M..E..T..A..S..P..E..C..T

Discussion text published on the occasion of the Post-2015, Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals events, United Nations General Assembly, New York, September 2013

(Dutch version: read here)

Since last year, I moderate a discussion about human rights among an international network of NGO’s. The discussion is part of an initiative that was taken on the occasion of the United Nations world summit on sustainable development as an answer to the lack of fundamental political attention to the importance of human rights as a criterion for sustainable development[1].  More than one year after Rio+20 and on the occasion of the opening week of the United Nations General Assembly, it is time to look back on that discussion and to look forward to how human rights will be taken up in the post Rio+20 process. Here in New York, there’s more than the case of Syria or Iran on the agenda. Politicians, the private sector, scientists and NGO’s also gathered to debate a policy process for sustainable development that should replace the millennium development goals initiative from 2015 on. A focus shift from concrete goals to a ‘vague’ process that aims ‘to care for sustainable development’ is not necessarily a negative move. It may also offer an opportunity to reflect on a new vision on human rights: a vision that would not only have the potential to effect well-being, environmental protection and fair markets, but that would also complicate a simply passing on of responsibilities from one to another. In this short text, I can only sketch the idea. I invite you to reflect on it and provide feedback.

The societal challenges are complex: people have different visions on what should happen, but also on what actually the problems are. Not only is the knowledge that can be used to reason about these problems ‘coloured’ by uncertainties and unknowns, we also have to accept that, even if we all would see a problem the same way, then opinions on solutions can still be different. Therefore, in light (or darkness) of the complex, the uncertain and the unknown, the only principle that remains is the principle that every human being would need to have the equal right to contribute to making sense of ‘what is’ and ‘what ought to be’. The right to be responsible in the interest of sustainable development and humanitarian well-being translates as a joint engagement to create possibilities for every human to be responsible, and thus as a care for participative democracy, self-critical policy supportive research and accessible and pluralist basic and advanced education. Intellectual solidarity as a synergy of care for intellectual emancipation (rights) and intellectual confrontation (responsibilities) will make the weaker more resilient and actively responsible, and will confront the powerful (the company, the nation state, the cultural guru) with their rationales used to preserve their own power positions.

The right to be responsible can, as principle, as well inspire the way we locally live together everyday as it can instruct markets and politics at the global level. To illustrate this, I sketch (although too brief) three examples of a different kind. (1) There is nothing wrong with expressing a religious or cultural belief through a specific ‘dress code’, but in a culture that prescribes more stringent codes of behaviour for women than for men, a woman’s ‘right to be responsible’ is limited, which implies f.i. that she cannot freely choose for herself to wear a headscarf or not. (2) There is nothing criminal about burning coal, oil or gas for energy production. But in the climate change debate, now blocked by a north-south stalemate and national protectionism, the right to be responsible would need to be passed on to those who produce and consume the energy: the different sectors (energy, agriculture, transport, industry) and the citizen. (3) There is nothing wrong in principle with thinking in terms of economic profit. But the current seeds politics of Monsanto deprives the local farmer of the right to be responsible for sustainable food.

This vision inspires the discussion text I drafted for the dialogue on human rights within the NGO network. The (apparently) radical point of departure did appeal to many, but also disturbed many others. Critiques went from ‘intellectually imperialist’ over ‘too academic’ to ‘plain naïve’, with the additional claim that there are more urgent issues to tackle, being there climate change, poverty and the financial crisis. It is true that these problems need action that cannot wait until a new era of enlightenment has come. On the other hand, we understand that sustainable development is as much about tackling misuse of power, poverty and disordered socio-economic systems now as it is about providing humans with capacities to stand stronger against power and to take care of themselves in these socio-economic systems in the future. Therefore, in the darkness of complexity and uncertainty and in light of pluralism and tolerance, the idea is that the principle of ‘the right to be responsible’ for every human being would be the only meaningful point of departure to speak of human rights today. Meaningful, as the principle inspires concrete change in how we organise democracy, scientific research and education, but also because it cannot be misused by politics or the market. The ‘right to food’ can still be strategically incorporated in the oppressive and exploiting seeds politics of Monsanto, while the ‘right to have a political voice’ can still be strategically interpreted by populist and authoritarian politicians as giving citizens the right to elect a politician who then, from a detached position, can speak in their place, instead of as the right to real participation in concrete cases of societal interest.

Meanwhile, it remains difficult to put human rights at the centre of attention of the political agenda, especially because it becomes more and more clear that the millennium development goals will not be met. Rather than motivating concrete action, the MDG numbers and deadlines have stirred political and economic actors to take position and strengthen the ratio of their own stake. An agenda that should have set off deliberations on transition paths ended up as a work plan of negotiating excuses of why we would not get there. Advancing from the principle of the equal ‘human right to be responsible’, human rights need central attention in global sustainable development dialogues and negotiations, not only in the interest of a livable earth and a fair global market, but also because it would create global and local possibilities to jointly reflect on what we find important in daily life. Also as a resistance to the fixation on ‘green’ economic growth as the so-called motor for sustainable development and humanitarian well-being, people here in New York and all over the world cooperate to bring human rights from the periphery to the centre of political attention. Join us and share your comments and thoughts with us.

Gaston Meskens, New York, 24 September 2013

Read more about the project The Possibility of Global Governance at http://www.the-possibility-of-global-governance.net/.

