Presidential Statements

Co-Building an Eco-Social World: Leaving No One Behind, Organizing a Robust and Protected Transborder and Transnational Civil Society

Keynote Speech delivered on June 30 at the Global People’s Summit on Co-Building an Eco-Social World held online from June 29 to July 2, 2022

by Liberato C. Bautista, CoNGO President

Introductory Remarks

  1. Thank you, Priska Fleischlin, for that introduction. Thanks to you and your organization—the International Federation of Social Workers, which is a member of CoNGO—the Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations was invited as a partner of this critical global undertaking—a people’s global summit “to share…solutions to our joint challenges so that all people can live with confidence, security, and peace in a sustainable world.”
  2. The draft People’s Charter that will emerge from this global summit characterizes a world that is imperiled by many challenges. The charter partly says, and I quote, “We recognise that the pledges made by governments after the second world war – on peace, development and human rights – have not yet been realized and rights have been eroded in instances. Inequalities and fractures have grown. Poverty sits alongside extreme wealth. Nature has been degraded, leading to climate warming and environmental destruction. Millions of people have been displaced. As a result, they are adding to the millions more displaced by conflict and violence. The governments that made these commitments have prioritized competition over collaboration and sovereignty over solidarity. They have not yet served the people they represent.”
  3. “They have not served the people they represent.” That’s a bold statement to say. It is a statement that also burdens this Summit, which must identify as close and inclusive a global picture as possible of the issues that keep people worried all day and awake all night. The draft Charter identified “interconnected, diverse values as a basis for forming a holistic, inclusive framework for our everyday relationships and actions.” The Charter enumerated the values as “reference points for the development of our shared futures.” I like this formulation—that values, while named and identified, cannot be exhausted in an effort as global as a people’s summit can undertake, and yet whatever we can already name—collaboratively and together—they are already available reference points for co-building an eco-social world which we will live in in a shared future.”
  4. The organizational mantra that serves as value orientation for the work of CoNGO says, “Defining the present, shaping the future.” And as we launch into our 75th anniversary next year, we have added the call “Making the change, now.” This addition impresses upon us the urgency of now. Defining the present and shaping the future is all very well, but making the change now matters to people and the planet.
  5. I would like to share some thoughts on the general topic, which is the theme of this People’s Global Summit: “Co-building an eco-social world so that no one is left behind. Allow me to approach my contribution to elaborating on this theme around four subheadings: First, the surplus of fear and a deficit of hope in today’s world. Second, the need to revisit multilateralism as an arrangement of global collaboration and delivery mechanism for achieving global public goods and goals. Third is the need for a robust, protected, transnational civil society co-constitutive with solid multilateralism. Fourth, what makes an eco-social world worth building together so that no one is left behind?

The Surplus of Fear and the Deficit of Hope

  1. On with the first—that there is in our world today a surplus, surfeit if you will, of fear and a deficit of hope which is imperiling the achievement of sustainable development goals for people and the planet. Co-building an eco-social world depends mainly on empowering the voice and agency of people as they identify their concerns and craft their futures. This is why decreasing fear and replacing it with increased hope augurs well into assuring people of their dignity and human rights and the planet’s sustainability.
  2. Today, this surfeit of fear and deficit of hope among the world’s peoples is putting humanity’s survival at stake in an ever more imperiled and unsustainable natural ecology. The health of people and the planet is endangered by intersecting crises, not the least brought about by the coronavirus pandemic, global violence, forced migration, economic crisis, climate crisis, racial injustice, and more. Time is of the essence, and we must decrease fear and increase hope in that eco-social world we are building together.
  3. To decrease fear, we must reaffirm that human dignity and rights are non-negotiables. That human dignity is inherent in every person—persons being rights holders—and human rights are buffeted and increased because they are the indivisible and interdependent protections we give to human dignity. To decrease fear among peoples, the pantheon of human rights we struggle to build upon daily must be demonstrable as effective instruments to check government impunity, indeed of state agents, who otherwise may conduct themselves with impunity as to violate and sully people’s dignity without fear of being accountable and punished.
  4. To increase hope, we must build a shared future for all the inhabitants of the earth and their natural ecology by promoting and safeguarding the common public goods and services indispensable to life. We must increase hope through arrangements that genuinely put people and the planet at the center of the local and global public imagination of policy and legislation. And we certainly need today a cadre of leaders from grassroots, local, national, regional, and international arenas to provide leadership for the much-needed catalytic strategies and action for transformative change in social and ecological relations.

Multilateralism: Revisiting, Revising, Transforming

  1. Second, the need to revisit, revise and transform multilateralism as an arrangement of global collaboration among an assortment of varied players focused on addressing the production and development of shared public goods collaboratively, not the least the development of visible, viable, and durable peace and prosperity which underpin an eco-social world responsive to the needs of peoples and ensures the viability of the planet.
  2. As we know today, multilateralism will no longer suffice for that catalytic and transformative change. It must be revisited, rebooted, rewired, or even repopulated beyond its all too nation-state-centeredness. Not only must there be multilateralism where institutions for norms and standards-setting work robustly, accountably, and transparently, but more importantly, a multilateralism where the common, just, and equal flourishing of peoples and the planet are at the heart of its work, and not the self-preservation of the state in ways hitherto buttressed by national security formulations.
  3. The challenge to multilateralism today is not only that the world’s problems have exponentially multiplied compared to the imagination of those who forged the Peace of Westphalia in mid 17th century. That provenance of modern multilateralism endowed us with the notion and reality of sovereign nation-states who contracted treaties and entered into obligations between and among them foremost to protect territories and resources. All in the interest of national security—meaning the protection of the inanimate nation-state!
  4. The urgent challenge to multilateralism today, it would seem, lies in the urgency for these sovereign nation-states to recognize how each of their people and their natural ecology are tied to the survivability and sustainability of all others and that acting together globally is simultaneously in their local and national interest. Today’s international interest must be equally a national interest because the international interest is the interest of nationals acting upon global threats and challenges that no single country can address better except collectively—under the aegis of entities like those that make the United Nations System.
  5. Multilateralism works, but only if the intention to involve civil society moves from rhetoric to reality. By civil society here, I mean its broadest meaning—all the world’s peoples in their varied settings and configurations, including as citizens, people on the move, and stateless persons. Their political and national affinities matter to the nation-state. But being simply human means they are at the mercy of the perils of intersecting social injustices and harsh ecological realities. The reality here means allotting time for them to speak and be heard in every venue. As NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and CSOs (civil society organizations), we claim that citizens and non-citizens alike are indispensable parts of the national, regional, and international governance architecture that cannot be ignored in the pursuit of common and global agendas—to evoke language that the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, has used in his latest recommendations now in the hands of the member states and for the upcoming General Assembly to consider.

