By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 1 2013 (IPS)

While a fine wine might get better with age, the same is not true for flawed political theories.

Courtesy of Harald Müller

Celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year, the much-debated theory of the “Clash of Civilisations” (CoC) prescribes a good-versus-evil logic to explain international relations and violent conflicts around the globe.

“It is wrong, but it serves basic needs,” says Harald Müller, executive director of the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF).

In 1993, Samuel Huntington, then a professor at Harvard University, wrote an article for Foreign Affairs which later became a book. He divided the world into eight civilisations “defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people.”

Huntington predicted that in the post Cold War era, cultural differences would be the key driving factor behind war and conflict.

In an interview with U.N. correspondent Rousbeh Legatis, Müller explains why Huntington’s theory gained so much traction despite its implausibility.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: “A good way to measure the power of a theory is to look at the scale and intensity and quality of the debate it provokes. On those grounds, ‘Clash’ is one of the most powerful theoretical contributions in recent generations,” reads the introduction of the Foreign Affairs special 20^th anniversary issue to Huntington’s theory. In your opinion, what determines a good political theory? And how do you assess Huntington’s success accordingly?

A: There is obviously a difference between “powerful theory” and [academically] “good theory”. A theory is “powerful” when it hits a public nerve on an issue of great saliency at the time of publication. If it is easy to grasp and simple enough to be grasped by a great number of people, and when a good selling job is done, it can gain considerable traction.

But it is not necessarily a good theory. Social Darwinism was very powerful at the end of the 19^th and the beginning of the 20^th theory, but it was a scientifically fairly bad theory.

Q: Observers say Huntington’s thoughts and predictions struck a nerve.

A: He struck a nerve because he presented a simple and all-encompassing theory of world politics at a time when people had lost the orientation which the simple, bipolar, antagonistic structure of the Cold War had provided.

He told those people once more who they were (the West), and who the enemy was (the awesome Sino-Islamic coalition). In fact, his prognosis mirrored the Cold War by projecting a counter-coalition to this enemy coalition in which the “Hinduistic”, the “Orthodox” and the “Latino” cultures would all flock to the West because the Sino-Islamic juggernaut looked so much more threatening.

Q: Huntington suggested that “most important conflicts of the future will occur along cultural fault lines separating these civilisations from one another.” Looking at current global conflicts, to what degree do cultural variables matter?

A: As many observers remarked before, many conflicts take place inside Huntington’s “civilisations”, most prominently within Islam – Shiites versus Sunnis, Sunnis versus Alavites, clans in Somalia etc.

In other conflicts, the basic cause is non-cultural, [such as] the climatic fault line across the Sahel which pits nomadic herdsmen against farmers, classical territorial conflicts – e.g Israel-Palestine, India-Pakistan – which were not flaring up between already culturally different groups when the territorial issue was not salient, i.e. in the Osmanic and British empires.

As a thumb’s rule, cultural factors – religion and ethnicity – are exacerbating conflicts existing for different reasons. They are rarely at the conflict’s causal roots.

Q: In your book “Coexistence of Civilisations: An Antipode to Huntington” (title translated from German), which was published in Mandarin, Korean, Turkish and Arabic, you assess whether Huntington’s theory is coherent and scientific.

A: His notion of civilisation is neither supported by history nor by most of the work on civilisation and culture. His description of Islam as a disproportionally violent culture ignores that majority Muslim countries are sandwiched between all sorts of other “civilisations” and thus have much more opportunity to clash than the rest – a simple case for “controlling for borders” in statistical language.

He neglects the mechanisms of national security policy where aspiring regional hegemons are usually looked at with distrust by neighbours who usually look at extraregional allies for counterbalancing.

He also ignores the experience that the more religion becomes central in political identity formation, the stronger the consequences of schism and the more probable and frequent intra-cultural clashes – like the one between Sunnis and Shiites.

Also, he selected only the dividing forces of diversity, but neglected the binding forces of globalisation. Altogether, a very one-sided construction that neglected insights from history, anthropology and ethnology, sociology and a few other faculties.

Q: Building on experiences of recent conflicts around the world, do you see any reason to reconsider your analysis?

A: No, I feel quite comfortable with what I wrote. Even Huntington himself denied that 9/11 was a case of the “clash of civilisation”. Most of Al-Qaeda’s victims are Muslims, and the anti-Al-Qaeda coalition is an impressive collection across all cultures of the world.

It would be even more impressive without the extraordinary ineptitude and short-sightedness of the [George W. Bush] administration that squandered the sympathy wave after the shock of New York and Washington, and alienated much of the world population initially inclined to show sympathy with the USA.

Great power rivalry is back on stage as one force shaping world politics. Democracy is continuing its slow, but apparently irresistible march forward, but this does not lead to a “League of Democracies”, as democratic states in the global south retain their identities as ex-colonies with a visible distrust in the intentions and objectives of the former masters.

Rather than the convergence of two civilisationally defined blocks, we see more diversity and shifting coalitions than before. This is not Huntington’s world.

Excerpt:

By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 19 2013 (IPS)

Western analysts all too often take a distorted and reductionist approach to the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), says Kai Koddenbrock, who analysed more than 50 policy papers for a study published in the journal International Peacekeeping in November 2012.

Courtesy of Kai Koddenbrock

In an interview with U.N. correspondent Rousbeh Legatis, Koddenbrock said the DRC is portrayed again and again as a “sick country” with “sick people” instead of accurately reflecting the diverse realities on the ground.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: The degree to which analysts and particularly Western think tanks have reduced realities and complexity on the ground in DRC “beyond what is required for description and intelligible communication”, as you wrote, results in a “functional pathologisation” of the Congolese society and its population. Could you elaborate on that?

A: Functional pathologisation refers to the relationship between the way think tanks and intervention actors analyse the Congo and the fact that simultaneously the assumption is made over and over again that Western organisations are urgently needed to deal with these self-identified problems.

Peacebuilding and other international actors approach the Congo and its people in a way that stresses their seeming problems and weaknesses and portrays it as a sick country with sick people only. By doing so, these outside actors create the impression that it is these outside actors that are urgently needed to overcome these supposed problems.

If policy papers and interveners were more respectful and appreciative of Congolese actors of all kinds, outside intervention would appear less natural and the abilities of the Congolese themselves to get things done would move to the forefront.

Q: What are the underlying reasons for this pattern you found in your analysis?

A: This is a difficult question. Racism and historical continuities in the ways of approaching the Congo and Africa more broadly probably play a role. The logic of the think tank market, where advice needs to be short and easily digestible, is decisive, too.

Think tanks sell ideas and decision-makers spend little time. For these reasons, reports have to reduce complexity. This is not a bad thing in itself, but the way this is done matters. If all kinds of rational and purposeful Congolese acts disappear in the course of simplifying, there is a problem.

I think that even all-out military occupations like the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are not successful as long as they do not manage to take the existing priorities and ideas of the existing government and relevant powerbrokers into account. This is a tough thing to do – especially if the power structure of the country and the region is hard to understand.

Security sector reform (SSR) in the Congo, for example, has failed for many years because President Kabila was not interested in it. Maybe this is changing at the moment. This means for peacebuilding that the relevant actors need to be on board: the Congolese government, the Rwandan government, the Angolan government, the South African government, customary chiefs and influential business people and various armed groups of the East and the ordinary Congolese.

Q: What should be done differently when analysing DRC and its peacebuilding processes, with their local, regional and international implications?

A: Analysts and think tanks follow trends because new work needs to be different than prior work to grab the readers’ attention. This is very visible in current Congo analysis.

Thanks to the good work done by Séverine Autesserre, for example, analysts now focus a lot more on local conflict than 10 years ago. However, I would argue they might focus too much on local conflict, as the recent controversy about the latest ICG [International Crisis Group] report showed. International and regional factors do play a very important role still.

What remains the same throughout all these shifts in focus from “elections will build the Congo” to “local peacebuilding” or the “international brigade” now is that the government in Kinshasa and the provincial government remains a curious blind spot.

The examples I provide in the paper are quite concrete, I think. Kabila deals with IDPs, strikes deals with Rwanda and manages the mines to a certain degree. This is more than “Congo is a failed state” or has no government. Analysts have repeatedly assumed during cyclical violence in the East that now this will be the end of the Kabila government. He is still there. How come? No analyst really deals with that.

This is part of what I see as “functional pathologisation”, which I tried to show in the paper. That Congolese – even the government’s acts – might actually make sense is never considered. This renders the analysis very one-sided and helps to sustain the belief, again, that it is up to Western NGOs, or the U.N. to improve situation in the Congo.

Excerpt:

M23 rebels near Sake, Eastern DR Congo. Credit: William Lloyd-George/IPS

By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 13 2013 (IPS)

Despite existing local expertise and strategies in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to build peace-supporting structures at the community level, official debates and media coverage continue to focus predominantly on military interventions.

“Local actors work in isolation and their actions are not part of a global peacebuilding process in the DRC. Their recommendations and their work on the ground are not taken into account,” Eric Malolo from Reseau Haki na Amani (RHA), a network of civil society organisations, told IPS.“Violence becomes a means of expression when there is no framework of reference." -- Suliman Baldo of ICTJ

As the coordinator of RHA, Malolo works in Orientale, a province in the northeast. RHA was founded in 2004 as a direct response to ethnic tensions between the Hema and Lendu communities in DRC’s Ituri region.

Its objective is to help reconcile these two tribes and to address frequent conflicts over land, with dialogue-supporting initiatives at the community-level.

“Barzas” – large community meetings organised by RHA – proved to be a very useful tool, enabling local populations to develop a deeper understanding of local conflict dimensions and how these are perceived by the different groups living in the same community.

“Most problems identified during these gatherings do not necessarily find a solution, but the main thing is letting the communities speak out and enter a process of intercommunity and pacific coexistence,” Malolo said.

Not only are locals working and living in the affected communities not sufficiently involved in ongoing peacebuilding efforts in the central African country, they often also lack political support.

In the context of property and identity-related conflicts, Malolo said, politicians are generally elected because they campaigned on a platform of protecting their own ethnic community’s interests.

“A latent intercommunity conflict is the reason for the presence of such extremist politicians,” he said. “To not risk these votes, they hinder decisively ongoing reconciliation process between communities.

“Even administrative staff receives instructions from politicians to stop the conflict resolution process started by some local actors. Or in other words, efforts started by local actors are often blocked by politicians who don’t agree with this kind of change,” he added.

Most experts agree that to be effective, peacebuilding requires intertwined processes and structures that run from the grassroots to the national level – especially in deeply fragmented and traumatised societies like the DRC.

But a look at official policymaking appears to prove Malolo’s point. The new Peace, Security and Cooperation Framework (PSCF) agreement for DRC, an accord signed by 11 African heads of state in Addis Ababa in February, has “no mention of local civil society and it was not prepared with any involvement of those local actors,” Maria Lange, DRC country manager at International Alert, a London-based charity, told IPS.

“The domestic oversight committee established by the DRC government for the implementation of the domestic commitments under the PSCF does not include any civil society representatives – these are limited to a parallel monitoring committee which has no decision-making authority,” she said.

A military emphasis

Even though the peace agreement represents an important milestone, Aloys Tegera from the Pole Institute regards the military approach backed up by the international community with scepticism.

The U.N. Security Council’s creation in March of its 3,000-strong “first-ever ‘offensive’ combat force“, alongside the 20,500 peacekeepers already in the country, was hailed by the political elite and raised expectations among Congolese “which cannot be met”, Tegera told IPS.

People are bound to learn that realistically, a political solution is the only way forward, said the research director at the Goma-based think tank.

“When I read the current military discourse of many Congolese, however, I am afraid to say that 20 years of suffering and wars have not taught us much,” he said.

For Tegera, the conflict is rooted in a “deadly triangle” of “identity, land and power”.

Where to find the most critical conflict-drivers – inside or outside the country – to what extent they matter and how to tackle them are still controversial questions. What is clear is that a myriad of local, regional and international actors pursue their own interests, and fall back on violence as an instrument to enforce them.

This is often carried out by local armed actors such as militias and rebel groups, who are characterised more often than not by a lack of political ideology, said Suliman Baldo of the New York-based International Centre for Transitional Justice (ICTJ).

“They are fictitious creations of whoever is intervening and mainly of these very greedy neighbours,” the director of ICTJ’s Africa Programme told IPS.

At the community and provincial levels, in an atmosphere of localised violence, these groups have gained the upper hand, overruling traditional leaders who would be more disposed to resolving conflicts “traditionally”, that is to say, through dialogue and accommodation with other groups.

“Violence becomes a means of expression when there is no framework of reference. There is no state to settle disputes among the population, there is no traditional authority to moderate tendencies towards violence and to find solutions and resolutions for problems within or among different groups,” Baldo explained.

Concluding that there is a power vacuum at the local level, however, is a false assumption. Where central authority collapses, other actors step in, creating alternative governance structures.

The evolving role of civil society

Over the years, many of the gaps left by dysfunctional or nonexistent state institutions have been filled by Congolese civil society groups, which provide essential social services such as healthcare and schooling. However, they have also been co-opted into transitional institutions – for example, holding a certain number of seats in provincial and national assemblies.

“It is precisely because civil society has been forced into this state-substitution role that many have lost their awareness and practice of its fundamental role of holding the government to account,” Lange said.

While there are hardworking civil society groups pushing to achieve lasting and sustainable peace, others show core weaknesses that prevent them from fulfilling their proper functions, she added.

Many are “politicised and riven by power struggles”, organised along ethnic lines, and “follow donor priorities instead of the priorities of the people and communities they are meant to serve,” she said, citing the study “Ending the Deadlock – Towards a new vision of peace in eastern DRC” by International Alert, which included the results of extensive consultations with local NGOs, representatives of local ethnic communities, and church and academic leaders .

The study recommends a dialogue that begins at the grassroots, is revised at the provincial level, and finalised at the national level.

A bottom-up dialogue in itself would not be enough, said Tegera, stressing the importance of making strides in three key development sectors: education, roads and energy.

“With these three in place, within 20 years, there is a chance to see an emerging middle class, able to ask for accountability and proper governance. This is the only way forward for DRC everyone should press for,” he said.

By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 17 2013 (IPS)

Rape is often perceived as an individual trauma, but in reality its impact extends far beyond a single person and instead affects entire communities, complicating the already challenging task of helping victims of sexual violence.

Thérèse Mema Mapenzi, who works with rape victims in South Kivu of the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), adds that in order for victims of rape and other forms of sexual violence to move on, they must have someone to listen to them.

Thérese Mema Mapenzi, who works with rape victims in South Kivu. Photo courtsey of Thérese Mapenzi.

Listening is also important to help devise solutions to deal with rape’s consequences on communities as a whole, explains the social assistant, who works directly with affected populations for the Justice and Peace Commission in Bukavu.

“I give them neither money nor food, but I listen to them and sympathise with them,” says Mapenzi. “What makes me proud is to see that soft words can help to cure the trauma of victims.”

In a conversation with IPS U.N. correspondent Rousbeh Legatis, Mapenzi discusses how rape is used as a tool of war to destroy people, families and communities. Excerpts of the interview follow.

Q: Could you explain the destructive consequences of sexual violence on both individuals and communities?

A: In DRC, rape has been and is used as a weapon of war. Rebels know that in our culture, women are those who protect the culture in their communities. To destabilise the country and help actors of violence reach their goals, they are destroying families and thereby local communities, weakening social cohesion. They raped our sisters, mums, killed our brothers before our very eyes, humiliating and threatening us.

This violence comes with an atmosphere of silence on rape. It is not easy for a survivor of rape to say that he or she has been raped, because in our communities people do not easily speak about sex-related topics, so rape is treated as a taboo.

Many families were and are separated as a result of these experiences; raped women find themselves isolated, the harmony within families broken. Entire communities are weakened and divided, leading to an atmosphere of fear where the rebels become more powerful.If a victim does not speak, the process of healing the trauma cannot proceed.

Q: Often survivors of rape are re-victimised at a community level. Can you explain how that happens?

A: These people suffer terrible treatment from rebel groups. When they return to their communities, they are discriminated against. Until 2010, many victims of rape were not even considered in their communities and discriminated against by their families and neighbours.

Men were often forced to watch their wives being raped and threatened with being killed if they tried to help. Afterwards, it is difficult for men to talk about this experience, because they were supposed to protect the women, so they feel powerless and ashamed.

It also happens that men who were not with their wives when the rapes took place then consider them collaborators with the rebels.

Q: You work with 16 listening centres (trauma centres) in different villages of South Kivu. Why is listening so important?

A: Only by actively listening to people’s problems can one understand them or know what kind of assistance to provide. That is why it is so crucial to listen. By doing so, we contribute to their healing by showing compassion and sympathy. Most of the time, trauma-related secrets that we have to hold back destroy us from within without our even knowing.

For example, many people, especially women, here suffer from stomachaches, tension and headaches because they do not know to whom they can reveal their problems and associated emotions.

Q: Should victims be speaking out as well?

A: Victims must talk about their trauma in order to be healed. In the healing process, one of our goals is to enable traumatised victims to speak out about their situation and where and why they have problems in their daily lives, so they can feel relief. If he or she does not speak, the process of healing the trauma cannot proceed.

Q: What are you concretely doing there to help and support women, children and men?

A: To find survivors of rape, we enter communities to inform people about and make them more sensitive to the physical and psychological consequences of rape. We do that to remind everybody that sexual violence is a community problem.

We also ask them to not stigmatise victims of rape and explain what help our listening centres provide, so they also can tell others about our programmes.

How we then assist them differs from person to person. Sometimes it requires legal assistance, medical care, psychological or economical support. We provide counselling by showing that he or she is not responsible for the rape. If they have never been to a hospital for medical care, we refer them to one.

We also do family mediation, which aims to restore peace within families destroyed by rape. And if the rapist is known or if a child is born from rape – often the most mistreated among victims – we help bring them to justice.

Q: What support does your work need so that you can continue to help others?

A: The first thing I need is security. Sometimes we help a survivor of rape and she reintegrates well. After a while, however, the rebels come back to the village and rape her and others again. This disappoints me so much and makes me feel discouraged.

Another thing is the lack of sufficient financial means. Sometimes we listen to survivors of rape who have gone two days without eating, or to a refugee with children, a pregnant woman or an orphan of three years. Without the financial means to help them, it is difficult to cure their trauma.

Excerpt:

By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 24 2013 (IPS)

Journalists can play a crucial role in helping to shift traditional attitudes within societies where the cruel practice of female genital mutilation is an everyday reality.

Mae Azango. Credit: Glenna Gordon for New Narratives

Mae Azango, a reporter for the news site FrontPage Africa, took on this taboo subject in her home country of Liberia, where as many as two out of three girls are affected and the topic itself has been neglected by politicians at the highest level for years.

Her coverage forced her and her young daughter into hiding for weeks, but it also gained international attention and put pressure on the government.

Azango, who just won the International Press Freedom Award 2012, spoke with U.N. correspondent Rousbeh Legatis about how media can make a difference and the situation of the few female journalists in the country.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Looking back on your work, you said: “I knew if we started to talk about it (FGM), and they knew the truth, many parents would choose a different path” for their daughters. Did they?

A: No, parents haven’t chosen a different path for their daughters yet because they still feel it’s the clean and just thing to do. As an ancient tradition, it isn’t going to be changed overnight. We know that. As I’m talking to you, the practice is still going on in secret, even though the government has suspended the activities.

But what we have done is start a conversation at a national level that will allow this practice to be debated for the first time ever in our country. I’m very pleased about that.

More and more political leaders and victims have felt confident to come forward and say, “This practice is outdated. It is wrong.” Many parents will hear that debate for the first time and think twice about cutting their daughters.

It’s not the end but it’s the beginning of the end and many little girls will be spared. But in the long run it will take the sort of long-term, intensive awareness campaign that the government has promised to really stamp it out.

