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DEVELOPMENT: A New Buzzword Hopes to Deliver

Analysis by Sanjay Suri

HELSINKI, Sep 8 2005 (IPS) - The new buzzword in the world of development is a bit of a mouthful; it is being called the ‘multi-stakeholder’ approach.

The word is being spoken, and heard a lot through the three-day Helsinki Conference until Friday this week. Hosts, guests, experts all say it is this ‘multi-stakeholder’ approach that makes the ‘Helsinki process’ as expressed at the conference different from other development approaches.

In a nutshell the multi-stakeholder approach means getting just about everyone you can to the same place at the same time and throw their experiences together. And then hope for decisions to be made, and action to follow.

The Helsinki Conference is therefore not a conference of non-governmental organisations. True, the 600 or so participants from 70 countries are mostly from NGOs. But there are representatives from 14 governments around, including Finland and Tanzania which together have initiated the ‘Helsinki process’.

Finland and Tanzania have been unlikely partners in more than the present Helsinki process launched 2002. Tanzanian President Benjamin William Mkapa and Finnish President Tarja Halonen co-chaired the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalisation set up by the International Labour Organisation. The commission produced a series of recommendations last year.

For the Helsinki conference this week Finland and Tanzania have together brought in also Algeria, Brazil, Canada, Egypt, Hungary, India, Malaysia, Mexico, South Africa, Spain, Thailand and Britain. Ministers and officials from these countries have been at hand to engage in the talks and to seek agreement on decisions to be taken. But that still means 14 countries, no more.

The Helsinki Conference was also intended to draw in very much more representation from business and from international institutions. Business interest in the conference has been low, to put it politely. The multi-stakeholder approach has not yet brought in a multitude of all stakeholders.

It is not enough, but this is nevertheless a move along the right lines, say Finnish officials behind the Helsinki Conference.

”Different stakeholders have different kinds of power; governments have legislative power, business has technological solutions, civil society has a unique ability to move the hearts of people and open the wallets of people, and to address many of our global problems you need all of these,” Pauliina Arola, executive director of the Crisis Management Initative that helped put the conference together told IPS.

It is not clear at the moment where the Helsinki process will go next. ”What the two governments are doing here is to carefully listen to what people are saying, and they are trying to figure out what would be the best way to continue, and in the next weeks and months the work will actually start,” Arola said.

Arola acknowledged that this conference is ”only a start, and then little by little it will be opening up and expanding to new governments.”

Less formally, this track of working together has delivered some results.

”We had success with the treaty on banning landmines,” former president of Ireland and now head of The Ethical Globalisation Initiative Mary Robinson said at the conference. ”It was civil society and some governments that came together and made a difference that saved so many lives.”

The Helsinki process hopes to multiply such examples of success. ”I would hope that in the next steps of the Helsinki process what would make it unique would be that it wouldn’t be just dialogue but would be in fact action,” Arola said. ”When different stakeholders could act together and then deliver together.”

Much of what the Helsinki process wants to deliver is on the economic front. ”It is a multi-stakeholder approach that seeks to bring together the World Economic Forum and the World Social Forum,” Finland’s minister for foreign affairs Erkki Tuomioja Told media representatives. ”The Helsinki process has contacts with both, and everybody agrees this dialogue should be continued.”

The value of the Helsinki process is this multi-stakeholder approach, he said. ”We have succeeded in getting many different actors together.”

Not enough, critics say. Not only were most governments away and big business absent, not all of civil society was pleased either.

A group of individuals wrote an open letter to the governments of Finland and Tanzania presented a long list of demands for more to take up, and with representation from more.

The militarization of globalisation was not being addressed adequately, they said. Nor had the debt crisis, or any moves to democratise global governance. The individuals asked for more action on inclusion of ”marginalised majorities” such as women, youth, farmers, indigenous people, workers and ”informal livelihood populations.”

The organisers were looking at the process as a small start in the right direction; critics were pointing to the inadequacies. But then Helsinki this week brought only a conference in a process. And when stakeholders can mean the world at large, they cannot be the easiest lot to bring together.