The Need for a Robust and Protected Transborder and Transnational Civil Society

  1. Third, the recognition that the need for a robust and protected civil society is co-constitutive of strong multilateralism at the global and national levels. NGOs, CSOs, and grassroots organizations are placed on a momentous occasion to advance social consciousness and organize to advance human rights principles everywhere in the public square. But in many places in the world today, the voices of civil society are increasingly muzzled in a public square that is shrinking and a public discourse that is curtailed.
  2. The latest report of CIVICUS—the eleventh edition of its State of Civil Society issued a few days ago is alarming. This CIVICUS report “shines a light on a time of immense upheaval and contestation: war, conflict, rising fuel and food prices, climate change…” even as it also reported on where it found hope—”in the many mobilisations for change around the world: the mass protests, campaigns, and people’s movements for justice, and the many grassroots initiatives defending rights and helping those most in need.”
  3. The CIVICUS report identified five key current trends of global significance: A) Rising fuel and food costs are spurring public anger and protests at economic mismanagement. B) Democracy is under assault, but positive changes are still being won. C) Advances are being made in fighting social inequality despite attacks. D) Civil society is keeping up the pressure for climate action. E) Current crises are exposing the inadequacies of the international governance system.
  4. CoNGO, in its public statements, echoes CIVICUS’s refrain on these issues. “CoNGO is concerned about the shrinking space for civil society. Freedom of assembly, opinion, and expression are inherent rights of every human being. Still, an increasing number of countries restrict these rights, treating civil society as a threat rather than as a partner working to achieve common goals. Some governments imprison civil society activists or use force to quell peaceful assemblies and demonstrations. They formally accept the recommendations of the United Nations while ignoring them in practice. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and relevant international conventions and covenants must be universally applied. The United Nations must ensure that NGOs have full access to United Nations bodies to allow the fullest contributions of their competencies, expertise, energy, and experience.”
  5. It is about time the UN and its member states are seized of the political will (of its people and citizens) to achieve the future we want and the world we need. Formulations of these are already being expressed multifariously by the world’s peoples in various social forums, peoples assemblies, and certainly peoples’ summits such as this. This global people’s summit and the charter that will come out of it should loudly and clearly state the high expectations of NGOs and civil society for the Heads of State and Government assembled during the High-Level Political Forum (July) and at the General Assembly (September)—to demonstrate political courage by making real their declaration at the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the UN, among them: A) “We will leave no one behind…The peoples have to be at the center of all our efforts.” B) “We will place women and girls at the center.” C) “We will upgrade the United Nations. The world of today is very different from what it was when the UN was created 75 years ago…Our working methods need to keep pace and adapt.”
  6. Beyond the multilateralism we engage in today, we need arrangements that enable civil society to claim spaces and position themselves at political platforms where their presence is visible. Their views are heard to impact decision-making. At the level of NGOs that advocate before the United Nations under consultative arrangements, Article 71 of the UN Charter and ECOSOC Resolution 1996/31 already provide modalities and platforms that must be reinforced and not rolled back to the peril of democratic exchange and participatory decision making.
  7. What matters to me as an NGO leader—as CoNGO President in particular—is that NGO representatives can speak their voice, even in their language, and claim their agency in the settings that present the realities of their localities—be the grassroots, local, national, regional or global arenas. This includes the essential role of CSOs, critical social movements (CSMs), and other civic organizations vying for public attention and rallying for support for action on pressing social, economic, and political issues. The dynamic of co-building an eco-social world such as that propounded loudly by this people’s global summit points to the need to coalesce and forge alliances and networks to multiply our collective power and potential to influence public opinion, affect policy formulation, and effect transformative change.
  8. CoNGO’s working modalities, especially its more than 30 substantive NGO committees organized in New York, Geneva, Vienna, and in four other political regions, exemplify the importance of harnessing collective energy and influence for impact, if not relevance. This organizational mode that gathers NGOs to work on substantive issues and act upon them to make the transformative change today demonstrates what I have called the power of co—the power of consultation, collaboration, and cooperation. The burden of this global people’s summit is not only to address the substantive issues that make an eco-social world. It matters equally and significantly that we employ methods of work that reflect the diversity of the transnational and transborder composition of who the world’s peoples are and how they struggle, organize and mobilize themselves for action.

Making Human Security and Planetary Sustainability Matter, Together

  1. Fourth and last of my subheadings is about an eco-social world we must co-build so that no one is left behind. That eco-social world is where food is secured as much as freedom is advanced, jobs are secured as much as justice is advanced, and land is secured as much as liberation is advanced. At its barest minimum, an eco-social world must be secure for people: a) Food and freedom, b) Jobs and justice, and c) Land and liberation.
  2. This formulation adheres to the indivisibility of social, economic, cultural, civil, and political rights. Easier said than done. Mainly because these are both human rights and human needs receiving the least resources that national budgets provide. But nothing to complicate what the world’s peoples want and need. People need food, shelter, clothing, education, health, and so much more in ways already enumerated by the goals and targets under each of the 17 SDGs. And suppose these needs are not made available, and their human rights are not protected. In that case, people must have venues to air their grievances to act on their marginalization, oppression, and exploitation and, ultimately, feel their liberation.
  3. In the age of the Anthropocene, we need to assert the integrity of the ecological system—and, as responsible human beings, fight for the right of nature to be integrally sustainable. And do this as robustly as we fight for human rights. The anthropocentrism of how our human rights principles have developed must come to terms with the planetary requirements of human survivability. In the age of the Anthropocene, we have tinkered so much with nature that nature’s ability to regenerate has been breached, and its integrity is imperiled unless human intervention is curved and put in check. And those who have contributed the most to its peril have the greater responsibility—morally and resource-wise—to address such matters, not the least that of climate change.

What Needs to be Done?

  1. In its previous statement, CoNGO has called upon the United Nations and Member States “to enter into a dialogue with civil society to create innovative partnerships that respond to changing world challenges. The spirit of Agenda 2030 requires the robust participation of the world’s people so that the benefits of multilateralism are felt in their daily lives. Everyone must work in concert so that the United Nations we need for the world we want prospers in a rules-based international order. We call upon Member States to recognize the vast potential of civil society as an essential element of the international system, defining the present and shaping the future. We must dismantle the hurdles to physical and political access to United Nations processes to achieve internationally agreed development goals and social justice agendas….Humanity cannot wait.”
  2. “The ‘Peoples’ who gave voice to the United Nations Charter and see the Member States as their representatives are demanding that the world body rise to its commitments and bring about transformative change. Peace, justice, and development depend on holistic, human-rights-based, people-centered, and gender-sensitive approaches to the systems underpinning our economy, society, and environment.”
  3. “We must increase momentum to transform the world and ensure that no one is left behind.” This means addressing those issues or concerns that worry “We the peoples.” These are concerns invariably identified or alluded to in the draft and, hopefully, final People’s Charter coming out of this Summit, issues such as: A) Climate Change: issues around global warming, its effects on the relations of people and planet, sustainability and viability of civilizational life itself. B) Global Migration and massive displacement and movement of peoples: realizing that migration today is globalized but xenophobically nationalistic, securitized and militarized, ethnicized and othered, gendered and sexualized, commodified and commoditized, homogenized and hegemonized. C) Global Violence: recognizing that the world’s peoples are not only wary and weary but frustrated and dying in this warring world, arming to the teeth, militarizing not only our borders but our social relations, putting people and planet encircled and occupied, endangered, and in many different manners in death’s way. The aggression by Russia against Ukraine is but one of many wars of aggression and occupation that colonizers and imperial powers have fomented and subjected other peoples and lands over centuries. Ending the scourge of war still is a blight in the multilateral undertaking.
  4. We are a human species in deep need today of the things that flourish life and undergird abundant living. Even more urgently, we need something that extinguishes the power of death and death-dealing forces and instruments that peddle violence. Ending the scourge of war and the proliferation of implements of war is urgent and necessary, even as it is also the greatest failure of the multilateral undertaking.

And what can we do to make the change now?

