I was happy to oblige by participating on a conference panel last Friday, February 22, called “The Multilateral System in the Public Eye: The Impact of Mass Communications.” (The conference itself was entitled “Emerging Challenges to Multilateralism: A Parliamentary Response.”)

This panel focused on the ways in which new communications media, especially the Internet, are affecting the effectiveness, credibility, and reputation of multilateral institutions such as the UN. The clear takeaway that I took from the conference is that certain players within UN are openly worried about the ability of multilateral institutions to solve the urgent problems of our time.

That’s a legitimate concern. As countless problems pummel the world order – climate change, inequality, cyber-warfare, data surveillance, the list goes on – the UN is an obvious forum in which to discuss issues. But with limited authority to solve problems and unwieldy internal governance structures and processes, no one expects bold, timely action. Yet the rise of participatory online media is showcasing the limits of the UN. Hence the open hand-wringing.  

I was pleased to learn that there is at least a glimmer of interest in commoning as an appealing option. Regrettably, my sense is that UN discussants are not prepared to explore the commons very deeply or seriously. This is not entirely surprising. Most participants in UN deliberations, after all, are representatives of their national government and are immersed in the bubble of state power and conventional politics. There is a general conceit that policy, legislation, and other top-down actions are the most meaningful and effective ways for dealing with problems.

They’re not, of course. There are other important approaches. Many centralized state and multilateral structures are themselves part of the problem. They tend to consolidate power too much, inviting political gamesmanship, media optics, and corruption at the expense of substantive on-the-ground results. They privilege capital-friendly “market solutions” at the expense of socially minded, creative innovation from the bottom-up. For their part, state bureaucracies often feel threatened by stable, locally grounded commons that assert their own interests and self-sufficiency. And so on.  

Below are my prepared comments for the panel, which a presented were abbreviated to accommodate the five-minute limit for each speaker. A video of the panel can be found here. My presentation is at the timemark 11:50 through 16:40.

Multilateralism and the Commons

It wasn’t so long ago that nation-states strictly controlled the types of news, information, and culture that citizens could see and hear. While certain authoritarian regimes still tightly control domestic communications – notwithstanding the Internet – the interconnected global village that Marshall McLuhan predicted in the 1960s is well upon us. Cheap and easy transnational communications is the norm for a great many of the world’s people. Communications from other cultures and countries routinely influence our everyday lives.

It’s not just that people can hear or see unauthorized, novel, and foreign information, however. It’s that they can now generate their own news, videos, and podcasts. They can write their own software code, develop their own wikis, and start new movements with modest resources.

This is enabling people to assert moral and political claims to global audiences that was previously impossible – and that traditional state and media authorities cannot control. Distributed media technologies have essentially changed the political and cultural ecosystems of individual nations and global culture, often in profound ways.

Naturally, nation-states and multilateral institutions tend to find these developments disorienting and troubling. They may still be able to assert their authority, sometimes with sufficient coercive power to enforce their will. But the legality they invoke is not necessarily the same thing as perceived legitimacy. The latter is more of an open question – a question that national governments may try to influence, but which ultimately only the citizenry can address.

This tension is not going to go away. It is now baked into the very structures of modern telecommunications, the economy, and politics. Indeed, the Trump Administration is largely based on exploiting the tension between new media and legacy state institutions.

I characterize the problem as a deep structural conflict between the centralized, hierarchical, expert-driven institutions of a prior era – and the bottom-up, self-organized, participatory communities made possible by open networks and various apps. The very ideas of centralized state power and shared national identity are under siege when everyone can easily create a diversity of new publics and subcultures on their own terms.

While social media have plenty of proven dangers – fake news, Facebook algorithms, venues for authoritarian populism and hate – let’s remember that open networks – especially when organize as commons – hold some fairly significant creative, productive, and democratic powers. For me, the question is whether state power and multilateral institutions are capable of recognizing and supporting these constructive powers of the commons.

As an activist and policy strategist, I have been studying and working with commons around the world for the past twenty years. I’m not talking about the “tragedy of the commons” that Garrett Hardin made famous in his 1968 essay immortalizing that phrase. Contrary to Hardins claims, a commons does not consist of unowned resources. It is not a free-for-all in which you can take as much as you want.

A commons is a self-organized social system for the stewardship of shared wealth over the long term. It’s a distinctly different form of governance and provisioning than either the market or state. Commoners devise their own rules, social practices, traditions, and rituals that are suited for their particular context and culture. They self-monitor for free-riders and they impose punishments on those who violate the rules.

The commons is not just small bodies of natural resources such as farmland, fisheries, forests, and irrigation water, as studied by the late Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Prize for her work in 2009. The commons also consists of shared management of systems in higher education, in cities, in diverse social settings, and in digital spaces. 

Commons are especially robust in the world of free and open source software and Wikipedia; open access journals that are making science and scholarly accessible to everyone; open educational resources that are making textbooks and curricula more affordable to students; and Creative Commons-licensed sharing of everything, bypassing the monopoly rents imposed by the intellectual property industries. 

There are many other commons to which I will turn to in a moment. But my basic point is that commons are generative and value-creating, not a “tragedy.” And they are huge potential partners for state and multilateral institutions, if the latter can understand commoning properly.

If we want a world of greater inclusion and participation, and greater freedom in both a political and consumer sense, then we need to be talking about the commons. It is worth remembering Hannah Arendt’s concept of power. She wrote in her book The Human Condition that power is something that “springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse.”

In other words, power does not inhere in our institutions themselves. It must be constantly created and re-created constantly, socially. In this respect, many state and multilateral institutions are losing their struggles to retain power and perceived legitimacy. They are not offering credible, effective responses to urgent societal needs. I’d like to suggest that state institutions would do well to enter into partnerships with various commons to:

1) leverage the generative, creative power that commons can offer;

2) empower peer governance and responsibility among people in ways that can nourish wholesome participation and, indirectly, state legitimacy; and

3) support locally appropriate, stable, self-supporting solutions that affected people can create themselves; and

4) enable transboundary cooperation on ecological problems.

In other words, state and multilateral institutions need to see the challenge of social media in a much bigger context. It’s not just about clever messaging and better tweets. It’s about developing a deeper modus vivendi with the largely unrecognized power of the commons. This, in fact, is what the French Development Agency has been doing recently as it explores how commons could enhance its development strategies in Africa and other Francophone countries.

So imagine an expansion the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative, DNDi, which is a partnership among commons, state institutions, and private companies to reduce the costs of drug R&D and distribution. DNDi releases medically important drugs under royalty-free, non-exclusive licenses so that benefits so that the drugs can be made available everywhere inexpensively.

Or imagine how the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team has helped various states in the wake of natural disasters, such as the earthquake in Haiti. HOT brings together volunteer hackers to produce invaluable Web maps showing first-responders and victims where to find hospitals, water, and other necessities. This is a notable commons-driven solution, not a bureaucratic one.

