[co_inspiracion] Fwd: Food for a make or break thought (1)
- From: Mario Parada <mario.parada@xxxxx>
- To: co_inspiracion@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2014 10:03:44 -0400
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Claudio Schuftan <cschuftan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: 2014-07-02 23:23 GMT-04:00
Subject: Food for a make or break thought (1)
To: yo <schuftan@xxxxxxxxx>
Human Rights Reader 341
*MAKING HUMAN RIGHTS RADICAL AGAIN: THE ROLE OF SCIENCE, PASSION AND
COMMITMENT* (A. Atkisson, J.J. Johnson) (Part 1 of 3)
[The following three Readers are a distillation and adaptation of Vol.56,
No.1, 2013 of this important issue of the journal Development entitled ‘The
Future of Development’ edited by Tariq Banuri. The issue has contributions
from 14 authors listed at the bottom. Some text is taken verbatim].
-In the post 2015 development agenda preparation, the temptation, to opt
for business as usual with a few cosmetic touches must simply be actively
resisted.
-Unfortunately, the varied and extensive online consultation process that
has been going on in the post 2015 agenda preparation process has lead to a
kind of developmental populism, a nod to every idea under the sun.
-To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair
convincing. (R. Williams)
*Hope in a time of despair* (Paul Raskin)
1. The world’s agenda for the future of development is in a state of flux.
New challenges call into serious question the very possibility of a
sustained human rights (HR) and a sustainable socio-economic development
future.* Why? Because the world is still not really actively engaged in
redefining the *shape of our future development agenda placing human rights
at its center*.
*: Note that pitching social versus economic development is a false
dichotomy. We are talking about a balance between both --as long as we all
understand that ‘the social’ is rooted in power and knowledge
considerations.
2. To live-up-to and lead this flux in the right direction, what is needed
at this time is an unrelenting, focused and widespread
collective-criticism-and-push to come from ‘less formal’ fora, i.e., from
social movements and organized communities. The biggest obstacle to be
overcome in this is the inability to more effectively address the (*only
seemingly*) intractable questions of inequality, of HR violations, of
political power, of marginalization and of empowerment. (To many of us, it
is remarkable how these seemingly radical ideas have now become the new
orthodoxy --at least in lip service). Quite worrisome is the fact that, on
these issues, there still is a North-South mistrust that badly needs to be
overcome to eventually lead to our joining forces.
3. These days, in the post 2015 development agenda discussions, the
questions faced by local communities and poor households are perhaps far
more elemental in character than they were before --now pointing more to
the very root and structural causes of maldevelopment the previous
development agenda never tackled. Ultimately, it will thus be citizens
(rather than politicians or policy experts) that must become the alchemists
who can convert the many unfulfilled HR of people into a coherent social
movement *for true* *change*.** (P. Raskin)
**: Put otherwise: The future shape of development remains too big a
challenge for policy makers unless citizens take the lead. The capacity to
expand sustainability rests not in the hands of diplomats, but in the hands
all of us acting as citizens-turned-active-claim-holders.
4. The aims of the neoliberal ideology --the cowboy economics of Kenneth
Boulding-- must be denounced as harmful wherever they are pursued. We know
they are well served by a (mock) democracy with stylized elections on a
prescribed schedule. The truth is that little has changed over the years
from the Washington Consensus’s macroeconomic policies. Developed countries
have continued to privatize success and to socialize their losses.
5. So far, signs are discouraging. We are seeing that the post 2015 debate
is centering on a sort of contemporary ‘technology of global governance’
that consists of three pillars, namely *indicators, deadlines, and review.*
After the MDGs experience, we say: Enough of rhetorical ideals, and of the
application of the efficiency paradigm! Indicators have wrongly become the
technology of governance; and this must be changed. But how?
6. When HR-activists-shunned-from-global-summits meet in side-events and
share success stories, many tell of new and innovative policy approaches
and show their willingness to collaborate across borders sharing best
practices and lessons learned. So here is where we see the post 2015 debate
marking a moment of opportunity, a chance for a fresh start.
7. Therefore, activists must yet more decisively prepare society for the
un-postponable changes by systematically and repeatedly articulating a
vision based on *justice, equality and HR* and by concomitantly working on
planning a strategy and actions that derive directly from such a vision.
*Today, tackling the questions of justice, equality and human rights
remains the major challenge to concerted global action*
These self-same issues have been discussed up and down the policy
decision-making chain, but with no real resolution yet in sight.
8. Worldwide, if one can generalize, one would dare say that
citizens-as-potential-claim-holders have been and are paralyzed or dormant
regardless of whether they wish to oppose, to support or to lead.
On the duty bearers’ side, success has come to mean that critical questions
are skillfully avoided (or energies are concentrated in the reiteration of
problems rather than the identification and implementation of solutions).
This reiteration predictably leads to no more than a ‘visionary rhetoric’
rather than concrete commitments. Often, their decisions are nothing more
than the lowest common denominator of stapled-together pastiches of
reaffirmations of previous agreements and non-committal acknowledgements of
old concerns. The most central of issues are perennially and systematically
left to be addressed *en-passant*.