  1. What can we do, what must we do, to make visible the change we want and need now? Can we redo civics education so that it is relevant today? How about glocal civics education that engenders glocal citizenship? What would it entail to ratchet up the co-building of an eco-social world where no one is left behind? Let me suggest three areas that reimagine and transform civics: A) Cultivate CIVIC VALUES, where obligations generated by the multiplicity of relations between and among peoples and nations go beyond traditional notions of national security and sovereignty into ones that foster people’s security, human rights, and global peace. Here we have to start fortifying our calls and acts for food security, water security, climate security, and the like. B) (En)gender CIVIC ENGAGEMENT, where citizenry goes beyond national allegiances and sovereign assertions. In a global world and cosmological existence, we need global citizenry and human solidarity where human welfare and cosmological well-being are primordial over activities that sever our human relations and deal with death rather than life—activities such as wars and extractive mining that generate other death-dealing activities and natural catastrophes and human-induced vulnerabilities, including climate change, and contemporary manifestations of the historical evils of slavery, colonialism, and racism. C) Foster CIVIC ACTION, which is oriented towards social justice, so that every activity—from grassroots, local, national, regional, to international—by peoples, governments, and multilateral institutions—redound to the improvement of the relations of peoples and nations, thus providing the possibility of (re)constituting ourselves—our relationships, associations, and communities—and readying all for catalytic leadership and transformative change.
  2. Let me come back to my initial statement that in our world today, there is a surplus of fear and a deficit of hope. And the urgency to reverse this is acute and necessary. In his famous “I Have a Dream” speech of August 23, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial on the Washington, DC National Mall, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., exclaimed: “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there “is” such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.”
  3. That fierce urgency spoken of by Dr. King is a moment for us to seize—because the future is upon us now. The future is today. And vigorous and positive action is expected of us. That us is everyone; we have a stake in that future now. Time is of the essence. At such a time and space as ours, we must act—with a determined voice and empowered agency. In an auspicious time and in a space where we can affect vigorously and positively, we must work collaboratively for the sufficiency and sustainability of the planet and peace and prosperity for all peoples.
  4. On this day, the fierce urgency of now admonishes us to recognize the things that make for peace and bring justice so that we recover better for a sustainable and equitable world and recover justly and peaceably. And safely for people and the planet. The human rights of people and the planet’s ecological health are at stake. And there is no time for delay.
  5. Because the future is now, we must make the change now. Just peace, now. Climate justice, now. Health justice, now. Vaccine justice, now. Racial justice, now. Economic justice, now. Gender justice, now.
    Migration justice, now.
  6. The future of humanity is intertwined with the planet’s future. Now is the time to demand that we look at the pillage that social pandemics have visited upon us and address the lingering social, economic, political, and cultural inequalities that trouble our peoples and lands. Now is the time to be kind to one another—in or out of pandemics. Kindness is hard currency when fear is in surfeit, and hope is in deficit. Let us make kindness available in all the ways we can as much as we can. Kindness is co-constitutive with solidarity, and kindness demonstrates our interdependencies in life and living as one humanity on one planet.
  7. Collaboration at all levels is needed to triumph over crises across locales worldwide. Greater humility is required knowing that collaborative thinking and working far outweigh individual proclivities and comforts we have individually valued. In the time of the CoVID-19 pandemic, and the like, we must wash our hands frequently and vigorously for our health and that of others.
  8. However, that is not the same with social pandemics and injustices. We must not wash our hands to diminish our complicity and entanglement with the injustices and unpeace that have sullied our human relations and endangered our planetary existence. Hope may be what holds life from death and peace from destruction. Let us recommit ourselves to an eco-social world that is just. Justice and just reparations for our relations with each other and the planet are doable now in mercy and compassion. Kindness is indeed next to godliness. Let us be kind even as we limp our way to recovering better, justly and peaceably, towards a sustainable and equitable eco-social world.

Lisbon, Portugal
30 June 2023

Food Security, Food Sovereignty: An Insurance Policy for Inclusive and Resilient Recovery for Future Generations

Food Security, Food Sovereignty: An Insurance Policy for Inclusive and Resilient Recovery for Future Generations

 

(Presentation by Liberato C. Bautista, President of CoNGO (Conference of NGOs in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations and Main Representative to the UN of The United Methodist Church-General Board of Church and Society), at the IFSW Virtual Parallel Event “Social Workers on the Frontlines of Inclusive and Resilient Recovery” convened by the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW)on the occasion of the 60th Session of the United Nations Commission on Social Development.)

16 February 2022 | New York | Virtual

1. Good morning, NGO colleagues, ladies, and gentlemen. Thank you, Dean Elaine Congress and IFSW, for having me on this panel on a crucial and urgent topic. I am especially delighted that IFSW has recently been elected to the global Board of CoNGO.

2. Today, there is a surplus of fear and a deficit of hope among the world’s people. I have often spoken about fear and hope, including my New Year’s message to the CoNGO constituency last year, 2021 because the future of people and our planet is at stake. That future is imperiled. People and the planet are imperiled. I thank the International Federation of Social Workers
here in New York for organizing this timely side event focused on inclusive and resilient recovery.

3. The concept for this event is well put. “Social workers play a global role in addressing issues that impact the well-being and dignity of populations through providing services, collaborating with communities and partners to strengthen social solidarity through advocating for just and equitable policies and centering the voices and leadership of the most marginalized, especially
indigenous people.”

4. The event’s focus on promoting inclusive and resilient recovery from COVID-19 for sustainable livelihoods, well-being, and dignity for all to eradicate poverty and hunger and achieve the 2030 Agenda is not only urgent but foundational. The advocacy here for vaccine equity, local capacity-building through transformative social protection systems, the right to development that includes socially just international trade agreements that advance human rights, and the promotion of the concept and practice of food sovereignty is foundational to what makes for resilience and inclusion in
society.

5. The survival of humanity is at stake in an ever more imperiled and unsustainable natural ecology. The health of people and the planet is endangered by intersecting crises, not the least brought about by the coronavirus pandemic, global violence, forced migration, climate crisis, racial injustice, and more.

6. To decrease fear, we must affirm the fundamental principle that human dignity and human rights are non-negotiables. To increase hope, we must build a shared future for all the inhabitants of the earth and their natural ecology by promoting and safeguarding the common public goods and services indispensable for life.

7. At face value, you may think that decreasing fear and increasing hope are fundamental tasks of nation-states. That the task of ensuring the rights of citizens and the integrity of the territory that bind them into one nation is what sovereignty means. It is, and the task of nation-states to protect sovereignty is fundamental. But my focus today is on another sovereignty—food sovereignty. How is this food sovereignty the same as our traditional notions of national sovereignty? How is it different from the original proponents of food sovereignty?

8. I would like to locate the notion and practice of food sovereignty in the context of its urgency. That urgency is mediated by fear as much as by hope. By fear because the survival of people and the planet are at stake. By hope because the notion and practice of food sovereignty are forcing us to reimagine sovereignty beyond nation-state constructs into constructs that are people-centered, human rights-based, and planetary in orientation.

9. Recovery from the intersecting pandemics that people and the planet face today must not only be inclusive of and resilient for people and the planet but also just. Justice must be at the heart of recovery. After all, we are recovering from past historic injustices, including slavery, colonialism, and racism, that have marginalized peoples plundered their lands and resources, and subverted their human dignity and their communities, especially indigenous communities. When inclusion, resilience, and justice come together, we are moving away from the prevalence of fear into the resurgence of hope.

10. Justice is what rights the wrongs that pandemics are made of. When justice is pursued, resilience goes beyond the human capacity to adapt. When people who have undergone injustices in their lives for centuries and generations in their families and communities endeavor to unyoke themselves from such injustices, I refuse to call that recovery. It is a transformation in its most fundamental, if revolutionary, sense. We must not consign resilience to resignation as if we will weather every climate and economic crisis without structural and systemic changes. Nay, resilience must be about uprooting the intersecting pandemics and injustices that bring people and the planet to hunger and poverty.

11. The impoverization that has resulted from shameful acts of injustice in human history has plunged our planet into the precipice of unsustainability and the resulting dehumanization and commodification of people and populations everywhere. The concerns this side event is trying to address—vaccine equity, transformative social protection systems, socially just international trade agreements—are an array most commendable because on this call are people, you and me, who can summon and mobilize both material and moral resources to undo the entanglements of public policy with such injustices that allow for poverty and hunger and for wars and violence to linger longer. And if this happens, our yearnings for successfully implementing the SDGs will have come to naught.

12. We must increase hope and decrease fear through arrangements that genuinely put people and the planet at the center of the local and global public imagination and public policy action. We certainly need global leadership to help identify catalytic activity and strategies for transformative change. Social workers are a well and wealth of that transformative leadership, and Multilateralism and sovereignty as we know them today will no longer suffice for that catalytic and transformative change.

13. This year’s CSocD60 is even more crucial if only because it must address what civil society is clamoring for. Not only must there be multilateralism, where institutions for norms and standards-setting work robustly, but more importantly, a multilateralism where the common, just, and equal flourishing of peoples and the planet are at the heart of its work.

