a lot to someone who comes from a different language community, because I know there's a lot of words in English that unless you understand the cultural background of them, you might not understand the depth of them. And I'm sure there's words like that in Chinese and in Hindi and in many other languages. I want to know them so that when I talk to people, I can, you know, reference these things and come from a place where they already have a bit of understanding of what we're talking about. And then I'm just trying to think about green economics and green answers to things beyond purely, you know, talking about trees or talking about plants. Like how does our understanding of economics play into the climate crisis? And how can we talk about green economic ideas? Something in a lot about that as well. Anyone wants to talk about that? Hit me up. Great. Next, Arne. Yes. So over the next month, I, in my work, I try to help the Germany's climate movement to turn the election into a climate victory. So we basically have 300 districts and 60 of them are climate relevant. And the Greens might end up, you know, winning even up to 40 districts seats directly. But in terms of green party research, I bring in a European perspective. I'm not sure if it's the right audience here, but there are but there are two ideas that are popping up to my mind what is worthwhile to research further. One is that there's currently six or seven in six or seven European member states. The Greens are in government and it would be worthwhile to evaluate their experience and compare that Swedish Greens, Luxembourg, Austria, Finland, Ireland, Belgium, and maybe Germany. So that's one one idea. And the other one is a transatlantic project. I think the obviously democracy in the United States is in a stage of deep crisis. But there's also attempts to modernize democracy in the United States and on the state level on the municipal level. Basically, their reform attempts to make democracy more functional and increase representation. And this could be done by proportional voting system can be done by ranked choice, which which is used in Alaska and in Maine already. And so I think these are questions of how does the democracy function and how does the political system function? And these are still from these are little, you know, these are little switches that impact also perspective of green policy. And I think it's this is an upcoming issue. And when once we see more energy in this going on in the United States, I think this will have a also an international dimensional international reference. Next Kara. Yes, yes, I thoroughly enjoyed our discussions today and the very stimulating and in the process of completing my book. And it's a very timely because we are the federal election is imminent now and the fall. And while there's been the pandemic now with the heat wave and the other the melting of the ice pack, there's going to be a change also towards focus more on climate change I think in the election. We had an ideal time last time the last election 2019, but the greens didn't make their breakthrough. So what I want to explore is the final what I can find out why it didn't happen. And so that I can perhaps gives provide some kind of information to the party that they can utilize. And I've been interviewing candidates as well as as looking at some of the survey data that I have. Also, I've been focusing on what what it means to be green because we've had an influx of people coming into the party from other parties. And it's and I want to compare their perspective with those who have been in the party for very long time were founding members. And how is the green party developed over time and involved. And here it's an ideal location because in British Columbia we have we've had a very close election where we the greens have nearly won, but they didn't quite make it. So I'd like to look at the campaign strategy and a lot of it has to do with how they position themselves relative to the NDP and the Liberals who also claim that they are green in some ways. Thank you. Great. And last but not least, David. Great. When we finish a project, we often said, what are you going to do next? But I'm not at that stage yet. I've enjoyed this project so much that I don't want it to stop. So I mentioned that I'm doing the working on the Chinese version of the book, but I think there's lots of other avenues that could be taken. I think one is looking comparatively. So long as there's similar cases, so potentially Taiwan, Japan, South Korean Green Party would be a really interesting comparison. And another thing that I think comes out a lot from our discussion today is about looking for practical solutions. From maybe from failed campaigns, what can we learn? How could Green Parties improve their relationship with social movements? And a final one that I think could be really interesting is something on green diplomacy, because I think that's one of the really exciting things about the greens. And a lot of people I've interviewed have actually found that has been the most meaningful element of being involved in the greens. That kind of international engagement while in contrast, electoral politics, I think as James has mentioned in the single member district, can be really, really frustrating. But the joy from that kind of international engagement came through so much in a lot of my interview. So I think there's a lot of things to do. I think it's why I think it's such an enjoyable thing to research. Indeed, that's certainly why I got involved. I fell in love with the global element and changed my life forever, for the better. So with that, I want to thank David for bringing us together in the Center for Taiwan Studies for making this platform possible, making it happen. Thank you. So please join me in a round of applause. Thank you for the study and everybody.