[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about how external development funding and multistakeholderism continue to frame recipient countries’ destinies as HR are only addressed as an afterthought. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Note: You can easily translate the Readers to many languages, Use the app deepl.com and it is done instantaneously. It takes seconds to download the app into your computer or phone and translations are of high quality.
-What so many call ‘the international community’, others have rightfully called ‘the community of 11% of the planet’. According to Washington, all those who are not there, do not exist, which is accepted in the most reactionary circles in the US and in Europe. (Sergio Rodriguez G.)
1. Take the World Economic Forum: It is geared towards replacing multilateralism (in which governments take decisions and are accountable for themselves as duty bearers) with multistakeholderism (the governance practice that conjures the illusion that all stakeholders, public and private, are equal in their rights, capacities, and responsibilities). In truth, the multistakeholder approach it ‘sells’ skillfully covers up long-standing injustices, power imbalances and human rights (HR) abuses that deepen inequality and injustice. (Civil Society and Indigenous People Mechanism of the Committee on Food Security, FAO)
To what extent does ODA policy advice and support frame recipient countries’ destiny?
2. In the external-funding-dependency-creating-development-model, policy advice and support indeed seal destiny. What this means is that LDCs end up applying too weak structural transformations that, at best, are largely based on policies from decades ago as pushed by international organizations and other development (purported) partners. Ponder: US and OECD development ‘partners’ never met their commitments to support structural national development strategies and policies.* They must (but somehow cannot) resist presuming to know what is best for countries rendered poor, e.g., requiring them to uncritically accept US and OECD outdated development fads. …wither HR. (Jomo Sundaram and Anis Chowdhury)
*: Nations have not even met their 0.7% original commitment in too many years. Oxfam estimated 50 years of unkept promises meant a $5.7 trillion aid shortfall by 2020! China is now a bigger player in international development finance than the world’s six major multilateral financial institutions together. Many developing countries have few options but to engage with, if not rely on, China. (J. Sundaram, A. Chowdhuri)
3. Furthermore, the model of ‘development aid’ is neither transparent nor predictable. After some earlier progress in untying it, external funding is increasingly again being tied requiring recipients to implement funder-steered projects or to buy from donor country suppliers; this compromises much more than only effectiveness… wither HR.
As transnational crises become more frequent, the world’s have-nots have been drawn into a vicious cycle
–Politicians give claim holders the right to development and the same politicians take it away from them. (Alberto Portugheis)
4. The current global development model is too limited, static, state-centric and under-resourced** to achieve what ought to be a historic initiative. The Bretton Woods institutions, that purport to be ‘pillars of growth and stability’, are ultimately funded by rich states to serve their own interests.
**: “In development work, good is not as well funded as bad”. (RSN)
5. Let’s face it: Some transnational problems have proven impossible for markets, governments, or multinational institutions alone to solve. As a result, human insecurity is on the rise as poverty, hunger and preventable ill-health and deaths wreak havoc on the lives of millions of people across the globe. The way things are, the question is not whether the developing world is going to fall further behind more advanced economies, but how far –and whether it will be able to recover.
6. Talking about falling behind, following the vaccine apartheid and climate finance fiasco, the poorer, ‘darker nations’ (Trump’s “shit holes”) have rightfully become more cynical of Northern hypocrisy as its racism becomes more brazen. (A. Chowdhury, J. Sundaram)
Bottom line
7. What ultimately shows, in the tip of the enormous iceberg of the contradictions in what makes sense in development work, is just a very partial view of the ongoing problems at the root of HR violations –the view of the actual people’s perennial struggles for HR remains hidden below the surface. (Luis Weinstein)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
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Postscript/Marginalia
-An additional development challenge not to be underestimated: Many countries are like continents, divided into parcels; it is impossible to measure the magnitude or variety of reactions, because each social, religious or ethnic group is a nation within a nation, all squished beneath a big umbrella. (Isabel Allende, The Sum of Our Days)