14. Under the leadership of the NGO Committee on Social Development, civil society leaders around the world are gathering in solidarity to “end discrimination and invest in human dignity and well-being; to end hunger by building resilience for food security everywhere; to invest in decent and sustainable jobs; and to bridge the digital divide to access fundamental rights.” These demands are at the core of sovereign state duties, and NGOs must call governments to their responsibility as duty bearers. The original proponents of food sovereignty have taught us that NGOs are genuinely the rights holders, and as such, they have a fundamental role in defining what makes them secure. Food sovereignty is about food security.

15. The challenge to multilateralism today is not only that the world’s problems have exponentially multiplied over as imagined since the Peace of Westphalia in the early 17th century that bequeaths us with the notion of sovereignty and sovereign nation-states who can contract treaties between and among them. The true challenge to multilateralism lies in the urgency that these sovereign nation-states recognize how each of their people and their natural ecology is tied to the survivability and sustainability of all others and that acting together globally is in their local and national interest.

16. Food sovereignty is truly about crossing boundaries worldwide—crossing sovereign territorial demarcations—ensuring that the wherewithal to address hunger is not hampered by political brinkmanship and exacerbated by the uneven economic development of nations. The faster we enact socially just international trade agreements, the better we will have food on every table, not the least in the mouths of children whose nourishment ensures the flourishing of the future. Food sovereignty is an insurance policy for future generations.

17. Food sovereignty is close to my heart. My parents were small farmers and rural agriculturists in the northern Philippines. My father was a high school and vocational school graduate; my mother only finished fifth grade. Their meager income from tilling the land always made them insecure—not knowing how long the harvest would last so that there would be food on the table and they could put their children to school. Food security and education—they thought—were the ways to increase hope and decrease fear.

18. What is food sovereignty? First, its origins. Let’s listen to the international peasants’ movement called La Via Campesina, which originated the concept. In a Guide to Food Sovereignty, they produced, it said, “Food Sovereignty has emerged from peasant organizations organized at the transnational level as a proposal for humanity to rethink how we manage food and agricultural production, distribution and trade, how we make use of land and aquatic resources and how we interact, exchange and organize with one another.

19. Food Sovereignty is not a simple set of technical solutions or a formula that can be applied – it is instead a “process in action” – an invitation to citizens to exercise their capacity to organize themselves and improve our conditions and societies together. The concept of Food Sovereignty was developed by the people most threatened by the consolidation of power in food and agricultural systems– peasant farmers. Instead of being destroyed by the forces of history, they are offering a proposal to solve the multiple crises which humanity is facing.”

20. Food sovereignty is a lynchpin to just, inclusive, resilient, and transformative recovery.
a. “Food is a fundamental need – access to food is essential to human survival and a basic human right.”
b. “Food is also political – the production of, access to, and distribution of food are essential for our society to function, and control of our food system confers power.”
c. “Trade in foodstuffs – the exchange and transport of food from one human population to another – is also a highly politicized and
complex process. Control of the rules and regulations governing international and interregional trade confers even greater power
and leverage.”
d. “Despite the political and economic pressures they face, human beings continue to manage and nurture the ecosystems around
them to ensure a food supply. For thousands of years, peasant farmers, pastoralists, and other peoples who live from the land and sea have developed and refined resilient food and water systems, plant and animal breeds and cultivated plant varieties to ensure their continuation and long-term sustainability.

21. Today, the notion and practice of food sovereignty provide a powerful method of work and a way of being, becoming, and belonging that is local, global, transnational, and transborder. We need leadership today whose focus and locus recognize the geopolitical nuances of location and orientation. We need glocal leadership whose consciousness and practice are developed and nurtured through transborder and transnational organizing and mobilizing.

22. We also need leaders whose practice—indeed, advocacies and activism—is rooted on the ground as much as oriented to the larger horizon of human and planetary flourishing. Social workers, it seems to me, have true potential to be transborder and transnational agents on a mission to realize a just, transformative, and inclusive recovery from the social, economic, and cultural pandemics that people and the planet wrestle with today.

23. In my former office as human rights staff for the National Council of Churches in the Philippines, hang a poster produced by the Peace and Justice Center in Marin, California. The text on the poster said these words that continue to influence my thinking and doing: “At the table of peace shall be bread and justice.” Food invokes images of a table around which we break bread together; around which we tell stories of lives and living; around which families forge solidarity; around which peace talks are held. Food sovereignty is ultimately about what makes for peace—food on the table for everyone, irrespective of political and economic ideologies and systems of governance.

24. Around a table where we share food, we can discuss those that create fear and diminish hope today: a) climate change and global warming that is changing the way people and the planet relate to each other—affecting the sustainability and viability of civilizational and planetary life, b) forced migration in which the world is ever more globalized yet also xenophobically nationalistic; ever more securitized and militarized, vilified and criminalized, ethnicized and othered, gendered and sexualized; human beings—their bodies commodified and their services commoditized; and worse is racism and racial discrimination that would rather homogenize our ethnicities and play our sexes, classes, and religions against each other.

25. And this is why food sovereignty is crucial because many wars and imperial conquests were launched in search of food that eventually became the foothold of hegemonic pursuits. Food sovereignty is a way to decouple hegemonic sovereignty from the true sovereigns—peoples, indeed “we the peoples.” Many wars have been fought, and violence inflicted on peoples and the planet in the guise of searching for spices and securing food and commercial routes—be they in the high seas or skyways.

26. At the table of peace shall be bread and justice. That is my wish. The struggle to make this wish come true is what I see when I read about the work of this transnational agrarian movement called La Via Campesina, whose story I want to end this presentation. I want to give Via Campesina the privileged narrative—for theirs is the actual work for food sovereignty: I will read from the article, “From Food Sovereignty to Peasants’ Rights: an Overview of La Via  Campesina’s Rights-Based Claims over the Last 20 Years”—originally a paper presented at an international conference on food sovereignty at Yale University in 2013.  “La Via Campesina developed in the early 1990s as peasant and small-scale farmers from Central America, North and South  America, Europe, and elsewhere, sought to articulate a common response to the neoliberal onslaught that had devastated their lives (Desmarais 2008; Borras 2004). Since then, the movement has opposed “global depeasantization” (Araghi 1995) and the emerging “corporate food regime” (McMichael 2009). It has developed a “food sovereignty” model to counterpose the dominant “market economy” paradigm (Rosset and Martinez 2010, 154) and has managed to build a common agenda across the North-South divide. To do this, La Via Campesina has deployed a powerful “rights master frame” (R. D. Benford and Snow 2000, 619). Rights occupy a central place in most Via Campesina statements, whether in local struggles over seeds, land, territories, and resources or in international struggles over trade and investment in food and agriculture. Rights have provided a common language to peasants and small-scale farmers organizations that are politically, culturally, and ideologically radically different. The concept of food sovereignty itself is often defined as “rights-based” (Patel 2007; Houtzager 2005; Rosset and Martinez 2010; Borras 2008). In this paper, I argue that La Via Campesina has claimed food sovereignty as a collective right (Claeys 2012, 852) and that it could, in the future, become a new human right.”

27. Given another round, beyond food sovereignty and food security would have been other issues—indeed of food and freedom, jobs and justice, land and liberation—that make a recovery just and lasting, inclusive and transformative. Thank you, social workers. Thank you, IFSW New York. As CoNGO president, I feel proud that IFSW is a CoNGO full member and serves on the CoNGO board, sharing in leadership so that the NGO’s voice is heard and the agency empowered at multilateral halls and on issues such as what this event has highlighted.

New York City

16 February 2022

 

 

Toward a just, inclusive, and peaceable digital society: promises and perils, ethical and moral considerations

Presentation by Liberato C. Bautista, President of CoNGO, at the WSIS Forum 2022 Special Track on “Opening of the ICTs for Industry 4.0 and Emerging Digital Technologies for Sustainable Development”

 

11 April 2022 | Geneva, Switzerland | Hybrid

Toward a just, inclusive, and peaceable digital society: promises and perils, ethical and moral considerations

Excellencies, esteemed UN officials, NGO colleagues, ladies, and gentlemen:

Thank you, Ms. Sah, for inviting me to this panel as the President of CoNGO—the Conference of NGOs in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations. The collaboration between WSIS and CoNGO is alive; I want to claim it from the outset.

