Remarks from Kate Gilmore, Deputy Executive Director of United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), at the UNDG Dialogues on Implementation of the Post-2015 Agenda “Partnerships with Civil Society” Global Meeting. The meeting took place in Siem Reap, Cambodia. Excellencies, Distinguished Representatives of Civil Society and the UN System, Ladies and Gentlemen, It is a privilege to address you on behalf of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Our sincere gratitude to the Royal Government of Cambodia and the Government of Korea for exemplary hospitality and the United Nations Volunteers (UNV), UN Non-Governmental Liaison Service (UN-NGLS) and the UN Millennium Campaign (UNMC) for their collaboration. We stand at the brink of much more, of course, than this first day of a welcomed meeting together. The world stands at the cusp – at the starting gates - of a major shift – for and over the coming 15 years - in how this principled but ultimately practical project of human progress, that we call “development”, is to be conceived. The “Global Conversation” on this new development agenda proves - through the voices of nearly 5 million people - that across the world – in each region – in every country, in thousands of communities, whether they be aware of the Post-2015 agenda process or not, people are grappling with exactly this question - what they wish the future to be for them, for their families and their communities and how best to accelerate our progress there. Development after all, is also a deeply personal and intensely local question, something that global actors can lose sight of, in the melee of political, technical and bureaucratic narratives that have seized international development dialogue over these past 2 years. But we must also recall that the machinery of the post 2015 process has not caused this grappling with our future. Rather, it has attempted to capture it, and it does aspire to influence it. Application of development goals, indicators and targets post-2015 will be expected of and supported by governments the world over and by the multilateral system as a whole and by myriad others. However, a critical transmogrification is to occur. A shift in the centre of gravity - crudely from a focus on developing world poverty to a universal concern with global and local inequality. This resetting of power’s balance in favor of a rebalance of power, stands on a stool of three legs – the state, multilaterals and civil society. Impatient with injustice, wanting for conclusive eradication of preventable human suffering, seeking redress in the face of unconscionable inequality, fearful of myriad fundamentalisms’ cruel extremes, living with the consequences of a planet and a climate under duress: surely people the world over have the greater stake in the world’s future, far beyond the policy maker, the business mogul, the governor or even the humanitarian. After all, people are not development’s problem, they are development’s purpose. People are not just development’s end, they are its central means. So how is their participation, their engagement best to flow? For change is indeed changing – accelerating and intensifying – greater numbers of young people, greater numbers of older people, more people on the move within and across borders, more people moving out of rural communities to live in urban centres; if communications technology is diluting and dissolving distances but perhaps entrenching differences, then how are people to organize and relate, express and create? From Venezuela to Tunis to Cairo to Hong Kong but against the backdrop too of Bangui, Juba, Gaza and Damascus – people are acting in and on their worlds – worlds marred by poverty and inequality, by exclusion and by alienation, by claim and counter claim. And they are doing so also beyond the immediate reach of their formal representatives or standard channels. Amplifying their voices through social media and social organizing, telling their own stories about what matters; about what is right and wrong, intervening sometimes creatively and sometimes destructively, to assert, to express, to discover, to rebuild, acting for good and,in some instances, acting for hate. Civil society is alive – a vibrant aggregate of non-governmental spaces, organizations, institutions and actors - manifesting the interests and will of citizens, not just consumers; of communities not just markets; of people not only elites …. However, people’s agitation bends so quickly away from inclusive sustainable development when the social assets and underpinning infrastructure of inclusive, transparent and pluralistic civil society are not supported. Legal, financial and social investments in the assets for civil organizing: in its organic knowledge production and its pluralistic responsive exchange; intentional opening up of spaces where the exercise of solidarity may flourish, solidarity of the kind that exposes systemic and structural discrimination even when power wishes it to be silenced; that brings powerlessness in front of power; that organizes immediately for local solutions; that strengthens good governance because there is scrutiny and demand; that platforms peaceful civic action for issues otherwise forgotten, neglected or rejected - That is civil civil society - the source and consequence of the conditions in which pluralism, dissent, commonality and difference, discovery and thus human dignity too may flourish. If in this more interconnected, yet somehow more fragmented, world, we are to keep stepping towards a future world that is sustainably different from that which so troubles our gaze today, we would ignore the essential ingredient that is civil society at our peril. Nowhere is this clearer than in regards to young people. Our investments in adolescents and youth, now and throughout their life course, will define development’s trajectories for years to come. But this call to step up to, for and with, young people is not a call to remedial benevolence. It is rather a matter of how can we best flourish open spaces for young people to gather, organize, express and explore so that we might indeed usher, more quickly and inclusively - on to center stage - the global population of innovators that we need if we are to meet the challenges that this fragile, finite planet faces, and in terms that will sustain our children, their children and the children that they too will want to raise in dignity and rights. To ascend the transformative shifts envisioned by the new development agenda we must waste not - we must waste not human dignity, talent or capacity or contribution - neither through bigotry nor exclusion; nor by neglect or design. To the contrary, through realization of the human rights for each of us, to the exclusion of none of us, we can more surely act in the interests of all of us – and that is the essence of the civil society project. For their talent, creativity and contribution to be fully available to human progress, women and girls, for example, must be fully free from preventable maternal mortality, from gender based violence, including child, early and forced marriage and FGM, they must have the opportunity to decide on the number and timing of their children. But, how do we know this to be true? It is thanks to civil society, and the human rights defenders that civil society protects and supports, that taboos have been broken, the fullest account of human suffering exposed, impunity denounced and creative solutions found. And civil society must have the information, space, opportunity and assets to continue to do just that. Civil society – spaces, voices and organizations – is crucial to development yesterday, today and tomorrow. Over the past three years, through the review of the Cairo Programme of Action for Population and Development, UNFPA has witnessed the power and relevance of this incredible asset that is engaged and empowered civil society. In discussions across the world: at global and local conferences, in inter-governmental negotiations, via on-line platforms, civil society actors gave the Cairo@20 review both its heart and its soul. It is why we are honored to co-lead this UNDG dialogue on “Partnerships with Civil Society”. Thank you.
Posted on: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 12:50:09 +0000
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