Generating ideas for global cooperation Monday, 31 May 2010 02:31

By Nasser Al Harthy

DOHA:  The Global Redesign Summit is intended to generate new ideas that would form a new basis for international cooperation, H E Mohammed Abdullah M Al Rumaihi, Qatar’s Assistant Foreign Minister of Follow-Up Affairs, told a news conference here yesterday.

“Today we would like to see especially at the beginning of the 21st century which kind of reforms we need for the international system,” he said.

“This is the responsibility of all; states, civil societies, parliamentarians business sector, intellectuals, academics and media. All these players have to give their input and ideas about what these reforms should be.”

Al Rumaihi was speaking at a join news conference with the World Economic Forum officials and some participants of the Global Redesign Summit which opened here yesterday about their expectations.

Alexandre Fasel, Ambassador of the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs of Switzerland; Global Agenda Council on Human Rights and Protection pointed to the need for a strong international governance. He said that because the multi dimensional challenges and facets to all the problems that have to be dealt with, there is no other way than to have a multi stakeholder approach and that is what the World Economic Forum  which he termed as ‘think-tank of think-tanks’ can offer and where new ideas can be generated and assembled.

“But ideas should be given time. One can deal with the details, one can ascertain what exactly the good ideas are, which ideas could gather enough support in the international arena to be implemented and this is our expectation here,” said Fasel.

Benno Ndulu, Governor of the Bank of Tanzania on his part expects the Summit would contribute to balance the upside and downside of the global inter-dependence through improved international cooperation to face the challenges of globalization.

“We have an opportunity now to use this summit as a place for smart ideas,” he said. “We hope that we will have the emergence of a global governance system that can effectively enforce the rules of fairness and ensure that there is an effective collective action of safeguarding our common welfare.”

Ndulu added, “I hope that on conclusion of this summit, the powerful set of ideas that are going to be discussed here will set the seeds of a global movement multi faceted in nature towards improving the global governance system.” There is a need to find critical ways to deal with these problems and challenges and small countries also should have a voice, according to Ong Keng-Yong, Ambassador-at-Large at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Singapore.

“In the search for new solutions we believe what we have now in the global system such as the UN, the IMF and other international bodies are still very relevant and we should try to find ways to make better use of these bodies in finding the solutions that we want for our global community,” he said.

“We hope that the discussions in Qatar will contribute to search for practical ways to reach our community effort to find solutions. We should be able to persuade more our governments to continue this process.”

He added that the strength of the combined 58 recommendations from nine work teams to be made should respective governments to bring this to the next stage which is to publicize the results of the Summit further and perhaps generate more discussions at regional forums.

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