Q: Why is FGM such a taboo subject and how difficult is it to cover as a journalist?

A: It’s a taboo subject in Liberia and Sierra Leone because it is a ritual practiced by traditional secret societies in those two countries. Girls as young as two spend months in the bush learning how to be wives and at the end there is a ceremony where they are cut. There is also a school for boys.

The people who run these schools make a lot of money from them and they want to protect that income.

People know that if you are initiated into the societies you must never speak about what goes on there. If you do, they will kill you, mostly by magic. So people are very afraid to speak about it.

But affected women, who went through this ritual of cutting, are often very bitter and resentful. I was able to persuade a woman to speak to me but she was extremely anxious about it. We had to hide in her hut and use a false name. She was still traumatised from the experience when she was held down by four women when she was 13 and was cut by a fifth with a blade that had been used on 25 other girls. She has lived with the trauma and the medical consequences ever since.

She has faced a lot of attacks since the story came out, but she says she is glad to
have done it because she hopes it will spare other girls what she went through. She is very brave.

Q: What is the situation of female journalists in Liberia and what do they need?

A: There are not many female journalists in Liberia, but the few that are there are trying to make a difference.

Many male journalists feel we are only good enough to go after soft news stories. I’m very lucky to work for FrontPage Africa – a paper that sees women reporters as assets. I’m also part of a U.S. project called New Narratives (NN) that is supporting women reporters in Liberia.

My fellow NN reporters and I have won nine national reporting awards in the last two years and have written for media around the world. We have forced the government and other leaders to act on a range of issues, including police abuse of rape victims, child prostitution and teen pregnancy.

We are proving the men wrong because we are really making waves in Liberia and having the sort of impact they want to have.

We are also proving that not all news has to be politics and scandal. There are so many issues that are plaguing women and children in particular in Liberia and we are proving they are valid news stories that people want to know about.

Q: Why do you think your reporting resulted in political action when other articles and messages never brought any change?

A: What was different about this reporting was that it was told in a very compelling way.

It was on the front page of the major newspaper in Liberia on International Women’s Day, when other media was doing light pieces about women’s advancement.

It had graphic photos that showed young girls were being initiated even though the societies claimed girls had to be marriageable age when they went to the schools. It also told the story through the eyes of a victim. People were able to really relate to her story because everyone had been through the same thing or knew someone who had suffered like that woman.

It’s so rare that reporters actually use real people to tell their stories in Liberia. Usually it’s just a rewritten press release or the words of a single leader being reproduced. There is no reporting. Readers really responded to this, because the overall presentation was so compelling. It got everyone’s attention and it was discussed for months on talk radio.

Excerpt:

By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 14 2012 (IPS)

Conflicts of interest can be viewed as drivers of societies and human development, although recourse to violence has destroyed millions of people’s lives and leaves generations wounded for decades and even centuries.

Tarja Turtia. Credit: Edouard Janin

Constituting one of society’s cornerstones, media and journalists are key actors when it comes to peacebuilding, reconciliation and institutional reconstruction in conflict-ridden societies.

Through their work they may nurture a culture of peace, defined as “values, attitudes, modes of behaviour and ways of life that reject violence and prevent conflicts by tackling their root causes to solve problems through dialogue and negotiation among individuals, groups and nations” – though they also often fail in this task.

By rebuilding and strengthening capacities, the Paris-based United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) supports media and journalists with millions of dollars and projects around the world.

Tarja Turtia, programme specialist at UNESCO’s Division for Freedom of Expression, spoke with U.N. correspondent Rousbeh Legatis about why media and journalists are important to reach out to local populations who are turning peace into lasting societal behaviour, and how they can be strengthened in this pivotal function to transform a culture of conflict resolution from simmering violence into constructive dialogue and understanding.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Involvement of local actors and creating local ownership are key success factors for lasting peace structures in post- conflict societies. Could you elucidate which function media and journalists hold in this equation?

A: It is an important feature of UNESCO’s work to assist civil society actors and local initiatives in all areas, conflict phases and levels of intervention.

Empowering local communities through capacity building of local media professionals, including marginalised and vulnerable groups, to participate in peace-building processes, and responding to their need to access critical information such as peace agreements, reconciliation initiatives, elections and public decisions taken throughout the transition period, will be among the major tasks.

The capacity of the media plays a constructive role in the post-conflict reconciliation process by promoting unbiased information, avoiding stereotypes and incitement in order to foster mutual understanding.

In some cases, the media can start debates that could not be initiated openly before. Blogging for instance, is currently an effective medium used by journalists and officials in Iraq to launch debates that they would not dare address in public.

Q: What are common features of the media and journalism landscape in post-conflict societies that peacebuilders are confronted with day in day out?

A: Peace builders are confronted with two major obstacles to the full enjoyment of human rights, as also are media-related legal frameworks that do not comply with international standards: democratic deficit and weak institutions. Indeed, insufficient constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression, regulations restricting media content or Internet freedom, no freedom of information laws, lack of ICT policies promoting universal access to the Internet represent important challenges.

In post-conflict areas, the very absence of media is a challenge: Afghanistan, for instance, moved from the post-2001 situation with virtually no media to today’s vibrant, professional and pluralist Afghani media sector.

One of the main challenges faced in conflict torn societies is the lack of safety of journalists. Over the last 10 years alone, more than 500 journalists and media workers have been killed worldwide.

For example, in Nepal, civil war, ended since 2006, has created a situation whereby exercising their rights and taking the role of watchdogs, journalists put themselves at risk: a high number of threats and violence against journalists take place in many parts of the country, often as the result of investigative journalism.

Q: As to whether media has a lasting constructive impact on successful conflict transformation efforts, some say there is only anecdotal evidence for this cause-and-effect relationship. What are your experiences?

A: Free, independent and pluralistic media are essential for strengthening transparency and fighting corruption, being key facilitators of the public’s demand for accountability and responsiveness from their society’s leaders. In turn, freedom of expression, the free flow of information, and the work of the media are crucial for poverty eradication, economic and social development, i.e. to equitable and sustainable development.

The Arab Spring has been and still is a key experience in which the media, if free, independent and pluralistic, have proven their influence in facilitating dialogue and enabling national movements. They ask for accountability, inclusiveness, the credibility and legitimacy of transitional authorities and transparent and peaceful elections.

That is why UNESCO has engaged in supporting the development of the free flow of information, safety of journalists and media professionals in the conflict-driven yet promising context of the Arab Spring.

Q: How is UNESCO supporting media and journalistic work in post-conflict societies to strengthen peacebuilding and to achieve more tangible deliverables?

A: For instance, UNESCO plays a vital role in supporting election reporting. The aim regarding elections is to strengthen the capacity of the media to provide fair and balance coverage of electoral activities. This works as a vital factor for the local democratisation process. Any democracy based on the respect of freedom of expression has an electorate that can make use of their right to vote on the basis of clear and non-biased media coverage.

In Iraq, for instance, UNESCO is currently implementing a project that trains media professionals to cover the election process: they are trained to inform the electorate and to build the capacity and enhance the performance of Iraq’s media regulator whose role it is to weaken factional and sectarian divisions.

Another key area promoted by peacebuilding efforts in a post-conflict setting is ensuring that information reaches the widest public. Lack of information or misinformation can trigger conflicts, especially in post-conflicts election scenarios. UNESCO supports community radio, the main source of communication for people in remote areas in Africa, through its International Programme for the Development of Communication, IPDC, programmes. In Sierra Leone, for instance, UNESCO’s support to the Independent Radio Network (IRN) a collection of community radios ensures that the local population has timely access to accurate information, especially in electoral periods to avert recourse to violence.

UNESCO actions in Nepal two decades ago can be cited as another example: the creation of radio Sagarmatha, the first community radio station in Nepal, which piloted a new concept of media in the Himalayan country, was enabled. This project had an ice-breaking impact on the country, paving the way to the spontaneous proliferation of community radio stations in Nepal in the late 90s. In the difficult years that followed, the community radios movement has been a force striving for peace and democracy as well as for sustainable development.

Q: Does constructive media and journalistic work get sufficient attention as supportive elements in peacebuilding efforts?

A: The level of attention this role attracts differs from country to country. For instance, in Sierra Leone, the peacebuilding efforts have mostly focused on building media institutions and capacities; while this has not been the case in Liberia or Cote d’Ivoire.

It may not be easy to deduce a cause-effect relationship, but of the three post-conflict states, Sierra Leone seems to be the one that is developing faster into norms of democratic governance and stability.

More generally, while the importance of media workers within a peacebuilding process is generally acknowledged, insufficient attention is paid to the needs journalists have in order to be useful to democratisation. Indeed, only with well-trained journalists who understand their rights and responsibilities can help media take its crucial place in strengthening the democracy and disseminating information to people.

Excerpt:

By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 19 2012 (IPS)

By now, the dilemma is well recognised but hardly solved: as the global population grows, resources become increasingly scarce. Indeed, food production will have to increase by a whopping 60 percent by 2050 in order to meet the future demand for food and agricultural products.

Agricultural practises, naturally, are key to addressing this problem, and as such, play a key role in sustainable development. “We need to save and grow,” says José Graziano da Silva, director-general of the Food and Agriculture organisation of the United Nations (FAO).

Da Silva advocates for farming practises with increased productivity and a reduced environmental impact, such as “no-till farming, conservation agriculture and integrated pest management that allow for productivity increase but with a smaller environmental impact”.

José Graziano da Silva, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO). Credit: FAO News

“But we cannot have sustainability only in the production side,” da Silva adds. “We also need to look at food loss and waste. Between production and consumption the world loses or wastes over 1.3 billion tones, the equivalent of one-third of the annual food production.”

While food loss occurs mainly in developing countries and has to do with lack of adequate post-harvest facilities, waste is concentrated in industrialised countries where edible food is thrown away.

The FAO has introduced methods of sustainable crop production intensification (SCPI) in its guide “Save and Grow”. It focuses on sustainable intensification, meaning a productive agriculture that conserves and enhances natural resources.

IPS correspondent Rousbeh Legatis spoke with da Silva about current issues surrounding sustainable agriculture and development. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: A reversal of decades of land reform appears to be underway in recent years, with speculators and private interests taking control of perhaps 200 million hectares of land from poor farmers in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Should land rights be on the agenda of the Rio+20 Earth Summit?

A: Yes. Having rights of tenure recognised is one of the most basic needs for poor farmers worldwide. It is the minimum basis to encourage him or her to invest and to use natural resources sustainably.

Recently we took an important step forward in this, with the endorsement by the Committee of World Food Security of the specific guidelines on tenure rights in the context of food security. These guidelines represent a milestone. For the first time, governments, civil society and the private sector reached a consensus over a set of rules to ensure that poor families have their tenure rights respected.

Building on this foundation, we now need to tackle another challenge: the principles of responsible agricultural investment. While the guidelines provide an overall framework to ensure the good governance of tenure rights, the principles for responsible agricultural investment should guarantee that investments serve the needs of all stakeholders and enhance rather than compromise food security.

Q: If agriculture is a driver of sustainable development, why is this importance not reflected in the direct financial support and political commitment of the international community? How can such support and commitment be gained?

A: Food prices had been falling since the early 1970s, making agriculture unprofitable in many developing countries and forcing the world to get used to a just-in-time supply to be bought at international markets. The food crisis of 2008 was a wake-up call.

It is now clear to everyone that we need to invest in agricultural areas in developing countries, where over 70 percent of the world’s hungry population is concentrated. Among them are many of the world’s over 500 million small-scale farmers, most of whom depend on agriculture for at least part of their livelihoods.

Agriculture is a key part of strategies for sustainable development. But agriculture is practised by hundreds of millions of individual farmers, livestock keepers, fishers and foresters – most of them dispersed and often distant from political processes. They do not necessarily have the same voice that their urban counterparts do.

The recent food and economic crises have focused the attention of both national policymakers and the international community on the challenges facing agriculture and rural populations, so we now have an opportunity and an obligation to address those challenges, not only through financial support but also by making agricultural and food systems fairer and more efficient.

Q: The Rio+20 effort recognises that major changes are needed to the global food system, given the fact that more than a billion people go hungry every day. Do you think governments have the political will to look at real alternatives to a failed industrial agricultural production system?

A: We should avoid the perception that there is only one global agricultural production system – in fact, changes are needed in diverse agricultural and food systems at all levels and in all countries.

These include measures to increase productivity and reduce food losses and waste, for example, by establishing and protecting rights to resources, especially for the most vulnerable; incorporating incentives for sustainable consumption and production into food systems; and promoting fair and well-functioning agricultural and food markets.

National governments and the international community have demonstrated renewed commitment to addressing these challenges, and we need to continue pressing forward with such commitments and their implementation.

Q: What are the most pressing existing flaws in food and agriculture governance? Could you give concrete examples of useful Rio+20 outcomes that would overcome these over the next two decades?

A: Ultimately, success in eradicating hunger and the transition to sustainable patterns of consumption and production will depend on the decisions of billions of individuals, both producers and consumers.

Conditions and incentives that are conducive to sound decision-making will be needed, including mechanisms for identifying and managing trade-offs that can arise in pursuing these multiple objectives.

This, in turn, requires building fair and effective governance systems – systems that are transparent, participatory, results-focused and accountable – at levels from the global to the local.

We already have the technology available for more sustainable production, but small-scale farmers need help adopting them.

The transition from our current model of agricultural production to a sustainable one has a cost. In the past, the poorer have paid a greater share of transition costs and received a smaller share of benefits. This is an unacceptable imbalance and one that needs to change.

Excerpt:

By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 14 2012 (IPS)

Human rights should be explicitly recognised as an indispensable ingredient of sustainable development at the Rio+20 summit in Brazil, says Navanethem Pillay, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

In an interview with U.N. correspondent Rousbeh Legatis, Pillay elaborated on the nexus between human rights and sustainable development, and what world leaders meeting Jun. 20-22 have to do to walk the talk.

Navanethem Pillay. Credit: Courtesy of UNHCHR

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: To what extent do sustainable development and human rights depend on each other?

A: Human rights and sustainable development are inextricably linked. Without human rights safeguards, policies intended to advance environmental or development goals can have serious negative impacts on those rights.

For example, in recent years, we have seen that technocratic efforts towards sustainable development have excluded many communities from the process of decision-making, causing economic and social inequalities to be exacerbated and human rights to be sidelined.

Indigenous peoples have seen threats to their lands and livelihoods from some emission reduction schemes, scarce food-growing lands have sometimes been diverted for the production of biofuels, and massive infrastructure projects have resulted in the forced eviction and relocation of entire communities.

This is why it is important to include specific human rights references throughout the Rio+20 outcome document. When it comes to women’s rights, we have seen time and again that if there is no explicit reference in important policy documents to women’s rights, they tend to be neglected and sometimes previous advances made are inadvertently reversed.

Q: NGOs have expressed fears that the final Rio+20 plan of action will marginalise basic human rights, including the rights of women and indigenous peoples. How valid are these fears?

A: I very much share these concerns. This is why I am personally attending Rio+20 and my office is working hard to highlight the need for human rights to infuse the final outcome.

At the end of March 2012, I wrote an open letter to all U.N. member states urging them to support human rights considerations in their deliberations as they began the second round of informal negotiations. NGOs have taken up this letter as a rallying point and some government delegations have taken up the issue. As a result, we have seen human rights proposals put forward in the negotiations, but the battle is far from over.

Most human rights provisions remain “bracketed”, and key concepts like human rights-based policy coherence and human rights impact assessment are yet to be introduced into the document.

Q: How widely did Agenda 21 and the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development adopted at the 1992 Earth Summit recognise the concept of human rights?

A: In fact, it reflected human rights language more than one would imagine, given the current discussions. The 1992 Agenda 21 and the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development were celebrated precisely because they put human beings front and centre – starting with Principle One: “Human beings are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development. They are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature.”

In my letter to governments, I reminded them of this – that the 27 principles of the 1992 Rio Declaration are firmly grounded in human rights.

The Rio Declaration specifically invoked the right to development, called for action to reduce disparities in standards of living, affirmed the role of women, indigenous peoples and local communities in sustainable development, and called for the protection of people living under repression and occupation.

Q: Looking back at the progress since human rights considerations were infused in that landmark Declaration two decades ago, what are the lessons learned in terms of “walk the talk”?

A: Twenty years after Rio, one would hope and expect that we would move forward rather than backwards on these essential human rights commitments.

We must address the North-South divide, improve upon the Millennium Development Goals by ensuring that a gender perspective is properly considered, and must learn from the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements that human rights must be at the core of development.

Governments will have to “walk the talk” when it comes to human rights because the women and men on the streets are loudly demanding it.

Excerpt:

By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 12 2012 (IPS)

Building the cities of the future requires not only smarter planning but a profound shift toward greater equity and social justice, says Joan Clos, executive director of the U.N. Human Settlements Programme, or UN-HABITAT.

Speaking with U.N. correspondent Rousbeh Legatis on the eve of the Rio+20 U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, Clos explained how the world’s more than three billion urban dwellers can directly participate in the process of making their cities healthier, more liveable places.

Joan Clos. Credit: UN-Habitat

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Can you talk about the link between urban life and development, and to what extent sustainability of the latter depends on the former?

A: With more than half of the global population living in cities, there is no doubt that we live in an urbanised world and the global challenges of the 21st Century are in urban areas.

It is in cities around the world that the pressures of globalisation, migration, social inequality, environmental pollution and climate change and youth unemployment are most directly felt.

On the other hand, they have for centuries been the cradle of innovation and they currently produce more than 75 percent of the world’s GDP. From this point, sustainable urbanisation is a key driver to achieve global sustainable development and economic world growth.

Q: What role does urban design and planning play in this context?

A: With the current worldwide rapid urbanisation, cities need to ensure a good urban design and planning. We must re-embrace the compact, mixed-use city. Cities and their component neighbourhoods need to be compact, integrated and connected.

This requires a shift away from the mono-functional city of low density and long distances, which is poorly connected, socially divided and economically unproductive.

City-dwellers themselves – particularly the poorest and most vulnerable – must remain the primary beneficiaries. The “right to the city” remains a powerful principle for ensuring that the collective interest of a city prevails.

A human rights-based approach is the only way to uphold the dignity of all urban residents in the face of multiple rights violations, including the right to decent living conditions. This paradigm shift cannot take place without addressing the fundamental issues of equity, poverty and social justice.

Q: UN-Habitat is calling for “Sustainable Cities for All”. What would they look like? Do any already exist?

A: Cities in Asia and Europe offer, generally speaking, some of the best models, with Singapore, Tokyo and Osaka and Copenhagen, Stockholm and Oslo leading their counterparts.

Siemens Green City Index, for example, provides a comprehensive, rigorous set of measurement principles for sustainable cities along the parameters of low CO2 emissions and energy use, optimal land use, efficient buildings and transport, recycling of water and waste, and air quality and environmental governance.

According to the index, the best examples in North America are San Francisco, Vancouver and New York; in Latin America, Curitiba and Bogota. In Africa, Cape Town and Durban offered the best models.

Q: Citizens are often excluded from planning and decision-making processes. How can their voices be strengthened?

A: We emphasise the importance of citizen participation and the ability of the local community to involve many actors including citizens and groups, civil society and the private sector. In many cases, citizens do not have the information or lack the mechanism to participate in city decisions.

In this context, UN-Habitat will launch the initiative “I’m a City Changer” in Rio during the Rio+20 conference. This will be a platform to intensify exchange of experiences and examples from cities, and a global partnership for sustainable cities, involving multi-stakeholder participation – cities and local governments, civil society, national governments and the private sector.

In the essence of the “I’m a City Changer” campaign, I encourage you all to advocate for the importance of sound national urban strategies, balanced regional development policies, and strengthened urban economic and legal frameworks.

