Development & Aid, Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines

DEVELOPMENT: Community Leaders Share Dreams for the Future

Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Jul 18 2003 (IPS) - What kind of world do you want by 2020? An ambitious international research effort called the Global Stakeholder Panel is surveying political, business and non-governmental (NGO) decision-makers – with a special outreach to civil society leaders in the South – to answer that question.

Launched by the 2020 Fund at the King Baudouin Foundation USA, the second phase of the three-phase-survey effort is currently underway.

"Our public opinion research demonstrates that, in many countries, there is dissatisfaction with the overall direction in which our world is currently headed," said Doug Miller, president of the Canadian-based Environics International, which is conducting the survey.

The preliminary results were released last January, simultaneously at the World Social Forum and the World Economic Forum, in a report called "Towards the Future We Want for Our Children".

"The first phase provided a good reading on the priorities for the future," says Tim Dottridge, a director of Canada’s International Development Research Centre and one of supporters of the project.

The survey found that while a majority of the mainly NGO respondents believe increasing globalisation is inevitable, nine of 10 think that not enough attention is paid to protecting human rights or the environment. To counter this, most want government institutions to increase their effectiveness.

Six in 10 respondents favour reform of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization. However, there is strong support for the United Nations and its agencies, such as United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the International Labour Organization (ILO).

Respondents named sustainable development (SD) and the new economic models needed to achieve it as the single greatest challenges for getting to the future they want by the year 2020.

"The first phase told us what the agenda is, the next will find out what the priorities and action steps are," Simon Jimenez, project coordinator at Environics, told IPS.

Environics conducted the Global Stakeholder Panel (GSP) electronically and by mail on a non-profit basis.

This is not a typical opinion poll, Jimenez is careful to point out. "We only wanted decision-makers, and particularly those from NGOs in the South." About 60 percent of the respondents were from NGOs but the total sample size was too low at about 300 respondents to say it is representative, he explains.

The NGO emphasis is important because they are the organisations that "are pushing the envelope on many issues and aspects of globalisation".

Overseeing the GSP effort is a Project Advisory Group comprised, in part, of senior advisors from organisations such as Ashoka, Civicus, International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), and International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF).

Environics uses Delphi methodology to weight the data and pull out findings which are then used to inform subsequent survey rounds.

"It’s a tool to provoke dialogue and find out what the hot issues are around the world," says Jimenez.

The results are freely available in many languages and are being disseminated far and wide. Governments can use the data to help set priorities while NGOs can use it to validate their arguments.

It’s a neat idea, Dottridge told IPS. "We’re using the results right now in developing our future program plans."

He was disappointed that participation by civil society from the South was not as high as hoped. Additional efforts are being made to address this in the second phase, as well expanding responses from corporate and government sectors. Results from this are expected to be released in fall of 2003.

A third phase will be done next year to find what should be done on the ground to put the results of the second phase into action. Selected survey participants will be brought to New York City in the spring of 2004 to discuss the action steps and policy directions for various regions around the world to address globalisation, capacity building, and governance issues.

"Globalisation is more complex than we thought," Dottridge concedes.