Please let me respond to the two questions you asked me to address from the vantage point of a civil society and faith-based NGO leader and as a social ethicist. You asked me what concerns come to mind when today we discuss emerging digital technologies, especially sustainable development. 

You also asked me about specific moral and ethical concerns when discussing emerging digital technologies. On this point, I will focus on WSIS Action Line 10, which is about the ethical dimensions of the Information Society, dealing with the common good, ethics, human rights, prevention of the abusive uses of ICTs, and shared values.

Given five minutes to respond, I’ll try a few responses. 

In 2009, during my first term as President of the Conference of NGOs, we entered into a memorandum of agreement with the ITU Director General for CoNGO to be a  civil society focal point for the WSIS Forum. From the WSIS Summits in Geneva (2003) and Tunis (2005), CoNGO has taken a lead role in organizing civil society presence unprecedentedly in many ways at a major UN conferences. 

The CoNGO President during the WSIS Summits, Renate Bloem, later reflected on her experience in the summits, and her comments remain in our assessment even today. Ms. Bloem recounted that  “the substantial and procedural nature of WSIS has been a major step forward in building a new model for global governance and a constructive way of engaging civil society into the process.” 

Looking back, Ms. Bloem reflected that  “WSIS was a successful test of the capacity of the multilateral system to find alternative and innovative ways to integrate a wider range of actors, including NGOs, academic institutions and local authorities, in a long-standing political process. Therefore, the stronger involvement of civil society was a very relevant factor in dealing more adequately with the specific challenges raised by the Information Society.” 

Almost 20 years later, civil society participation in the WSIS process remains crucial. CoNGO Presidents Ms. Bloem, Mr. Cyril Ritchie, and I have spoken annually at these Forums with the message that civil society voice is critical to elaborating for what makes, among other values, a just, inclusive, solidarious, participatory, and sustainable information society. 

“Competent and responsible civil society input enhances coherent and implementable governmental output.” We remain committed to this enterprise every time we, as NGO representatives, claim a place at the table, just like this WSIS Forum and this panel.

On the second question, I would like to say that the digitization of knowledge and the digitalization of information—in all its applications, but especially in industry and commerce, are fraught with moral and ethical considerations. These moral and ethical considerations point to the digital divide and inequalities already raised earlier, including their intersections with more significant economic, political, social, and cultural divides.

These moral and ethical considerations are even more crucial as we deal with digital communications technology like the “Internet of Things” (IoT), cloud computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, digital twin, and the like. 

Knowledge is indeed power. We must therefore strive for an information society—including its technologies—so that knowledge is produced and shared justly, equitably, and peaceably. If the magnetic pull of the moral compass were to point to the common good, are these communications and information technologies close to being common good, indeed common public goods? 

Because communication is intrinsic to our humanity and the relations we build, the right to communication and access to it are “basic human rights, essential to human dignity and a just and democratic society.” Nothing in our pursuit of new technologies should derogate peoples’ dignity and human rights.

Building a future with technologies changing by the second and besieged by intersecting pandemics, including health, economic and social pandemics, is fraught with promise and peril. It could spell the leaving behind of many that would then frustrate the achievement of the SDGs.

The alarm is already sounded in places where analog services will be cut in favor of digitalized streaming, even as more than three billion people from developing countries remain dependent on radio for their information source.

Two NGOs that I represent at the UN—CoNGO and United Methodist Church-General Board of Church and Society—have invariably asserted in their advocacy work that a strong moral compass is needed to direct digital communication and technology to the true ethical north whose elements must constitute respect for peace and the upholding of the fundamental values of freedom, equality, solidarity, tolerance, shared responsibility, and respect for nature and its sustainability.  

These are values of moral significance in the crafting of normative multilateral frameworks. At the core of these ethical values are the voice and agency of human beings who must be conscious rather than passive producers and consumers of digitalized knowledge and information.

Crucial to the principle of access to and stewardship of information communications technology is recognizing that vulnerable and marginalized peoples, especially migrants, indigenous peoples, internally displaced peoples, older persons, people with disabilities, and refugees, will have varying difficulties accessing such digital technologies. 

For indigenous peoples, two concerns about the digitization of indigenous knowledge and the digitalization of information they have produced are whether the principle of free, prior, and informed consent has been recognized and whether indigenous peoples will have the technology to access back what is digitally stored. 

Nothing storing knowledge and information should alienate these from their owners and producers. Speaking of perils, digital technologies must refuse to be the purveyor of the evil of systemic racism, xenophobia, and racial discrimination. Digitalization must be the handmaiden of transborder solidarity and global citizenship. These and more are concerns related to the achievement of digital justice, which also includes free and equitable access by people to information communication technologies, respect for privacy, freedom from being manipulated, misinformed, and undue appropriation of people’s information by digital media.

The Digital Society we ought to foster must be peaceable and secure—for the people and the planet. This is in keeping with a global ethic already inscribed in Agenda 2030 and the 17 SDGs. We must ensure that technologies of digitization and digitalization do not diminish but rather enhance and flourish human,  social and planetary connections. 

Thank you for your kind attention.

________________

The Rev. Dr. Liberato C. Bautista is President of CoNGO–the Conference of NGOs in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations and represents the United Methodist Church–General Board of Church and Society at the United Nations.

Statement by Liberato C. Bautista President of the Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations (CoNGO) at the joint meeting of ECOSOC with the Chairs of its Functional Commissions and Expert Bodies

Educate to Increase Hope and Decrease Fear in a Time of Intersecting Pandemics Joint Statement on the International Day of Education

Education is a human right, essential to well-being and dignity, and is key to achieving the United Nations Agenda 2030. Further, an ethos of global citizenship is required in order to fulfil this bold, people-centered, universal, and planet-sensitive development framework. (Gyeongju Action Plan).

IPPNW, PEAC Institute and CoNGO welcome 50 states ratifications and imminent entry into legal force of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons

JOINT STATEMENT
16 November 2020

Always immoral, but now a new treaty bans nuclear weapons.

On October 24, 2020, exactly 75 years from the day the United Nations opened for business, Honduras became the 50th member state to ratify the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). By crossing the 50 ratifications threshold, this means that in 90 days, on 22 January 2021, the treaty will enter into legal force and become international law, binding on the states that have already ratified it and all those which subsequently ratify the treaty.

Outlawing these genocidal weapons, which International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) and Peace, Education, Art, Communication (PEAC) Institute have been working as partner organizations in the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)—now joined by the Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations (CoNGO) in this statement, representing the will of nongovernmental and humanitarian organizations worldwide, is an essential step toward the prevention of nuclear war. The TPNW’s entry into force is a massive win for planetary health.

The growing danger

The treaty is especially needed in the face of the real and present danger of nuclear war climbing higher than ever. All nine nuclear-armed states are modernizing their arsenals with new, smaller, and more accurate weapons, and some of their leaders are making irresponsible explicit nuclear threats. The cold war is resurgent—hard-won treaties reducing nuclear weapons numbers and types are being trashed while nothing is being negotiated to replace them, let alone build on them. We expect that the incoming Joe Biden administration, in cooperation with the administration of Vladimir Putin, will not allow the New START Treaty to expire before 5 February 2021, narrowly averting a situation where, for the first time since 1972, there would have been no treaty constraints on Russian and US nuclear weapons. This close call demonstrates the risky environment we have entered.  Armed conflicts which could trigger nuclear escalation are increasing in a climate-stressed world.  Armed conflicts which could trigger nuclear escalation are increasing in a climate-stressed world. The rapidly evolving threat of cyber-warfare puts nuclear command and control in jeopardy from both nations and terrorist groups. Close to two thousand nuclear weapons remain on hair-trigger alert, ready to be launched within minutes of a leader’s fateful decision.

