Den 22.-25. juni mødtes knap 1.000 personer fra 120 lande i Glasgow til årsmøde i CIVICUS, som er en international sammenslutning af civilsamfundsorganisationer, der har til formål at fremme eksistensen og udviklingen af civilsamfund verden rundt.
Årsmødet, der nærmest kan karakteriseres som et NGO træf MAXI, var en spændende begivenhed og et sted, hvor der bliver sat fokus på de de nyeste trends samt bliver netværket på kryds og tværs, skriver Projektrådgivningen i Århus i sit seneste nyhedsbrev, der udkom onsdag.
Projektrådgivningen er som en af få danske organsationer medlem af CIVICUS og var repræsenteret med to personer. Troels Hovgaard fra sekretariatet samt Vagn Frikke-Schmidt fra Styregruppen.
Sammenslutningens generalsekretær, Kumi Naidoo, holdt en brandtale, da årsmødet blev åbnet. Den gengives her.
OPENING Address to the Sixth CIVICUS World Assembly, Glasgow, Scotland, 22-25 June 2006
By Kumi Naidoo
The overall theme of the World Assembly remains unchanged since we last met in Botswana: Acting Together for A Just World. Global, national and local developments over the last couple of years all suggest that this theme remains timely today and will be for many years to come.
The main ideas in the overall theme for the Assembly are “acting together” and “justice.” At the heart of these ideas is the valuing of human life and working together. The gross violations of human rights that stunned the world community on 11 September 2001, the tragic war in Iraq, and the continuing conflicts in many countries around the world that unnecessarily claim human life, must force us to think about the value we place on human life and how much that shapes what we do, how we think and how we relate to each other.
The world is consumed by “terror” and the so-called “war against terrorism” which itself has become terrifying; violence against women has assumed gigantic proportions, millions of people are displaced by war, and then there is the quiet violence of poverty and hunger. Today for many people around the world the real weapon of mass destruction is dehumanizing poverty.
The second piece of this is acting together. Nelson Mandela has said: “If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner. Your freedom and mine cannot be separated.”
The South African experience teaches us well, that working together and acting together requires courage and the ability to rise above our own pettiness. Even within civil society we have much to do to ensure we work effectively together. We need to do much more to ensure that, for example, trade unions and NGOs find common cause, we have much to do to ensure that secular and religious civil society unite around those things we agree on and agree to disagree in so far as those issues we have fundamental differences around.
While civil society organizations are justified in criticizing governments for often failing to achieve coherence across line departments the NGO community ironically reflects often the same parochialism and territorialism that make it difficult for us to achieve maximum impact in our quest for a just world.
The CIVICUS World Assembly is a space for us to assess the impact our actions are having, and is about giving further impetus and energy to the numerous acts taken by citizens from small villages to large cities around the world to create a better society. It is also a space for us to encourage innovative actions already taking place and to lay the basis for further actions, as civil society tries to be more united and coherent within the reality of our rich civic diversity that we are all part of.
Learning to act together and apart, where appropriate with the intergovernmental system, governments and business is also a challenge, since we will not be able to address the challenges that humanity faces by one sector acting alone. Some of us work at the local level, others at a provincial or state-wide level, yet others at the national, regional or international level.
Some of us are primarily focused on providing services to communities in need. Others are more focused on influencing the policies adopted by governing institutions at the local, national, regional and global level. Yet, others are focused on the improvement of the governance of our public institutions, recognizing that policy is made within particular parameters determined by political arrangements that require not only reform but in many cases substantive and fundamental change. Of course, many civil society groups are involved in more than one level of intervention as well.
Bridging the north-south divide amongst civil society is a key challenge as well given that our governments and the international system appears to be failing in this regard. Yet, global civil society reflects all the inequalities and contradictions that exist in the world today. How we deal with these differences is critically important.
CIVICUS own existence is a statement that the north and the south need each other desperately. We share the same planet and unless we give up on the notion that countries can only advance on basis of competitive advantage over other countries, the future of this planet is doomed. Global problems call for global consensus and global solutions.
We should also admit that there should be no shame or inherent gain, based on where one is born, none of us chose that consciously. Irrespective of where we are born we all have the power and ability to contribute to a just world. We know well that there are many citizens in the north that have done so much for a just world and similarly some of our leaders in the south who have acted against the interests of the south.
While most of us come from civil society organizations, we have colleagues from intergovernmental organizations, such as the UN and the World Bank, we have counterparts from the business community and we have representatives from national governments.
We do not as civil society want to talk amongst ourselves all the time. We are confident enough today that we can engage with our colleagues from these institutions on the basis as equals. Notwithstanding this diversity, we are united by a common concern. Recognising that the basic building block of civil society is the citizen, we are committed to ensure that the voice and aspirations of ordinary citizens is respected and valued.