The System of Rice Intensification is a global open-source community that trades advice and knowledge about the agronomy of growing rice. Working totally outside of conventional multilateral channels, SRI has brought together farmers in Sri Lanka and Cuba, India and Indonesia, to improve their rice yields by two or three-fold.

We should think about how Community Land Trusts are decommodifying land and making them more available to ordinary people. Let’s consider the Open Prosthetics Project that is producing affordable, license-free prosthetics….and cosmo-local production that shares knowledge and design globally, open-source style, while producing physical things (farm equipment, furniture, housing) locally. 

The King of the Meadows project in the Netherlands is a commons that has mobilized citizens to steward biodiversity connected with cultural heritage. The Bangla-Pesa is a neighborhood currency in Kenya that is helping people exchange value and meet needs without the use of the national fiat currency. 

I think you get the idea. If multilateral institutions are going to adjust to the new world unleashed by distributed apps and digital technologies, they should begin by exploring the great promise of commons in meeting urgent needs, giving people some genuine control over their lives, and compensating for the inherent limits of bureaucratic state systems and markets.

The post Multilateralism and the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

January 2019

We, intellectuals, academics, artists, activists and others in solidarity, as well as organizations, associations and collectives from across the world, express our solidarity with the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in this critical moment in its history, and condemn the ongoing campaign of disinformation, lies, and slander directed against the Zapatistas.

For us, and for many others around the world, the Zapatista struggle is a key referent for resistance, dignity, integrity and political creativity. 25 years ago, the cry of Ya Basta! was a historically transcendent event and one of the first categorical rejections of neoliberal globalization at a planetary scale, because it opened the way toward the critique and refusal of a model that at that time seemed unquestionable. It was and continues to be an expression of the legitimate struggle of indigenous peoples against the domination and contempt they have suffered for centuries and for their rights to autonomy. The self-government that the Zapatistas have put into practice with the Juntas de Buen Gobierno(Good Government Councils) in the 5 Caracoles is an example of radical democracy that inspires people and should be studied in social science departments around the world. For us, the Zapatista construction of autonomy represents the persistent and honest search for an alternative and emancipatory model crucial for a humanity facing the challenges of a world that is rapidly sinking into a deepening economic, social, political, ecological, and human crisis.

We therefore express our concern for the Zapatista communities and many other indigenous peoples in Mexico whose territories are being attacked by mining, tourism, agribusiness, and large infrastructure projects, etc., as recently denounced by the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) and the Indigenous Governing Council (CIG) of Mexico. At this very moment, the new Mexican administration is imposing a series of large-scale development projects — including the Trans-isthmus Corridor, a one million hectare commercial tree planting project, and the so-called “Mayan Train”– that Subcomandante Moisés, EZLN spokesperson, recently denounced as a humiliation and provocation that would have very serious impacts on the territories of the Mayan peoples of southeastern Mexican.

In addition to the devastating environmental effects and the massive tourist development the “Mayan Train” is designed to unleash, we are concerned about the pseudo-ritual asking permission from Mother Earth that was used to legitimize the race to begin laying its tracks, an act that the Zapatista spokesperson denounced as unacceptably mockery. We are outraged by ongoing preparation for further attacks on Zapatista territories and the denial of indigenous people’s rights, including their right to prior, free and informed consultation and consent, as established in ILO Convention 169 and the UN Declaration on Indigenous Peoples. This represents a serious violation of Mexico’s international commitments.

We echo the EZLN’s total rejection of these and other mega-projects that seriously threaten the autonomous territories and ways of life of indigenous peoples. 

We denounce in advance any aggression against Zapatista communities, either directly by the Mexican State, or through groups or organizations of armed or unarmed “civilians.” We hold the Mexican government accountable for any confrontation that may arise through the attempted implementation of these mega-projects, which represent an already defunct, unsustainable and devastating model of “development” that is determined within the highest spheres of power in violation of the rights of original peoples.

We call on all good-hearted people to see through the current wave of disinformation about the Zapatistas and about the proposed mega-projects, and to be alert to the imminent risk of aggression against Zapatista communities and other indigenous peoples.

To read the list of current signatories and add your own name, visit: http://solidarityfrombelow.org/

The post 2019: Letter of solidarity and support for the Zapatista resistance and autonomy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is one of the most translated and celebrated documents in the world, marking its 70th anniversary this year. But relatively few people are aware of the significance of its 25th Article, which proclaims the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living—including food, housing, healthcare, social services and basic financial security.[1] As our campaign group Share The World’s Resources (STWR) has long proposed, it is high time that activists for global justice reclaim the vision that is spelled out in those few simple sentences. For in order to implement Article 25 into a set of binding, enforceable obligations through domestic and international laws, the implications are potentially revolutionary.

To appreciate the truth of this assertion, it is necessary to outline some brief history. Since the Universal Declaration was adopted by the General Assembly in 1948, the United Nations never promised to do anything more than “promote” and “encourage respect for” human rights, without explicit legal force. The Universal Declaration may form part of so-called binding customary international law, laying out a value-based framework that can be used to exert moral pressure on governments who violate any of its articles. But in the past 70 years, no government has seriously attempted to adapt its behaviour in line with the Declaration’s far-reaching requirements.

An International Bill of Human Rights was eventually agreed by the General Assembly in 1966,[2] which comprised the Universal Declaration and its two main “implementing” treaties—the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). The latter Covenant elaborated in greater detail the economic and social rights previously laid out in the Universal Declaration (as largely reflected in Articles 22 to 26, especially Article 25), and it was intended to form the basis of a binding legal obligation under international law. Still, both Covenants lacked any serious enforcement machinery, and were ratified by States parties under the sole proviso that they would submit periodic reports on steps taken and “progress achieved”.[3]

Marginalising economic and social rights

While civil and political rights have enjoyed an increasing degree of implementation throughout the world (albeit partially and fitfully), the historical record on economic and social rights is far less sanguine. This is forcefully illustrated by the UN’s current Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston. In his first report submitted to the Human Rights Council, he argues that economic and social rights are marginalised in most contexts, without proper legal recognition and accountability mechanisms in place.[4] Indeed, he even questions the extent to which States treat them as human rights at all, and not just desirable long-term goals.

Despite the widespread constitutional recognition of economic and social rights, as well as an abundant scholarship on their fundamental importance, they nevertheless “remain largely invisible in the law of and institutions of the great majority of States”, according to Alston. Even many of the States that enjoy the world’s highest living standards have disregarded proposals to recognise these rights in legislative or constitutional form.[5]

Most of all, the United States has persistently rejected the idea that economic and social rights are full-fledged human rights,[6] in the sense of “rights” that might be amenable to any method of enforcement. Some of its past administrations have notoriously even challenged the “soft law” status of the ICESCR treaty, regardless that it was signed (yet not ratified) by Jimmy Carter in 1977.[7] Although the United States has ratified other treaties that clearly recognise economic and social rights,[8] it is the only developed country to insist that, in effect, its government has no obligation to safeguard the rights of citizens to jobs, housing, education and an adequate standard of living.