We all have to start being City Changers, and think about how we can achieve cities that are more sustainable, equitable and prosperous for all.

Q: What would be measurable results from Rio+20 for achieving sustainable urban development and to reinvigorate the urban agenda?

A: I strongly believe that the Rio+20 conference will be crucial to connect all the work by prioritising sustainable urbanisation within a broader development framework towards a new multi-level governance architecture; increasing the number of countries that adopt and implement national urban policies to coordinate different ministerial and sectoral efforts.

Now more than ever, the role of regional and local authorities is crucial to delivering practical results that will defeat poverty, protect the natural environment and improve resilience to potential disasters. Our challenge is to connect the dots, so that advances on one can generate progress on others.

UN-Habitat strongly recommends that countries establish National Urban Strategies that shape regional and local level development policies and connect the work at local levels to national policies that aim to ensure that urbanisation contributes to economic growth. As part of this process we also recommend the strengthening of the capacity of local and regional authorities to empower them to implement the plans.

Furthermore, a structurally and qualitatively different type of economic growth is needed. Incentives should direct growth towards more resource-productive, resilient, low-carbon and low risk urban infrastructure, and renewed urban design with a focus on the green economy.

Excerpt:

By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, May 30 2012 (IPS)

As Africa’s Sahel region faces a new food crisis, smallholder famers hold the key to making future development policies sustainable.

That is why it “is just impossible to speak about sustainability” at the Rio+20 conference next month without listening to what smallholder farmers have to say, says Mohamed Beavogui, head of the International Fund for Agricultural Development‘s Partnership and Resource Mobilisation Office.

Courtesy of Mohamed Beavogui

Some 18 million people in the Sahel region are at risk of food insecurity and malnutrition, warns the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

Recurring droughts, environmental degradation and high grain prices accompanied by decreasing migrant remittances, as well as displacement and chronic poverty are creating a situation that has resulted among others things in a 26-percent decline in cereal production compared to 2011. Finding long-lasting solutions is pivotal in this context, said Beavogui.

And these solutions are already there, developed by smallholder farmers over centuries.

Promises were made by the G8 group of wealthy donor nations to scale up international agriculture-related foreign aid, especially in Africa, but they remain unfulfilled.

Speaking with U.N. Correspondent Rousbeh Legatis, Beavogui laid out what the world can learn from smallholder farmers to promote sustainable agriculture as a key element of future sustainable development.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Regions like the Sahel seem to be hit by famine every few years, often for predictable reasons. What structural changes can be made to break this cycle?

A: Firstly, we should invest in providing targeted communities with greater capacity to implement self-help activities in response to production shortfalls, as well as more effectively coordinate and implement governmental and international relief activities.

Secondly, we have been learning that in areas where attempts were made to build long-lasting sustainable approaches like re-greening of land, solving the issues of water availability, drip irrigation, bounds, the adverse effects of droughts have been less than in areas where this kind of work has not been undertaken.

But this means what? It means that we should work all together. Governments should encourage the right policies that allow to have the right inputs, particularly drought-resistant seeds, as well as policies that allow good extension services to be adopted and easy access – particularly for women and young people.

We should furthermore invest in better roads to allow the transportation of food from the high production zones to the deficit zones.

Q: IFAD has supported organic farming pilot projects, such as among cocoa producers in Sao Tome, as a way to leverage higher-paying markets. Are these kinds of markets – organic, fair trade – expanding, and do they offer an opportunity for public-private partnerships that really benefit small farmers?

A: Yes, it is a very good way to contribute to the creation of wealth for the rural smallholder farmers.

We have had very successful experiences in Sao-Tomé, Sierra Leone, Uganda and in many other places in Latin America and so on.

But what have we learned? What are the success factors in order to get there? When I say “there” I mean the situation whereby the farmer is getting the fair price on its product, increasing his or her income in a very respectable manner and the partner, the private company, is also satisfied that it is making money. Because that is the reality: it is about making money, but in a fair manner.

So the first success factor is that we should think long-term. We should work with real private sector professionals, partners, committed also to development, to just human beings. Besides business and trade, fundamental to this is that we need some kind of ethical approach to the work. So in short, we need genuine commitment from everyone.

The second success factor is that we need to work through organised producers to ensure a critical mass. Allowing to have, firstly, the size for delivery and, secondly, minimised processing and marketing costs.

Thirdly, we need to ensure quality to have good access to markets and good prices and we need to optimise logistics to reduce cost again, as well as an easy transfer of knowhow and good practices.

Q: Gender equality is a priority for IFAD. Are governments giving women, especially young and rural women, the attention and support they deserve?

A: I think we have a long way to go in that area for the time being. Policies are changing. If you look at what is happening now in Africa, the new constitutions are giving more and more space to women. You look at the governments, you are having more and more women getting to high-level positions, women are getting also better positions in different corporations.

The issue where I think there is a lot of work to do yet and which need a bigger push is really women in the rural areas.

In the documentation, there is a lot of talk about how do we help women, but when you go into actual activities, you will see that the extension service for agriculture is geared very frequently towards men. That issues like land are first devoted to men. So, that is where we have to work and to continue supporting.

Women in Africa particularly are the ones who produce food, who process and market food. Commodities are dealt with by men, but food is the responsibility of women. So, in IFAD we have been investing a lot in this area. The major partners in our programmes are women first and young women also.

Q: There is a growing recognition that sustainable agriculture is central to sustainable human development. What do you hope could be accomplished at the Rio+20 summit in this regard?

A: What we as IFAD are pushing is that you cannot build sustainability without involving the main actors. We have about two billion smallholder farmers around the world. These people are working on the lands we have every day, they are dealing with our waters, with our forests, with our livestock, they are in fact dealing with our nature.

So it is just impossible to speak about sustainability of our environment without really involving these people.

They can help us to have a sustainable agriculture; an agriculture that allows us to produce enough food and in the same time to preserve our environment, our nature.

Smallholder farmers are dealing with our local knowledge. They are good managers of risks, have a very good experiences and solutions in terms of alternative responses to droughts, floods etc.

Sometimes, if you look at these farms you will see that he or she plants different types of species to manage the risk. One (plant) will respond to droughts, in case there are droughts, and you have others who would respond to floods, and if there is a flood, that production will survive. So they have this type of responses that are extremely efficient. So we have a lot to learn from them.

Excerpt:

By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 3 2012 (IPS)

After Latin America and the Caribbean’s “lost decade” of the 1980s, the region has experienced a period of “light and shadow”, says Alicia Bárcena, executive secretary of the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

Alicia Bárcena. Credit: Rousbeh Legatis/IPS

“The real progress in the social arena was in the first decade of this century because we went from 44 percent people living in poverty to 31 percent last year,” she says.

But that percentage still represents 177 million people of region’s 600 million inhabitants.

In the lead-up to the major international summit in June known as Rio+20, 19 U.N. agencies collaborated to take stock of progress and challenges in the region over the last two decades.

Bárcena spoke with U.N. correspondent Rousbeh Legatis about ways forward on the path of sustainable development in the region, the historic chance of the upcoming world summit to revisit global governance structures, and the role of the South in tackling problems of a common future.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: What are some of the main threats facing the Latin America and Caribbean region? A: One of the important alerts for our people in the region is that the fertility rates are going down in general. However, the place where more children are being born are with youth pregnancies. Poor young women are the ones who are having children.

This is very crucial, because if our region does not invest in the first ages from zero to five years, the future of this region is going to be in the hands of poverty.

Furthermore, we have also analysed where in Latin America and the Caribbean are the areas most vulnerable to climate change according to its expected impact by 2050.

Take extreme events or natural disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, etc. as an example. Most affected are going to be Central America on the Atlantic side, Mexico on the Caribbean basin, some areas of Ecuador, Peru and Colombia on the side of the Pacific Ocean, and Montevideo (Uruguay) and the port there (on the Atlantic).

It is true that socially we have improved poverty rates, but unemployment is a very important issue in Latin America and the Caribbean. [The rate is] relatively low compared with Europe or the U.S. – 6.6 percent. The problem is the quality of employment: often it is informal and does not provide social security. As important as reducing poverty is reducing inequality.

Q: If we look at the main foundations of the regional economies, we see exploitation and exportation of commodities and natural resources: mining, oil and gas, coal, agribusiness products. Those are the items moving the Latin American economies forward, due to Asian demand. How could the green economy make any impact in this scenario? A: Abundance of natural resources has to be seen as a blessing; the curse is not to have policies to handle it. What we need to do is invest the rents of the extraction of those natural resources in other areas, to build other forms of capital and to replace it with other forms of productivity for the future generations.

It has to be done with the lowest impact possible on the environment. And the rents have to be adequately distributed, we need a better mechanism to guarantee that.

So we are discussing the governance of natural resources. What did countries like Norway, Finland, Australia, New Zealand do, since all those countries have an abundance of natural resources and made the transition to a more technology-oriented society and they did it thanks to the rents of their natural resources.

Q: Green economy experiences until now are just case studies, nice examples. In the dominant economic scenario, how can governments find space to take measures like fiscal reforms or subsidies reforms? A: First of all, in our region the term “green economy” is very polemic, because it is seen as a trend imposed by Northern developed countries without proposing also the mechanisms and the costs of this transition and answering the question of who is going to pay for this transition towards this type of economy. And it is seen with fear in terms of protectionism.

What can the governments do? I believe very much in fiscal reform, which is a very powerful sign. Governments with fiscal reforms give signs to the productive agents but also redistribute resources. To make it successful it has to be a consensus-based fiscal reform.

This is what we need, it cannot be imposed. There has to be internal discussions to see where and what is the society ready to pay for this transition, this is essential.

Q: What can be done in terms of solutions? A: So what we are trying to tell the governments is “you do not have to invest in everything but in certain things that are essential for people” – electricity being one, potable water being the other, broadband internet access, public transportation and intelligent construction.

Why not build houses which have solar energy, air conditioning facilities or light already included, to have some engineering or design behind (them) that is already available? In Latin America and the Caribbean, we have space to do things better as to urban planning.

The cash transfer programmes were (also) very successful, like “Bolsa Familia”. This is a programme that took 20 million Brazilians out of poverty in the last 10 years.

If one expands these programmes and conditional cash transfers so that they are not only for education and health, taking the children to school and to the doctor, but also incorporate sustainability measures there, by saying to the community “we are going to give you money but you have to protect the soil”, “you are going to use the water this way”, etc. then you also include some of those sustainability measures.

Q: In the report you say that “developed countries have not honored their commitments to provide finance and leadership”. Please explain that a bit more. A: The developed countries commit themselves to provide 0.75 percent of their GDP for the Official Development Assistance (ODA) to transfer money from north to south in terms of financing for development. We are now at 0.33 percent, which is half of the commitment that developed countries made.

Okay: in the moment of financial crisis, it is very difficult to achieve this goal now or soon. However, historically developed countries developed themselves with high consumption of energy and resources of the planet. Now it is very unfair to impose this on developing countries, which is more costly.

The other way of achieving this transfer from north to south is through knowledge sharing and technology transfer. That is why we believe patents, training and free exchange of knowledge could be useful mechanisms.

Investment in science, technology and innovation is essential; that is going to be the key for the transition to sustainable development.

Q: What would be a useful outcome from Rio+20? A: To have the sustainable development goals agreed upon, because that puts a lot of pressure on everybody and all the institutions to achieve those goals.

Another thing that we are suggesting is a “Tobin Tax” that should go to sustainable development that is on financial transactions. With a tax of 0.0005 percent, we could get a good amount of money for the world to go for this transition.

Secondly, to have clear financing tools. Third, to have clear technology transfer mechanisms and fourth to have institutions that work.

From our perspective, multilaterally, the U.N. Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) should be strengthened. To bring the economic actors to ECOSOC to discuss economics, because what is wrong is economics, the environment is on the receiving end, but we need to change the economics.

Excerpt:

By Rousbeh Legatis and - -
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 13 2012 (IPS)

Empowering rural women in the Iraqi marshlands, who mostly remain off the radar of international support, must involve local languages and dialects as well as local women trainers, says Mishkat Al Moumin, founder of the Iraqi group Women and the Environment Network (WATEO).

Mishkat Al Moumin, founder of the Iraqi group Women and the Environment Network (WATEO). Credit: Rousbeh Legatis/IPS

Through training in resources management and environmental design at the village level, WATEO empowers rural women as primary users of environmental resources, particularly water.

Hailing recent efforts by U.N. Women, the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), and the U.N. Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO) to address issues facing rural women, she said, “Hopefully, more discussion and actions will take place.”

IPS correspondent Rousbeh Legatis talked to Al Moumin about the daily challenges faced by rural Arab women in the marshes and the importance of culturally appropriate interventions.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Could you describe rural women’s environmental livelihood in Iraq? A: Women and the Environment worked among rural women living in the Iraqi marshlands, an area of 20,000 square kilometres, and according to UNEP having the most unique ecosystem in the Middle East that goes back to 5,000 years B.C.

Saddam (Hussein’s) regime destroyed the marshlands by draining them and launching systematic attacks against the Marsh Arabs, estimated at around half a million. Forty thousand fled to Iran and around 100,000 became internally displaced.

After the fall of Saddam’s regime in 2003, the Marsh Arabs returned and cooperated with the ministry of environment and International organisations to rehabilitate the ecosystem of the marshland. Around 45 percent of the marshland was rehabilitated.

However, the marshlands were not the same anymore. Lacking fresh water requires women to walk at least 10 miles back and forth more than once a day to collect water. As to food, the Marsh Arabs depend upon fishing and hunting for their livelihood.

More than 66 species of birds are considered at risk. Due to food shortage, the Marsh Arabs, who were once proud to fish by a trident, now they are fishing using the net or electricity.

This harsh and difficult environment means more work and more responsibilities for women. Before the destruction, fresh water was everywhere, now it is scarce. Women harvest water regardless of its smell and colour; sometimes families drink from the container even if their animals (that live with them) drank from it, one cup is used for the entire family. That caused water-borne diseases.

Q: You try to empower rural women through resource management in Basra, Maysan and Thi Qar. Could you please explain the underlying issues here you try to tackle? A: The main issues the organisation works to address is to train women to provide water, sanitation, and hygiene to meet the basic needs of their family.

Furthermore, we want to include women’s perspective in water policy. Oftentimes, policies forget to include the perspective of those who use water most of the time – which happens to be women. To that end, in August of 2010 Women and the Environment organised community meetings in the three provinces attended by government officials, private sector, NGOs, and rural women reviewing water policies, which led to the recommendation that women should be recognised as the primary users of water.

In the case of the Marsh Arabs, as additional example, we have trained women in more than 53 villages in the marshlands, building their capacity to provide water, sanitation and hygiene.

That included knowledge about how to preserve water, sanitation and hygiene, including boiling water, covering containers to keep the water clean, cleaning the cups that are used to drink water rather than having one cup for all family members to use and so forth.

Q: Did you make progress in supporting rural Iraqi women? A: When communities come together to address an issue, progress will be made. I feel that a great progress was made (in the case of the Mash Arab women) because it was a group effort including Iraqi professors who contributed their knowledge, time and effort, tribal leaders who supported these programmes and believe that training the women makes their communities safer – which it did – as well as international organisations, especially UNEP, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the Victoria University, and the Waterloo University.

The survey conducted before the training shows that 90 percent of the surveyed women collected water regardless of its colour and smell. After the training, 80 percent of women cared about the colour and the smell of water, 80 percent identified areas where water is less polluted, 85 percent boiled water, 85 percent cleaned the container before using.

The only challenge we have to face is financial funding. Due to the lack of financial resources, we cannot expand training to other villages and cover more areas to provide a higher level of training.

Q: Empowering rural women needs cultural aspects to be understood and incorporated in gender mainstreaming, could you explain that? A: Empowering rural women needs to be done from within according to the norms and culture accepted by communities. The tribal community is an Islamic conservative community, thus, the language used in the training reflected that nature.

All the training materials were designed to coincide with the nature of the community. For example, well-known Muslim women who managed water resources were introduced as models. Local dialect was utilised, experts from the local areas were trained to train others.

Throughout the training, all experts utilised the local language, well known practices and traditions to introduce the idea that women are the primary users and managers of water resources.

Rather than referring to Western terminology or focusing on terms, the entire focus was on the culture itself and concepts. We utilised the Iraqi and Islamic culture to present case studies about women who managed water resources.

Excerpt:

By - - and Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 10 2012 (IPS)

In Haitian refugee camps, women are still crammed under plastic or cloth tarps that provide no security and quickly become overheated by the sun. Sexual abuse, harassment, assault and rape run rampant, even as political responses to these dangers have stalled. But KOFAVIV, a women’s organisation founded by and for rape survivors, offers a glimmer of hope.

Eramithe Delva, founder of KOFAVIV, a Haitian women's organisation founded by and for rape survivors. Credit: Courtsey of KOFAVIV

The lack of sanitation infrastructure forces women to walk long ways to reach bathrooms and showers, even when it’s “pitch dark after sunset”, she explained, since some camps have no lighting at night.

“Women are scared to walk by themselves at night because of that; they are scared that people will walk into their tent and rob or hurt them,” she added.

Other problems relate to children, education and income. Mothers “have the choice of staying in or around their tents to stay with their children, or leave them behind with a friend or a neighbour to be able to try and make a little bit of money”.

IPS spoke with Delva about how a women’s organisation founded “by and for rape survivors” is trying to make a difference while political decision makers remain, for the most part, idle.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: In a recent report, you shed light on survival sex, a problem for displaced women and girls that has gone neglected. What has changed since that report? A: “Survival sex” occurs when women and teenage girls have no other options but to sell their bodies to make a little bit of money to provide for themselves and their families. Although they are similar, we consider “survival sex” to be different than prostitution or sex work, because the person engaging in the sexual exchange did not choose to do it willingly.

Most, if not all, of the women and girls engaged in survival sex have told our outreach workers that they don’t like doing it, and that they would stop if they found another way to provide for themselves and family members.

Since the report, nothing has really changed. Reports aren’t going to change anything by themselves; it is through direct work and activities within the affected communities that we can start seeing changes.

Our network of outreach workers lives in the camps and in the poor communities, so this is part of their daily lives, and they will tell you that not much has changed. KOFAVIV has provided shelter for young women and young mothers who are (or have been) engaged in survival sex, but a lot more needs to be done to change that.

Q: What are main causes of this problem and what must be done to tackle them? A: There are many different causes. We consider poverty, the lack of access to economic opportunities and all the accompanying complexities to be the main ones.

It will be very difficult to solve this problem because it exists on so many levels, but we think that there needs to be an infrastructure created to support and provide relief for the young women engaged in survival sex.

First of all, they need to be able to finish their studies. A lot of the young women and girls who come to the KOFAVIV Centre have told us that they are engaging in these activities to be able to pay for their school fees.

They need to be taken out of the camps and placed in secure housing. There need to be programs and activities where they can receive counselling and medical services, where they can participate in trainings and classes to learn skills that they could apply to income generating activities.

Q: Fighting sexual violence is high on the political agenda in Haiti, at least rhetorically. What kind of governmental support have you observed reaching out to women in camps, including survival sex? A: There have been talks of combating sexual violence but I have not seen any concrete plans or activities being implemented by the government. As a grassroots organisation working directly in the affected areas, we have not seen much change. Most people displaced by the earthquake are still living in horrible conditions.

Q: Where you have seen major progress being made? A: In terms of our organisation, KOFAVIV has been able to make a lot of progress and to make a difference for survivors of sexual violence.

We provide legal services and accompaniment to victims of gender-based-violence (GBV), with the support of the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI). Through this partnership, our legal unit of outreach workers accompany the survivors to report her attack, to file a complaint and to go to trial to pursue her aggressor.