We are committed to the ideal that every human being on this planet has the right and capability to shape the form of governance institutions that make the policies that lead to the delivery of services and the maintenance of the rule of law which we hope will one day be based genuinely on social, economic, social and civic justice.
When the cold war ended in the early 1990s, there was much optimism that a “peace dividend” would reduce wasteful military expenditure, would ensure that we address the real issues that humanity faces and that democracy will deliver just social and economic outcomes. Unfortunately, that optimism has not fulfilled its promise and rather than moving towards a more united global community we see many lines of division that keep us apart.
Perhaps more than anything that unites us here today is the desire to work for a more equitable and just world that will ensure that future generations will not judge us harshly. They should not say, why did you not prevent the environmental degradation of the planet when collectively you had the power to do so.
They should not ask, why did you not act with courage when the gap between the rich and poor, both within countries as well as between rich and poor nations was growing at an unsustainable pace? They should not ask why did you bequeath to us a planet where injustice, intolerance, fragmentation, inequality and cynicism reigns supreme. We are here for the next four days, therefore, to join several other efforts at ensuring we add our contributions to ensuring that A JUST WORLD IS POSSIBLE.
We will not ignore previous cross-cutting concerns such as gender equality. Gender equality, still unfortunately remains an elusive dream and even though there has been progress in a few places around the world, the pace and depth of progress leaves much to be desired. What does it say about the quality of our democracy if still less than 10 percent of women occupy leadership roles in political life? What does it about our social cohesion if violence against women and children is on the rise?
Youth empowerment, another cross cutting issue, is critically important, perhaps today more so than ever before. It is simply not good enough to say that young people are the leaders of tomorrow.
In poor countries around the world young peoples sheer numbers make them potentially powerful social actors. In Africa, for example, with the passive genocide being caused by HIV/AIDS, we have seen such an impact on our demography, and the rise of teenage headed households, that young people are very much the leaders of today.
The failure to create opportunities for young people to have voice and presence in public life will ensure their further marginalization. This not only creates further social problems that need to be addressed but also ensures that humanity is robbed of the vast talents of young people.
An urgent cross cutting priority whether we are grantmakers or funders, or whether we are grantseekers, is to ensure that we can make these relationships work better to ensure that we reduce transaction costs.
Should we not dream of the possibility that a critical mass of donors, including Foundations, bilateral agencies, such as DFID, CIDA and NORAD, or multilateral agencies such as UNDP, can get together and agree a joint application format and a joint reporting format so that civil society groups can focus more on the substance of their work rather than spending disproportionate amount of time on fundraising and reporting to funders.
We are all concerned also about how to communicate to our various publics more effectively. While new media offers civil society new ways of reaching some of its potential publics, if we are to promote social, economic, political and civic justice then we need to urgently develop strategies to ensure that the mainstream media which sadly not simply reports on reality but has the ability to shape reality, must be engaged and influenced.
If we are genuinely committed to justice we should be saying now that in the coming decades humanity must not judge itself on the progress and prosperity of those that are most privileged, advantaged and are in the mainstream of their societies.
Rather, humanity should judge itself on the basis of the progress of those that are most marginalized and socially excluded. Often when we talk about social exclusion and marginalization, we might be tempted into thinking that we are talking only about minority constituencies of citizens. To be sure, we need to make a special effort with regard to for example racial, religious, ethnic and linguistic minorities, or people living with disabilities, or indigenous peoples, people living with HIV/AIDS or people with alternative sexual orientations.
However, given that in many societies, older persons, women and young people are socially marginalized we have a frightening situation where in actual fact the majority of citizens on the planet do not have full and effective voice to advance their concerns and aspirations.
While civil society organizations at the local, national and global levels have considerable skills, talents and often take the lead in innovations, given the tremendous changes that have been brought about by globalization many capacity development challenges need to be tackled. In effect, what we are talking about is really releasing capacity rather than building it up from scratch. During the course of this Assembly learning and capacity development will be a central focus of our efforts.
The four sub-themes of our Assembly, Economic Justice, Political Justice, Social Justice and Civic Justice are interconnected and provide a framework for our deliberations.
Political Justice is concerned with the reality that we today find ourselves in a situation where democracy is in a deep crisis. True, we have seen the rise of the instituting of elections around the world but has this has not improved the quality of our democracy.
We need to debunk the idea that democracy equals elections. We must appeal to our political leaders not to read a victory at the ballot box as a blank check to rule without any interface with their citizens in between election periods. In many democratic systems “form” has largely overtaken the ‘substance’ of democracy: elections may be held, but fewer and fewer people are choosing to vote and the meaningful interface between citizens and the elected are minimal between election periods.
Elections run the risk of becoming pre-ordained, elite legitimating processes and are, in some cases, not delivering genuine democracy. Affiliation with traditional political parties is on the decline as the parties themselves are characterized by a growing lack of internal democracy or fail to address issues that citizens believe are important.