In their defence, governments may point out the historical progress made in reducing extreme poverty across the world, which has generally been achieved without adopting a strategy based on the full recognition of economic and social rights. But the extent to which these rights remain unmet for millions of people today is unconscionable from any kind of moral perspective. Consider that more than 60 percent of the world population struggles to live on less than $5 per day, an amount which the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has considered the minimum daily income which could reasonably be regarded as fulfilling the right to “a standard of living adequate for… health and well-being” (as stipulated in Article 25).[9]

The International Labour Organisation of the United Nations also estimates that only 27 percent of people worldwide have access to comprehensive social security systems, notwithstanding the fact that virtually every government recognises the fundamental right to social security, as also enshrined in Article 25.[10] The fact that many thousands of people continue to die each day from poverty-related causes,[11]while the number of chronically undernourished people increases once again,[12] is an affront to the very idea that everyone has the right to an adequate standard of living. Also in the most affluent nations, of course, millions of people have limited access to essential services and social protection, and vast numbers of families are homeless or seeking emergency food assistance.

Such facts demonstrate how far we have strayed from realising the modest aspiration expressed in Article 25. Gross inequalities of wealth and power are seemingly built into the structures and operations of the world economy, which gives the least priority and concern to the world’s majority poor. Its design is determined in international negotiations which are dominated by rich industrialised nations, who ensure that the major beneficiaries of global economic growth are the powerful corporate and elite interests that they basically function on behalf of.[13] Consequently, the number of billionaires continues to grow at an unprecedented rate, with combined annual increases in wealth that would be enough to end extreme poverty many times over.[14]

The duty of States to respect and support the achievement of socioeconomic rights outside of their borders may be anchored in international law, but the most influential multilateral organisations are not challenged to adhere to these agreed norms and standards. A rich literature examines the impact on less developed countries of this virtual system of global economic governance,[15] as principally upheld by the Bretton Woods Institutions, the World Trade Organisation and the Group of 7 nations. For example, most countries of the global South have been pressured to service their debt burdens by making structural adjustments at the expense of the most disadvantaged segments of society. Through such policies as privatisation, deregulation of markets and cutbacks in social services, the harsh conditionalities of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank’s lending programmes have widely hindered the ability of State’s to fulfil their human rights obligations.[16]

At the same time, many of the thousands of bilateral international treaties and free trade agreements of recent decades are incompatible with basic human rights standards in some fundamental respects.[17] In particular, the current international investment system creates rights to multinational corporations to challenge the legal and policy decisions of governments through “investor-state dispute settlement”,[18]even when those decisions are taken to meet social needs and pursue sustainable development objectives, such as reducing inequality.

Formidable obstacles

All of this points to the formidable political obstacles to implementing Article 25 through an enforceable system of international law that can offset the damaging social effects of deregulated, market-led globalisation. The challenge is well recognised by civil society groups that advocate for a new direction in economic policymaking, beginning with a reversal of the austerity measures that are now expected to affect nearly 80 percent of the global population within a couple of years.[19]

Rendering Article 25 into a truly “indivisible”, “inalienable” and “universal” human right therefore means, for example, reforming unfair tax policies that undermine the capacity of countries to invest in universal social protection systems.[20] It means rolling back the wave of commercialisation that is increasingly entering the health sector and other essential public services, with extremely negative consequences for human wellbeing.[21] And it means regulatory oversight to hold the out-of-control finance sector to account,[22] and domestic legislative action in support of a living wage and labour rights, as well as fair and progressive tax systems.

It also means, in short, a redistribution of wealth, power and income on an unprecedented scale within every society, in contradistinction to the prevailing economic ideology of our time—an ideology that falsely views economic and social rights as inimical to “wealth creation”, “economic growth” and “international competitiveness”.

But the scale of that redistribution must extend beyond national borders alone, considering the reality that developing nations are unable to fulfil the socioeconomic rights of their citizens without greater access to wealth and resources. That depends on substantial coordination and assistance from the international community, which must come in the form of bilateral aid that is no longer disbursed on the basis of geo-strategic considerations, or with a preference for privatisation and “free market” models of development.[23] At present, low-income countries are able to devote, at most, only 15 percent of gross domestic product towards meeting the basic needs of their citizenry.[24] Yet donor governments are far from helping to bridge the gap in public finances through more effective aid, despite the agreed global target of achieving “zero” extreme poverty by 2030.[25]

This only serves to underline the enormous political implications of achieving Article 25. For it is clear that rich countries prefer to extract wealth from the global South, rather than share their wealth in any meaningful way through a redistribution of resources. Yet we know the resources are available, if government priorities are fundamentally reoriented towards safeguarding the minimal guarantees of Article 25 for all peoples everywhere.[26]

To be sure, just a fraction of the amount spent on a recent US arms deal with Saudi Arabia, estimated at over $110 billion, would be enough to lift everyone above the extreme poverty line as defined by the World Bank.[27] And if concerted action was taken by the international community to phase out tax havens and prevent tax dodging by large corporations, then developing countries could recover trillions of dollars each year for human rights protection and spending on public services.[28] Achieving Article 25, therefore, is not about merely upscaling aid as a form of charity; it is about the kind of structural transformations that are necessary for everyone to enjoy dignified lives in more equal societies with economic justice.

Towards a people’s strategy

The most radical article of the Universal Declaration, in this respect, is not only Article 25 but also Article 28, which refers to the necessary arrangements of the “social and international order” wherein all the rights and freedoms set forth in the Declaration “can be fully realised”. In other words, it is impossible to achieve a more social regulation of the world economy without dramatic adjustments in the relations between States and regions, which also needs to be reflected in more democratic structures of global governance.

For how can States implement a new global social contract, rooted in a respect for socioeconomic rights and the imperative role of international law, unless normative considerations of justice and human rights are given precedence over strategic alignments in foreign policy affairs?[29] And how can global public goods be made equitably accessible to all citizens of the world, unless the United Nations is significantly reformed and empowered to fulfil its original mandate?