Invited Lecture – The Trouble with Justification – Getting Straight on the Science and Politics of Nuclear Energy

done at the Seminar “Nuclear Policy in Argentina and the World”, Buenos Aires, 25 April 2013

The way nuclear energy technology ‘escapes’ a deliberate justification approach as an energy technology on a transnational level is today in sharp contrast with the way fossil fuel energy technologies are subject of global negotiations driven by the doom of climate change. The claim put forward in this lecture is that this ‘denial’ is a symptom of a contemporary settled ‘comfort of polarisation’ around the use of nuclear energy technology that is deeply rooted in the organisational structures of politics, science and informed civil society. The lecture argues for the need to develop a new rationale that aims to seek societal trust ‘by method instead of proof’, taking into account that the outcome of such a justification process might as well be an acceptance or a rejection of the technology. It sketches what this ‘deliberate-political’ approach would be in theory and practice, briefly hits at two contemporary myths that would relativize the need for this approach and concludes with a ‘pragmatic’ list of elements of an advanced framework for deliberation on nuclear energy technology and on energy in general.

[…]

See more about the Seminar here.

A conversation on

The human rights principle for sustainable development governance

when: World Social Forum 2013, 27 March 2013, 13h00 – 15h30
where: Room TD4 at the University Campus El Manar, Tunis.

See the event flyer here. Visit the official website of the World Social Forum here.

[…]

What if …

in face of the urgent but complex challenges we need to tackle today, we would understand human rights as providing ‘the right to be responsible‘ for every human? Would this way of looking at social justice and at fair and effective governance provide a way to meaningfully discuss rights and responsibilities for authorities, institutions, private sector actors and individual citizens?

The conversation, seen as ‘an exercise in global ethics – thinking’ will try to map and discuss rights and responsibilities relevant to specific themes of sustainable development (food, water, energy, health,  education, …). The event is meant to be an open conversation inspired by your views on the issues, whatever your background or interest is.

More information here.

[…]

Philosophical activism is a concept I introduced in the context of my research on global governance. Some time ago, I proposed the Centre for Ethics and Value Inquiry of the University of Ghent to organise a series of workshops under the title of ‘Philosophical Activism’. The event that kicked-off this series was held on the 15th of February 2013. See the programme and the presentations here.

[…]

Read more at http://www.the-possibility-of-global-governance.net.

[Paper presented at the Earth Systems Governance Tokyo Conference ‘Complex Architectures, Multiple Agents’, 28 – 31 January 2013, United Nations University Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan]

Summary

Sustainable development is impossible without a continuous care for the implementation of human rights as made explicit in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the human rights-related principles of the Rio and Rio+20 Declarations. However, a full implementation of human rights would not automatically lead to sustainable development. As an exercise in coordinating complex systems of interlinked socio-economic processes in a dynamic of increasing globalisation, fair and effective sustainable development governance will always be troubled by cognitive complexity and moral pluralism. That is: even if we would all agree on the knowledge base of a sustainable development related problem, then opinions could still differ about the acceptability of solutions. The natural and social sciences can inform us about the character of options, they cannot always clarify the choice to make.

Advancing from this rationale, the paper argues that, added to the fields of human rights concerning a fair socio-economic ‘organisation’ of our society, fair and effective sustainable development governance implies the right for every human ‘to contribute to making sense of what is at stake’. In practice, this social justice based concern for human intellectual capacity building translates as a concern for free and pluralist advanced education, inclusive and transdisciplinary knowledge generation and inclusive, deliberative multi-level decision making.

The paper concludes with the argumentation that a rights-based approach to intellectual capacity building, supporting ‘the right to be responsible’ for every human, is the only way to enable the possibility of global sustainable development governance in a complex and pluralist world.

See the introduction and the paper here.

This paper was presented on 5 October 2012 at the 2012 Conference on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change at the Free University of Berlin. It proposes an alternative qualitative vision on sustainable development that could inspire a global ethics for societal development and intergenerational accountability and, at the same time, expose specific responsibilities for policy, the private sector, science and civil society. The vantage point would be viewing sustainable development as a convergence of interests on three ‘policy levels’:

Normative integration: a ‘meta-level’ that starts from an interpretation of the concept of sustainable development as a meta-norm under which every human socio-economic activity would need to ‘fit’;

Pragmatic assemblage: a ‘medium level’ that concentrates on the ‘building blocks’ of sustainable development and their interrelation;

Pragmatic assimilation: a ‘ground level’ that focuses on how and why specific actors formulate own responsibilities and (eventually) take corresponding action;

The motivation is that, whatever our stake or concern is as citizens, communities, companies or institutions, we all have a joint interest in making these levels ‘work’. The challenge for sustainable development governance is then to ‘succesfully connect’ the levels, as this would unveil specific requirements for the way we make sense about our behaviour and rationalise it in view of the totality. Today, the political view is that ‘we know what (science tells us) to do’ and that governance is about organising our ‘good intentions’ into a coherent totality (see ‘the green economy’). The general assumption is that this is a complex but feasible exercise ‘if everybody shows political will’. This contribution argues that this approach is wrong, as this still provides ways for actors to escape specific responsibilities that are crucial for sustainable development. The paper elaborates on why and how the three-level picture of sustainable development governance would also make explicit these responsibilities and sketch required institutional approaches for a ‘politics of confrontation’ that would set this view in practice.

Read on at the research website of the ‘The Possibility of Global Governance’ project.

My philosophical research is primarily concerned with a human rights approach to intellectual capacity building for sustainable development governance. As I believe that any philosophy that makes normative statements about the socio-political reality also needs to be brought towards and tested in that socio-political reality, I find it also important to explore and establish the link between academic normative philosophical research and deliberative discursive interaction with civil society in global policy processes such as those facillitated by the United Nations.

From out of that motivation, during the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro (Rio+20 – see the official website), I engaged in a number of activities related to human rights. Read on at the research website ‘The Possibility of Global Governance’.