Other examples of the deepening democratic deficit, include the fact that the influence of moneyed interests in many political systems is making it prohibitively expensive to run for political office, an important factor in the under representation of women in our parliaments and the fact that political incumbents are often able to maniipulate the power of their existing offices to promote their electoral chances and the under representation of socially excluded constituencies, such as women.
Furthermore, apart from the optimism presented by the internet for greater transparency and alternative sources of analysis and information, broadcast and print media independence and critique is also diminishing and, in an age of aggressive spin doctoring, citizens are often separated from the full story about public concerns.
Last and certainly not the least, is the lack of gender parity in national governments worldwide. While there has been some movement in the positive direction, the rules of the formal political game is largely framed by a distinctive masculine approach to dealing with conflict and compromise.
We have to take account of the deepening lack of faith in national political and business leaders among citizens across the globe. While each national context has its own distinctive features, the declining passion for electoral politics is troubling for the future of democracy. The reality is that democracy at the local and national level is in trouble, even in many long established democracies.
In the current global context where real power around issues such as the environment, trade, debt and other fundamental economic issues, terrorism and security, are unable to be addressed solely at the national level, more attention needs to be given to the workings of regional and international institutions.
Unfortunately, there are no direct channels for democratic representation to global decision-making forums such as the UN General Assembly, the UN Security Council, the World Bank, the WTO or any of the 300 other intergovernmental organisations affecting the lives of individuals and communities the world over. All of these institutions use a framework rooted in the nation state system that might have made sense to some more than half a century ago, but appears to be increasingly inappropriate.
Given the shift of power from national to global levels, it has become a critical priority for southern governments and socially excluded groups, to be engaging at a trans-national level, yet it is here that the “global democratic deficit” is felt most strongly.
Supranational governance structures wield great power over the lives of ordinary people around the world and should, in some way, seek to be participatory and accountable to those people. Herein is the crux of the global governance deficit: decisions affecting the lives and well-being of people around the world increasingly lie with international institutions that are not directly accountable to those people and which are not accessible to citizen voices.
Decisions about trade rules, intellectual property rights, macro-economic restructuring policies, privatization of vital services, and debt relief are perceived to be made behind closed doors in ways that are largely perceived to be undemocratic, lacking in coherence, legitimacy and ultimately, even the more acceptable policies that are embraced globally is burdened by the lack of compliance in implementation terms.
Many of the global institutions that have become increasingly powerful in our current age such as the World Bank, the IMF, and key structures of the UN, such as the Security Council – were constructed at a particular moment in world history that is a far cry from the context in which we currently find ourselves.
The geopolitics of 1945 continues to dominate the governance structures of key institutions, even at this point well into the post-colonial era following these institutions reaching their 60th anniversary last year. We need to concede that many of these global public institutions appear to be operating under rules and logics that are not in keeping with the realities that citizens confront around the world today.
Democracy suggests, among other things, a system wherein a community of people exercises collective self-determination. Members of a given public take decisions that shape their destiny jointly, with equal rights and opportunities of participation, and without arbitrarily imposed constraints on debate. Democratic governance strives to be participatory, consultative, transparent and publicly accountable.
By one mechanism or another, democratic governance should rest on the consent of the governed. Given the present configuration of global governance, how are we to ensure the consent of the affected publics?
We run the risk today of having democracy diminished to little more than a liberal oligarchy or the rule of the few, including in some countries who see themselves as promoters of democracy. It is in this context that the role of civil society is critically important at several levels.
Firstly, civil society has an important role in breathing new life into democracy. This can be witnessed in several countries as civil society organisations are playing a big role in non-partisan voter education efforts or for that matter in voter registration itself.
Secondly, civil society organisations are able to offer several options in addition to voting for ordinary citizens to take part in public life. It is important therefore to recognize that civil society organisations are involved at the macro (governance), meso (policy) and micro (operational/delivery) levels in public life.
While most of civil societys efforts are at the operational level, increasingly civil society organisations are offering citizens an opportunity to reflect on policy and try to shape it, in between election periods (where electoral democracy is in place) as well as trying to improve our very governance systems. The idea that democracy should be reduced to the singular act of voting is clearly flawed, as is the idea that all energy should be put into non-electoral politics.
Thirdly, civil society is an important protector of democratic space when governments move in the direction of authoritarianism. In many countries around it is a severely battered civil society that is struggling against tremendous odds against the erosion of human rights and the devastation of democratic politics.
Therefore at this Assembly we will focus on our brothers and sisters from trade unions, NGOs and the media who are languishing in prisons around the world. It is worth remembering the words of Pastor Martin Niemöller, written during the second world war: “When the Nazis came for the communists, I did not speak out because I was not a communist, When they came for the social democrats, I did not speak out because I was not a social democrat, When they came for the trade unionists I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the Jews I did not speak out because I was not a Jew;. Then they came for the Catholics,and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. When they came for me there was no one left to speak out.