From 2004 (KOFAVIV’s inception) to 2010, we barely had ten cases make it to the justice system. Since the earthquake, from 2010 to 2012, we have had about 200 cases that have made it through the justice system, five of which are awaiting a ruling.

It might not seem like a lot compared to the number of women and girls that have come forward, but to us that is a great accomplishment.

Because of our presence in the camps and throughout the communities, rape survivors know about us and the type of work that we do; they are coming forward and talking about their attacks.

Survivors of sexual violence (rape, sexual assault, conjugal violence, etc.) are sometimes humiliated and shamed by their communities so they often kept their abuse a secret. But now, to see women and girls come to our centre or call in to our call centre to report abuse and to seek help and justice is great progress.

Furthermore, our emergency shelter in the centre is open to survivors of sexual violence if they feel it is too dangerous for them to go back to their home or tent. They can stay safely at and participate in all the services and activities offered by KOFAVIV.

Excerpt:

By Rousbeh Legatis and - -
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 8 2012 (IPS)

Tools such as “gender markers”, which screen budgets and resources dedicated to promoting gender equality, are proving critical to improving the effectiveness of monetary support that seeks to empower women and girls.

Saraswathi Menon Credit: Courtesy of UN Women

Four years ago, the United Nations (U.N.) called for enhanced gender responsive planning and budgeting processes in order to follow money invested in gender equality and women’s empowerment.

Since then, various U.N. bodies have made an effort to improve internal accountability standards and the quality of programming in order to respond best to different realities of women and girls across countries and regions.

U.N. Women supports over 40 countries to introduce a gender perspective in planning and budgeting processes and budget-tracking methodologies. IPS spoke with Saraswathi Menon of U.N. Women about the agency’s work in this field and about the use of gender markers.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: What can budgets tell us about efforts to improve women’s livelihoods? A: There is no direct correlation. However, when budgets allocate funds you can see what the priorities of the government or the organisation are. So, if gender equality is a priority, clearly the budget has to be structured in a certain way.

You do not set aside funds for women but for funds to address the issues that are undermining gender equality. That is how you will analyse a budget – not only in terms of the funds but also in terms of what is being funded.

So in a country where women have limited access to, let’s say, economic opportunities in the countryside and rural areas, you will look at the budgets of the agriculture ministry, commerce ministry, legal ministry and others in terms of how women are now getting access to land, investments, technologies, etc. The pattern of the budget is actually also important as well as the allocation itself.

Now, a gender marker measures only institutional support to women, whether it is a government or civil society or private sector organisation. In that sense, it is not directly empowering but it measures to what extent the investment is empowering.

Q: The U.N. and U.N. Women have worked to improve and expand the use of gender markers. Could you update us on their development at this point? A: Many agencies and organisations have developed markers in order to measure how they are performing. I think this comes from the real push towards work on gender equality.

But the measurements are very different; some are measuring only inputs in terms of funding, some are measuring inputs plus activities and others are measuring outputs.

The methodology itself varies; basically what is often done is a scale. So, if the programme or project has no gender contribution it is given “0”, if it has some it is given “1”, if it mainstreams it is given “2” and if it is directed at gender results then “3”.

There are variations in the way scales are used and variations in the way what is measured. Therefore, one of the things we want to be able to do across the U.N. system is to make this approach a little bit more systematic .

You will always find different agencies requiring different things to be measured, because their mandates are different. But yet at the same time there should be some common principals that we apply across the boards.

Q: What will be required in order for the U.N. to see progress across the board in its use of gender markers? A: Some institutional changes will be required. One of the problems we face is that your financial systems have to be structured so that this measurement becomes possible.

So there are methodological issues that will have to be addressed, but fortunately because so many have been working in the area, I think by comparing experiences we can take the best principles and methodologies and apply them across the board.

Then you have, of course, this commitment to do things in a common and balanced way so that you can be comparable and you can actually aggregate the contribution at the U.N.

So there are methodological and institutional challenges and always there is the issue of commitment. But I think on the side of commitment we see at the highest level in the U.N., starting with the Secretary General and the heads of agencies, there is real commitment to making a change.

Q: What are the risks of assessing gender equality and (rural) women’s empowerment only through the lens of a gender marker? A: This is only one prism. It is a prism of us looking at ourselves in terms of how we are prioritising and what contribution we are making. But the real measure of success are the changes in women’s lives, their own aspirations being voiced, their taking part in decision-making and the outcomes that are related to that.

Conditions of life, work, health and so forth, these have to change. The real measures are the outcome measures.

But this is one piece of a larger picture. And I think that it is very important that all of us who work in rural areas and on gender issues are held accountable for what we are doing.

Excerpt:

By Rousbeh Legatis and - -
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 7 2012 (IPS)

Promising methods of tracking aid funding intended to improve women’s and girls’ livelihoods also offer the possibility of revealing whether donors and policymakers are walking the walk when it comes to gender financing.

Tracking aid funding can gauge its effectiveness for women. Above, an apprentice learns handicraft work that has empowered rural Indian women. Credit: Nitin Jugran Bahuguna/IPS

Tracing the myriad paths of financial support for gender equality and women’s empowerment is no easy task, but nevertheless a necessary one to test whether political commitment is translating into results.

“One very concrete way to measure” the effectiveness of support is to check “the actual resources that are being given”, Alpizar explained.

“Having this data available helps us to push donors to do better, because what they do is not close to what is needed, not close to the minimum,” she added.

So in the last five years, the OECD’s Development Assistant Committee has started tracking the extent to which donors’ funding is focused on gender equality, if at all. The Development Assistance Committee is comprised of 24 major donor countries, all of which are required to report sex- disaggregated data on a regular basis.

The limits of tracking finances

However, this tracking doesn’t measure the aid’s impact or quality, and gender-sensitive budgeting methods have other limitations as well.

Introducing a gender perspective in planning and budgeting processes will not lead automatically to more accountability amongst interest groups such as politicians, lobbyists, or private sector actors, experts said during a conference of donor organisations, U.N. delegates and civil society organisations during the 56th Commission on the Status of Women at the U.N.

Nor will the tracking resolve structural problems like gender stereotyping in labour markets, societal discrimination against women and girls, to name a few. Still, it can help highlight areas for improvement.

“Beyond budget tracking, there is, most importantly, the need to ensure that concrete results are delivered for women and girls and that their lives change for the better,” emphasised Saraswathi Menon, director of U.N. Women‘s Policy Division, at the conference.

Gender-responsive budgeting has led to even greater progress in advancing gender equality and women’s rights since the adoption of the 2008 agreed conclusions, Menon said. Some examples are Morocco and Rwanda.

“I think there has been progress,” she told IPS. “We feel there is a movement which is supported by U.N. Women and others, but it is coming from the countries themselves,” pushed by women’s organisations and “enlightened people in ministries of finance” and other areas of government.

The ongoing economic crisis, of course, poses a threat to this progress, especially because during times of financial hardship, gender financing is the first to go when policymakers look to trim budgets.

If you don’t ask, they will not tell

One of the most persistent problems is the lack of publicly available gender-disaggregated data and critical assessments of how strongly funding supports women’s empowerment. The only multilateral organisations that provide the OECD with data on the gender equality dimensions of its aid programmes are the United Nations and the World Bank.

Hailing the efforts of U.N. bodies to synchronise instruments for measuring for gender equality, O’Neill urged the world organisation itself to publish its information as well. “Once they do that then I think we will have a much better picture of what is really going on and what needs to change.”

Asked why such information is not made openly available, Alpizar cited two reasons. The first was “a limited culture of accountability amongst donors and multilaterals on how their resources are used”. The second was simply that “in other cases, we have not asked for the data”.

O’Neill also noted that sometimes politicians are too scared to question how and where money is spent. But she labelled that very problem as a starting point. “Start asking the questions and do not be frightened to ask questions about money. They should be asking donors, ‘Where exactly are you spending this money in our country?'”

Excerpt:

By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 29 2012 (IPS)

Gender considerations remain largely disregarded in existing climate funds, even though women are some of the hardest hit by the impacts of climate change on livelihoods and agriculture.

Courtesy of Liane Schalatek

The Green Climate Fund (GCF), which would receive a portion of the 100 billion dollars a year expected from rich nations by 2020, could prove to be “important way to put equity back into the multilateral response to climate change”, says Liane Schalatek, Associate Director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in North America.

However, most climate financing – whether channeled through funds, governmental spending programmes, ministry initiatives or bilateral and multilateral agencies to reduce emissions and to help societies to deal with the adverse effects of climate change – lacks gender responsiveness, she stressed.

Together with the Oversees Development Institute, the Heinrich Böll Foundation monitors the 25 most important climate funds (Climate Funds Update), tracking down who pledges what, how much donors have disbursed, and to where climate financing flows.

A participant in the fifty-sixth session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in New York, being held in New York from Feb. 27 through Mar. 9, Schalatek spoke with IPS U.N. Correspondent Rousbeh Legatis about taking stock of climate financing through a gender lens.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Looking at existing dedicated climate funds, you found gender considerations to be an “afterthought” instead of systematically addressed. Could you explain that further? 

A: Several of the existing climate funds, for example the Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF) or the Special Climate Change Fund (SCCF), both dealing with adaptation and administered by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), have been in existence for more than 10 years.

Others, such as the Climate Investment Funds at the World Bank or the Kyoto Protocol Adaptation Fund, have only operated since 2008/2009. At the time of their operationalisation, the discussion about gender and climate change was an exotic one that had not yet extended to climate funds and financing instruments and need to make them more gender-aware and gender-responsive. This is a fairly new topic in the global climate finance discourse itself.

However, these funds several years into their operations with their first projects and programmes implemented have realised that without gender considerations, their funding is less effective and less equitable. Their experience confirmed that of development finance, where a focus on gender equality has proved to be a core contributor to better development outcomes.

Better outcome of climate actions is particularly important in times of scarce public funding availability. By including some gender provisions retroactively, for example consultation guidelines that stipulate the outreach to women as a special stakeholder group or the inclusion of a gender analysis in project proposals, fund boards and administrators feel that they have a better chance of benefitting more people in developing countries.

However, putting some provisions retroactively into funding mechanisms is not the same as designing them in a way that is focusing on improving gender equality in recipient countries as an important and expected co-benefit of funding climate actions.

A climate fund designed this way would include gender equality as one of the goals of its actions; would strive for gender-balance on its governing bodies; make sure that there is gender-expertise among its staff to evaluate proposals for their contribution to gender equality; write operational and funding guidelines that stipulate the inclusion of gender indicators and gender analysis in any project proposal; and monitor for gender equality co-benefits as part of a results framework.

So far, no existing climate fund has managed such a comprehensive integration.

Q: Could you describe the consequences if climate funds are not gender-responsive? 

A: If the financing that climate funds provide for mitigation and adaption actions is not gender-responsive, projects and programmes done in the name of climate protection might actually hurt women or discriminate against women (in violation of women’s human rights).

They are also likely to be less effective in reaching long-lasting results. For example, in Sub-Saharan Africa, women are still the primary agricultural producers, accounting for up to 80 percent of the household food production.

As women own little of the land they work on, they are often kept out of formal consultation processes to determine adaptation needs of rural communities and are unable to secure credits or other agricultural extension services.

In times of food insecurity – aggravated by the extreme weather variability and long-term weather pattern changes brought on by climate change – women and girls are often likely to receive less food because of gender-based distribution dynamics within households.

To be effective, adaptation policies and funding for adaptation projects and programmes in agriculture in Africa need to consider the gender dynamics of food procurement and distribution both within households and markets.

For example, they should target rural women in Africa specifically with capacity-building, consultation outreach, technical assistance and tailored agricultural extension services. Without a gender- sensitive lens, climate financing instruments delivering adaptation funding for Africa can exacerbate the discrimination of women.

Q: You point to the Green Climate Fund (GCF) as particularly promising to change business as usual in global climate financing. Why? 

A: The GCF in its governing documents already has several references to a gender-sensitive approach integrated, for example, with respect to gender-balance as a goal on the GCF Board and among the staff of its secretariat.

Most importantly, it has stipulated in its objectives and principles that promoting gender responsiveness is to be considered an explicit “co-benefit” of any funding done by the GCF. Verbally, this is already more than any other existing climate fund has integrated.

Of course, the challenge is now to make sure that these words are operationalised into concrete measures or mechanisms, for example in the form of gender indicators and gender-inclusive stakeholder participation guidelines. The outlook is not too bad: The level of awareness of governments, both of contributing and recipient countries, on the relevance of gender considerations to address climate change, has increased.

It is today far greater than just a few years back when many of the other funds became first active. International organisations such as UNDP (U.N. Development Programme), UNEP (U.N. Environment Programme) or multilateral development banks as implementing agencies of many climate funds have become better in supporting governments in writing more gender-aware funding proposals and investment plans.

Lastly, civil society groups, which have played a key role in the GCF design process in pushing the integration of a gender perspective, are committed to work with the new GCF Board and Secretariat, but also to challenge the GCF publicly if necessary, should it fail to turn promises contained in the governing document into actions.

Of course, the GCF can only be operationalised as a gender-responsive climate fund if it receives the full political and financial support of developed countries quickly. Some large funding pledges now would secure its viability.

It would also send a signal to developing countries that developed countries are willing to fulfill their part of the Durban package without quid-pro-quo, but in the spirit of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities”.

A gender-responsive, fully funded GCF would thus be one important way to put equity back into the multilateral response to climate change.

(END)

Excerpt:

State and local Commissions on the Status of Women (CSW) are facing shrinking budgets and even total elimination at a time when women are some of the hardest hit by the financial crisis, says Susan Rose, vice chair of Human Rights Watch’s Santa Barbara Committee.

Susan Rose Credit: Courtesy of Susan Rose

First advocated by the John F. Kennedy administration in 1963, there are now more than 200 commissions throughout the United States, according to the National Association of Commissions for Women (NACW). Most of them are run by volunteers with little paid staff.

In California, Governor Jerry Brown is trying to defund the California Commission on the Status of Women, eliminating its 265,000 dollars in funding in the proposed 2012-2013 budget – meaning that the 47 year-old commission will likely close its doors in April.

A former executive director of the Los Angeles City Commission on the Status of Women, Rose discussed with U.N. Correspondent Rousbeh Legatis the importance of the commissions in promoting issues of political and economic equality, reproductive health, and to combat domestic violence.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Could you clarify what kind of entities we are talking about? A: Commissions on the Status of Women are the voices for women within government. They are advocates for the needs of women, as well as sponsors of legislation. They monitor the activities of government to ensure that the issues affecting women – and their families – are considered and acted upon. Certainly, this model is and can be used internationally with the same purpose and effect. The singular mission of these commissions is advocacy for women.

Q: What are the most pressing concerns for women in the U.S.? A: From my perspective, there are four pressing concerns for women in the U.S.

The economy and jobs are the most significant issue affecting all Americans and especially women. This is followed by the need for social services.

Per my article for the San Francisco Chronicle, the California Budget Project reports that “the recession has had a greater impact on women than men. The governor’s budget will cut deeply into services women rely on, including education, childcare, welfare and health care.”

In addition to jobs and social support systems, health care – including reproductive choice – and violence against women are the other most important issues facing American women.

Q: Could you give some examples of how these commissions make a difference in women’s lives at the state and community level? A: For example, on the state level this past year, the governor signed legislation supported by the California Commission that affected “health insurance coverage for maternity leave, protection for victims of domestic violence and child custody proceedings”.

On a local level, when I was director of the LA City Commission, we held public hearings to assess the needs of women, sponsored educational conferences, issued publications on available services, as well as carried out legislative advocacy. We focused on issues affecting working women and their families and during those years crafted policies on childcare – one of the first in the U.S. – and sexual harassment.

Q: Do CSWs get enough political support for their work across the nation? A: Commissions do not have enough political support, perhaps due to the lack of awareness of their activities. In the 1980s and 90s, state and local commissions were much more robust with funding for staff and programmes.

In today’s political world, with governments across the U.S. struggling to provide basic services, there is little political support for such agencies. It is unfortunate that they are not a priority of political representatives for they have a significant impact with very little cost.

Q: How are budget cuts around the country affecting these entities at a time when women are some of the hardest hit by the financial crisis? A: I can speak to the impact on women and their families in California. California Governor Jerry Brown has proposed eliminating the California’s Commission on the Status of Women (CCSW). A statewide effort has begun to save it. At this time, it is unclear whether the governor will change his mind.

Now more than ever, women need the California Commission.

The California Budget Project released a report this week called “Falling Behind: The Impact of the Great Recession and the Budget Crisis on Women and their Families”, which specifically describes how low-income women and their families have been hit the hardest by the cuts in California. The poor job market has affected single mothers more than others. Social services such as childcare, Medi-Cal and welfare programmes have been slashed, affecting those who need it most.

Q: Could you name the biggest step forward, as well as the major shortcoming in commissions’ work, that you have observed in recent years in the U.S.? A: Unfortunately, I have not seen much advancement in the work of commissions, primarily because they have not been supported by government jurisdictions. U.S. Congresswoman Jackie Speier attempted to pass a national commission for women in Washington but could not get enough support.

This would have continued in concept the one originally established by President John Kennedy. I believe such a federal commission could have reenergised state and local commissions and created a new national movement for commissions.

Q: What is needed to further strengthen women’s political voice in the US – both at state as well as community level? A: The most important step forward would occur if political representatives would make women’s issues and commissions for women a priority on their own political agendas. A commitment from legislators could result in new funding and support for these efforts and certainly a better community-based (and media) understanding of their ability to affect the lives of women and their families.

It is time Commissions on the Status of Women were recognised for what they have achieved in the past and valued for what they can accomplish in the future.

Excerpt:

By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 25 2011 (IPS)

Involving women in decision-making and resource management is a basic necessity for any effective plan to address the multi- layered and life-threatening consequences of climate change, says the head of UN Women.

Michelle Bachelet. Credit: Sriyantha Walpola/IPS

Looking to Durban, South Africa, where world leaders will discuss future climate change policies Nov. 28 to Dec. 9, Michelle Bachelet is calling on leaders to ensure “that words become reality”, for full participation of women at all levels of the negotiations, and an “outcome that responds to women’s needs and advances women’s empowerment”.

Women and girls – who make up the majority of the world’s poor – have much more limited access to information and financial resources than men, a fact which exposes them to a higher risk of severe climate change impacts, underscored Bachelet.

In devising and implementing financial instruments like the Green Climate Fund, she urges government delegates, international experts and civil society actors gathering in Durban to retain a gender- sensitive approach to improve accountability.

“Climate financing should be equitable and respond to the urgent needs of all members of society, and gender issues must be taken into account at all stages of the financing process,” she told IPS.

The risk of injury and death from natural disasters – such as floods, droughts and landslides – is systematically higher among women and children, she explained. “In inequitable societies, more women than men die from disasters.”

Especially rural women and girls in developing countries are “carrying a particularly heavy burden of climate change” due to environmental stress and their responsibility to secure water, food and energy for cooking and heating.

They spend many hours a day collecting and transporting water, for example, and this is becoming much more difficult in areas impacted by drought, Bachelet pointed out. “For many girls, this means missing out on school and losing an education.”

Between 1980 and 2010, the average number of extreme weather events more than doubled, underscoring the “urgent need to invest in women and girls and advance gender equality”.

Bachelet talked with IPS U.N. Correspondent Rousbeh Legatis about women’s needs in the context of climate change and how to reshape global climate policy-making.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: What are women’s needs and do they have a particular role when it comes to climate change and adaptation strategies? A: Women need equal opportunities and equal rights. This includes the right to participate in decisions related to climate change. Women need to be actively engaged in the processes that affect their lives – from urban planning that aims to build resilience of communities to climate shocks, to the delivery of services such as clean water and irrigation plans in a rural community, to the development of clean- energy technology that aims to reduce green-house gas (GHG) emissions.

