WSSD: NGOs
Divided about How Best to Alleviate World Poverty
by Anthony Stoppard
JOHANNESBURG, Aug 21 (IPS) - Civil society and environmental
and community development activists remain divided about how
best to alleviate world poverty and protect the environment,
as they head into the Global Forum of the World Summit for
Sustainable Development (WSSD).
The Global Forum is an opportunity for
non-governmental and civil society organisations from around
the world to meet and sketch their vision of how global poverty
can be erased while still protecting the environment and natural
resources of the world.
With about 40,000 delegates - optimistically
- expected to attend the gathering, it will be the largest
of the WSSD meetings. The forum runs from Aug 19 to Sep 4
in the South African city, Johannesburg.
The Global Forum is meant to submit a
declaration to the heads of state meeting of the WSSD, for
them to consider when they draw-up the official political
statement and plan of action for the UN summit.
”It is early days and very difficult
to see if we will be able to reach agreement,” says
Victor Munnik, a policy analyst with the Civil Society Secretariat,
which is charged with organising the forum. ”The immediate
challenge is to overcome the physical fragmentation between
delegates, and then see what of their differences are tactical
- and can be overcome - and which are principled.”
Because of political differences and
practical difficulties, different organisations have set-up
camp in different places. Right next to the venue for the
UN-endorsed Global Forum, the Social Movements Indaba has
set up its own meeting place.
The Social Movements Indaba is a grouping
of organisations that do not want anything to do with the
official UN process as they believe it is dominated and controlled
by governments and big business and will not be able to come
up with solutions to the challenge of sustainable development.
They are planning their own meetings and protests.
A bit further down the road, the South
African-based Landless People's Movement (LPM) has set-up
camp for those who want to focus on a single issue - the right
of ordinary people to have access to land. They are trying
to keep both the Global Forum and the Social Movements Indaba
at an arm's length to prevent them taking the focus off the
land campaign.
Sounding slightly bemused, Munnik appealed
for ”diversity in solidarity, and solidarity in diversity”
and for organisations to compromise ”as much as they
can live with” so that the Global Forum could come up
with a united, broadly supported political declaration.
Munnik sees some chance of the diverse
collection of non-governmental, environmental and community
development organisations, attending the summit, reaching
an agreement. He points out the environmental organisations
as politically diverse as Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund
and the Environmental Justice Network to be overcoming some
of their differences ahead of the Global Forum.
”They are working together in a
way that I have not seen before,” he comments.
Important groupings like youth, women
and indigenous peoples have been meeting ahead of the Global
Forum, to come up with positions that will reflect their common
interests and concerns. These will be tabled at the forum
for inclusion in its political declaration.
The big issue, facing civil society at
the Global Forum, is deciding if they can work with global
political and financial institutions like the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund (IMF). Then they have to find
ways of defending existing agreements on the protection of
the global environment and the alleviation of world poverty;
and pushing for increases in international development aid
and environmental protection standards, say some activists.
There are also divisions between those
organisations who want the forum to rally to the cause of
protecting natural resources, while others believe that the
only way to protect the environment is to prioritise the social
and economic development of communities.
Community and environmental activists
also point out that even if civil society manages to hammer
out a broadly acceptable political declaration, it is likely
that it will demand more in terms of development and environmental
protection programmes than governments attending the WSSD
are going to be ready to concede.
Despite the divisions and the difficulties,
World Conservation Union (IUCN) South African representative,
Saliem Fakir, says the Global Forum and other events being
held around the WSSD will give activists a chance to debate
issues in a way, which the diplomatic protocols of the official
meetings will not allow.
That alone makes the gathering
vital to coming-up with solutions to the challenges of sustainable
development, he observes. (END/2002)
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