As spelled out in the preamble of its Charter, the UN was always intended “to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples.” However, its role in that regard has been severely curtailed by the Permanent Five and other major powers, who mainly use the United Nations as a “vehicle for the aggregation of national interests”, while constantly preventing significant reform within the Organisation.[30]

Its role in global economic governance was purposefully weakened from the outset; all the important financial and trade negotiations take place outside the UN system. And as we have seen, the policy priorities of the Bretton Woods Institutions and World Trade Organisation have grown increasingly distinct from the basic human values of the UN’s economic and social programs.[31] At the same time, the UN’s ability to hold States accountable for human rights and international law standards is severely limited by a lack of financial independence, with a budget too small to enable it to be truly effective.[32]

These are just some of the reasons why the human rights of Article 25, however simply worded and unassuming, hold the potential to revolutionise the unfair structures and rules of our unequal world. Because if those rights are vociferously advocated by enough of the world’s people, there is no gainsaying the political transformations that will unfold. That is why STWR calls on global activists to jointly herald Article 25 through massive and continual demonstrations in all countries, as set out in our flagship publication.[33]

At the least, it behoves us to contemplate the urgent necessity of achieving Article 25 as the highest international priority, which is a responsibility that obviously cannot be left to individual governments. The UN Charter famously invokes “We the Peoples”, but it is now up to us to resurrect the UN’s foundational ideal to promote social progress and better standards of life for everyone in the world. It is high time we seized upon Article 25 and reclaimed its stipulations as “a law of the will of the people”,[34] until governments finally begin to take seriously the full realisation of their pledge set forth in the Universal Declaration.

Image credit: riacale, flickr creative commons

The post As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights turns 70, it’s time to resurrect its vision of global sharing and justice appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Sam DeJohn: Recently, Pablo Soto Bravo, Madrid City Council Member, computer programmer and the city’s lead for public engagement, spoke at an event in New York on “Restoring Trust in Government” on the occasion of the United Nations General Assembly. “Why should we trust government,” he asked, adding “the people don’t trust governments…they’re right not to trust the government.” Like many Spaniards, Soto had joined the 15-M movement in 2011 to protest the government’s austerity measures and rising levels of corruption.¹ With trust in government having declined over twenty percentage points since 2007,² Soto used his programming skills to champion the adoption of digital technology to give the public a greater voice in a traditional two-party governing system from which the average person had generally been excluded. But, as we shall explore in this three-part series, Decide Madrid, a pathbreaking civic technology platform co-designed by Soto to force “the administration to open their ears” (El Mundo), is evolving from a protest tool designed to challenge the status quo into a more mature platform for improving governance.

In Part 1, we will explore the platform, which is among the best-of-breed new generation of open source civic technologies, and its myriad features. In Part 2, we will draw on open data from Decide to focus in more depth on how people use the site. In Part 3, we focus on recommendations for improvements to Decide and how to test their impact on the legitimacy and effectiveness of decision-making.

What is Decide?

The Ahora Madrid coalition (which was founded with support from the Podemos political party³) created Decide in 2015 to enable citizens to propose, deliberate and vote on policies for the city and ensure transparency of all government proceedings within the municipality.  An information page on the Decide website further elaborates the program’s focus. “One of the main missions of [the platform] will be to ensure the inclusion of everyone in the participatory processes, so that all voices and wills form a part of them and no one is left out.” The website, which utilizes the free software Consul as many other administrations are now doing, allows Madrileños to influence the City’s planning and policy-making through voting, discourse, and consultations with the goal of empowering citizens, promoting transparency, and fostering open government practices. The site is composed of four distinct features to address these areas of desired impact. Of these components, two processes stand out as having the most potential for direct citizen influence: a proposal section where individuals may propose new laws and subsequently vote on them, and a participatory budget section where citizens decide how a portion of the City’s budget is distributed among different projects. The other two features include a consultation process where citizens are asked to offer, and vote on, opinions about City proceedings and finally a debate process which does not directly lead to action but rather deliberation for the City to assess public opinion. These processes are all designed with the intention “to create an environment that mobilizes existing collective intelligence in favor of a more hospitable and inclusive city.”

Key Features

Propuestas: Citizen Proposals Enable More Direct Democracy

The proposals feature was designed as a way to allow citizens to utilize the full power of direct democracy and shape government actions. According to Pablo Soto Bravo and Miguel Arana Catania, Director of Participation for the City Council of Madrid and Project Director for Decide Madrid, the proposals feature is by far the most important aspect of the platform as it has the greatest potential for impact. It has definitely generated interest as almost 20,000 proposals have been submitted since the launch of Decide in 2015.

This feature enables citizens to create and directly support ideas for new legislation. Registered users⁴ can propose an idea by simply clicking the “Create a Proposal” button and submitting a title and description. Proposals range significantly in terms of length and content, but gravity of the topic does not seem to influence popularity as two of the most supported proposals currently active on the site are “Penalty for those who do not collect the feces of their pets” and “Replacement of public lighting by LED lights.” Once a proposal is submitted, anyone with verified accounts can click a button expressing their support for said proposal.⁵ Each proposal is given twelve months to gather requisite support to advance in the process.

Screenshot from the “proposals” home page on the website

Example of an ongoing proposal

In order to move forward for consideration, a proposal must receive the requisite support, represented by 1% of citizens of Madrid over 16 years of age (~27,000 people currently). The process is designed this way to ensure that every citizen has the opportunity to submit proposals but that the administrators do not have to waste time considering proposals that fail to attract minimal backing.

Proposals that receive the necessary votes advance to the decision phase, which affords time and opportunity for citizens to get educated about the issues and make informed decisions. The site announces whenever a proposal reaches this phase and it is grouped with others that are in the same stage of the process, thus beginning a 45-day period of deliberation and discussion before the final voting phase. The managers of the platform do not provide background information other than what is posted by users, so citizens are responsible for conducting their own research and perusing the site for debates and comments about the proposal. Afterward begins a seven-day period where anyone over 16 years of age and completely verified in the municipality of Madrid can vote to either accept or reject the proposal.

It is important to note that proposals that receive majority support are not automatically implemented, as the Spanish Constitution does not permit binding referenda. Instead, the Madrid City Council commits to a 30-day study of any such proposal, during which they will determine if it is to be implemented. During this examination, the proposal is evaluated based on its legality, feasibility, competence, and economic cost, all of which are highlighted in a subsequent report that is openly published. If the report is positive, then a plan of action will be written and published to carry out the proposal. If the report is negative, the City Council may either propose an alternative action or publish the reasons that prevent the proposal’s execution.

Although it is understandable that the administration wants to ensure that only popular, viable proposals are presented before them, the hurdles that each proposal must clear are proving to be a significant obstacle. While it is difficult to determine the reason, the undeniable fact that only two proposals have even reached the final voting phase suggests a serious flaw in the system and a possible deterrent for future participation. However, on a more hopeful note, the two successful proposals (one calling for a single ticket for all means of public transportation and the other an extensive sustainability plan for the city) reached majority support in February of this year and in May the Council approved them and posted implementation plans.

Presupuestos participativos: Participatory budgeting

This feature was created to allow citizens a substantial say in how their taxes are being spent. Specifically, it permits them to decide where a designated portion of the City’s budget is going to be allocated. In the first step, individuals registered in Madrid can submit expenditure projects which will be posted publicly on the website. Spending projects can be submitted for either the entire city or for an individual district. One key difference between this process and that of proposals is that authors of similar projects are contacted and offered the possibility of submitting joint projects as a way of limiting the volume of projects and ensuring cost-effectiveness.

