Founded 1998 | Location Tokyo, Japan | |
Focus Globalization, Alternative Development, Japanese Political Economy Product Critical research, policy analysis, seminars, roundtables Website | ||
The Tokyo-based People’s Plan Study Group (PPSG) is a transnational alternative policy group that produces and disseminates analyses and proposals oriented towards the enhancement of social justice and ecological sustainability. The PPSG was established in 1998 and developed out of the network of activists and processes that made up the PP21 initiative (People’s Plan for the 21st Century), which was a predecessor to the World Social Forum and which officially dissolved in 2002.
Goals and activities
Through a network of a few hundred activists and action-committed intellectuals, PPSG maintains a commitment to ‘transborder solidarity’, and sees itself as linking to other likeminded people and groups throughout Asia and the rest of the world, working to identify the transformative potentiality and capacities of the people and providing critical evaluations of past movements for social transformation.
In its consciousness raising efforts and search for alternatives to neoliberal, global capitalism, it brings together activists from different movements for seminars, roundtables and strategic discussions, serving as a ‘networking institute’ for activist communities. Concomitantly, PPSG maintains an active listserv among its several hundred members, each of whom receives a hard-copy of its quarterly periodical, featuring analyses, critiques and proposals. Further, through extensive collaborative projects, it produces knowledge on radical-democratic alternatives to existing forms of economic, political and cultural organization.
While PPSG is committed to transborder solidarity and a vision of global social justice, its focus is on Asia, its board of directors continues to be composed of activists based in Japan and its constituency is for most part contained within Japan's national borders.