November 2017 Working Group Update
Alternatives Project
After a series of calls with multiple members of the working group over the last few months, we are just about to complete a draft of concept note for the Alternatives Project, which was based on ideas shared at the 2016 Global Strategy Meeting.
Your feedback on this concept note continues to be very welcome as we begin our work of articulating and amplifying alternatives to the dominant economic and development model. We hope to organize online discussions to facilitate wider input from members in the lead up to our Economic Policy Strategy Planning Meeting scheduled for 7-10 February.
If you are interested in contributing to this project which aims to shift discourse, policies and, ultimately, power relations with wider systemic impacts, please get in touch with Leanne, at lsajor@escr-net.org.
Promoting respect for human rights in development finance
with Coalition for Human Rights in Development
ESCR-Net members joined a meeting of the Coalition for Human Rights in Development in Washington, D.C., USA, 7-10 October. Approximately 70 representatives of 54 organizations came together just before the World Bank Group’s Annual Meetings.
The Coalition for Human Rights in Development emerged from the Bank on Human Rights Campaign, which was co-founded by ESCR-Net in 2014. Since then, multiple members focused on development finance and human rights have engaged in different efforts. The meeting was convened for the Coalition’s members to reflect on the past two years, share tools and resources, and collectively establish priorities for the coming period.
ESCR-Net was represented in the gathering by several organizational members of the Economic Policy Working Group, who have been active in the Coalition, as well as by a staff person from the Secretariat.
1. What issues related to economic policy or wider economic system are you confronting? What do you think is the added value of the human rights framework in analyzing and confronting these issues?
The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival is bringing grassroots communities across the United States together around the intersecting evils of poverty, racism, the war economy and ecological devastations. The Souls of Poor Folk Audit, in particular, will seek to understand: what happened in the past 50 years in relation to these four broad themes that led us to where we are today? What gains were made and what was lost? Why? Under the four areas, we are looking at issues of health, water affordability, wages, affordable housing and homelessness, incarceration, militarism and many others, and the question of economic policy is at the core of these issues.
The project will create a structural analysis based on an empirical and historical assessment that will help us envision a way forward for the Campaign.
It has been 50 years since Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King advanced a vision of the Poor People’s Campaign, today’s Poor People’s Campaign is asking for a moral revival. Many people are impacted, but poor people carry the brunt of the four evils of poverty, racism, militarism and ecological devastation. A Campaign that is fighting for all of these is, fundamentally, about securing our human dignity and our human rights to water, food, jobs, health care, and more.
2. Could you give a brief overview of how your organization is thinking alternative(s)? Why is it important to articulate alternatives and what strategies are you using to promote it?
Ultimately the Poor Peoples Campaign is about building the power of poor and dispossessed people, which has not been possible in decades. Our strategies include building deep relationships within and between communities across the country. We are organizing 40 days of direct action in 25 states and Washington D.C. by the summer of 2018. We are aiming to organize 1,000 people in each of these 26 places and coordinate our activities, civil disobedience, political education, and cultural work targeting state legislatures, state capitals, and Washington D.C. We are building the power of poor people, not just to realize economic justice but also human rights for all. In conjunction with the
Campaign, the Audit will look at the ways in which the different issues we are confronting such as racism, homelessness, policing, etc. intersect, and this information will shape the demands and the direction of our strategies for those 40 days.
3. Where do you see connections between your own efforts and collective work with fellow ESCR-Net members?
We need to learn from the movements from other countries, what have they done to confront these issues in their particular history and contexts. We need to learn from each other on what works and what doesn’t work given the nature of the global economy. Economic policy today is global in nature. What happens in one part of the world has ripple effects in another part, or it has impact regionally, that in turn has a global effect. The four focus issues of the Poor People’s Campaign – poverty, racism, militarism and ecological devastation – are to some extent the same evils that dispossessed, poor communities have to confront all over the world. And on the fundamental
question of human rights, we cannot just have human rights in one country. The forces that we are up against are global in nature and are on multiple fronts. We must build the power of poor people globally, coordinate and fight together.
1. What issues related to economic policy or wider economic system are you confronting? What do you think is the added value of the human rights framework in analyzing and confronting these issues?