Far too often, women are left out of consultations. They are not at the decision making table and their absence makes programmes and strategies less responsive and effective. There is empirical evidence to show that women’s involvement in decision making and the management of resources can have positive environmental outcomes.

Evidence from India and Nepal suggests that women’s involvement in decision-making is associated with better management of community resources such as forests. A study of 130 countries found that countries with higher female parliamentary representation were more prone to ratify international environmental treaties.

In addition to engaging women in decision-making, climate strategies need to integrate gender considerations that are specific to each situation. In rural Africa, for instance, consideration must be given to the needs of women farmers, who are responsible for 60-80 percent of food production as well as the nutrition of their families. Too often, women farmers lack access and rights to property, land and credit and this reduces crop yields and threatens food security.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation points out that eliminating the gap between men and women in access to agricultural resources and inputs would raise yields on women’s farms by 20-30 percent and increase agricultural production in developing countries by 2.5-4.0 percent, which could in turn reduce the number of undernourished people in the world by 12-17 percent or 100-150 million people.

Q: Do you see enough awareness of the specific situation of women, and the involvement of women’s perspectives and experiences when policy-makers enter into discussions about how to confront climate change and how to adapt to changed environmental circumstances? A: Awareness has definitely increased on this issue, especially among leaders and policy-makers. We are seeing changes in attitudes and policies. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged women’s equal participation in addressing the challenges of climate change in 2009, some governments are talking about the gender dimensions of climate change and gender is included in the 2010 Cancun Agreement.

The next step is ensuring that words become reality on the ground and women participate in decision-making processes. If we consider climate financing, for example, gender considerations have a history of not being systematically integrated in their design.

In response, UN Women is working with partners to ensure that the new Green Climate Fund does not repeat this mistake and integrates gender from the start by including the principle of gender equality in its operations and monitoring of impacts and results.

In addition to the international policy level, women must be fully engaged at the national level, on the ‘home-front’, where national strategies are designed and implemented, budgets are formed, and services delivered to mitigate or adapt to climate change.

Unfortunately, women remain underrepresented in national parliaments and especially in Ministries that are central to decision-making on climate change and sustainability. Globally women occupy only 16 percent of ministerial posts and of these only 19 percent are in finance and trade; seven percent in the environment, natural resources and energy; and a mere three percent in science and technology.

The lack of women’s presence in national decision-making hinders women’s ability to influence policies and budgets. This limits the inclusion of gender considerations in environmental management, sustainable development and the climate change agenda.

Q: What is needed to enhance women’s participation in climate policy- making and protection from adverse climate change impacts? A: It is important to support women’s organisations to participate in consultative processes for the development of climate change strategies, especially at the local and national levels. This requires outreach to affected groups and targeted efforts to ensure inclusivity. Within formal processes, special measures such as quotas, even if temporary, can provide the impetus needed to increase women’s participation and leadership.

We also need better sex-disaggregated data to inform gender responsive climate policies. All too often that information and data cannot be found and this is blocking progress in disaster risk management, urban planning and agricultural reform.

Excerpt:

By Rousbeh Legatis and - -
NEW YORK, Nov 17 2011 (IPS)

Long before the Pacific will rise to a level that will leave its estimated 30,000 islands submerged, most of them might be severely affected by frequent flooding and storms.

Thousands of people living on islands scattered across the world’s largest ocean are already fleeing their homes and lands because of altered climate conditions.

Still, “an extraordinarily cold or warm winter in a region or even globally is not proof of climate change,” said Mary-Elena Carr, biological oceanographer at the Earth Institute in New York. Real climate change can only be concluded from shifting weather conditions observed over 20 to 30 years.

Carr¸ associate director of the Columbia Climate Centre, spoke with IPS U.N. correspondent Rousbeh Legatis about the human impact on rising sea levels, how islanders will be affected and what can be done to mitigate adverse consequences for people in the Pacific.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Is it still arguable that the increased natural disasters we are seeing are due to climate change? A: At this point, we cannot attribute any weather event to climate change, anthropogenic or natural. The climate system is extremely complex and there are many factors that determine what we experience from day to day.

While we can assert that climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions will lead to changes in the patterns of rainfall or temperature, we cannot assign a single cause to any specific event like a flood or a hurricane.

Q: From a scientific perspective, who or what is responsible for the rising sea levels and how do human actions contribute to them? A: Globally rising sea level is a consequence of a warmer planet, which is due to increased amounts of atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs). Historically, developed nations are responsible for the current levels of GHGs in the atmosphere. However, rapidly developing nations are increasingly contributing to GHG emissions.

At a local level, land use choices can directly impact the relative height of ocean and land: groundwater extraction, destruction of coral reefs, construction choices, can all lead to local sea level rise.

Q: How do sea levels change and why does this harm human life? A: Sea level changes when there is a change in either the mass or the volume of water in the ocean. If we imagine the ocean basin like a very large bathtub, you can change the total mass by adding or removing water; in the ocean, that would be through evaporation or precipitation, or when water flows from land to sea, either as rivers or ice.

The mass of seawater in the bathtub can change its location due to currents or winds. The same mass of seawater changes in volume, expanding when it warms or freshens.

Sea level also changes with vertical land motion (if the sides or bottom of the bathtub were to sink or rise). Such motion can occur over very long time scales. Land also undergoes vertical motion over short time scales, due to groundwater extraction or tectonic activity.

While all of these processes have occurred throughout the history of the earth, humans impact sea level rise directly, by manipulating the flow of ground and surface water, and indirectly, through GHG emissions which raise the average global temperature.

This warming affects both the mass and volume of seawater primarily due to increased melting of land ice and higher ocean temperatures, both of which translate into a global rise in sea level.

Global average sea level measured by tide gauges and altimeters was relatively constant between 1900 and 1930. Since that time, sea level has not only risen, but the rate of sea level rise has also increased: tide gauges estimate sea level rising about 1.8 millimetres per year between 1930 and 2000, while the altimeters measured approximately 3.1 millimetres per year between 1993 and 2009.

Q: Do you see a certain time when islands could be below the sea level? A: The answer to that depends on the elevation of the island and on the tidal range in addition to storm activity and sea level rise. Both storm activity and sea level rise are affected by climate change. Even the orientation of the island relative to prevailing winds affects the likelihood of flooding.

While it may be more than 150 years before sea level is three or four metres higher than in the late 20th century, islands with average elevations of four metres will undergo flooding because tides and storms raise sea level on top of the global average rise.

Predictions vary depending on both the island characteristics and projections for sea level rise, but it is likely that in the early 21st century there will be frequent flooding in most small island states.

Q: What must be done to mitigate the impact of climate change for island inhabitants around the world? A: To mitigate climate change we should reduce emissions. To adapt to the impacts of sea level rise, we need careful land use choices and adaptable infrastructure. Coastal vegetation such as mangroves can help reduce the impacts of flooding. Conservation of coral reefs also plays a huge role in protecting atolls.

Q: Is climate change an unstoppable phenomenon of contemporary times? A: We are committed to warming, and sea level rise, even if all emissions stop today, because carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. If we continue emitting GHGs without any reduction, the climate change impacts will be greater and last much longer.

*This is the third in a three-part series on the impacts of climate change in the Pacific region.

Excerpt:

By Rousbeh Legatis and - -
NEW YORK, Nov 16 2011 (IPS)

Asian countries, home to about 60 percent of the world’s population, will be hit hardest by changing weather patterns and a degrading environment, research indicates.

A whopping 90 percent of all disaster displacement within countries in 2010 was caused by climate- related disasters, the international body Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) reported. That year, 38.3 million women, men and children were forced to move, mainly by floods and storms.

Out of 16 countries with the highest risk of being severely affected by environmental changes in the next 30 years, ten are in Asia, according to the 2010 Climate Change Vulnerability Index, released by global risks advisory firm Maplecroft.

In Southeast Asia alone, extreme weather events like rising sea levels and storm surges “could cause economic losses of 230 billion dollars, or equivalent of 6.7 percent of GDP, each year, endangering the livelihoods of millions of people”, as Bart Édes, director of the Poverty Reduction, Gender and Social Development Division of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), told IPS.

Climate change adaptation costs for Asia and the Pacific are estimated in the order of 40 billion dollars annually, the expert said.

Sea level rise particularly affects the poorest of the poor living in coastal areas 10 metres above sea level and in small island states.

Already facing the consequences of a changing environment, some Pacific Islands, including Kiribati, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu and Vanuatu, are also considered among the least developed countries, meaning they possess limited resources to implement measures to effectively support those in need.

“About 100 million people would be affected by sea level rise of one metre. There are more than 30 small island developing states that would be impacted by sea level rise as well as the populations of large delta systems in Egypt, Bangladesh, Niger and Vietnam,” said Mary-Elena Carr, associate director of the Columbia Climate Centre in New York.

In the early 21st century, frequent flooding in most small island states is likely to be a reality, added Carr.

Off the radar

A clear understanding of the situation of people’s livelihoods in the Pacific region remains elusive so far due to a lack of data. Although the Islands are spread over a vast geographical area, their population and combined area make them an otherwise comparatively small region that tends to be overlooked in international discussions on climate change.

The infrastructure and housing of the poor cannot withstand cyclones, floods, landslides or king tides, all of which have been exacerbated by accelerated sea level rise.

In the region, climate change-related migration follows inward paths, meaning people flee from outer to main islands, as they typically lack the means to move abroad.

Protection issues can arise from this situation. Internally displaced persons (IDPs) are not protected by any internationally binding legal framework. They frequently face discrimination as well as increased vulnerability to exploitation and violence.

IDPs are often deprived of rights to social services, livelihoods, housing and property.

“Specific strategies need to be developed to ensure that disaster-displaced find durable solutions, including in situations where return is not an option,” explained Kate Halff, head of IDMC, in an interview with IPS.

Such methods include displacement monitoring systems to track population movements and ensure timely and adequate responses as well as joint approaches by disaster risk reduction, development and humanitarian actors.

The struggle to take action

To highlight the key characteristics and challenges of displacement, “Protecting the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons in Natural Disasters – Challenges in the Pacific”, a study recently published by the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), compared cases and responses in Samoa, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.

Indicating major flaws in governmental responses to the needs of IDPs, the study determined that planning and prevention measures to assist the displaced were inadequate.

Political decision-makers have not taken into account complaints from the displaced or even acknowledged them as “internally displaced”. They refer to them instead as “affected” or “homeless”, the UN report showed.

“A lot of change is happening within a country because of climate change. Lots of decisions need to be made about where, how and who to resettle,”  Matilda Bogner, regional OHCHR representative for the Pacific, told IPS.

Additionally, hierarchical traditional systems in some countries exclude certain groups from decision- making. “Women are fairly systematically excluded from decision-making within most countries of the Pacific,” Bogner said.

Resettlement efforts are further complicated by land issues on the Islands, where the majority of territory is commonly owned by different communities and individuals and not available for public use.

Since regional governments depend heavily on international development assistance, “donor governments in the region also have a particular responsibility to promote and protect human rights within the Pacific,” the OHCHR study emphasised.

Understanding environmental migration in Asia and the Pacific is of paramount importance in adopting policies and programmes capable of coping with future migration flows in the region, stated an ADB paper in September.

As the number of people displaced from their homes by both sudden and slow-onset climatic events will increases, multiple aspects of migration policies – including financial – will have to fall into place to create solutions beneficial to both guest and host communities.

*This is the second in a three-part series on the impacts of climate change in the Pacific region.

Excerpt:

As world leaders gear up to spend the coming weeks in South Africa haggling over economically bearable cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, climate change is already exacerbating environmental conditions and threatening the lives and livelihoods of thousands of Pacific Islanders.

Diversity characterises the Pacific region, with its approximately 30,000 islands – of which 1,000 are considered to be populated – scattered across the world’s largest ocean, which covers nearly a third of the earth’s surface.

“But the millimetres are turning into centimetres and there are inarguable risks of long-term sea level rise of a meter or much more.”

Long before small island states might find themselves submerged, another possible outcome of rising sea levels is that islands “are left barren, (or) uninhabitable”, reckoned Peniamina Leavai of the Pacific Adaptation to Climate Change Project (PACC).

The situation and living conditions of inhabitants of the Pacific Islands vary greatly across the region, as they are shaped by the financial resources’ availability, geography, technology and the affluence of the population.

“The rate at which these affected areas become uninhabitable will also fall in a wide range, from already happening now, to happening in a couple of months, years, and in 20 years’ time and more,” Leavai explained to IPS.

Yet environmental changes, accelerated by climate change, already severely affect the livelihoods of people in the Pacific.

“High tides are frequent and continue to wash away our shorelines,” said Council of Elders member Ursula Rakova, about the 2,700 families living on the Carteret islands, 86 kilometres away form Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) main island Bougainville.

“Our biggest concern is that one fine day, a king tide will simply sweep over the islands and most or all people will be washed away without any trace,” she told IPS. Recently, one of the islands was divided in half by rising waters.

The islands, lying 1.2 metres above sea level, have lost a significant area of arable land in a traditional culture where people’s livelihoods are based on fishing and harvesting seasonal crops, even as the population grows.

“The land is becoming less and less and the people find it harder to make gardens to sustain themselves,” Rakova said.

To address and adapt to the changed environmental conditions, the Council of the Elders developed and implemented what is called an autonomous adaption strategy by relocating and resettling their islanders in safer grounds.

Rakova founded the organisation Tulele Peisa, which means “sailing the waves on our own”, for this purpose. The organisation coordinates the relocation of the islanders to host communities.

Two families to date have resettled to PNG’s Marau islands and the move of another eight families is planned. While the international community is responding positively to their cause, Rakova emphasised that the government’s reaction remains “very slow and does not set its priorities right”.

“The PNG Government responded to our call in October 2007 with PGK 2 million [about 700,000 U.S. dollars at the time] to the Carteret’s Relocation Program, and the Bougainville administration has not since that time given a penny of that money to our organisation to support us in building homes for the Carteret’s families,” Rakova added.

They warn that the situation will only worsen if global climate policymaking follows a business-as-usual approach.

In Tuvalu, where groundwater is unsafe due to high salinity and pollution, the drinking water scarcity could be further aggravated. There, rainfall is primary natural source for reservoirs, while accelerated sea level rise could cause the intrusion of seawater.

This situation could easily result in social tensions between the affected population living on the main island, Funafuti, and islanders seeking drinking water who have migrated to Tuvalu’s capital.

More extreme and unusually frequent weather events like cyclones or tidal surges, driven by accelerated sea level rise, cause coastal erosion and force people to move inland to find new sources of livelihood.

Samoa’s coastlines, for example, have eroded from a few to 80 meters, and people have relocated inland where territory is already partitioned. Disputes over customary lands will likely intensify.

“Picture the waves going past your home five meters inland from the shore, every morning and evening… This isn’t your mansion. These are simple thatched roof shelters, with the risk of snakes, wallabies and fire ants,” explained Leavai.

Traditional knowledge about winds, seasons, rain patterns, the time at which mangroves can be crossed and what kind of clouds to look out for have become unreliable for the population, due to developments induced by climate change.

Recently, in what was supposed to be monsoon season with typical knee-high flooding, some islands instead found themselves in a drought season.

“People were experiencing dust, pigs killing banana trees for the water in trunks, and being robbed of their already withering food gardens by their neighbours, while wallabies and pythons decided to go beyond the borders of the jungle and into human settlements searching for food and water,” described Leavai.

In the face of these changes, local and regional response strategies have been formulated over time, and policy and decision-makers have been provided with information from lessons learned on the ground.

But despite these very visible consequences of climate change in the Pacific, international development partners and donor countries have proven to be slow in increasing their efforts for finding a global solution for this global problem.

*This is the first in a three-part series on the impacts of climate change in the Pacific region.

By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 28 2011 (IPS)

In order for global climate change policies and efforts to progress, intense local activism and countries most adversely affected by climate change must play a leading role.

Patrick Bond believes the victims of climate change deserve to dictate the rules on how to address the issue. Credit: Courtsey of Patrick Bond

If they don’t, an upcoming meeting of state parties to the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) in South Africa will be a conference of “paralysis” and “profiteers”, says Patrick Bond, climate justice expert and author of the book “Politics of Climate Justice” coming out in November.

“The elites have defaulted on their chance to solve the climate crisis,” Bond believes.

On Dec. 17, during the Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the UNFCCC, 194 countries will assess global progress in dealing with climate change. In particular, they will negotiate and agree upon binding targets for reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, which will steer international efforts in climate politics for the next four years.

Previous conferences have depicted and conceptualised climate change as a problem that has primarily an economic impact, due to the ideology that “you must always fix a market problem with a market solution”, Bond said.

As a result, discussion about using carbon markets, where emissions are traded back and forth, as the primary tool to manage climate change is dominant.

Bond spoke to U.N. correspondent Rousbeh Legatis about countries of the South – pivotal actors in future climate policies – and their prospects and needs.

Q: When it comes to climate change, you have seen conferences where empty promises are a dime a dozen. What is needed in Durban in December to achieve an outcome that breaks with the business- as-usual approach?

A: What is needed, based on past performance, is for the delegations from Washington, Ottawa, London, Brussels, Tokyo, Moscow, Delhi, Beijing, Brasilia and Pretoria to stay home, and let the main victims of climate change establish the rules by which the big polluters stop what they’re doing and pay reparations to everyone else – and also establish an International Climate Court to impose sanctions and penalties on those who fail to abide by a planet-saving solution.

Although many activists in these cities will appeal to their leaders to stay home in the interests of a breakthrough outcome to COP17, they will be ignored, as usual.

We need activists from Africa and across the world to unite for climate justice solutions, to keep fossil fuels in the soil through direct action such as we saw earlier this month at the White House (1,252 arrested for protesting Obama’s tar sands oil pipeline), and to generate just transition strategies away from the climate-threatening energy, transport, extraction, production, distribution, consumption and disposal systems (now in place).

Q: Global elites, as you say in your book, have failed to arrange a “genuine solution to the climate crisis”. How would such a solution look and why they have failed?

A: The most destructive global elites are those in the fossil fuel sector and their allies at the World Bank and in the U.S. White House, State Department and Energy Department, as well as in Canada’s Tory government and tar sands extraction industry. They are intent on expanding greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as far as possible.

They have taught this to the governments of middle-income countries, so it seems as if everyone – perhaps except for Bolivia – goes to the COPs with one aim in mind: raise the ceiling on GHG emissions so as to allow each national bloc of state elites backed by their national capitalist classes to pollute as much as possible, no matter the consequences…

The solution should follow the precedent of the Montreal Protocol in 1987 when it came to saving the ozone hole from chlorofluorocarbons: ban CFCs outright after an appropriate phase-out period (in that case, nine years).

But market ideologues and fossil fuel industries won’t allow that, so the delegates are hamstrung and we are fools if we think they have the wherewithal to address climate change through the UNFCCC, given the current adverse balance of forces.

Q: Do you see burdens and responsibilities being properly shared among affected countries, the international community and states mainly responsible for climate change?

A: Climate debt is the concept we need to understand, as a component of ecological debt owed by the North to the South.

What we all know is that the responsibility for climate change lies with the global North, which of course includes companies that operate irresponsibly in the South – such as BHP Billiton and Anglo American here in South Africa, which get the world’s cheapest electricity and then export their profits to Melbourne and London, respectively.

The burden sharing here, climate activists agree, should be a shutdown of the old apartheid-era special pricing agreements that give these companies their climate-destroying hyper-profits, so that instead the vast majority of people can have access to more free basic electricity than the present tokenistic 50 kilowatt-hours per household per month.

This is not just a ‘third world nationalist’ demand. The climate debt – probably upwards of 400 billion dollars per year by most estimates – should not be paid via tyrants, such as Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi or Swaziland’s King Mswati.

