PHM-Exch> At UN, elites mull Millennium Development Goals. Did the poor weigh in?

[Claudio Schuftan]

From: James Boyle <jamesbyl at yahoo.com>



*At UN, elites mull Millennium Development Goals. Did the poor weigh in?*

*Talk of the Millennium Development Goals at the UN General Assembly this
week’s brought home one very clear fact: Western thinking about development
is elite-driven.*

 The Christian Science Monitor

September 23, 2010

 By Laura Seay

*Guest blogger and Assistant professor of political science at Morehouse
College in Atlanta, Georgia [
http://morehouse.edu/academics/urbanstudies/index.php?id=6]*



I’m headed home from a couple of days at UN Week in New York, where I was
fortunate to get to attend several events relating to a review of the
Millennium Development Goals. I’ll have a lot more to say about that debate,
TEDxChange with the Gates Foundation, the Mashable/92Y Social Good Summit,
and the Clinton Global Initiative in the days to come. The summits and
meetings are covering a huge range of topics, some of which are being
honestly debated and discussed and others of which have been reduced to a
series of feel-good talking points backed by questionable statistics and
assertions.



This week’s events brought home one very clear fact for me: Western thinking
about development is elite-driven. Almost entirely.



It’s partly understandable; the primary goal of the Clinton Global
Initiative, for example, is getting the rich and powerful to make
commitments to save the world in various fashions. While this work is
targeted at the poor, their voices are absent in the conversation. While
there is a lot of discussion of the need to capture human capital in
developing countries, we didn’t hear from anyone who had actually lived the
experience of escaping poverty. We didn’t learn how families survive on $1 a
day from people who have no choice but to make it work.



There’s something very discomfiting about sitting in a hotel ballroom full
of rich people talking about the best ways to help the world’s poorest
people when almost none of the latter are present.



Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy hobnobbing with influential people as much as
anybody.



I love getting to hear people like Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
and Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus speak and am still astonished that I
got to go. But just as there are limits to what I can tell you about life in
central Africa, there are limits to what elites from developing countries
can describe about their countries as well.



Rich and poor, privileged and not – the contrasts are rarely clearer than at
events like these, where the presence of the poor is limited to pictures in
slide shows while wealthy people hobnob over cocktails and abundant buffets.



Am I the only one who would rather hear about what life as a poor woman in
Ethiopia is like from an actual poor Ethiopian woman? Wouldn’t she give
listeners more insight and perspective than yet another celebrity who’s been
“touched by Africa” (and it’s always “Africa,” never the specific country)
on a two-week trip organized by an NGO and a PR firm?



Couldn’t leaders of small-scale civil society organizations in Pakistan tell
us more about their struggles to provide services, promote democracy, or
build peace than the experts who supposedly know them well? Doesn’t a woman
who’s managed to find foster families for hundreds of orphans in her
Congolese community know more about accomplishing tasks on a shoestring
budget than most of us ever will?



The world’s poorest people aren’t often welcome in these forums. Not really.



It’s too bad, because ignoring the expertise of the poor – or only
considering it when translated by the famous for the masses – hasn’t served
them or us very well thus far.



I don’t know what keeps them out of the discussion – culture, language, visa
restrictions, or just being overlooked. What I do know is that talking about
development while excluding from the conversation those who need it most is
a mistake. We need the voices of those we want to help.



Badly.



www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/print/content/view/print/327583




*We must hear the unheard for a more stable world*

* *

Financial Times

* *

April 5 2006



By Carne Ross

* *

*The writer, a former British diplomat, is founder and director of
Independent Diplomat, a non-profit diplomatic advisory group [
www.independentdiplomat.org]* **



Powerful and affluent countries usually get their way because they are
powerful and affluent. But that is only part of the story. They also
dominate international decision-making because the world of diplomacy is
skewed in their favour.

I have seen this diplomatic imbalance from both sides of the table – the
strong and the weak – and it serves the interests of neither.



As a British diplomat at the United Nations Security Council up to mid-2002,
I had substantial advantages. With reams of telegrams and intelligence
reports (I covered the Middle East), I was better briefed than most other
diplomats present. Our mission was among the largest at the UN, with squads
of diplomats covering every issue. In negotiation, our experienced lawyers
could ensure that any textual changes were turned to our benefit. We could
consult our capital in real-time without fear of interception: unlike many
others around the table, our communications were secure.



Such advantages are available to a handful of the world’s most powerful
countries – China, the US, Russia, France, Britain. By no coincidence, their
real power (economic and military) is multiplied by this less-r ecognised
but nonetheless forceful diplomatic power.



Now working on the other side of the table, with governments such as that of
Kosovo or the people of Western Sahara, I see the opposite picture. Perhaps
it is no surprise to some that poor and inexperienced governments are at a
massive disadvantage in diplomacy. At the World Trade Organisation in Geneva
for instance, many poor countries cannot afford to maintain missions, let
alone the experts they need to track and influence highly complex trade
negotiations. In New York, the numerous smaller UN missions struggle to
cover the enormous and proliferating agendas of the UN General Assembly,
Security Council and specialised committees with just one or two horribly
overworked and under-equipped diplomats.



Often those with most at stake are not even allowed into the room where
their affairs are being discussed. In the misnamed “open” or “public”
sessions discussing Kosovo at the UN Security Council, for example, Serbia,
Russia and even Mauritania can speak, but Kosovo, as it is not a state,
cannot. This imbalance of course does not serve those marginalised but nor,
paradoxically, does it serve the powerful.



Traditionalists may sneer that it is too difficult or simply too anarchic to
open the doors of diplomacy to more participants. But in this era of
globalisation, agreements that fail to take into account the interests of
all concerned parties are not good or sustainable and, too often, they fall
apart. The ultimate effect is a less stable world. If people are ignored,
they tend to find ways – sometimes violent – to get heard.



The closed world of international diplomacy must devise ways to hear the
unheard. During the years of international sanctions on Iraq, we on the UK
(and US) side could have paid more heed to the many aid organisations and
informal Iraqi groups who warned us about the damaging impact of sanctions;
today Iraq is still paying the price for that indifference. In preparing for
the post-invasion political future, planners should have consulted a wider
range of groups than Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress or the Kurds,
who were wrongly assumed as representative of all of Iraq’s “opposition”. In
negotiations on Kosovo’s status, not only should the Kosovo government be
given a hearing but so should groups including Kosovo’s Serbs and other
minorities, whose interests are not necessarily represented by Serbia’s
government in Belgrade. Greater inclusiveness need not mean chaos: it is not
difficult to discern which non-state groups are genuinely representative of
legitimate concerns, and which are not.



What can be done? For a start, multilateral bodies such as the UN, European
Union and WTO could make their meetings more transparent, posting detailed
briefings on agendas and issues under discussion (a new non-government
organisation called the Security Council Report is showing how in New York).
More public information about key officials would help too, as would more
deliberate policies of consultation.



Of course, this is all about power. Governments think that by meeting in
secret and excluding dissonant voices they will more easily get what they
want – but they often end up with the opposite. To really get your way and
sustain it, in diplomacy as in life, you have to include, not exclude. It is
harder work at first, but ultimately, the result would be a more stable
world.



www.ft.com/cms/s/2/18dc0c68-c4cd-11da-b7c1-0000779e2340.html


<http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/18dc0c68-c4cd-11da-b7c1-0000779e2340.html>


<http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/18dc0c68-c4cd-11da-b7c1-0000779e2340.html>

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