The radioactive incineration unleashed by a nuclear war involving even less than 1% of the global nuclear arsenal targeted on cities in one part of the world would be followed by a worldwide nuclear ice age and nuclear famine, putting billions of people in jeopardy.

As medical organizations, including the World Health Organization, International Committee for the Red Cross, the World Medical Association, the World Federation of Public Health Associations, and the International Council of Nurses have confirmed, health and emergency services could not respond substantively to the needs of the victims of even a single nuclear weapon exploded on a city. When there is no cure, prevention is imperative.

Treaties work

A consistent lesson is provided by experience with biological and chemical weapons, antipersonnel landmines, and cluster munitions. Treaties that have codified the rejection of an unacceptable weapon in international law have provided a crucial basis and motivation for the progressive work of eliminating these weapons. Providing one legal standard for all nations has been essential to the substantial progress made in controlling banned weapons. All the weapons subject to treaty prohibition are now less often justified, produced, traded, deployed, and used. No indiscriminate and inhumane weapon has been controlled or eliminated without first being prohibited.

Nine nuclear-armed states, the 30 nuclear-dependent members of NATO, Australia, Japan, and South Korea, appear unlikely to join the TPNW soon. Yet they are already being affected by it, just as some have been influenced by the other treaties banning inhumane weapons, even if they opposed and haven’t joined them. Their hostility to the TPNW and shameful pressure on other states not to support or join it show that the treaty matters, stigmatizes nuclear weapons, and puts them on the wrong side of history. Already the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, major banks, and pension funds have divested from companies manufacturing nuclear weapons. Now that the treaty is entering into force, every responsible financial institution should do the same.

The TPNW fills a gap in international law that for far too long saw the most destructive weapon ever invented, the only weapon which poses an acute existential threat to all humanity and the biosphere, as the only weapon of mass destruction not expressly prohibited under international law.

In a dark time, the TPNW shines a light on the most promising path to free the world from the risk of indiscriminate nuclear violence. The treaty provides a comprehensive and categorical prohibition of nuclear weapons, and the only internationally agreed framework for all nations to fulfill their legal obligation to eliminate nuclear weapons.
Further, the TPNW obliges nations that join to provide long-neglected assistance for the victims of nuclear weapons use and testing and to undertake feasible remediation of environments contaminated by nuclear weapons use and testing.
The NGO community—including humanitarian, development, peace, and human rights organizations worldwide—calls on all states to add their signature and ratify the treaty as a matter of utmost urgency and to faithfully implement it. Time is not on our side, and the TPNW provides our best hope against our worst weapons.

Liberato C. Bautista, President
Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations in
Consultative Relationship with the United Nations (CoNGO)
president@ngocongo.org

Rebecca Irby, President
Peace, Education, Art, Communication (PEAC) Institute
rebecca@peacinstitute.org

Michael Christ, Executive Director
International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW)
mchrist@ippnw.org

 

Presidential Statement on the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize to UN World Food Programme

Presidential Statement on the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize to UN World Food Programme

Liberato C. Bautista, CoNGO President

12 October 2020

 

On behalf of the Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations (CoNGO), I congratulate the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) on its receiving the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of both of its many years of action to alleviate hunger across the world and of its relief work during this time of the pandemic.

The award to the WFP is a yes to food security and a no to “the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict.” In their announcement of the award, the Norwegian Nobel Committee stated: “The link between hunger and armed conflict is a vicious circle: war and conflict can cause food insecurity and hunger, just as hunger and food insecurity can cause latent conflicts to flare up and trigger the use of violence. We will never achieve the goal of zero hunger unless we end the war and armed conflict.”

Funded by the voluntary contributions of UN Member States and civil society worldwide, the World Food Programme is a shining example of cooperation between government on the one hand and civil society on the other. Much of its work depends on partnerships with non-governmental organizations of the kind that the Conference of NGOs is proud to represent.

At this time of crisis, when many governments are struggling to feed their people and in which the incidence of poverty is rising because of economic disruption, CoNGO calls on UN Member States to support the global work of the World Food Programme on nongovernmental organizations to work increasingly together to redouble their efforts to achieve the same goals, and on people of goodwill everywhere to play their part both in supporting the World Food Programme and in urging their governments to do the same.

Presidential Statement on United Nations Charter Day 2020

Presidential Statement on United Nations Charter Day 2020

Liberato C. Bautista, CoNGO President

26 June 2020

On June 26, 1945, a new dawn arose. On that day, the United Nations Charter was signed in San Francisco, creating a successor to the League of Nations and declaring unambiguously that the new United Nations Organization’s goals were, among other things,

  • to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,
  • to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained,
  • to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good

The UN Charter, from the outset, established the world organization to be at the apex of solutions to the major global challenges that are necessary conditions for building a peaceful world, including international economic and social cooperation to ensure social and economic progress for all based on equal rights and self-determination of peoples. For the first time, human rights were made into a central objective of a world organization.

The United Nations Charter created the prime multilateral international institution that would be the linchpin for a complex but indispensable system of interdependencies. Governments and peoples had learned that the alternative to multilateralism—unilateralism and rote nationalism—had led the world to the disasters of two World Wars.

As civil society celebrates the values enshrined in the UN Charter—signed by governments on behalf of” We, the peoples”—and celebrates the values enshrined in the UN Charter, we cannot but ask: Why have wars between, among, and within nations so frequently recurred? Why are inequalities and uneven development between rich and poor increasing internationally and nationally? Why can international financial institutions continue to practice policies at odds with the UN while the Charter calls for coordinating all specialized agencies? Why is the unaccountable power of transnational corporations expanding? Why have the legacies of centuries of slavery, colonialism, and racism not been repaired? Why have treaties and international law been so frequently neglected or undermined? Why has disarmament become forgotten when the resources squandered on arms could add needed resources to sustainable development for all?

Civil society salutes the aims and purposes of the United Nations as defined in the Charter. It will continue to work for their achievement as it has been done untiringly for 75 years. We plead and demand that the governments of UN member states do no less: that they live up to their commitments and promises and take their Charter commitments seriously and unremittingly. As it has done for 72 of those years, since its founding in 1948, the Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations (CoNGO) pleads and demands that governments recognize that the civil society organizations in their countries and internationally are powerful force working for the public good, acting selflessly to promote and expand those exact causes for which the United Nations was established.

Article 71 of the UN Charter opened the door to non-governmental organizations. Over the years, there have been innumerable beneficial interactions between the UN and NGOs—in all their operational and terminological diversity. Establishing formal consultative status for NGOs with the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) was groundbreaking for the system of international relations. ECOSOC Resolution 1996/31  governs the establishment of consultative status and accreditation of a broader civil society group to United Nations conferences and consultations. It contains principles and modalities for regular NGO participation in designated United Nations bodies that have stood the test of time and enjoy broad NGO support. In that context, and in furtherance of the UN Charter values, CoNGO pleads and demands that governments take every opportunity to further incorporate into their deliberative and decision-making processes the competent voices of NGOs and all civil society. The encouragement and acceptance by governments of the input of the knowledge, competence, and experience of peoples and communities will consequently enhance the output of governmental mechanisms, thus making treaties, conventions, and other decisions more realistic and implementable. That would be wholly in line with the goals of the Charter.

It is time now to reaffirm the benefits, indeed the indispensability, of multilateralism. Renewed and reinvigorated multilateralism, especially in this year of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the UN, is fundamental to achieving two other of the UN Charter principles:

  • to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security
  • to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all

The UN Charter principles are crucial to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, which encapsulate the fundamental purpose of having an effective and reliable United Nations Organization devoted to “the advancement of all peoples” and shaping a more just, participatory, peaceable, and equitable world.

But for the United Nations System to be effective and reliable, it must be adequately resourced—in finance and personnel. CoNGO repeats its oft-expressed alarm over the adverse effects of the continuous shrinking of the regular budget of the United Nations. Significantly more than in 1945,   many of today’s world problems respect neither physical nor territorial boundaries. The unfinished agenda of decolonization and corollary issues related to self-determination cry out for attention.