Instead, direct payment mechanisms similar to the Namibian-style ‘basic income grant’ should ensure that those who have been harmed by climate change – most of Pakistan last year, for instance – will be reimbursed through local funds transfers directly, bypassing corrupt states and aid industry middlemen.

Q: What about emerging economies and now simultaneously major GHG emitters on the global level? What role do they play?

A: The best thing would be for a government like South Africa’s to let those weak countries who will be most adversely affected – in the Andes and Himalayas when glaciers and snow packs melt, the sinking small islands, much of drought-ravaged landlocked Africa, places suffering terribly from rising sea levels like Bangladesh – lead the process.

The Bolivians have the best track record, and they also developed a Cochabamba people’s agreement in April 2010 that should, in a just world, replace the Kyoto Protocol. Instead, the BASIC countries decided to gaze upwards and unite with the U.S. in Copenhagen, for self-interested reasons. This disqualifies them from being part of the solution.

So the appropriate role for negotiators in the emerging economies is to apologise for the Copenhagen Accord and for subsidising multinational corporations with electricity, ultra-cheap labour and externalised pollution – and turn over climate policy to the climate justice movement who have the ideas required to properly address the crisis.

Excerpt:

By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 27 2011 (IPS)

With the Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period set to expire in 2012, Connie Hedegaard, EU commissioner for climate action, is pushing for more countries to agree on binding commitments to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Connie Hedegaard Credit: Courtesy of Connie Hedegaard

Heads of state will meet this December in Durban, South Africa, to renegotiate their commitment to creating a global response to the international challenge of climate change.

The most cost-efficient way forward in climate change policy making, according to Hedegaard, would be the marked-based system of trading emissions. “As politicians, we can set the targets, but it’s the businesses and the industries that have to come up (with) and implement very specific solutions” in order to halt adverse impacts of climate change, she said.

Hedegaard spoke to U.N. correspondent Rousbeh Legatis about European experiences in dealing politically with countries with high GHG emissions, their interests and emission reduction strategies.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: In your opinion, where do we stand in terms of global climate policy-making?

I don’t think the (political) will is shrinking, but the problem is, it’s not growing – that is the challenge. Many governments are actually doing things domestically at home, so it’s not that they are not realising it is serious. I agree, however, that there is a contradiction between the urgency of the matter as we see climate change unfold in front of our eyes and the lack of good enough progress in the international process… That is why Europe is still pushing for an ambitious outcome of the international process. But in order to achieve that, we need not only emerging economies to commit, we need also the United States to commit and also to commit in a binding form…

Europe is expanding in renewables, even in these years when we also have economical challenges. We are making the transformation. So we are living proof that it makes a difference if you are actually committing in a more binding form and if you are setting targets, and that is why we think it’s so imperative that other big emitters are following that example.

Q: Why should other countries follow EU’s lead in climate policies?

A: We think that we can use ambitious climate policies as a driver for our economy. As we see it in Europe, this is also a question of who will be best positioned for taking what will be growing markets in the future – namely, the market for energy efficient solutions. So, we don’t only talk about climate as an isolated thing.

In the European debate climate, energy and resource efficiency, job creation as well as finding more innovative solutions (are) very much linked. And I think that these days you would have a hard time to find CEOs in Europe who would not realise that it pays off to become more energy efficient. We have shown in Europe it is possible, we have grown our economies over a period of time with more that 40 percent, we have grown the manufacture output with 36 percent and in the same period we decreased emissions. So for us it is not theory, we have shown over very many years in Europe we can have economic growth and yet diminish energy consumption and emissions. It is possible, it is doable.

Q: Looking at emerging countries’ carbon dioxide emission rates, which have increased dramatically, what kind of role do you think these countries should take on?

If you take Brazil, China, India or South Africa they have domestic targets and domestic policies starting to evolve. They are already doing things back home. But what we need in a global world with a global challenge like climate change (is) to agree on a global response. In the world of the 21st century it is not enough that the only one(s) who (are) signing up to the global response is Europe, 27 countries, plus Switzerland, Norway and maybe New Zealand. Together we might account for 13 to 14 percent of global emissions. What is about the last remaining more than 85 percent? We need them to commit also in a binding way. That doesn’t mean that we in Europe would ask the same from India as we ourselves should do. Of course, we in the rich part of the world will have to do more and we would have to do it before others. But the point is, in a globalised world, whatever we pledge, we must be legally and equally bound by it.

Q: Is there a risk that only emissions trading will be kept, while targets and binding elements of the Kyoto Protocol will be cut out?

The way we see it in Europe is that there is a link between having emissions trading and having a cap on emissions, because (otherwise) emissions trading is just another tax. The good thing is that you put a cap to how many emissions you can allow to be emitted and then there is a price for emitting that. But you sort of put the cap there in order to ensure that there is an environmental outcome as well. Up to recently Europe was alone in having such a carbon trade system, now Korea is doing the same, I understand that California is moving forward with some kind of carbon trade, Australia has right now a majority for getting this kind of legislation through the parliament having carbon trade from 2015, in New Zealand they have an emissions trading scheme.

So we are not in a perfect world yet, but… Europe (was) alone five years ago in making a carbon trade system. Now we can see countries start to follow, why? I think because when countries start to set domestic targets they realise that they have to find a system to reach them in the most cost-efficient way and that is by activating market forces.

Excerpt:

By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 16 2011 (IPS)

As the effects of accelerating climate change ripple outward, pushing millions from their land and homes, experts warn that international human rights and refugee law needs to catch up to the reality on the ground if migrants are to be given adequate protection and support.

Jane McAdam Credit: Courtesy of Jane McAdam

The 1998 Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement could serve as an interim model “until a more comprehensive solution is found”, says Jane McAdam, director of the International Refugee and Migration Law project at the Gilbert and Tobin Centre of Public Law, University of New South Wales, Australia.

“At the moment, if somebody crosses the border and says ‘I need protection, I fled the impacts of climate change’, there is no mechanism to provide that,” she explained.

Seeing the big picture of how climate change impacts on people’s livelihoods and their decision to migrate as an adaptation strategy is indispensable, McAdam stressed.

“Climate change overlays preexisting stressors that people face and it is about taking a multi-pronged approach to solutions at every level, from the sub-national through to the national, to the regional and international,” she said.

McAdam spoke to IPS U.N. correspondent Rousbeh Legatis about the pros and cons of the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement for devising a further legal framework to protect climate-driven migrants worldwide.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Why is climate change such a difficult factor when we are talking about protection laws? A: It is very difficult to single out “climate change” as “the” cause of movement. Climate change interacts with underlying stressors, such as poverty, environmental vulnerability, poor development practices, and so on.

For example, if you go to the slums of Bangladesh, to which many people from rural Bangladesh have moved, people will cite different reasons for why they have moved, even if the underlying conditions are very similar. You might have two people in front of you, and one says ‘I have come here because of the impacts of climate change on my environment’ and the other says ‘I have come here because I have no work opportunities at home anymore’, even though both might have fled areas exposed to frequent flooding, crop loss, and so on.

If you have a protection instrument that requires climate change to be singled out as the cause of movement, the person who can identify the climate impact would get protection and the other would not. Is this appropriate when their needs may be identical? Or because they articulate the reasons for their movement in different ways?

I think focusing solely on climate change can actually skew the way we understand migration, especially because the governance structures we put in place can in part determine the way people then characterise why they moving. I think that we need to be quite level-headed when we devise what will the process be.

Q: Seen from a legal perspective, what can be done? A: One question is whether we want to talk about opening up the International Refugee Convention to renegotiation or alternatively constructing an additional protocol to it. I have concerns with this, because of the empirical nature of movement.

Legal definitions are constructed for a particular purpose, which is to filter who gets protection. So they are not going to adequately describe the complexity of movement. If they require climate change to be singled out as a cause of movement, they will require people to focus on the climate change aspect rather than on all the other underlying things as well.

The other thing with a refugee-like instrument is that it is remedial in nature. So, it does not assist people to plan movement in advance – as an adaptation strategy – but relies on them getting out and saying “now I need help”. A treaty is only useful in this context if you cross an international border.

Yet, the evidence shows overwhelmingly that most [climate-induced] displacement or migration will be internal, meaning most people who are going to be affected and who are going to have existing migration options are not going to have the resources to get themselves overseas and cross borders. That is why we perhaps need to be looking more closely at the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and perhaps supplementing them with guidelines that focus on other particular needs that might arise in a climate context.

Q: The Guiding Principles could be an interesting approach to find effective answers in terms of climate-induced migration, because they explicitly involve displacement by natural disasters and so on. Yet, so far just 30 countries have adopted them and they are not binding. What kind of problems are coming out of this situation? A: There is no political appetite to draft a new international treaty, so I think the Guiding Principles may provide a useful first step. It might be more appealing to states to have an interim – non-binding – instrument before they get to formal, binding instrument: a precursor until a more comprehensive solution is found.

Furthermore, the fact that just few governments have adopted the Guiding Principles suggests that a treaty option would be even less likely to succeed at the international level.

The Guiding Principles were an initiative that occurred outside the normal state-to-state negotiating processes. They were drafted by experts and then presented to states and other actors as useful guidelines. They are not binding, but based on binding international law. So they draw together relevant bits of humanitarian, human rights and refugee law, and bundle them up and say that is what is relevant particularly to internal displacement.

The question is what else do we have? Even though a small number of countries have implemented the Guiding Principles, a much larger number are signatories to the international treaties on which they are based. So maybe it is a matter focusing on those international obligations and reminding states that they have agreed to respect them. The Guiding Principles simply distil them for this particular context.

Q: A prerequisite for effective legal protection measures is a notion of who is a climate-displaced migrant. Why is this so complicated? A: There are so many different contexts that can be encapsulated in that single term that we need to look at the particularities of any given situation to ensure that solutions are crafted that speak to the needs of that community. I think there are important lessons to be learned. Focusing on just one thing like the Guiding Principles is dangerous.

We need to look at a whole range of solutions so that we deal with the different stages and nature of climate change-related displacement.

Excerpt:

With political will to dramatically cut the world’s greenhouse gas emissions failing to materialise, a multi-pronged approach is needed to protect the millions of people who are being displaced as a result of environmental factors driven largely by climate change, experts say.

“Climate change is looming as a potentially very serious and underappreciated complicating factor when it comes to international displacement,” said Erika Feller, the assistant high commissioner for protection in the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

More is needed from the international community to address this challenge “in a coordinated and pragmatic manner”, she told IPS.

Of paramount importance is that national authorities play a central role in developing appropriate responses to both the internal and external dimensions of climate-related displacement, while affected persons and communities must be made fully aware of their rights and given opportunities to participate in decision-making, Feller said.

“Decisions about where, when and how to relocate communities, for example, must be made in consultation with the affected populations and be sensitive to cultural and ethnic identities and boundaries to avoid possible tensions and conflicts,” she added.

The overwhelming majority of people who are displaced by environmental factors become internally displaced persons (IDPs) within their own countries. Just a fraction will likely cross international borders, said Michele Klein-Solomon, director of the Migration Policy, Research and Communications Department at the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).

“[The latter group tends to move] from countries in the South, in the developing world, to other countries in the ‘less emitting world’, and it is also not likely to be the most vulnerable who move,” she explained.

More frequent and severe floods, storms, landslides or land degradation, droughts and water shortages – so called slow-onset natural and human-made disasters – can all be triggers for migration.

Those most in need of protection tend to lack sufficient resources to adapt to the new living conditions, and that can include an inability to move away or migrate to other countries.

Speaking at a conference at Columbia Law School in May on migration and climate change, Klein-Solomon stressed that it was important to grasp these facts to counter “the overwhelming fears of the developed world being awash with people who are coming into their countries, taking jobs and burdening social security mechanisms”.

Even under worst case scenarios, in which some 250 million people could be displaced due to climate change over the next 25 to 30 years, it still would be “a tiny portion of the world’s population”, she said.

“We are really not talking about enormous numbers relative to global populations and we are not talking about hordes of people flooding into the Western, industrialised, developed countries. We do not need further repressive legislation and xenophobic debates as a result of this discussion,” she added.

Few legal protections

Rapid-onset disasters attract far more attention from the media, policymakers and researchers than gradual environmental changes – such as the human consequences of rising sea levels, soil salination, deforestation and desertification.

Precise estimates on climate-induced migration are hard to come by. However, recent events such as last year’s nationwide flooding in Pakistan, severe mudslides following heavy rainfall in Brazil and Colombia this spring, and the ongoing humanitarian disaster in drought-hit Somalia show that millions of people are already being driven from their homes and property due to extreme weather patterns.

International protection strategies are often marked by a humanitarian focus on “the immediate need of the person without necessarily looking at the causes of the phenomenon nor to a response in a longer term,” said Paola Pace, acting head of the International Migration Law Unit at IOM’s International Cooperation and Partnerships Department.

When emergencies occur, immediate funding is provided which lasts about three to six months, but for the subsequent “recuperation phase” it is very difficult to find donor support. This wastes the knowledge acquired in the initial months and squanders an opportunity to “really tackle the causes that brought about that emergency”, Pace stressed in an interview with IPS.

The lack of a long-term strategy is a major problem for those seeking to protect and support affected populations. A better approach would go beyond basic needs – food, water, shelter – to address trauma and stress-induced illnesses, and provide opportunities for sustainable development in a new environment, she said.

The climate-displaced also face an uncertain legal situation. Neither international humanitarian law nor international refugee law has a legal definition for this group, making it difficult to hold governments responsible for their wellbeing.

Often, there are multiple, complex, interconnected factors at work, from extreme weather events to land degradation or sea-level rise, and identifying the exact culprit is impossible.

“[I]t is a bit like the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Jane McAdam, an expert on refugees and international migration law at the University of New South Wales.

“Climate change is never the only reason why people move, there are always other factors like underlying socioeconomic conditions, for example,” she told IPS.

Finding appropriate legal and policy responses requires a combination of strategies, “rather than an either/or approach”, she said.

While there is no single legal standard specifically addressing environmental migrants, the IOM’s Pace stressed that should not give a “wrong impression” that no framework applies.

“Before a person becomes a migrant she or he is a human being,” and entitled to every protection under human rights law, she said.

By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 8 2011 (IPS)

U.N. peacekeeping missions face myriad problems but they remain the most effective strategy for dealing with post- conflict situations, says Page Fortna, a political science professor at Columbia University who has extensively researched the impact of various missions around the world.

Page Fortna Credit: Courtesy of Page Fortna

“Warts and all, peacekeeping works,” says Fortuna.

She nevertheless acknowledges that problems of contemporary peacekeeping are legion.

U.N. missions are “underfunded and understaffed, equipped with ambiguous mandates, [and] they struggle with problems of compatibility, including language, among troop contingents and of communication between the U.N. headquarters and the field,” says Fortna, author of the book “Does Peacekeeping Work?”.

Fortna spoke with IPS correspondent Rousbeh Legatis about why peacekeeping halves the risk of nations returning to armed conflict, builds bridges of communication between deadly enemies, and leads primarily to non-military political solutions.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: In your book, you say that peacekeeping is successful with “a clear and resounding yes”. How does it work? A: I find that it works through four important pathways:

By changing belligerents’ incentives so that going back to war is more costly, while maintaining peace is more rewarding.

By alleviating belligerents’ fears about each other’s intentions and ameliorating the atmosphere of severe mistrust that is built up during war.

By helping to prevent or nip in the bud accidents and misunderstandings that might otherwise spiral back to war.

And by pressuring the parties to live up to the terms of their political settlements so that neither party is excluded from the political process in a way that makes them feel they are “losing the peace” and would therefore be better served by returning to war.

Q: How specifically does it work? A: One example of the way that peacekeeping can work to change belligerents’ incentives is the fund that was set up ostensibly to help RENAMO [Mozambican National Resistance] in Mozambique transform itself into a political party – this was a straight cash payout that helped to coopting RENAMO and its leaders into a peaceful political process.

It was legitimised by the fact that the funds came from a neutral party (the U.N.). If the funds had come from the government – as was done in another case I examined, the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh – this would have led to charges that the leadership had sold out. But this fund gave a direct incentive to RENAMO leaders to maintain peace.

Peacekeepers can also help oversee military and political processes, such as disarmament, that are likely to be plagued by mistrust such that the parties can’t accomplish them on their own, even if they sincerely desire peace. Monitoring disarmament in Mozambique was one example of this, and taking control of strategic diamond mining areas in Sierra Leone was another example.

By investigating allegations of misconduct by both sides, peacekeepers also provide an important “third option” for parties that might otherwise return to war. If peacekeepers are not present, the parties have only two options if they think the other side has violated some part of the agreement: ignore it and risk looking weak and having the other side take advantage of them more and more, or respond in kind and risk an escalation back to war.

Q: Is military strength required in U.N. peacekeeping missions to bring real change on the ground? A: One of the most surprising findings of the book is that the more “robust” and militarily strongest peacekeeping missions are not necessarily more effective than missions with less military strength.

This is not to say that military strength is unimportant, it is often very helpful for peacekeepers to protect themselves in insecure environments. But many of the ways that peacekeepers work is through non-military mechanisms: through on the spot mediation, through political cajoling, and by linking peace to ongoing attention and aid from the international community.

The lesson here is that peacekeeping can be effective even where large militarily robust missions are not feasible.

Q: How important is local ownership to make peacekeeping work? A: Peace is maintained, or not, by the parties to the conflict – the government and rebel leaders who fought the war, whom I refer to as the “peacekept.” I do not necessarily argue that there needs to be “local ownership” of peacekeeping – part of the point of peacekeepers is that they are outsiders, and therefore relatively neutral. If the parties could solve the problem on their own, peacekeepers wouldn’t be needed.

Rather, the point is that those designing and directing peacekeeping efforts need to keep in mind how what they do will affect the decisions of the peacekept. Locals don’t need to own peacekeeping, but by definition, they own the peace process, for they are the ones who decide whether peace will hold or war will resume.

Excerpt:

By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, May 4 2011 (IPS)

“In South-South cooperation we are all partners,” Josephine Ojiambo, ambassador of Kenya to the U.N. and president of the U.N. General Assembly High-Level Committee on South-South Cooperation, told IPS. “SSC specifically shies away from the donor-client relationship.”

Ambassador Josephine Ojiambo of Kenya, President of the U.N. General Assembly High-Level Committee on South-South Cooperation. Credit: Courtesy of GSSD Expo

While partnership and support received by Least Developed Countries (LDCs) from traditional donors is often “far from adequate”, exchange of resources, technology, knowledge and best practices between developing countries – generally referred to as South-South cooperation (SSC) – is gaining momentum, Ojiambo said.

In the run-up to the 2011 Fourth U.N. Conference on the Least Developed Countries (LDC-IV) in Istanbul, IPS talked with Ojiambo about how Southern solutions could complement North-South cooperation with LDCs. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: What makes South-South sharing so helpful for LDCs? A: The countries of the South are a tremendous source of tested solutions to development challenges faced by all developing countries especially the LDCs. SSC offers new concrete ideas, models and practices for LDCs and thus provides major additional opportunities. Additionally, Southern countries tend to offer technologies and solutions that are more appropriate to the special needs and circumstances of LDCs, given their similarities in environment, background or development path.

Developing countries – regardless of their size or level of development – have something to bring to the table… Today when LDCs participate in international negotiations, particularly as a group, they are able to exercise a stronger voice at the table while also bringing forward appropriate technologies, agricultural models, and other successful solutions.

Southern countries are now at the centre of the new geography of international trade – as producers, traders and consumers in global markets… South-South [Foreign direct investment] FDI flows peaked at 187 billion dollars in 2008 (representing 14 percent of the total global FDI), up from 12 billion in 1990 (4 percent of the total global flow). The LDCs have been major recipients of FDI from other countries of the South – accounting for 40 percent of total FDI from developing countries.

China, India, Brazil and South Africa in particular have become important sources of development financing for LDCs.