9. Take, for example, the MDGs; they were a choice of the wrong paradigm
(and, worse, not explicitly articulated) and were focused on domestic and
technical rather than structural matters. Across the MDGs and the targets
they pursued, the key HR concerns of inequality and discrimination were
(almost) entirely neglected. So, for 15 years, we have kept marching-on to
an almost fated path uninfluenced and unaffected by the cerebrations of
successive duty bearers evading or circumventing their HR responsibilities.
Many, if not most, developing country governments simply paid the usual
rhetorical acknowledgment about the ‘importance’ of the MDGs so that:
· Visible and overtly political engagement has been and is rather
rare. The main forms of engagement have been and are rather plain,
technocratic, top-down and routine.
· The language of change has been and is continually coopted by the
mainstream. The development discourse has become and is as disconnected
from the development reality as finance is from the real economy, i.e., the
rogue, stubborn and pessimistic economic system where, for economists, the
community is invisible or, worse, their thinking actually undermines
community.
· Voluntary guidelines set over the years have not held anybody
accountable by being overarching rather than specific thus providing a
platform for action only by those willing to act.
· Little is known about the way that global goal setting has
influenced shifts in actual policy rather than influenced actions; much
less is known of how --if at all-- the MDGs have had an effect on
furthering a people-centered vision for development as enshrined in the
Millennium Declaration where the MDGs were actually extracted from.
· The MDGs have really distorted priorities by displacing attention
from people’s objectives, as well as creating perverse incentives.
· The setting of the MDGs’ indicators was derived from an exercise of
numerical-target-setting making indicators ‘a credible part of a technology
of governance’ as measured by these indicators. Result: The MDGs have
represented the quintessential use of measurement as a tool of governance
to influence behavior.
· MDG priorities have had a heavy emphasis on ‘basic needs’. This was
a simplification that framed development as a process of delivering
concrete and measurable outcomes. On top of it, the MDGs set the bar too
low, setting minimalist targets. It thus enthusiastically received the
financial support for vertical and technocratic strategies that really
represented a reversion to 1980’s thinking.***
· The problem of the MDGs has been that, by framing the concept of
development as a set of basic needs outcomes, they missed focusing on the
needed process of transformative changes in economic, social and political
structures.
· Once the MDG numerical targets were set, they were perceived to be
value neutral. By marginalizing ongoing strategic processes of empowerment,
they ended up selectively cherry-picking the broad 1990s development
agenda. This has often had unintended consequences, which seem to have
undermined or distorted the impact on the intended objectives.
· The MDGs have had enormous communicative power though. True. But
once the goals were defined and the targets set, they began to shape the
way that development was understood --with dramatically reductionist
consequences.
· While simplicity helped communicating the urgency of development
priorities, simplicity was highly reductionistic. Development priorities
are too complex to reduce to a set of goals. The MDGs interpreted its eight
goals as hard priorities in the international agenda. It is now painfully
clear that goal setting, by itself, is a poor methodology for *elaborating
an international agenda*.
***: If the growing divide between the more immune North and the threatened
South is the one which we should focus on, the moral alternative to
technological fixes is not inaction, but a transfer of income and wealth,
i.e., disparity reduction. Since it is rather thinking at the margins what
brings about technological fixes, technological ingenuity is comforting
only to true though misguided believers.
10. Bottom line:
· Social targets are not being met.
· HR are not being directly addressed.
· Social resilience, ecological resilience and political resilience
are not being addressed.
· More and more, environmental disruptions and social conflicts are
interacting in complex ways.
This all warns us against sleep-walking back into the arms of a new and
supposedly improved Washington Consensus.
*Development is not so much about fixing deprivation, but more about
transformation --structural, institutional and normative*
-A simple incorporation of new dimensions is not the answer.
-Export-oriented industrialization no longer works.
11. Many of the MDG patterns have come to the end of their useful life and
must be reinvented. Rapidly changing conditions are forcing us to advance
these patterns. Simply adding new goals (such as peace, security, and human
rights) to the post 2015 agenda is not enough. Neither is it enough to
simply ‘add’ human rights, peace and security, however important these
challenges are, since more is necessary to point things in the right
direction. Why? Because anybody can see we have lived through a strategic
development era of obfuscating the structural causes of the manifestations
of social injustice. For this reason alone, it is not useful to maintain an
MDGs-like structure with stiff, universal targets and deadlines for the
next 15-year period.
12. Take, for instance, the economistic interpretations of sustainable
development. They have simply resulted in a catastrophic failure to reach
the actual goal of sustainability and of the rule of HR. The problem with
sustainable development in recent years is that it has not been properly
coupled to its actual ultimate goal. It has instead been linked
increasingly to a piece of the vision of sustainability considered easier
to sell.
13. The question all this begs for is: As activists, have we stopped short
of guiding claim holders towards concrete actions and new, more radical
commitments? For instance, why has the ‘Occupy Movement’ not managed to get
more political traction? Is it because the majority of activists’ responses
restrict themselves to individual sectors and/or silos? Or is it because
the energies devoted to bringing people together is spent in the hope that
perhaps solutions will appear miraculously and spontaneously through the
interaction of protesting masses? Food for a self-criticism thought here.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
________________________________________
List of contributors: T. Banuri, H. Clark, W. Bello, S. Alkire, A.
Atkisson, S. Fukuda-Parr, A. Yamin, D. Hastings, S. Marglin, P. Raskin, E.
Braunstein, B. Armah, A. Hovorka and J.J. Johnson.
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