The next phase consists of a two-week period where qualified voters are authorized ten support votes for city-wide projects and ten for projects in a district of their choosing. After this period, all projects undergo an evaluation by the City Council either confirming or denying that the projects are valid, viable, legal, and includible in the municipal budget. Following the evaluation, both approved and rejected projects are published with their corresponding reports and assessments. The “most supported” projects then move on to the final voting phase, but the administrators are unclear about this term’s definition as they do not specify how many projects are permitted to advance.

In the final voting phase, the total available budget and the final projects along with their estimated cost (produced by the City Council during the evaluation phase) are published. Qualified voters can vote for any number of projects for the whole city and one project from the district of their choosing but the projects they support cannot exceed the total amount of funds available in the budget.

Projects are then listed in descending order of votes received, both for city-wide projects and district projects. They are then selected down the line from highest number of votes to lowest number of votes, making sure each additional proposal can fit within the total available budget. If the estimated cost of a project would cause the budget to be exceeded, that project is skipped and the next viable option is selected. Finally, the selected projects are included in the Initial Project of the General Budget of the City of Madrid (Participatory Budgets).

This feature is making impressive progress consistent with its goals. From 2016 to 2017, the amount allocated to these projects rose from €60 million to €100 million and the total number of participants rose by almost 50% from 45,531 to 67,132 people. With each project’s status and details available in a downloadable file on this page of the site, transparency is not an issue for this component. Pablo Soto Bravo and Miguel Arana Catania have indicated that citizens should start seeing concrete results from the 2016 projects very soon, which should lend credibility to, and faith in, the process.

Screenshot of Downloadable Project Spreadsheet

Debates and Consultations

In addition to the proposed actions which actually go through a voting process, the site contains sections that are intended more for simple deliberation, promoting communication and information-sharing. Debates do not call for any action by the City Council but are instead used to assess the public’s opinion and general consensus on a range of topics.

There is also a consultation process where users can voice their opinions about certain proceedings throughout the city. They can answer questions, make suggestions, and praise or denounce measures or activities that are already happening instead of creating new proposals. For example, the City Council currently plans on remodeling several squares and plazas throughout the city. Thus, there is a section where citizens are able to answer three questions created by the City Council pertaining to the revitalization of each area. City officials can comment and debate as well, allowing them to directly engage users on the site. There is no indication as to how seriously the public’s opinions are taken into consideration, but it is implied that their ideas are valued. At the very least, the highlighted names of politicians appearing on the debate space creates the appearance that they are taking an interest in these concerns.

Membership Levels

Because Decide has the potential to cause such a grand impact on Madrid’s citizens, government, and economic prosperity, there are certain security precautions to encourage participation while protecting the integrity of the process. The platform has a sliding scale of permissions with stronger authentication enabling access to more features of the site to create the incentive for more accountable participation. The site is open to anyone with internet access and users may create an account simply by providing a username and valid email address. While anyone can submit proposals, additional authentication is necessary to access other capabilities. There are three levels of authentication, each with differing rights of access.

• Registered users, who provide a username, email address, and password but do not verify residence, are able to:
  • Participate in discussions
  • Create proposals
  • Create expenditure projects
• Basic verified users must verify residence online by entering their residence data. If it is correct, they will be asked to provide a mobile phone number in order to receive a confirmation code to activate their verified account. People may also elect to do this in person at a Citizen Assistance office. These users are able to:
  • Participate in discussions
  • Create proposals and expenditure projects
  • Vote for proposals and expenditure projects in the support phase
• Completely verified users must fully verify their account in person at a Citizen Assistance Office or via mail. If done by mail they will receive a letter containing a security code and instructions to carry out the verification, which they must send back to a Citizen Assistance Office. These users are able to:
  • Participate in discussions
  • Create proposals and expenditure projects
  • Vote for proposals in the support phase
  • Vote for proposals in the final decision phase

Conclusions

Although the concept of Decide is consistent with the highest ideals of open government, the execution falls short in practice as, with the exception of participatory budgeting, there is no evidence that the site leads to improved decisions. We will discuss these shortcomings in more detail in part two, however, on the surface it is seems that Decide has not yet accomplished its ultimate goals, as its creators acknowledge. Soto and Arana want Madrileños to understand and fully utilize the power of direct democracy. With only two proposals reaching the voting phase of the process, it is clear that neither citizens nor Madrid’s institutions are taking advantage of this novel system and it has yet to achieve a significant impact on governance in Madrid.

The platform’s design is innovative and impressive and has been inspiring many other administrations to adopt similar programs. Indeed it bodes well for Madrid, and the rest of Spain, that various cities throughout the country are being inspired by the same political aspirations to replicate this process, such as decidm.barcelona which uses the same Consul software. However, like many others, Decide still has its flaws. In the next installment, we will address how Decide handles the keys to a successful digital democracy, such as advertising, incentivizing, and stakeholder analysis. We have identified the strengths and weaknesses at its foundation, so the next step is to examine the results it is producing.

¹ 2016 marked Spain’s worst year on Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index since its launch in 1995, as they scored just 58 on the 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (highly clean) scale.

² Trust and Public Policy: How Better Governance Can Help Rebuild Public Trust, OECD, http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/download/4217051e.pdf?expires=1492821633&id=id&accname=ocid177224&checksum=6C5097C12FAE130455255C94D249CA20 (Mar. 27, 2017)

³ Podemos did not formally run in the most recent local elections. However, it has been the driving force behind local platforms that share the same political agenda.

⁴ See “Membership Levels” below for detailed explanation

⁵ Note: in order to maximize citizen participation and accommodate those without internet access, most actions that take place on the website can also be done in one of Madrid’s 26 Citizen Assistance Offices with the help of trained staff.

This post by Sam DeJohn is reposted from Featured Website, GovLab Blog

Photo by grantuhard

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And the more we grow, the more we eat away at the web of life on which we all depend.

We have known about this problem for decades now, but we’ve been told not to worry: As technology improves and becomes more efficient, we’ll be able to keep growing the economy while nonetheless reducing our impact on the natural world. The technical term for this is “green growth,” which requires absolute decoupling of GDP from material use. According to the theory, we can speed this process along by incentivizing innovation; if we tax carbon emissions and material extraction, we can spur companies to invest in more efficient tech.

It sounds great, it’s promoted at the highest levels by tech billionaires like Elon Musk and international organizations like the World Bank and the United Nations, and it sits right at the center of big global plans like the Paris Climate Accord and the Sustainable Development Goals. We’re all hanging our collective future on this hope. But is it really possible?

Here’s the magic number: 50 billion tons. That’s how much of the Earth’s materials and life forms we can safely use each year. That includes everything from wood to plastic, fish to livestock, minerals to metals: all the physical stuff that we consume. Right now, we’re using about 80 billion tons each year–way over the limit. So for growth to be green, we need to somehow get back down to 50 billion tons despite expanding the GDP.