Q: Do the emerging southern powers – India, Brazil, and South Africa (IBSA) or China – help LDCs within a South-South framework? How? A: Many developing countries have developed substantial knowledge and acquired capacity and experience in setting up dynamic successful institutions for social and economic management, as well as for science and technology development and environmental management. There is now the potential for the sharing of concrete experiences among the South – with development-replicating value. A win- win scenario for all partners.

Examples of some success stories are the ‘Bolsa Familia’ hunger alleviation programme of Brazil, the ‘National Food for Work Programme’ of India, and the central regulatory and liberalisation policies followed by China. These are potentially useful practices to be replicated in other countries.

China and India both also have Africa strategies, which is relevant given the large number of LDCs within the continent.

Q: Building on the Nairobi Outcome of the High Level U.N. Conference on South-South Cooperation a large number of LDCs have called for an international programme of action aiming at reducing the number of LDCs by half over the next decade. What concrete steps can be taken at the upcoming LDC- IV to put LDCs on track to meet this goal? A: At LDC-IV delegates have to agree on how the successes of the Global South over the last two decades can be translated into solutions to the numerous development challenges faced by LDCs in areas including: food security, agricultural/industrial productive capacities, climate change, public health, education, desertification, trade and investment, infrastructure, transportation, information and communications technology.

The Delhi Declaration – adopted by Foreign Ministers, Ministers, and Representatives of the LDCs and India at the India-LDC Ministerial Conference in February – stresses that the interconnected and globalised world has made it essential for the international community to accord its highest priority to the cause of LDCs.

The international community must express its highest political commitment in support of the Istanbul Program of Action as well. There is an urgent need for the development community to further its engagement with LDCs by helping to enhance their productive capacities, through such means as private sector development, the transfer of productive technologies, and the enhancing of LDCs’ enabling environments.

By developing their productive capacities, LDCs will be empowered to mobilise domestically the resources needed to finance their economic growth, thus lessening their dependence on aid and attracting the sort of private capital inflows that can support their development.

Of special importance is the need to commit to specific measures needed to boost LDC productive capacities – delegates emphasised at the February preparatory meeting for LDC-IV in India.

South-South and triangular cooperation, particularly that which engages the private sector through public-private partnerships, have the potential to play a significant role in this agenda as the South is home to many successful examples of effective partnerships, innovative technologies, and sustainable solutions to the very challenges faced by LDCs.

Now, more than ever, it is critical that the development community utilise South-South, triangular and public-private partnerships to empower LDCs’ in poverty reduction, employment creation and sustainable development, enabling LDCs to truly integrate into the international economy, engage in beneficial trade, and escape the poverty trap.

The UN Office of the High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States (UN-OHRLLS), which serves as the coordinator of the LDC- IV process, has mobilised the entire U.N. with a view to deliver a comprehensive, action-oriented and meaningful outcome of the conference, including concrete deliverables.

In response to this call, the Special Unit for South-South Cooperation will be hosting an event entitled ‘South-South Development Roundtable: Building Productive Capacities of Least Developed Countries through South-South, Triangular and Public-Private Partnerships.’ The main objective of the roundtable is to showcase announcements of concrete plans for the successful transfer and scaling-up of actual mechanisms for increasing the productive capacities of LDCs through the effective and efficient application of South-South, triangular and public-private partnerships… The event will feature several presentations of successful, transferable Southern mechanisms… each of which will include a comprehensive description of the mechanism and its expected benefits, and announcement of concrete plans and financial commitments for its transfer and scaling-up.

Q: What is the role Northern-industrialised countries have to play? A: South-South cooperation is not a substitute for North-South cooperation.

SSC operates on very different principles from those of Northern donor aid. Not only does SSC encompass financial flows, such as loans and grants for social and infrastructure investment projects and programmes, but it also embraces cooperation through experience sharing, technology and skills transfer, preferential market access and trade-oriented support and investment, transmitting and stimulating similar kinds and levels of development, generating employment and building capital and capacity.

However, despite rapid progress in South-South cooperation in scale, scope and dimension, there are limitations also – as Southern countries, particularly LDCs, face huge challenges in terms of a high prevalence of poverty, malnutrition, and unemployment, serious deficits in infrastructure and productive capacities and the impact of external shocks. North-South cooperation and triangular partnerships remain critical in this regard.

Southern development opportunities can be brought to the table through multilateral mechanisms, such as the U.N. Fund for South-South Cooperation managed by the Special Unit for South-South Cooperation hosted by UNDP. The multilateral development system can be a bridge between the countries of the South and Northern partners – it can mobilise donors and be a catalyst for developed and developing countries to intervene where and when needed.

Q: What are limits of South-South cooperation in supporting LDCs? And why? A: Funding and resources are significant limits. In the last few years, during the financial crisis, LDCs are expressing concern that even past development gains have been eaten away.

Excerpt:

By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 21 2011 (IPS)

Eleven years ago, 192 countries – all the United Nations member states – agreed to step up the integration of women in international peacebuilding and security processes, a promise that has remained largely unmet.

Mavic Cabrera-Balleza Credit: Courtesy of GNWP

Mavic Cabrera-Balleza notes that by having specific provisions compelling their members to implement and report progress, regional organisations like the European Union and the African Union “are a step ahead” of the United Nations, which lacks a regular accountability mechanism.

As international coordinator of the Global Network of Women Peacebuilders (GNWP), consisting of 50 women’s and non- governmental organisations (NGOs) from Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Latin America, Cabrera-Balleza spoke to IPS about developments and challenges in supporting women around the world.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Recently you conducted a stock-taking study to look at the progress made in 11 countries in terms of women’s involvement in national efforts to prevent war and build peace. What did you find? A: One of the biggest problems is what we refer to as the ‘accountability gap’. There is nothing that compels U.N. member states to report on what they are doing to put resolution 1325 [on women, peace and security] into practice, apart from the beautiful statements that they all say during the open debate in the U. N. Security Council every October. But that is not an accurate reporting.

A second finding of our report is the enduring lack of women ‘s participation in decision-making, which is also related to an absence of women in official peace negotiations. When negotiations are informal then women are there and recognised, when they become official and national they disappear. The reason is that in these peace negations a bigger premium is put into parties who had guns or who were engaged in actual combat. So it is not because women do not have anything to contribute, but there are structural barriers to their participation and that has to be changed.

We have also found that women’s participation in the justice and security sector is still very low, in general, across the 11 countries. There has been a change in the judiciary, but not in critical mass, meaning at least 30 percent. The security sector – police and military – is still very male in all the analysed countries. Women’s participation in the military, for example, was less than nine percent in eight of the nine countries for which data were provided.

Q: Did you find ways to confront these problems? A: To begin to fill the ‘accountability gap’ we have been advocating for the adoption of a general recommendation on armed conflict for the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). The general recommendation is the CEDAW Committee’s interpretation of state obligations under international laws.

So what will happen if a general recommendation on women and armed conflicts gets adopted is that member states who have ratified the CEDAW – there are around 186 of them – will be obliged to include in their regular compliance report to the Committee how they are actually implementing resolution 1325.

And NGOs which are providing or presenting on their own shadow reports to CEDAW will also more consciously integrate 1325 implementation, even when they are already do it. It will raise their awareness.

Q: Some critics say that NGOs and U.N. agencies are competing for visibility and resources instead of working together. A: This happens a lot, I cannot believe how much it happens. We [women’s groups, civil society organisations and U.N. agencies] go to the same donors. What we are encouraging the U.N. is that they should not duplicate what NGOs or other agencies are already doing, but provide the models or catalytic examples, meaning examples that one can replicate in other areas.

The world is big, there are many problems. We should not try all of us working in the Democratic Republic of Congo or Afghanistan. There are many places which need attention.

The existing lack of appreciation and the competition is in some ways driven by the need for visibility and the need to attract donors’ attention to our individual work and not to our collective work. And here I would really challenge the donor community to encourage collective work, partnership and not just to put their stake on the bigger and more visible agencies or organisations.

They are accountable to their constituencies, to their parliaments and to their congresses, but they should also educate their constituencies and not just work on one priority country when there is already presence there.

Q: GNWP was part of the NGO executive committee at the 55th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), which just held two weeks of meetings in New York. What do you see as the greatest challenges yet to overcome? A: The CSW remains the only regular global policy discussion space dedicated to women, there is nothing else. It brings in a very good number of participants together, no matter what the theme is. I want for the CSW and U.N. Women, which serves as a secretariat to the Commission, to realise the convening and mobilising power of this event.

Unfortunately, there is a persistent procedural or you may say structural problem with the CSW. It is not clear where do the agreed conclusions – which is the main outcome document at the end of the two-week meeting – actually go to, how are they influencing other U.N. policy discussions.

Another persistent problem is the refusal by some U.N. member states to recognise that gender equality is upfront and central in any policy discussion. There is no escaping it, women are totally part of the equation. When you are talking about peace, human rights and development – which are the major areas of U.N. work – gender is an integral component. There is no meaningful, substantive discussion that could happen in this policies if do not integrate that.

Excerpt:

By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 12 2011 (IPS)

Surgery saves the lives of millions of people around the world, but only a tiny percentage of them live in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where a shortage of skills, supplies and infrastructure can turn easily treatable accidents and illnesses into lifelong disabilities and even death.

Reinou Groen Credit: Courtesy of Surgeons OverSeas

The world’s poorest receive only four percent of all major surgical operations worldwide, while 75 percent of surgeries benefit the richest third of the world, according to a 2010 Harvard University School of Public Health study.

In the LMICs, people often “die instead of being operated on”, says Reinou Groen from Surgeons OverSeas (SOS), a New York-based group that improves surgical care in resource- poor environments through training and support programmes.

Recognition of these enormous shortfalls in basic and emergency surgical care is urgently needed at the local, national and international level, underscored the surgeon, who has worked in Niger, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Sierra Leone.

Groen spoke with IPS about the problem, why women are especially affected, and how this imbalance affects the U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: You have compared the state of surgery in Sierra Leone today with the U.S. Civil War era (1861-1865). A: Basically we found that the surgical capacity of present- day Sierra Leone is worse off than in the civil war in the 19th century in the USA. Running water was well organised in the U.S., every health facility had a good water supply. In Sierra Leone, we only found two hospitals out of 10 that had running water all the time.

Without running water, sterilisation of surgical equipment and proper hand-washing before operations is impossible. This poses the risks of transmitting diseases. Also electricity is not continuously available in Sierra Leone’s hospitals nowadays.

This means for us that we will never go to work without taking a headlamp, since we have needed that more than once during operations.

In our study we have found also that there are only 0.2 government hospital surgeons per 100,000 people in Sierra Leone compared to 300 surgeons per 100,000 Union Army soldiers. While things like open fractures, limb dislocations, and amputations were commonly employed in U.S. Civil War hospitals, they are rarely managed in Sierra Leone.

Q: What does this mean for patients? A: Take knowledge of treatment for open bone fractures as an example, where the bones are exposed without overlaying skin. In Sierra Leone, 80 percent of the hospitals cannot perform good care for open bone fractures. This is due to knowledge gaps and lack of human resources and appropriate material.

As a consequence, an infected bone, so-called osteomyelitis, is a common cause of disability and mortality. The treatment for infected bone, which should have been prevented in the first place by good trauma care, is difficult. Long courses of antibiotics and operations to remove the infected bones are needed to first stabilise the critical condition of the patient.

Thereafter the patient often needs subsequent interventions to reduce disability and a long physiotherapy is needed. This full process can take months or years. One can imagine the cost which comes with this treatment. Initial good trauma care would have prevented this.

And when it comes to costs, there are actually two types: the actual medical costs and the fact that the patient is not able to work in this period of rehabilitation and has no income. This is not affordable for the majority of people in Sierra Leone.

Q: Can you quantify the problem? A: Well, in Sierra Leone there are only 10 surgeons for 5.3 million women, men and children and in Liberia are only three surgeons for 3.5 million people.

There is no reason to believe that these [same] illnesses are not happening in countries where fewer operations are done, it just tells us that people with these diseases are not taken care of and die instead of being operated on. In developed countries emergency surgery is available for everyone, every hour of the day. In the developing world it is currently simply not available.

Q: Do these shortfalls in emergency and essential surgical care affect overarching development strategies like the U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) (adopted by the international community in 2000)? A: Yes, definitely. There is a strong need to integrate surgery in the existing MDGs, since there are so many related topics and subtopics: The reduction of poverty (MDG 1), child health (MDG 4), maternal mortality (MDG 5) and the fight against HIV/AIDS (MDG 6) will not be achieved if the surgical capacity is not strengthened. To give you some examples:

Five to 10 percent of [pregnant] women or their child will die in labour if they don’t get their live-saving Caesarean section. This means that you need a hospital with an operating room with anesthesia and skilled personnel to achieve MDG 5.

According to studies conducted in 2010 in eight low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) – amongst others Sri Lanka, Mongolia, Tanzania, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and Gambia – this common kind of operation, however, could be done only by 44 percent of rural, community, provincial, or general hospitals and major health centres.

Particularly women will gain from a better surgical care system. If a Caesarean section is available in the hospital, she initially attends to her baby, has more survival chance and she has less risk of developing severe complications when giving birth.

Excerpt:

By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 3 2011 (IPS)

Burundi will put U.N. Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security into practice with a National Action Plan (NAP) that is ready to be signed within the coming months.

CATHERINE MABOBORI. Credit: Courtesy of SOFEPA

“It is the appropriate moment” to push for adopting the NAP in the coming months, even if “having enough funds to implement the plan” still poses a major challenge, says Catherine Mabobori, Chairwoman of the Association of Women Parliamentarians in Burundi (SOFEPA).

Since 1993 Mabobori has been educating Burundian women on their rights, and showing them how to assume an active role in rebuilding their society after 15 years of civil war.

Despite an officially signed peace accord violence remains an endemic problem in Burundi – particularly for women. During the war women became “fragile economically and even socially”, Mabobori told IPS, but today they are exposed to widespread sexual and gender-based violence.

Mabobori spoke to IPS about how internationally adopted resolutions can lead to progress in national gender policy and bring change for Burundian women.

Excerpts of the interview follow:

Q: To what extent can resolutions like 1325, designed to address the disproportionate and unique impact of war on women, and 1820, addressing the problems of sexual violence in conflict situations, help Burundian women? A: I think resolution 1325 came at really good time in Burundi, because it was adopted when the country was in a peace process. In fact, 1325 is the same age as our peace agreement – both were adopted in 2000.

Together with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) – which was adopted in 1979, and has been ratified by Burundi – 1325 came as an additional tool for us to lobby for engendering laws… and integrating women in the national post-conflict reconstruction and peacekeeping efforts.

Today, we have many women heading governmental institutions – including the Ministries of Justice, Finance, Labour, Agriculture, Telecommunications and Gender. In total we have nine female ministers out of 22. And while we have 32 percent women in the National Assembly, 46 percent of Senate members are women. This is an improvement compared to what we had before 1325.

Q: International resolutions are one thing. To work on the ground is another thing. What are you experiences? A: Our country is 90 percent rural, and among the rural population women are the majority. So talking about 1325 or 1820 or any other resolution we say is like speaking ‘Chinese’, because it is a language they do not understand.

We women activists know about those resolutions of course and we use them to empower rural women to claim their rights. Rural women need concrete actions – they do not need to be taught about these resolutions. Even when they understand them, it is not easy for them to apply what for example a law says. To give an example, if a woman has been a victim of violence by her husband and you tell her that now she should take her case to the court, it might not be possible for her. When she goes to the court that means no one is doing her work at home. Instead of losing time to go to the court she will stay there, cultivating the land, looking after her children, fetching water and so forth.

Q: Is there political will to implement provisions and norms for realising the three “Ps” – women’s protection, participation, and prevention – of resolution 1325? A: I think there is, because in Burundi we have made progress in terms of gender policies and laws. We could not have made progress without the political will.

The problem is the implementation, because it requires a collective commitment. Take our penal court as an example, which takes into account all kinds of human rights violations, including gender-based violence (GBV). What we have seen at the local administration level is that there is a kind of ‘banalisation’ of violence against women. We still need to sensitise the local administration so that they take the matter seriously. Whenever the cases are taken to the penal court judges, however, they judge according to the law. There are still gaps that we have in implementing laws.

We need our National Action Plan (NAP) to be adopted as soon as possible. So that our work can be well organised, because we need to include all the stakeholders in a better coordinated way which will help us to know who is doing what. And so we have a mechanism to evaluate what we are doing. For me the political commitment will be also translated in the adoption of the NAP.

Q: How was Burundian NAP developed? A: We started in 2007 with a wide sensitisation campaign targeting women’s organisations, after we have noticed that the resolution was not known seven years after its adoption. Subsequently, we did a baseline study for mapping the progress of implementing 1325 in Burundi and based on the findings we drafted our National Action Plan. To make it as inclusive as possible we invited about ten related Ministries, civil society, international NGOs and U.N. agencies. Now, we are waiting for the official adoption of the NAP within the next three months.

Q: Why is it still not adopted? A: The problem is we have had a heavy political agenda, because of the elections and the peace process. Our plan was not really a priority… This is the appropriate moment, since we have a new government, a new parliament a new Senate.

We are working in all directions so that the NAP can be adopted as soon as possible. And even if our NAP is not yet adopted officially by the government, the implementation is already in progress. We have managed to secure a women’s quota in governmental institutions and we have a specific budget line just dedicated to implement 1325 – this shows that there is a political will and maybe it will encourage other donors who are interested in investing in peace in Burundi.

Excerpt:

By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 1 2011 (IPS)

It is short sighted to dismiss the benefits or potential of engaging the private sector in human rights matters, says Sara Lulo, director of the Avon Global Center for Women and Justice at Cornell Law School.

I would disagree that “doing good” and “doing good business” are incompatible, Lulo told IPS, stressing that, “the private sector might have some relevant resources to bring to bear to help advance the goals of 1325.”

U.N. Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security – adopted ten years ago – is described as the first in which the Security Council addressed the role and experience of women in armed conflicts, called on warring parties to adopt “a gender perspective” on peace negotiations and “gender mainstreaming” in peacekeeping missions.

Lulo spoke with IPS about opportunities and challenges for private sector engagement in implementing Resolution 1325.

Excerpts of the interview follow:

Q: There is some resistance to engaging the private sector in human rights matters such as the implementation of women rights, what is your stance on that? A: In my view, it would be short sighted to dismiss wholesale the benefits or potential of engaging the private sector on human rights matters. Many private entities already commit significant resources to creating and advancing women’s rights initiatives around the world. So I would disagree that “doing good” and “doing good business” are incompatible, in theory or in practice.

As to engaging the private sector on 1325 specifically, I consider it in line with the spirit and principles of the resolution to involve all sectors of society in its enforcement.

Q: Does the private sector have a specific responsibility in implementing 1325? A: The private sector has a responsibility to uphold human rights, including women’s rights. In my view, private sector actors that are operating or doing business in post-conflict areas have a particular responsibility to uphold 1325 in their own practices.

However, not all aspects of 1325 are necessarily appropriate for direct private sector involvement. For this reason, it’s important to identify relevant entry points where the private sector can be meaningfully engaged – such as providing technical expertise and skills trainings to women. That in turn ultimately determines how the women on the ground can benefit.

Q: How could one get businesses on board to put the promises, provisions and projects of 1325 into practice? A: There is a three-tier way to involve private sector actors in the implementation of 1325.

The first priority would be to indentify champions of this issue and this cause, because ultimately there are great advocates for women’s issues within the private sector. For example, Avon and Vital Voices created the ‘Global Partnership to End Violence Against Women’, which supports anti-violence initiatives in 15 countries. Goldman Sachs’ ‘10,000 Women’ project provides business and management training to women entrepreneurs around the world.