The United Nations System is more and more the world’s “plumber” not of last but of first resort, called into service to “stop the leaks” before a deluge (climate change, a pandemic, natural disasters, weapons of mass destruction, endemic poverty, global hunger, forced migration, gender violence, and injustice, racism…) overwhelms our only planet. For this, we demand governments adopt a sufficiently increased UN regular budget this year and a generous increase over the long term. And, of course, governments pay their contributions fully and on time!

“Building Back Better” is not just a slogan for the post-COVID-19 recovery period (long as that may yet be) but a challenge to build better on the UN Charter. Even more urgent now is to go back beyond pandemic management and into addressing the roots of our global maladies by acting justly and peaceably and ensuring that peoples and communities reap and enjoy the benefits of multilateral negotiations equitably, foremost of which are agreements in the protection of human rights and ecological justice. And we must build back so that neither war, poverty, nor systemic racism is inevitable. The Charter is a tool and an opportunity. “We the peoples” plead and demand that governments work with us—in consultation, collaboration, and cooperation—to save succeeding generations from the scourges of the twenty-first century.

New York City

For further information:
Liberato C. Bautista, president@ngocongo.org

Intervention at the ECOSOC Presidency Briefing for Civil Society

The Power of Co: CoNSULTATION, CoLLABORATION, CoOPERATION

The Power of Co: CoNSULTATION, CoLLABORATION, CoOPERATION

Acceptance Speech by Liberato C. Bautista, President of CoNGO

Thank you, delegates of the 26th CoNGO General Assembly, for this signal honor to be, once again, at your service as President of CoNGO. What an honor and privilege to be associated with this distinguished conferential body of dedicated nongovernmental organizations gathered for consultation, collaboration, and cooperation under the umbrella of what we call CoNGO—the Conference of Nongovernmental Organizations in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations.

Seventy years of existence for an organization like CoNGO is no mean feat. This veritable gathering of nongovernmental organizations is almost synonymous with the life of a compelling proposition seventy-three years ago, the United Nations. In 2002, during that decade of international consultations and conferences, we sought consultative status with the UN through its Economic and Social Council. In so doing, we formalized our affirmation of what its Charter required the UN to do: to find  “suitable arrangements for consultation” with nongovernmental organizations.

It is worth noting that our organization is as old as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The seventy years of this preeminent universal instrument are the same seventy years of our organization. This instrument, more popularly referred to as UDHR, inscribes the understanding of the foundational character of human dignity—the building blocks of human rights—which is that human dignity is born with every human being. This instrument has given the necessary protections to human dignity through fundamental human rights that are now enumerated in this most globally accessed international multilateral agreement. Our solemn obligation is to affirm human dignity and our commitment to promoting human rights.

The drafting of the UDHR drew from the expertise of nongovernmental and civil society representatives. Seventy years have tested the strength of this instrument. And for seventy years, nongovernmental organizations and members of civil society have dedicated, if not given their lives, to defend this sacred premise that we owe no one our human rights save that they arise from the dignity that is born with each one for simply being human.

Today, CoNGO is the beneficiary of this consultative arrangement with the UN. It has afforded us all the protections the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affords. And these are all civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights. The UDHR and the succeeding instruments that are now part of the human rights regime that they have inspired to develop have, in considerable measure, propelled our imagination and fruition of just and democratic functioning of society and its institutions, which, if provisioned well, and sustainably, they can genuinely work in securing for us—indeed for humanity and the planet—the conditions that make for peace and security, prosperity and sustainable development, human dignity and human rights, and the rule of law that bolsters democratic participation. These pillars of the United Nations undergird our consultative relationship with this indispensable institution called the United Nations.

This consultative relationship is multiplied in its power and impact when harnessed with the most excellent intentions and commitment. That multiplier is the “power of Co,” It is the power generated and produced from consultation, collaboration, and cooperation. By reproducing consultation, collaboration, and cooperation in many forms, we also multiply their impact not just for the institution called the UN but, more importantly, the communities and associations whose aims are to better and secure the lives and livelihoods of “We, the peoples.”

The idea of the power of co comes from the mathematical power of pi. But alas, not only am I not a mathematician, but the little that I know of mathematics is very little. I am a failure in this field. But I was to appropriate part of what the mathematical power of pi means. In that case, if we assume the entire membership of the conference as the mathematical circle, we can then measure the power of co by the distance around the circle’s perimeter (conference) and the distance across the broadest part of the circle (membership). That may need to be clarified mathematically. In its crudest way to explain the power of co, it means that the strength of our conference—the power of co—comes from the intensity of consultation across CoNGO (consultation)  and the involvement, through collaboration and cooperation, of the broadest expanse of CoNGO membership. That’s the power.

The power of Co is within us. We are CoNGO. All members of CoNGO are more vital than CoNGOs together. It is in the DNA of CoNGO to confer with each other; this is why we are called a Conference. We are a conferential body where conferring with each other is the lifeblood of what we do and how we implement our organizational mission and objectives. As we confer with each other,  we also confer upon each other trust and confidence, integrity and accountability, and indeed, even relevance.

The power of Co brings to our consultative relationship with the UN and the multilateral enterprise a tremendous opportunity to prove and offer our rich and varied competencies. One venue to offer such competencies is in the implementation of Agenda 2030 and the realization of the 169 targets under the 17 sustainable development goals. And CoNGO is dedicated to the critical support and implementation of Agenda 2030, even pushing them where their limitations are pegged.

Make no mistake; the power of Co will also be challenged. Not the least because togetherness bolstered by consultation, collaboration, and cooperation is formidable, but because togetherness erects a strong front that must and will challenge the shrinking of democratic space, the suppressing of democratic discourse, and even those that foment incivility in civic life and civil society.

The rise of illiberal democracy, intolerant practices in society, and the continued prosecution of pernicious and unjust wars, coupled with unrelenting climate change and the persistence of formidable epidemics, and the rise of pandemics in our world today are conditions that will test our strength and the power of Co. But these conditions will coax and lead us to demonstrate together the ability of Co that comes from the multitude of competencies in our membership and that make for our conferential body an organization of note and importance. But we must seize the opportunity, rise to the occasion, and keep our work strong.

Indeed, we must ensure the UN is well-provisioned to meet these global challenges. We must mobilize the power of Co for the adequate funding of the UN and its related agencies. This work will be challenging because these global conditions will sap energy and resources from the UN member states and make them think the international agenda will be secondary to their national interests. Sometimes these interests are disguised as sovereign assertions over increasing cosmopolitanism.

The power of Co positions us to argue that the national and the international are simultaneous locations, much as the local and the global. It is to say that we must address together conditions that go beyond the backyard of nation-states, beyond constructed and imagined borders.

This requires glocal imagination!

The power of Co positions us to challenge the hurdles put up by functionaries to make our physical and political access to political processes and decision-making venues more difficult—be they in the local government units, national governments, or international institutions like the UN. These conditions also have the potential to derail the best-intentioned internationally agreed development goals and to imperil social justice agendas of the peoples of the world, even of the planet, not the least about the overarching agendas and crosscutting principles of gender equality and inclusion and the primordial safeguarding of the dignity and rights of children.

But we also know that when we rise to the occasion and meet these tests and challenges head on it is this test that we will prove to the nation-states, indeed to the member states of the United Nations, that the power of Co is the power of “We, the peoples.” The UN cannot deny and renege on a charter obligation.

The power of Co stands at the threshold of unprecedented challenges and opportunities. They are the same challenges that will test anyone’s leadership, and indeed, they will try the Presidency of this organization.

Given another opportunity to serve as your president, let us harness as much of the power of Co so that together we will rise to the occasion and make visible our contribution to bettering humanity and the planet.

