The systems and behaviors that have brought us to this point in history –reaching planetary boundaries and societal breaking points– must change
-True citizens activism will have to question consumerist habits and values, as well as go beyond painting a ‘green’ veneer onto a broken economic system.
-The post 2015 development agenda needs not only go beyond ‘finishing the agenda of the MDGs’, but also much beyond.
14. Better sooner than later, what is badly needed is a more comprehensive paradigm or explanatory framework for why development has not been able to take-off coupled with a concrete plan of action, or roadmap for a new global social contract. Here is where the discussions on the post 2015 development agenda come in.The post 2015 ‘reset’ needed must, nothing less than, reassert a more radical role for the non-negotiable rights of people and of the planet.
15. The challenge is to help along an agenda that will support steady progress, not letting the best become the enemy of the good. Unfortunately, as you know, it is money that buys influence and generates cheerleading around 2015 –mostly, so far, undermining true near-future systemic change.
16. Our role then? We must rally claim holders to demand systemic changes fostering a common cause with other agendas and communities to eventually build strong alliances and movements that prepare us for a rough ride in the next 15 years.
17. Note that using the right human rights language is a necessary, but far from sufficient condition. By itself, it cannot strategically take us where we need to go; the world needs and wants far more than this in terms of the actual mobilization of social forces. For instance, we can no longer allow the economistic definition of sustainable development to stand in the spotlight and monopolize the stage. Instead, needed are the strong outspoken voices of social movements, of principled political leadership and of idealistic citizen activism. It is this that gives the needed social, political and human dimension to our demands for and beyond human rights (HR).
18. In short, push, pull, solidarize, and rally are the action verbs available to us. But here is the problem: Today, our push is insufficient and incoherent, our pull is often blind, solidarity is only nascent, and rallying is still the exception. Yet claim holders can indeed harness all four elements of such a strategy –push, pull, solidarize and actively demand– and can bring these into an active militant opposition so as to create de-facto political space for the have-nots.*
*: This is quite different from them just seeking mainly to maintain channels open for dialogue rather than actively claiming for problems affecting them being solved.
19. Among other, we must:
• Raise the level of global ambition and of combativeness to eradicate extreme poverty by actively introducing disparity reduction measures.
• Better connect-with and positively influence what people are already doing on the ground around the world, i.e., reinforcing bottom-up leadership to build issue-based coalitions. In the end, what will motivate governments to act is the knowledge that there is a groundswell for change.
• Influence the post 2015 choice of indicators for them to reflect both processes and outcomes that reveal whether a we are moving towards a break with the old structures that are preventing comprehensive, HR-based development. Such an effort must rest on a paradigm that has a critical component and a prescriptive component containing the goals or features of an economy that is considered desirable from the point of view of justice, equality, and sustainability. (Note that HR and the rule of law are across-the-board enablers and a precondition).
• Do much more to make people understand that entrenched poverty itself is not sustainable and that people who suffer from it are people who are multi-dimensionally poor, a fact that calls for working with people to understand why and how they are poor; showing there is a nexus between poverty, HR and sustainability. So we need to push for voices-of-the-poor-type participatory processes.
• Foster an engagement of people that brings a shift of direction –only as activists can we become the agents of this needed reversal. What is envisioned is a major cultural shift along with (or resulting from) a popular mobilization for fundamental change in the coming years.
20. Bottom line here: Did the MDGs process foster a global intolerance for still high levels of poverty, inequality and marginalization? One can say yes –and that is good. But yet further considerations in this complex narrative should inform the current process of setting the post 2015 development agenda. In particular, the overarching criteria proposed for elaborating goals and targets in these debates has still been simplicity, measurability, concreteness and achievability –and too few of us are saying how this will clearly pose more than some dilemmas.
21. To paraphrase Winston Churchill: The post 2015 debate is not the end for HR advocacy, nor is it the beginning of the end. It may, however, be just the end of the beginning.
A few words on social protection and HR
22. Comprehensive social protection has been one of the hallmarks of developed societies. However, comprehensive social security systems are under attack in many industrialized countries as part of the current global crisis. At the same time, institutionalization of comprehensive social protection has stalled in the so-called middle or upper-middle income countries such as China and South Korea. In general, as a percentage of GDP, levels of social protection are much lower in Asia than in Latin America and Europe. In many developing countries, social protection mechanisms are very limited or rudimentary, though more and more countries are adopting conditional or non-conditional cash transfer programs to address the needs of the 15–20 percent of the population living in extreme poverty. These are all bona-fide HR issues. Social protection mechanisms include unemployment compensation, old age pension, disability payments, universal health care, conditional and non-conditional cash transfers, and a guaranteed basic income. Social protection systems have been seen not only as mechanisms of poverty prevention, but as an investment in a healthy work force and the maintenance of social peace. (But, foremost, social protection is a HR; no other justifications needed!). The ratio of social protection expenditures to GDP would be one of the measures of a country’s standing in the provision of social protection. Another would be the range of social protection services it supports.
23. One proposal advanced by Olivier de Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, and Magdalena Sepulveda, UN Special Rapporteur for Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, is the establishment of a Global Fund for Social Protection, along the lines of the Global Climate Fund. This fund would allow poorer States to draw on international funding to meet the basic costs of putting social protection in place. As in the case of the Global Climate Fund, governments could be assessed levels of contribution according to their wealth and measured by their progress in meeting these targets.
Talking about sustainability
-A way-of-life is different from making-a-living.
-Note that a non-growing economy also pollutes and draws on fixed resources.
24. The current crises (climate, financial, food…) mark the end of the era of unlimited growth and this is having undeniable political implications. The stream of crises we have confronted has been enough to create an importantly greater gap in equality the world over.
25. The problem this planet faces with sustainability is captured in the parable critics tell about lilies growing in a pond that double in area every day. If the pond is going to be full of lilies on the thirtieth day, on which day will the pond be half full? The answer, counter-intuitive for some, is the twenty-ninth day. The message is simple: the economics of climate change calls for bold actions and not inaction.
26. In the recent past, the painfully slow progress on poverty eradication, on HR and on human development was only made possible, because it did not detract from the wellbeing of the rich and powerful. If limits to growth begin to assert themselves, as they are, tough decisions have to be made. This reminds us of the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Be not anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself’.
Talking about gender
We can indeed speak of the neoliberal development’s gendered-employment-and-low-wages effects.
27. Even if we take the literature on the positive impacts of economic growth on women’s wellbeing and gender equality at face value, there are still problems with this logic in the context of the neo-liberal macroeconomic policy environment. For one, the intensity of global competition pushes women workers to the lowest rungs of the buyer-driven global commodity chain. In essence, women’s low wages work the same way as an exchange rate devaluation, but without the associated increase in domestic prices.
28. I have yet to encounter a context where gender does not matter and indeed where inequalities, injustices and women’s rights violations do not exist, at least to some extent particularly to the detriment of women.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Schuftan@gmail.com