We are challenging extractivism as a development model which does not serve the interest of indigenous groups and peasants. We are confronting the dominant economic ideology which is highly unequal and is based on exploitation and marketing of the people’s natural resources for export and for profit. Extractivism is a development model which our governments inherited from the colonial era where natural resources in the colonies fed the metropolis with raw materials needed for capital accumulation and fueled development in the global north. This development model—now backed by international financial institutions, like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, as an engine
that could fuel economic growth—has destroyed Africa’s subsistence economies due to mass land dispossessions and environmental devastation. The majority of African people, more than 70 percent, depend on subsistence economies. Extractivism threatens indigenous peoples’ right to development and their right to consent.
2. Could you give a brief overview of how your organization is thinking alternative(s)? Why is it important to articulate alternatives and what strategies are you using to promote it?
We are advocating for people-driven, endogenous development which is based upon the people’s understanding of development, taking into consideration their subsistence economies as supported by their social systems and spiritual well-being. This participatory development alternative integrates people’s indigenous knowledge systems, striking a balance between their material, social and spiritual well-being, and seeks to overcome development that is defined in purely Western terms. We believe that development should be driven internally and not externally. Therefore, we are using participatory methodologies to build the local people’s knowledge from below through creating those spaces which allow the
people to start imagining thekind of development that they would like to see.
3. Where do you see connections between your own efforts and collective work with fellow ESCR-Net members?
We both realise and believe that the current dominant economic model has failed, as evidenced by the global economic crises, and that there is need for an alternative development model. Acknowledgement of the paradox of plenty, where people in the Global South languish in poverty yet they are rich in natural resources is an area of convergence; where economic policies are driven and informed by transnationals and multinational corporations in collusion with the states, which have been given the role of putting in place conditions which are necessary for wealth accumulation by corporations and a few political elites, at the expense of the majority. I think we agree that this current
situation calls for thinking through and imagining the economic model that works for the Global South.
1. What issues related to economic policy or wider economic system are you confronting? What do you think is the added value of the human rights framework in analyzing and confronting these issues?
In Mexico, as in the rest of Latin America, we are perpetually contending with an economic model that privileges the participation of extractive industries, such as mining and hydrocarbons, over the protection of the environment and, in a significant proportion of cases, over peoples’ rights. Particularly in this country, the increase in extractive activities is linked to rising socio-environmental conflicts and the rights violations that result.
In this sense, the international human rights framework serves to bring into relief the poor practices of companies and governments. Likewise, international instruments constitute an important tool for the defense of land.
2. Could you give a brief overview of how your organization is thinking alternative(s)? Why is it important to articulate alternatives and what strategies are you using to promote it?
In coordination with other civil society organizations, Fundar has been working on a campaign called Valor al Campesino for the past several years. The main objective of the campaign is to propose better public policy and resources for small-scale food producers as an alternative to the extractive model.
Beyond this campaign, within Fundar we are actively discussing alternatives to the current development model. In Mexico, we can draw on various examples of community-led responses that are emerging with increasing momentum to confront extractive projects, such as cooperative economies and/or energy cooperatives, which are gaining more and more momentum. Therefore, I think it is fundamental to know what alternatives are emerging in other countries, in order to confront the development model and connect these responses.
3. Where do you see connections between your own efforts and collective work with fellow ESCR-Net members?
I think we can join together to search for, discuss, and analyze new economic and political alternatives to development. While these discussions might be slightly philosophical initially, I think they will provide us with important elements, an important foundation in order to better understand what type of development we need.
I also perceive a connection in relation to the issue of gender and extractive industries. In particular, I believe that there have already been several isolated attempts to better comprehend how these industries impact women, and what type of institutional frameworks are required. In Mexico, we are part of a group on gender and extractive industries that is endeavoring to grow and identify other organizations in Latin America, given that the contexts within which we are working are very similar.
The Economic Policy and Human Rights Working Group seeks to develop critical analysis of the global economic system via the human rights framework, facilitate collective advocacy to challenge unjust structures and policies, and promote alternative models of development.
Stay connected to our ESCR-Net Economic Policy and Human Rights Working Group
Email Working Group Coordinator Leanne Sajor at: lsajor@escr-net.org
Use our Google Group, a private e-mail list, to contact fellow members of this working group: escr-net-cawg@googlegroups.com
Visit out our website:
escr-net.org/economicpolicy
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