On 8 – 10 February 2018, 23 ESCR-Net members from social movements and NGO members from around the world, came together for a three-day strategy meeting of the Economic Policy Working Group (EPWG) in Tunis, Tunisia. The primary aim of the meeting was to establish a two-year strategic plan for the working group.

Grounded in the Common Charter for Collective Struggle as the starting point for future advocacy and campaign plans for the EPWG, members built on EPWG discussions from the Global Strategy Meeting and collectively agreed to prioritize work in the following next two years that:

1. deepens and popularizes a human rights-based critique of the global economic system and structure, informed and guided by social movements and grassroots struggles;
2. amplifies and advocates for shared alternatives to the dominant socio-economic model, grounded in lived experiences and local struggles, with an inclusive vision for realizing human rights and environmental justice, and
3. strengthens the political and institutional constitution of the working group and the larger Network to fully understand and engage with economic policy from a human rights lens.

To learn more about the meeting see this Collective Work News

Next Steps

The outcomes of the meeting were incorporated into a 2 Year Action Plan for the Economic Policy Working Group which was shared for inputs to the whole working group. You can find the 2 Year Action Plan here in Arabic, English and Spanish.

Project Plans for our three areas of work are also available below:

• Alternatives (Arabic, English, Spanish)
• Systemic Critique (Arabic, English, Spanish)
• Political and Institutional Strengthening

Next Steps

Your ideas, comments and questions on these Project Plans are very much welcomed! If you would like to input into and become actively involved in any or all these projects, please get in touch with Leanne (lsajor@escr-net.org)

At the Global Strategy Meeting, members emphasized the need to more effectively use the strength of ESCR-Net across 75 countries to challenge the common global conditions that systematically undermine human rights through collective action and campaigning across the Network.  To further operationalize this mandate, ESCR-Net is planning a meeting in Durban, South Africa, 22-25 July 2018, co-hosted by Abahlali baseMjondolo in partnership with the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI).

In preparation for this meeting, the Economic Policy Working Group organized a working group wide discussion to begin identifying priority areas for network-wide campaigning and collective action. In this initial discussion members identified elements of an effective campaign from their experience:

1. a concrete and achievable objective,
2. a broader framework would be useful for mass appeal, but the objectives need to be specific,
3. backed by very good research, and
4. organic or emerging via bottom-up approach. 

In line with the concept note for the process, members on the call also affirmed that any proposal from the EPWG could build on existing projects and engage the diverse expertise that already exist in ESCR-Net.

Next Steps

The EPWG will organize a 2^nd online discussion in either 21 or 22 June to deepen proposals or potential contributions to collective action and campaigning. If you would like to participate in the online discussion, please email Leanne (lsajor@escr-net.org) and note your preferred date on this Doodle Poll. (Both options are for 9AM EST, the Doodle poll should automatically convert this to your local time.)

Political and Institutional Strengthening of our network is a cross-cutting project of the Economic Policy Working Group. It aims to strengthen the capacity of working group members to fully engage with economic policy from a human rights lens that is grounded in local and lived experiences, by learning from skills and expertise that already exists within the Network. Among other things, this project intends to facilitate member to member information exchange and strategic support.

To this goal, members decided to generate a database of organizational profiles and ongoing projects related to economic policy and human rights. The database would be available online and periodically updated. The purpose of this member generated database is to encourage information sharing, collaboration between members and support members in mapping spaces and processes to advance their collective advocacy goals.

Next Steps

Please fill out this google spreadsheet with your organization’s information. This will be open for entries until Friday, 29 June. After this date, the spreadsheet will be closed for translation. If you need language support, please feel free to contact Leanne (lsajor@escr-net.org)

Co-founder and co-director of the Climate Litigation Network, which is a project of the Urgenda Foundation, and an individual member of ESCR-Net.

• What global challenge or opening is your organization discussing?

My organization works on climate change, which is a massive and systemic threat to human rights all over the world. Our approach is to take governments that are failing to do enough to address climate change to court. In 2015, my colleagues filed the first case in the world that resulted in a court ordering a government to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. It sparked a wave of litigation against other national governments, including Belgium, Switzerland, the UK, US, New Zealand and, most recently, a case that we are supporting against the government of Ireland. Governments are responsible for many of the economic and political structures that are responsible for propping up our carbon-intensive, environmentally and socially destructive economy, so we want to hold them accountable for that.

• What project are you most excited about and why?

I’m excited by the EPWG’s work to popularize alternatives to the dominant socio-economic model. Any model that seeks to be genuinely sustainable will have to address the fact that we need to rapidly transition away from our extremely natural resource and fossil fuel-intensive economies and societies. Critically, Northern countries must take the lead because they have historically benefited from extractivism and continue to consume the most resources on a per capita basis. Doing so would help to redress some of the massive global imbalances that currently exist across a range of economic and social rights.  

• Why is collective work with fellow members important to you and your organization?

Collective work is important to me because we believe that litigation itself can only achieve so much; we need social movements to pressure governments and hold them accountable. E.g. A case that’s currently underway in Belgium has 37,000 plaintiffs who are ordinary Belgian citizens. These cases need social movements to ensure that governments listen when courts confirm that they are violating human rights.

of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR)

• What global challenge or opening is your organization discussing?

It is no doubt the increasing inequality. If the current trends of wealth concentration continue for another few decades, then a tiny minority of us will control all the world's wealth. The challenge is to reverse this trend, and the immense task we are all faced with is how to do that especially those who benefit from this wealth concentration are the ones who decide the policy, control coercive and non-coercive forms of power, and shape the discourse around these issues.

• What project are you most excited about and why?

This dire situation makes a discussion on alternative models and the transition to it more relevant and urgent than ever. It is usually when crisis hits that serious transformations tend to happen, and we are undoubtedly facing an economic and environmental crisis that a continuation of the current model will only lead to its intensification. The crucial question is: how much worse does it need to get, before the world is able to do anything about it? One would hope that we can learn from past experiences and develop a sense of what a looming crisis looks like, and manage some aspects of it preemptively. However, observing policies of institutions like the IMF, this does not seem to be the case.  This is why, the EPWG’s work in general and the Alternatives Project in particular, is more relevant than ever. The Alternatives Project is not only important to help us start envisioning what a good and fair economic model for a healthy and sustainable future might look like, but also to warn us about what our world would look like if we just sit back and do nothing.

• Why is collective work with fellow members important to your organization?

Collective action has always been romanticized, but what we need now is for collective action to be “practicalized”, that is to present and rebrand it as the most practical approach to the current global struggles. The kind of economic and environmental struggles that the world is facing at the moment cannot be dealt with if we remain atomized, over-dependent on individual initiative or the so-called “entrepreneurial spirit”.

EIPR recently published a new report on the International Finance Corporation’s use of tax havens and politically connected officials in their development investments in Egypt. To learn more about their findings and for a copy of the full report please see this link.