When green growth theory was first proposed, there was no evidence on whether it would actually work–it was purely speculative. But over the past few years, three major studies have set out to examine this question. All have arrived at the same rather troubling conclusion: Even under best-case scenario conditions, absolute decoupling of GDP growth from material use is not possible on a global scale.

It was a team of scientists led by Monika Dittrich that first pointed this out. They ran a model showing that under business-as-usual conditions, growth will drive global resource use to a staggering 180 billion tons per year by 2050. At more than three times the safe limit, that means game over for human civilization as we know it.

Then the team ran the model with the optimistic assumption that every nation on Earth immediately adopts best practice in efficiency, with all the best available technology. The results were a bit better: We would end up hitting 93 billion tons per year by 2050. But that’s not absolute decoupling, and it’s a far cry from anything approaching green growth.

A second team of scientists tested the same question again in 2016, and found that even aggressive measures like a carbon price as high as $250 per ton and a doubling of technological efficiency don’t do the trick. If we keep growing the global economy by 3% each year, they found, we’ll still hit about 95 billion tons by 2050. No absolute decoupling. No green growth.

Finally, last year the United Nations itself weighed in on the debate, hoping to settle the matter once and for all. It modelled a carbon price rising to a whopping $573 per ton, added a material extraction tax, and assumed rapid tech innovation spurred by strong government policy. The results? We hit 132 billion tons by 2050–even worse than the two previous studies found. Worse because this time the scientists included the “rebound effect”in their model. As gains in efficiency reduce the cost of commodities, demand for those commodities goes up, cancelling out some of the reductions in material use.

And let’s not forget: All three of these models use radically optimistic assumptions. We’re a long way from even testing a global carbon tax, much less a tax of $573 per ton; and we’re not on track to double our efficiency. In fact, quite the opposite: Right now our efficiency is getting worse, not better.Why the bad news? The main reason is that tech innovation just doesn’t work the way most of us assume. We know that Moore’s law says that chip performance doubles about every two years–but this doesn’t apply to material use. There are physical limits to material efficiency, and once we start to reach them then the scale effect of growth drives material use back up in the long run. For instance you might be able to produce a wooden table more efficiently, but you can’t produce a table out of nothing. In the end you’ll need a minimum amount of wood, and once you reach that limit, then any growth in table production is going to come along with a corresponding growth in wood use.

It would be hard to overstate the impact of these results. Right now, our only plan for dealing with the ecological emergency that’s staring us in the face is to hope that tech innovation and green growth will mitigate the coming disaster. Yes, we’re going to need all the wizardry we can get–but that alone is not going to be enough. The only real option is in fact much simpler and more obvious: We need to start consuming less.

The tricky bit is that our existing economic operating system–capitalism–has a design flaw at its core. It requires that we produce and consume more and more stuff each year. If we don’t, then firms collapse and people lose their jobs and livelihoods. So it’s time to make room for new systems to emerge–systems that don’t require endless exponential growth just to stay afloat. This is where we need to focus our creative energy, rather than clinging to the false hope of “green growth” fantasies.

There are lots of ways to get there. We could start by ditching GDP as an indicator of success in favor of a more balanced measure like the Genuine Progress Indicator, which accounts for negative “externalities” like pollution and material depletion. We could roll out a new money system that doesn’t pump our system full of interest-bearing debt. And we could start thinking about putting caps on material use, so that we never extract more than the Earth can regenerate.

The old generation of innovators believed that tech would allow us to subdue nature and bend it to our will. Our generation is waking up to a more hopeful truth: that our survival depends not on domination, but on harmony.

Jason Hickel is an anthropologist at the University of London who works on international development and global political economy, with an ethnographic focus on southern Africa. He writes for the Guardian and Al Jazeera English. His most recent book, The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets, is available now.

Photo by eelke dekker

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In a unique investigation of the subject, Share The World’s Resources (STWR) founder Mohammed Mesbahi has set out a strategic vision for how to realise the very highest ideal of a basic income worldwide. He argues that a truly universal and unconditional basic income is ultimately feasible within each nation, coordinated under the auspices of the United Nations. Yet this will initially depend on an unparalleled degree of public support for the cause of ending hunger and needless deprivation, based on a fairer sharing of the world’s resources.

That is the only path, writes Mesbahi, for a basic income policy to uphold the fundamental human rights of all. And if pursued with this motivation, it is a pioneering and honourable path that inherently says: ‘above all nations is humanity’.

STWR’s latest publication is closely related to Mesbahi’s two recent works that also examine popular intellectual discourses in a similarly holistic way, in relation to the contemporary ideas of the ‘commons’ and the ‘sharing economy’. Yet the emergent discourse about a universal basic income is perhaps closest to the heart of STWR’s principal concerns, as reflected in the slogan for the 10th Basic Income Week: “Redistribute the wealth, here and everywhere!”

However, few advocates for a basic income contemplate its implementation in a definitively universal or planetary sense, as Mesbahi sets out to investigate in this inspirational treatise for activists and concerned citizens.

While the publication is principally aimed at advocates within the basic income movements across the world, it is also hoped that lay readers can easily read and benefit from the author’s intuitive observations. With this in mind, a number of explanatory and contextual notes are included at the end to help clarify where STWR stands on some of the technical issues, and also to help provide some introductory material for interested newcomers to this important (although somewhat controversial) policy proposal.

An excerpt of our new book, ‘Towards a universal basic income for all humanity’, is available online here.

To purchase a copy of the book, please contact [email protected]

Further resources: 

Towards a universal basic income for all humanity

Heralding Article 25: A people’s strategy for world transformation

17th BIEN Congress on “Implementing a Basic Income”

10th international Basic Income Week 18-24 sept. 2017

Image credit: Andrew J. Nilsen, Fast Company

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Brussels, 25 September 2017 – CICOPA, the international organisation of industrial and service cooperatives, published today its second global report on “Cooperatives and Employment” [PDF]. .

For Bruno Roelants, Secretary General of CICOPA:

“Employment is one of the most important contributions made by cooperatives throughout the world. This report shows that people involved in cooperatives constitute a sufficiently high percentage to be considered as a major actor in the United Nations “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”, as well as in the worldwide debate on the “Future of Work” launched by the International Labour Organization. In addition, the intent of the study is to improve the methodology and the quality level of cooperative statistics. This is particularly timely, as the next International Congress of Labour Statisticians will take place in 2018. The public authorities and the cooperative movement itself should pay particular attention to this forthcoming event.”