In this plenary we remember, Daniel Bekele and Netsanet Demissie, two leaders of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty who are on trial for treason as we gather here today. I visited them in prison in April and know that while they are not here in person they are most certainly here in spirit.
As we have seen repeatedly at world summits, civil society actors from different national contexts are better able to find common global approaches to various challenges that humanity faces than their national political leaderships who are constrained by election cycles, various national political expediencies, and often an exaggerated national parochialism. Let us now turn then to the democratic deficits at the global level.
So the challenge within the political justice theme is how to we essentially democratize democracy. War on Terrorism itself has become a problem. It is undermining some of the fundamental tenets of democracy and is in fact feeding and fuelling terrorism.
Stuart Etherington, CIVICUS Treasurer, said at the start of a CIVICUS Board meeting in Johannesburg, March 2005 captured the concern well: “Last night I left a country the United Kingdom that just passed house arrest laws, this morning I landed in a country that is a new democracy, that said ten years ago never again to house arrest, never again to detention without trial and never again to racism and racial profiling”.
The Economic Justice sub theme recognizes that while enthusiasts of economic globalization promised that this is will lead to the unhindered flow of ideas, technology, capital and so on and this will lead to unprecedented economic development the reality is that there are more loses than winners.
We should remind ourselves of the words of Mahatma Gandhi who said that this planet has enough to meet all of humanity’s need but certainly not all of humanitys greed. We are also concerned about the major impact on jobs. The current market logic seem to reward unemployment and we are seeing a rise of the informal, part time, home based, employment which ends up heightening livelihood insecurity.
We have to ask some troubling questions here: How is that the European Union can subsidise every single European cow to the tune of two euro’s per day, when almost half the people on this planet survive on less; what does it mean for sustainability if what we spend on pet food in North America and Western Europe is more than what will provide the entire African continent with nutritional food for the same amount?
Why, not withstanding the historic mobilizations last year around debt cancellation, trade justice and increasing the quantity of aid and improving the quality of aid, there has been so slow progress on the global poverty agenda? These are some of the issues we will need to reflect on economic justice including the big issues of economic governance at the national and global levels.
Social Justice deals with the difficult issues such as the role of civil society in divided societies and ones that experience conflict and violence. We here are concerned with issues of tolerance, fundamentalism and so on. We live in a world where we see the rise of anti-semitism, islamophobia and the rise of anti-Americanism.
With regard to anti-american sentiment we need to make a distinction between the policies and actions of a government in power and the American people as whole. Should we brand any people in its entirety an enemy we undermine the fundamental ethic of civil society. In Africa we have a proverb which says: I am because you are, I am because you are. This means that our place and meaning in the world is primarily determined on our relationships with people we share this planet with.
Tolerance, sadly is not achieved without effort. While tolerance is currently something of a buzzword, suggesting open-mindedness and a celebration of diversity, it still reflects an approach that focuses on how we suffer the differences of others. As Professor Thomans Gup puts it: “Progressive individuals and progressive societies are not those that wait for some elusive golden age in which prejudice and fear magically dissolve before embracing change. Rather, they are those who though bedeviled by uncertainty and distrust, act out of fundamental convictions of fairness and justice”.
He goes on to say that, “Intolerance always has two victims, the object of prejudice and its carrier…With intolerance, the real threat is never from without but from within. It is the cancer that discomforts the nation, its families and its citizens.”
Civic Justice is a term that CIVICUS has used to describe the urgent need for creating a just and enabling framework for citizens to be able to participate in public life beyond the singular act of casting a ballot once every four or five years.
We will be looking here at our own efforts as civil society to enhance our accountability, advocate for more enabling laws that encourage the role of civil society organizations, as well as looking at such specific things, as how to ensure changes in tax laws, that encouraging giving of in-kind and cash resources by businesses and individuals to non-profit organizations.
I would like to conclude by quoting Thomas Jefferson, as he once said:
“I am certainly not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and constitutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times”.
It is naive to expect that institutions constructed, in a different global context, can be made more appropriate and relevant to our age with only minor changes. We can agree with Jefferson that we do not want to take the changing of institutions and electoral conventions too lightly, but clearly the time has come for a revamping of governance institutions within a more visionary framework that puts the interests of people at the centre of our deliberations.
Unless representative democracy is balanced with participatory democracy, democracy will lose its fundamental essence.
My dream is that in the coming decades the vast inequalities between the rich and poor within individual countries and the vast inequalities that exist between rich and poor countries will be significantly reversed and that one of the key’s to realizing this dream, the elimination of the vast and unjust inequalities between men and women, will become a reality, Secretary General Kumi Naidoo concluded.
