Contents with tag: PRIMERS
This primer traces the roots of the climate crisis as well as other social crises to the dominant economic paradigm and the prevailing socio-economic system in the world today—a system that has proven capable of generating unprecedented wealth for some at the same time impoverishing the majority of the people and devastating the planet.
This primer is being published as a contribution to the urgent need to raise awareness among the people about climate change, the possible consequences for humanity and the urgent need for action.
The primer on the Development Effectiveness of Civil Society Organizations reviews the on-going movement driven by civil society organizations (CSO) to raise concern on the issues of the “aid effectiveness” agenda, and their effort to push the reform toward a more comprehensive, rights-based approach of development effectiveness. It argues that CSOs are development actors in their own right, having a special concern for human rights, social justice, gender equality and sustainability, and are seriously concerned with ensuring effectiveness of the aid system not only from the limited concern of aid management and delivery but also with the full range of development effectiveness, including that of their own. It presents the determination of CSOs to challenge the ill-suited Paris Declaration principles and the need for CSOs to develop and abide by their own principles and mechanisms of development effectiveness principles. The primer outlines a set of principles based on a common framework of social solidarity and identifies conditions for an enabling environment to capacitate CSOs in conducting their affairs as development actors in their own right.
New free trade deals across regions such as the Transpacific Partnership Agreement, Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, and Trade-in-Services-Agreement, among many others are being negotiated that will have far-reaching implications for peoples in both the global North and South and for the future of the world economy. But these deals will neither benefit the democratic majority nor rescue the world economy in crisis.
The package of proposals being negotiated towards and post Bali is obviously imbalanced against developing countries. While some developed countries argue that the global trade system needs "some outcome" from Bali in order to show "progress," it is clearly not "progress" if the changes made to existing WTO agreements constitute an expansion of the failed model, rather than fundamental changes to existing unfair and asymmetric rules.
DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE, in the traditional North-South mode, has been based mainly on industrialized nations of the Global North providing aid to developing countries of the Global south to help meet the latter's development goals. Donor-recipient relations have been characterized as unequal and paternalistic, and aid has been used as a foreign policy tool for geopolitical and economic interests of developed countries. Such characteristics of traditional North-South aid led to the Global South's search for alternative development approaches.
IN THE PAST FEW DECADES, states, civil society, and the corporate world have been obliged to review and rethink the whole range of development issues. As the world stumbled from crisis to crisis, all development actors have sought out new paradigms and pathways to alleviate the said crises or to change the system altogether.
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