Turning to qualitative aspects, the report also examines cooperatives’ specific contributions to addressing problems related to work and employment in the informal economy:

  People working in the informal economy who join savings and credit cooperatives, mutual insurance cooperatives, multi-purpose cooperatives and consumer cooperatives have an easier access to credit, education and training, affordable goods and services to meet their basic needs and a certain level of social protection based on solidarity and mutual help.
  Self-employed producers and entrepreneurs who join shared service cooperatives gain access to various services which help them to attain economies of scale and a higher bargaining power.
  For the self-employed workers and freelancers who have considerably increased in number over the last decades, cooperatives could be used by trade unions or member based organisations as a tool to organize them, but could also provide innovative models which could guarantee both flexibility and protection.
  Worker cooperatives, which aim at providing decent jobs to their worker-members, can be a direct solution to the formalization of informal employment.

However, to fully display the potential contributions of the cooperatives, “a favourable environment and an appropriate legal framework are necessary” and “the cooperative model should be better explained to trade unions, member-based organisations, NGOs and local governments”, concludes the report.

Photo by Andrea Marutti

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San José de Apartadó, Colombia — This is a significant feat, given that it is the leading peace community in Colombia, born in the heart of a civil war between the Colombian government, right-wing paramilitaries and the guerrilla army of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-Ep). Dignitaries from around the country and the globe have gathered in San José de Apartadó, including high-level officials from the United Nations, European ambassadors and heads of international non-governmental organizations like Peace Brigades International. Despite the international awareness of this community among certain circles in the human rights movement, most notably Noam Chomsky’s deep admiration for the community’s work, most people have never heard of San José de Apartadó. A little history might help us better understand why this is the case.

A Peace Community in the Heart of a Civil War

Founded by 1,350 displaced farmers in March 1997, after paramilitaries roamed the region pillaging and massacring, the community came together to protect themselves and their land, declaring themselves neutral in the war. The armed groups made them pay a huge price for this decision, killing more than 200 of their members, including most of their leaders. Almost all victims died by the hands of paramilitary and national armed forces, largely trained by the US government, working in the service of local landowners and multinational corporations.

Despite the horrors they have faced, the members of this community have stood their ground and continue working together bound by a commitment to nonviolence and reconciliation. Eduar Lanchero, one of their late leaders, once said, “The power of the community consists of its ability to transform pain into hope …” With their community, the people of San José have shown other communities in the region and country how to break the vicious victim-perpetrator cycle and to create a self-sufficient community outside the dominant resource extraction economic model that surrounds them. This level of economic autonomy and independence from state influence has been seen as a grave threat to the interests of multinational corporations looking for development opportunities in the region.

Conscious of the larger systemic effects of their resistance, Lanchero further elucidated,

The armed groups aren’t the only ones who kill. It’s the logic behind the whole system. The way people live generates this kind of death. This is why we decided to live in a way that our life generates life. One basic condition, which kept us alive was to not play the game of fear, which was imposed upon us by the murders of the armed forces. We have made our choice. We chose life. Life corrects us and guides us.”

Peace vs. “Development”

Despite international accompaniment through various non-governmental organizations, the persecution of the community has actually increased since the peace deal was signed. According to the February 24, 2017, newsletter of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, the community has faced paramilitary invasion, with their remote hamlets continually occupied, threats that the community remain silent about the atrocities they have been afflicted by or face further retaliation.

As Todd Howland, Colombia representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights told Truthout, “Many claim that now there’s peace, there’s no longer any need for a peace community” and according to sources who wish to remain anonymous for their safety, the state has offered community members money to lure them out of the community. Gloria Cuartas, the former mayor of Apartadó, the municipality governing the region, says, “Parts of the government and multinationals use the cover of apparent peace to manage what they so far haven’t — ending the peace community.”

Why is the Colombian state so worried about a community of peaceful farmers? And is the answer to this question the same reason the story of San José de Apartadó has been so hidden from international media? The Colombian army has been clear on this answer, often stating that the community is in the way of”development.” What do they mean by development? Clearly, they are not referring to peace and human well-being, but rather the standard narrow definition of extractive-based GDP growth.

Edward Goldsmith, one of the fathers of the British environmental movement, reminds us, “Development is just a new word for what Marxists called imperialism and what we can loosely refer to as colonialism — a more familiar and less loaded term.”

For 20 years, the community of San José de Apartadó has been living a working alternative of nonviolent resistance to the brutal agenda of displacement and oppression. It seems to be the imperative of the state to dismantle it so it won’t be replicated or emulated by other communities living through the same struggles across the country.

Ati Quigua, leader of the Arhuaco people, who served as a spokesperson for Colombia’s Indigenous nations in the Havana peace negotiations, mirrors those worries. “They are making ‘peace’ in order to get rid of the guerrillas, so that paramilitaries can take over the countryside, drive out farmers and Indigenous Peoples and carry on with what they call ‘economic development’,” Quigua told Truthout. “This isn’t our peace. We want peace with the Earth. If things don’t change, Colombia is going to face a cultural and ecological genocide.”

The Possibility of Genuine Peace in Colombia

Colombia is a country at the tipping point, at a fragile moment of uncertainty, pregnant with both the prospect of a genuine humane transformation and the imminent danger of a violent backlash that could be even more brutal than the violence of its recent past.

One thing is clear: Peace will only be possible by addressing the root causes of the war. In other words, peace cannot be achieved without changing the rules of the global system that require perpetual exploitation of natural resources for maximum private profit, and therefore, necessitates the displacement of people from their lands.

Communities like San José de Apartadó can serve as living laboratories for the necessary next phase in the Colombian peace process: initiating a process of reconciliation and social peace-building in the country. They can also provide an alternative to traditional Western-led economic development. This is why knowing about this community and its peace work is an important part of creating a post-capitalist future. What better place to start than communities that have fostered reconciliation and resilience in the heart of violence and oppression?

Photo by Fellowship of Reconciliation

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Media reporting that heralds the success of global poverty reduction strategies making claims such as “the number of people living in extreme poverty ($1.90 per person per day) has tumbled by half in two decades” is still very much routine. However, articles like Nicholas Kristof’s recent piece in the New York Times, entitled The Best News You Don’t Know that suggests that “historians may conclude that the most important thing going on in the world in the early 21st century was a stunning decline in human suffering’ accepts doctored UN numbers at face value, misguidedly casting them as if they were news.

Much as we all naturally want to believe Mr Kristoff’s rendering of reality, it masks some far deeper, more depressing truths.

We can and should recognise that there has, indeed, been some remarkable progress on some fronts, but the idea that this warrants an overall “the world is getting better” diagnosis is, we’re sorry to say, untruthful, as it is based on a very partial reading of some fundamentally unsound data. In truth, the number of people living in poverty (as measured by the $5 a day mark, which UNCTAD defines as the absolute minimum for living a healthy life) has increased by 10% since the 1980s, and hunger by 9%. This, during a period in which global GDP increased an astonishing 271%.

Right now, according to the World Bank’s database, 4.1 billion people – more than half of humanity – are living in a state of poverty. So whose pockets are really being lined with all this aggregate economic growth?