Defining the present, shaping the future

CoNGO must be ready to offer its energy and facility in making available venues, locations, and platforms for the consultative process to be meaningful and relevant in the campaigns and struggles of peoples and nations who want their issues and concerns to get a hearing in the international community. We can bring CoNGO to a level where it can help civil society re-imagine international relations so that NGOs can be valued and taken seriously as a pillar of the global system. While hitherto nation-states dominate the international system, we are also aware of the vast potential, some of which are already being harnessed through formations like the World Social Forum, of civil society in defining the present and shaping the future.

The revitalization of civil society must happen far and beyond the governance centers of governmental and intergovernmental bodies. This is the genius of the much-needed outreach to the regions of the world that hitherto need to be represented in the conferencing we do as an international organization.

We look forward to another 70 years of CoNGO life and work today. This must mean for us the infusion of new access points in the geographical reach of our work and the enfolding in our agendas of far more varied concerns than are now imagined in the confines of the three centers of our operation.

We cannot rest on the perception that the world is global because our fingertips can travel the world. Instead, the world is global because we intentionally clasp hands and join arms together to feel and address the aches and pains, and the joys and jubilations, of peoples and nations raging against injustice and unpeace and waging campaigns and struggles for durable peace and sustainable livelihoods.

In the end, ensuring access to the UN is part of the larger project of making the UN a responsive, accountable, and relevant entity in the lives of peoples and nations so that access is not in vain for those who have to toil daily for mere existence. I can only surmise that thoughts of food occupy the imaginations of those who struggle every day and where to get food.

I must confess that much of international law I know remains wrought in the imagination of the relations and negotiation of ties that the so-called Westphalian truce in 1648 has spawned through the creation of sovereign nation-states. In the end, the United Nations is a function of sovereign nation-states gathering to craft decisions of global import need not and cannot be the end of our imagination of what this extraordinary institution can be.

The permutations of the “transformation of Westphalia,” including but especially multilateralism, must inevitably be part of a meaningful transformation project that, in many ways, truly honors “we the peoples.” We can make it the beginning of a transformation. That transformation must necessarily, even constantly, include the engagement of the broadest representation of “we the peoples” in their varied formations—NGOs, civil society organizations, or social movements. CoNGO must engender transformative discourse to locate, nay relocate, a narrative of empowerment of peoples at the center of governance at all levels. It may take a counter-narrative to engender such transformative discourse and praxis in international and grassroots practice.

The direction to which I want to bring CoNGO is a humble contribution to the construal of new venues and structures of empowerment—ones that are not centered on the presidency but on the constituency. CoNGO is a membership organization, and the members, gathered as committees and working groups, we can be a meaningful and relevant force in not only transforming the discourse of just and peaceable governance but practicing it even more so.

Whatever we do, we must no longer be content with what the Westphalian project has endowed us—the impositions of the global nature of our interaction press upon the necessity of both location and positionality. We must realize that, by commission or omission, what we do as non-governmental organizations, if they are to be relevant, are an exercise in the politics of transformation.

We can no longer be an organizational form that proceeds with politics as usual in these unusual times. We must be about politics that organizes and mobilizes around “the creation of the fundamentally new, which is also fundamentally better.”

Our normative claims about durable peace, sustainable development, human rights, and dignity must evince the transformed societies we imagine and envision the future. It is a future that matches our normative claims with that of the interpretive significance of the victims of this world—those who do not see, feel, and experience in their lives the presence and the living out of our claims. For example, our normative claims about human rights do not mean anything to someone detained for one’s political beliefs until this person is released from prison.

Human rights learning is about making human rights not just a normative claim but a possible and visible way of life. We must rise to the challenge of making human rights a way of life and living! The imagination of human rights learning as truly embodying and engendering human rights in our being, knowing and doing, might yet transform human rights in ways that, in the words of Michelle Foucault, the French philosopher and thinker, “bear the lightning of possible storms.” Here is the full quote:

“I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listens to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes—all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.”

Our organizational values

The canvas on which we will inscribe the next 70 years of CoNGO is not entirely blank, and it is open to new ideas and forms of being, knowing, and doing. We must contribute to continuing to define the present to be counted in shaping the future. But we must do so as a credible partner and worthy interlocutor between the vastness of civil society and the governmental and intergovernmental system.

As your President, much like the first time you gave me this mantle of leadership, I will lead with the organizational values of accountability, transparency, and responsibility.

Accountability for the ideas we prosper and the platforms and resources we provide for these ideas to grow.

Transparency in how we engage the broader world of civil society and global governance—with the clout we exercise, with the power of the structures with which we exercise our responsibilities, and transparency in how we use the resources we generate and the resources we are privileged to manage.

And then responsibility that owes its salience not in how we become good at self-referential exercises but in how best we permeate civil society by diffusing ourselves in solidarity with others in need of our accompaniment in their hopes, struggles, and aspirations.

As we move on to another set of organizational values, as I will lay out next, we will continue instituting mechanisms and measures for the first set to permeate our corporate ethos.

What’s in a name: restating the power of Co

As I take leadership for the second time, I want to emphasize that you can hold my administration and the board of directors by putting together a set of organizational values.

In the field of non-governmental work, we cannot rest on our laurels, self-referentially thinking of what makes us unique and essential no matter how needed this exercise must be.

To not rest on our laurels means that because we know we have the potential and resources to make a difference in defining the present and shaping the future, we must get down to work not soon but now and not alone, still, in consultation with the UN, collaboration within the CoNGO fold, in cooperation with like-minded NGOs whose values are equally about those that define us.

If we know that the issues and concerns beset us are vast and daunting to address, we too must realize that any single organization or institution cannot do and go it alone. CoNGO (in all caps) must look at once humble itself to know we are but one among many in work for social transformation in the multilateral enterprise’s vast landscape.

We are building on solid blocks of accomplishments by my predecessor president and the board of directors who worked with him. I now challenge us to relaunch ourselves beyond simply writing the acronym of our name with one small O. Every so often as we can, we must pronounce our name as Co-NGO merely to emphasize the power of Co. This is not to entirely abandon what we’ve always pronounced as CoNGO but more as a way to catch the attention of the curious watcher and the serious collaborator, again by demonstrating the power of Co.

When we say we are co-NGOs together, I believe we are saying that our strength as an umbrella organization of many members worldwide lies in our being a collaborative body of many diverse NGOs. The power of our collaboration is secondarily about how many we are and primarily because our number has a beautiful diversity. When this number and this diversity define what together is, I think we can make a difference.

We must increase our membership through a systematic membership drive even as we must seek to diversify that membership through, for example, regional outreach such as the one that culminates at this meeting when we launch the Asia Regional Committee.

To be Co-NGOs together is to be consultative, and this means taking the consultative status seriously, as I have laid out above. It also means demonstrating the consultative process that defines how we conduct business. This will entail a reappraisal of the CoNGO Substantive Committees so that their raison d’etre—a gathering of NGOs engaging substantive issues and themes that matter in their interface with the UN—is indeed what they are in mission and method of work.

We are Co-NGOs together, harnessing the power of Co when we recognize that the CoNGO substantive committees are the veins, vessels, and platforms through which the consultative process is not only organized collaboratively but a widely shared formation and function by CoNGO members and like-minded persons and organizations.

We are Co-NGOs together, harnessing the power of Co when we recognize the lifeblood that flows through the veins and vessels that are the substantive committees. This lifeblood, our members, defines our competences and competencies and marks our relevance.

The CoNGO board members compose the limbs that make our conferential body move to work. The members serve as the nexus that connects the vessels that will pump the necessary energy and blood for the proper functioning of our organization.

So much more to be said. I barely scratched what being CoNGO means. More must be spoken of this and what becoming CoNGO and belonging to CoNGO means. And the power of Co will even be more powerful when you join our new board and me in saying what needs to be done to make our organization more robust, relevant, effective, and responsive. To be, to belong, and to become CoNGO are matters I would like to invite conversation on in the years of my term.

The work in this chapter of our life together has just begun. And I am grateful for your support, now and in the future.

CoNGO General Assembly

Geneva, Switzerland

3 March 2018

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