Second, along with identifying those champions, it is important to equip them with the types of information, and measurable indicators that can help them galvanise resources within their respective organisations, educate others and really sell their ideas internally. More specifically, individual advocates will need details regarding the needs on the ground, foreseeable challenges, credible local partners, and how success will be measured so that they can get their support institutionally and from their colleagues for these types of issues.

The third point I want to make is that we need to think broadly and creatively about what we mean by the private sector, and what we mean by financing 1325’s implementation. We should think of the private sector as people and organisations that can lend relevant expertise as well as possible funding opportunities. But… we should think more creatively about not just underwriting the costs of initiatives, but how we actually implement them and what we do with the money that is there. Corporations, for example, are increasingly interested in not simply funding an initiative, but leveraging their other resources to have a higher impact and be more directly involved. That goes to the point of in-kind support and tapping into the relevant expertise of the people in the private sector – through the development of training programs or by providing a relevant product or service for example.

Q: How would that work in practice? A: Private sector engagement should be largely guided by the priorities and initiatives set forth in countries’ National Action Plans (NAP). For example, a NAP might call for greater public education on a particular issue. Relevant businesses could pool their expertise in public relations, communications and advertising to create and finance a public awareness campaign. This was done in Sri Lanka, where business leaders joined together to create a series of television segments to promote dialogue on the many personal and national costs of conflict.

Q: Do you have concrete examples of how private sector actors have helped to implement 1325? A: I know from in-country advocates that examples of local private sector contributions include hotels providing meeting space, and businesses providing supplies free of charge to organisations working on 1325 initiatives. These are important and valuable, especially because they come from the local community.

However, we can go further. In addition, I would suggest that there is an opportunity to learn from existing corporate alliances – with an eye towards possibly creating one that is specific to 1325 work. Three types of alliances come to mind that could be instructive. For example, there’s an alliance of international companies that works to eradicate human trafficking – participating companies commit to certain guidelines and self-regulation to ensure that their own supply chain and employees do not engage in activities that support trafficking. There are also global private-public partnerships like GSMA mWomen, through which governments and mobile communication companies work together to find specific ways to apply mobile technology to advance women’s security and women-led enterprises. There are also specialised networks such as through the NGO Lawyers Without Borders, which works with major international law firms to develop rule-of-law initiatives, such as advocacy skills training programs.

To maximise the potential of private sector engagement, I would advocate cross-sector collaboration and, importantly, involving in-country stakeholders.

Q: What are the biggest challenges? A: Private sector engagement with 1325 is a largely uncharted area. Although many private entities are doing important work in the areas of women’s empowerment and violence against women, this work is not often tied specifically to 1325 and individual National Action Plans.

A major challenge is demonstrating and convincing individual and institutional private sector actors why and how they could play a role in enforcing 1325. And why 1325 warrants particular attention.

Another key challenge is that political instability, weak rule of law, and corruption serve to undermine 1325 generally. These factors, not surprisingly, would be a concern and possible deterrent to private sector involvement – especially for non-local entities unfamiliar with the particular country or post-conflict work. Proven processes, reliable and credible partners, and measurable success are predictable priorities for private sector actors.

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By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 1 2011 (IPS)

Ordinary women’s voices are too often ignored when it comes to solving their own problems, admonishes Loga Virahsawmy, Director of the Southern African NGO Gender Links, Mauritius and Francophone Office.

As a freelance journalist and gender activist, Virahsawmy has spent years analysing how Southern African media cover women, and recently completed a study in 15 countries that showed a discouraging lack of improvement from previous years.

On the sidelines of the 55th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in New York, Virahsawmy spoke to IPS about the importance of hearing the voices of ordinary women and the shortcomings of mass media. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: What are some of the important things ordinary women have to tell? A: Ordinary women have lots of things to tell. Ordinary women have more things to tell than people in power, because they are experiencing the problems. Their voices must be heard. You know it is good to do scientific research, it is good for scientists to talk, but who implements? Who puts the strategies and plans in action, and who suffers? These are the grassroots women. They are very knowledgeable and maybe this knowledge has not been put on paper.

It is about time that we listen to them and take this knowledge into account. Had we listened to all these women with their ancestral knowledge maybe we would not have been in so much trouble today.

Q: Do you think the voices of ordinary women are being heard here at the CSW? A: It really depends what session you go to. I went, for example, to a conference where grassroots women exchanged their experiences when it comes to climate change. These women had to do their presentations in their own language, so they were given proper space, even to talk in their own languages. This is important, because these are grassroots women and it is crucial for people here at CSW to know what is happening in these countries.

What could be seen as problematic, however, is that there is a lack of mixture between grassroots NGOs and high-level representatives, since there are official events, debates and meetings on the one side, and NGO presentations and parallel events, often outside the U.N., on the other.

At official events I met ministers, members of parliament and other crucial decision-makers when it comes to gender policy-making. The majority of them were not attending the mentioned parallel events. Furthermore, it is true that when high-level people like that talk they do not speak the language of the people. They use more a sort of an academic language, which does not trickle down to the ordinary citizens.

Therefore, it is crucial for women organisations who are attending the CSW here in New York that they must make sure of meeting and talking with their delegations and representatives, to learn what is happening and to communicate what they are doing.

Q: Your work focuses on the link between media and gender. A: Very often we forget how important media is, because media shape opinions of people. Day in, day out when people listen to their radio, they think that is God’s voice. While listening to the radio, reading the newspaper or watching TV, they do not question the content. It is therefore important for people, both women and men, to know how to read the media.

In 2010, we conducted the Gender and Media Progress Study because we wanted to see what developments have happened in recent years. We have not made much progress, unfortunately. From 17 percent of women’s voices in the media [in 2003], we are now at 19 percent in 15 analysed Southern African countries. After five years and only two percent more, I think there is a major problem.

Q: How do you approach changing this situation? A: We do it quantitatively and qualitatively, as well. Quantitative are all the statistics about where the women’s voices are, on what they talk, how many female journalists there are, what sort of beat they get to cover in comparison with male colleagues, what kind of positions women have in senior management positions and so on.

And qualitatively, we are looking at the media coverage, how the articles, for example, could have been better, what other voices are missing. Very often you have an article with a beautiful picture of a woman and when you read it her voice is not there.

Once we come up with our findings, we do trainings in media houses and with journalists. We present them our results to show how they can change their work. We are living in a very patriarchal society and journalists have been used to go and access male voices all the time. They do not realise themselves that they are not doing it correctly, until you show them the results and train them. Then maybe we can see change happening.

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By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 11 2011 (IPS)

“The agenda for women’s rights and empowerment in each country must be supported by the political leadership,” says Norah Matovu-Winyi, Executive Director, African Women’s Development and Communication Network (FEMNET).

NORAH MATOVU-WINYI. Credit: Courtesy of FEMNET

FEMNET is a membership based Network, mandated to facilitate the sharing of information, experiences, ideas and strategies among African women’s NGOs in order to strengthen women’s capacity to participate effectively in the development process.

In future World Social Forums “there is need to support more women to participate in the dialogues,” Matovu-Winyi said. Women learn a lot from each other and in many instances discover that their struggles are the same despite coming from different continents.

Bringing women from different countries together to share ideas, experience and challenges “is the greatest solidarity mechanism for women,” Norah Matovu-Winyi told IPS.

Excerpts from the interview follow:

Q: What are the most pressing issues for women in Africa? A: Increasing poverty and its feminised characteristics continue to be a major challenge in Africa. Women and girls, especially in poor urban and rural communities, continue to live on less than one dollar and a half per day, with household capacity for income generation decreasing. This has worsened with the multiple crises including the global financial and economic meltdown, food insecurity and climate change and the fuel crisis which have all combined to impact the households in developing countries in ways that have left many women more vulnerable to poverty. The majority of African women have limited opportunities for realising their full potential in their lifetime.

Insecurity resulting from the wars and conflicts (intra-state, inter-state and within communities) in which women’s bodies have increasing become battlegrounds are causing havoc in the region.

The HIV/AIDS pandemic is one of the biggest threats to human security and a daily nightmare for many women, girls, boys and men on the African continent.

Patriarchy is Africa’s dominant, organizing social system, in which women’s rights as citizens remain subordinated to the inferior social prescriptions for the female gender, which does not accord the same recognition to women and girls as to men and boys; and which does not equally tap into this resource for Africa’s development.

Q: Does the Social World Forum respond to the need of African women? A: The World Social Forum (WSF) is an open and significant space for African women activists and feminists to meet and link with other social movements and civil society organisations that propagate another alternative world that is free of neo-liberalism and any form of imperialism. The thousands of people from all corners of the world brainstorm, share experiences and ideas; and identify key agenda items that they agree on how to harmonise for a better world.

During the 2011 WSF, FEMNET partnered with PANOS to organise the Gender and Media workshop, and attached two female journalists to the Flame of Africa Newspaper which was produced throughout the WSF. This was part of capacity building for the young journalists because they had the opportunity to challenge each other to demand for gender responsive media reporting, support each other to take up decision-making positions in the media and to utilise new information technologies in order to put the women’s agenda at the forefront in the global development processes. The main role of FEMNET in this partnership was to provide a gender perspective to coverage of issues during the WSF and also mobilise African women journalists to cover the WSF with a gender lens.

The WSF provided space for FEMNET as a regional organisation to work with other regional women’s organisations like WIDE (a Network of European women’s rights NGOs) and also AWID (a women’s rights NGO which covers Europe, Latin America and Africa).

As women’s NGOs from Africa, Latin America and Europe we used the WSF to engage with women from different parts of the world. We used the WSF to hold a consultation with women on the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, as part of preparing African women to engage in debate and discussions around aid and development effectiveness before the Fourth High Level Forum (HLF4) which will be held in Busan, Korea in Nov. 2011.

The WSF does in a way respond to the needs of African women because it provides space for women to articulate their issues and also find common ground on some issues. It also provides space for women to share experiences, challenges and best practices.

Q: Do you see enough political will bring change for African women? A: Political will and/or political commitment is essential because leadership at the top enables things to move at all levels. For example in Rwanda, it is the political will that started moving the agenda for improved maternal health and care and this trickled down to the community level, where women were sensitised on the need to work together with government to change their health care seeking behaviours including addressing basic things like hygiene, sanitation and clean environment.

In Uganda, the President led the country in moving the agenda for HIV/AIDS from a personal/individual affair to a community/country business, that required each and everyone to play her/his role in its prevention, treatment and care. This resulted in increased awareness creating a culture of public acceptance of people living with HIV/AIDS and reducing stigma and improving access to medications.

To some extent we felt not enough political will among the leadership of Senegal to host the WSF.

For example most of the meetings were cancelled because there was no venue, despite an organisation paying for the venue prior to coming to the WSF. For example all women’s meetings were held in tents because authorities were not willing to give rooms within the University of Cheikh Anta Diop University, the venue of the WSF. The alternative venue (tents) also proved expensive for some women’s organisations who could not afford to pay for on-the-spot interpretation and interpretation equipment.

Political commitment/will must go along with the allocation of the required financial resources.

The agenda for women’s rights and empowerment in each country must be supported by the political leadership, but also the financial resources must be available to facilitate the much-needed change.

FEMNET believes that the African Women’s Decade (2010 – 2020) is a great opportunity for all African women to mobilise and organise themselves to create a critical mass at national, regional and sub-regional levels that will push for a common agenda – that of transformative change for women and girls of Africa.

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By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 9 2011 (IPS)

“Security Sector Reforms” (SSRs) have become the latest catch phrase in donor discussions on post-conflict peacebuilding around the world.

Bjørn Møller Credit: Courtesy of Bjørn Møller

But instead of taking a one-size-fits-all approach in diverse countries like Afghanistan, Haiti, Iraq and Somalia, SSRs should include an “openness towards non-Western approaches”, says security and defence expert Bjørn Møller from the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS).

In an interview with IPS, Møller notes that this means involving local communities as well as dealing with former combatants who earned their living through the gun, destroying remaining arsenals of weapons, and reforming power structures. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: What type of security are we are talking about as far as SSRs are concerned? A: Mainly the security of the state – i.e. “national security” – vis-a-vis internal enemies such as insurgents, but also the human security of the inhabitants. The most important part of SSR may be DDR, i.e. the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of former combatants, but insuring civil and democratic control of the military and police are also very important.

In the case of negotiated ceasefires and peace agreements, SSR often also includes provision for the co-optation of parts of the rebel forces in reformed national security forces, which also provides some security for the disarming of rebel forces.

Q: How does a lack of security particularly affect people living in poverty? A: The poor people are those who are least able to escape or defend themselves against the consequences of civil wars. The more affluent people can often flee or hire armed protection.

Q: To what extent are SSRs important to build structures of lasting peace, and what can they achieve compared to other peacebuilding instruments? A: The DDR element of SSR is the most important. In the immediate aftermath of a civil war, what matters most after the signing of a peace is to give the former combatants something better to do than fighting. Otherwise they may resort to violent crime, start a new war or join one in a neighbouring country – as we have seen in West Africa where the same fighters have fought in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire.

Q: SSRs became an appealing buzzword in international policy making. Why is this idea so attractive for donor countries? A: It came along with a new emphasis on post-conflict peacebuilding and as an integral part of the latter. It could thus be seen as a means to prevent second rounds of armed conflicts.

Q: You raised key conceptual concerns when SSRs are applied to African countries. Can you explain further? A: The West – which is usually “calling the shots” because it is paying the bill – finds it very hard to think beyond its own experience. It therefore seeks to establish a “state monopoly on the legitimate use of force”, which the German sociologist Max Weber found to be the distinguishing feature of the modern state.

In Europe, establishing such a monopoly took several centuries, and to expect a non-Western country coming out of a civil war to accomplish the same in, at most, a couple of years is quite unrealistic.

Q: Despite the fact, which you have mentioned, that the SSR concept is premised on Western notions and experiences, it is applied to countries in all regions of the world. What are the implications for effective policy making and the affected people? A: First of all, a lot of effort is wasted with, for instance, training of “national” security forces before the confrontation is really over, and a large part of these forces may simply “disappear” shortly after the completion of their training, perhaps because they join the remaining rebels – now better trained and even armed than they were before, as we have seen in, for instance, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Secondly, institutions for collective self-protection of villages, tribes or other communities are often dismantled because they do not seem compatible with a state monopoly on the use of force.

Q: What are the challenges to meet? A: This all depends on the concrete circumstances, which differ from setting to setting. There is no “one size fits all” SSR formula. It is also important to have enough time, but the external actors, both states and international organisations, are almost always looking for an exit option – often defined as the completion of a superficial SSR programme and the holding of elections.

Q: Are there policy complements which could improve the concept? How about alternative approaches? A: There is a need for openness towards non-Western approaches to the provision of security. In religiously divided societies, for instance, there may be a need for a more pluralistic legal order, i.e. for a coexistence of secular and religious or Christian and Islamic legal orders. This is hard to reconcile with the Western ideals, but may appear as more legitimate to the local population.

It may also be important to provide scope for local and community-based security forces, simply because they may appear more legitimate. In fact, legitimacy is usually far more important than professional skills, but this is something that cannot be taught.

It is also important to realise that the West is very often mistrusted – and not without reasons – and its values not necessarily shared by the local population. Hence, the more the West does to help, even with the best of intensions, the more it may inadvertently undermine the legitimacy of the post-conflict state and its security forces.

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By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 5 2011 (IPS)

Maximising time, energy and resources toward improving living conditions for millions of people in the poorest countries of the world – the so-called Least Developed Countries (LDCs) – means that the “business-as-usual” approach must yield to a holistic strategy, says Arjun Karki, a longtime expert on grassroots, democratic peace-building and development.

Arjun Karki Credit: Courtesy of Arjun Karki

With an eye on the upcoming Fourth U.N. Conference on the Least Developed Countries (LDC IV) in May, Karki underscores that unless there is a decisive shift, the world is heading toward “another unproductive decade” in terms of LDC policy- making.

The major gathering of head of states, civil society and the private sector in Istanbul represents a “historical opportunity” to “pave the road of translating rhetoric into action”, Karki says.

Rethinking old patterns would make it possible to halve the number of LDCs by 2020, he argues.

For more than 10 years, LDC Watch has monitored policy- making and the outcomes for people on the ground. U.N. correspondent Rousbeh Legatis spoke to Karki about flaws in the past and his hopes for the future. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: How serious is the economic crisis facing the 49 LDCs? Does it relate to aid, economic growth, trade or lack of foreign investments? A: In the context of today’s highly globalised world characterised by trade liberalisation, the economic crisis has certainly adversely affected the LDCs in terms of reduced trade, FDI [foreign direct investment] and more conspicuously, remittance inflows.

It’s totally unjustifiable that the LDCs have to bear the burden of the economic crisis that was not created by them and which has further worsened other crises of food prices, fuel, debt and climate change in LDCs. Such external shocks of the international economy exacerbate LDC economies already challenged by extreme resource constraints. Needless to say, we’re witnessing drastic cuts in aid that will further make matters worse vis-a-vis development financing.

Q: Since the U.N. General Assembly created the special category of LDCs in the 1970s, there are only two countries, Botswana and Cape Verde, which have “graduated”, indicating an improvement of their economies. Do you expect any other countries to follow suit? Or do you expect the number of LDCs to increase from the current 49 judging by the ongoing global financial crisis? A: To be precise, with the graduation of the Maldives in January 2011, we now have 48 LDCs, which however doesn’t dilute the bitter fact that the figure has doubled from 24 when first recognised in 1971. Hence, the last four decades of development failure urges us for a radical departure wherein we take a holistic approach to development that goes beyond economic growth and embraces human development in terms of productive capacities, social protection, equity and human security.

Moreover, LDCs are not only about economic vulnerability but also about inherent geographical and environmental constraints amongst others, which have been aggravated by the alarming climate change hazards today. Therefore, both poverty and vulnerability are endemic in LDCs. The key thrust of the new-generation development action in Istanbul must therefore envisage the graduation of at least half the number of LDCs by 2020.

Q: How much of the Brussels Programme of Action on LDCs adopted 10 years ago remains unimplemented, and why is this so? A: First and foremost, the Brussels Programme had its limitations with regard to a pro-poor focus in the sense of so-called special development attention to LDCs, and LDC Watch has always positioned itself with a critical perspective towards it. We have called to go beyond the Brussels Programme in addressing poverty, hunger, vulnerability, social injustices and human rights in LDCs.

Moreover, its implementation has fallen far short of its expected outcomes, which only proves the lack of political will and sheer apathy of both LDC and development partner governments. For instance, the ODA [overseas development aid] commitment of 0.15-0.20 percent of GNI to LDCs stands at only 0.09 percent by the 2010 deadline.

The other key reason identified out of our decade-long observations and analyses is the absence of concrete follow- up mechanisms for sustained monitoring and review, which obviously failed to maintain or even scale up the momentum of 2001 onto 2010. And, this particular point also factors in the limited space and role of civil society to play its desired part in the process.

Q: What do you expect to come out of the upcoming LDC IV conference in Istanbul in May? Will there be a concrete plan of action? Or do you expect the conference to be an exercise in futility? A: Ideally, I expect the upcoming Istanbul Programme of Action to be both quantitatively and qualitatively different than the Brussels Programme else the LDC-IV will indeed be an exercise in futility.

As I mentioned earlier, the Istanbul Programme of Action must focus on and address the twin issues of poverty and vulnerability with an integrated approach not in isolation. The UN LDC IV provides a historical opportunity to come up with an ambitious agenda that underscores graduation with a vision of reducing at least half the number of LDCs by 2020.

A global campaign on LDCs along the lines of concrete implementation and follow-up mechanisms including capacity- building of the UN-OHRLLS as well as other stakeholders engaged in defending LDC interests must be a key commitment and outcome in Istanbul. All in all, Istanbul must pave the road of translating rhetoric into action, towards a world without LDCs.

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