This narrative also masks the fact that this growth has been dependent on economic activity that is destroying the environment wholesale, laying bear-traps for people living in poverty long into the future. The worst aspect of this narrative is not, ultimately, its empirical dishonesty, but what it hides. It gets people believing that everything is getting better, therefore we just need more of the same to end poverty. More of the same being the neoliberal ‘capital growth at all costs’ system that got us here, into the anthropocene, with its unfolding 6th mass extinction event, its massively centralising patterns of wealth and power distribution, and its deep, structural poverty and inequality.

No thanks.

Far better to fess up to the whole truth, as that is far more likely to focus attention where it’s needed to actually overcome poverty: the fundamental operating principles of the economic system, starting with, ‘material growth everywhere, all the time, at all costs’.

Unfortunately, generating a political and social imperative to do that is just the sort of thing Mr Kristof’s faux ‘everything’s great and getting greater’ narrative works against.

Find out more about how poverty is created on The Rules website: https://therules.org

Further resources:

Exposing the great ‘poverty reduction’ lie, Al Jazeera

Could you live on $1.90 a day? That’s the international poverty line, The Guardian

The hunger numbers: are we counting right? The Guardian

Photo credit: psd, flickr creative commons

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Following the first ever United Nations Summit on Refugees and Migrants last week, many civil society organisations and concerned citizens are taking stock of our government’s collective response to this unprecedented global crisis. The UN Summit was two years in the making, and gave a rare opportunity for world leaders to step up their commitments to help refugees, as well as draw up a blueprint for a more effective international plan of action. Central to these negotiations was the need to share responsibility for dealing with the crisis more equitably among member states, which was one of the key principles reaffirmed in the outcome document. Yet there is little promise for the world’s 21 million refugees that wealthy nations will be genuinely sharing—and not further shirking—their responsibilities to fulfil these vulnerable people’s basic rights.

Before the summit convened, it was already clear that rich governments would not be placing the needs of refugees and migrants above their narrow national self-interest. Rights groups widely criticised the watered-down agreement adopted by the UN General Assembly, particularly a commitment to resettle 10 percent of the global refugee population annually (itself inadequate) that was later dropped from the negotiation text. Another omission was the hoped-for Global Compact on Responsibility Sharing for Refugees, which was intended to be one of the summit’s main outcomes. Instead, any chance of a global solution is deferred for another 2 years of negotiations. What remains is a long list of general and vague commitments, without any kind of binding mechanism or targets decided for responsibility sharing between nations. More concrete pledges were made at a separate Leaders’ Summit on Refugees, convened by President Obama with 50 other nations, who together promised to take in significantly more refugees this year and increase funding by $4.5bn. But even these promises lack a guarantee, and may be reneged upon by the United States in its next administration.

So where is the hope that the situation can improve while 34,000 people are forced to flee their homes each day due to conflict and persecution, many of them continuing to die in an attempt to reach safety? The shocking trends show no sign of abating, largely driven by violent conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa that Western powers have had a substantial role in causing or exacerbating. Yet the responses we are seeing from governments are often far from the fundamental principles set down in international refugee law, as reaffirmed at the UN Summit. Europe is currently building more walls than during the height of the Cold War; billions of euros are being spent on deterrence measures and reactionary cooperation agreements that are having limited impact on the number of overall arrivals. Our own country, the UK, is admitting only a tiny proportion of Syrian refugees, while shamefully diverting part of the aid budget to control immigration from Africa. The new UK government’s position is that those fleeing war zones should remain in the first safe country they reach—effectively arguing that the refugee crisis is somebody else’s problem.

It is not enough to question where is the hope, for where is the morality, the kindness, the basic compassion? In this era of growing polarisation, fear and prejudice, there are many ordinary citizens who stand in solidarity with refugees as they are forced from their homelands, stepping in with volunteering and rescue efforts where governments have failed. STWR joined 30,000 others as part of the “refugees welcome” march in London on the weekend prior to the UN Summit, calling on the British government to settle more refugees and provide safe, legal routes to asylum. The numbers of people gathered were considerably less than last year when 100,000 marched, thought to be the biggest national show of support for refugees in living memory. But among a population of 64 million, such a one-off event was never going to be enough to compel the UK government to accept its fair share of refugees, and play its part in forging strong multilateral action.

The same situation pertains in other wealthy nations, where the majority of citizens turn a blind eye to the senseless suffering of those less fortunate than themselves. It has to be remembered that while 65 million people have been displaced by war or persecution, there are millions of others living in extreme poverty who do not have the economic means to seek refuge abroad, which may cost thousands of dollars to pay the fees of illegal human smugglers. What about the many millions of people who do not have enough food to eat on a daily basis, or the 22,000 children who die each day due to conditions of poverty? The global refugee crisis is the tip of the iceberg, compared to this wider tragedy of inequality and injustice that is seldom mentioned in news reports across the Western media. Yet even the problem of internally displaced persons—those who flee their homes but do not cross national borders, totalling around 45 million people—was ignored by the UN Summit. We are left to wonder at the fate of the billions of other people who live without adequate means for survival worldwide, so long as the lack of compassion in global policymaking is sustained by a generalised public indifference.

Much has been made of the basic unfairness in how responsibility is shared between nations for ameliorating the refugee crisis, whereby only 14% of refugees are being hosted in the wealthiest parts of the world. According to analysis from Oxfam, more than half of refugees have been hosted by just 6 countries and territories that account for less than 2 percent of the global economy. But is this a surprise when we consider the lack of sharing that defines the planet as a whole, and the longstanding inequalities in living standards that divide the richest countries from the majority poor overseas? As Oxfam comment in their report “I Ask the World to Empathise”, the men and woman seeking a safer future have faced intense hardship, and will invariably have relied on the kindness and solidarity of strangers along their journeys, who may have shared their scarce resources with them. In contrast, most of the governments of affluent nations are failing to share their resources in the same spirit of common humanity.

The real question is the kind of sharing that is needed to deal with the root causes of this unmitigated crisis, when the international response continues to be woefully inadequate. A coordinated multilateral plan of action based on the concept of responsibility sharing is the barest minimum that should be expected, in accordance with the capacity and wealth of each country. A massive upscaling of support is also required for the low- and middle-income countries who are hosting the most displaced people, so that response efforts can go beyond humanitarian aid to include help for livelihoods and education. All of these demands are entirely possible and realistic, if the right resources are directed at the problem.

However, addressing the root causes of an economic order that constantly produces the drivers of mass human displacement—entrenched poverty, endless wars and worsening climate change—will demand a level of global economic sharing that is unlike anything we have seen since the foundation of the United Nations, before we can realistically envisage a better world without borders, xenophobia or racism. The fact that our governments have even failed to agree a new refugee protection system based on genuine sharing in any form, only serves to underline the obvious reality: that the true burden of responsibility lies ever more heavily on the shoulders of ordinary people of goodwill.

Adam Parsons is the editor at Share The World’s Resources.

Photo credit: streets.life

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