Zeal for global reform may be waning: Experts Tuesday, 01 June 2010 05:03

DOHA: The World Economic Forum Global Redesign Summit concluded yesterday with participants expressing concerns that the zeal for reforming the global system may be waning.

The Forum’s Global Redesign Initiative (GRI) produced a set of 58 proposals for strengthening international cooperation put forward by more than 1,500 business, government, academic and civil society leaders.

These were published at the start of the two-day summit in a report entitled Everybody’s Business: Strengthening International Cooperation in a More Interdependent World.  More than 450 participants from 60 countries debated the proposals in interactive sessions to see how they can contribute to the redesign of existing institutions and mechanisms of global governance.

“We can now take this time as an opportunity for innovation to determine how we can move forward,” Patricia Espinosa Cantellano, Secretary of Foreign Affairs of Mexico, said in the closing plenary session. Tarja Halonen, President of the Republic of Finland, added: “It is a question of how. We have to always think about how.”

But some participants worried that, even though the impact of the global economic crisis is still playing out, the willingness in the international community to implement significant reforms may be faltering. “People need a crisis to really become aware of the necessity for change,” Willem Kok, Prime Minister of the Netherlands (1994-2002) and President of the Club de Madrid, explained.

Others suggested that the resistance to change could be hard to overcome. “There is frustration that existing institutional platforms cannot deliver the kind of transformational changes that are needed,” said Achim Steiner, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). “We need to look for positive opportunities for significant change.”

The status quo is simply not an option, reckoned Samantha Power, Senior Director of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights at the US National Security Council. Institutions of global cooperation have to become more representative and more efficient, she argued.

“Institutions and frameworks that don’t provide for people are not going to be sustainable. Representativeness, efficiency and competency can converge. We have to move into that world.” Approaches to global challenges must be multidimensional, involving not just governments but also business and civil society. Power noted: “We are so not there yet in knowing how to integrate non-state actors.”

Solutions to global problems have to take into account real conditions on the ground, advised Sadako Ogata, President of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), and a Member of the Global Agenda Council on Humanitarian Assistance. “The models we are taking are too international. The models of governance [we need] will have to come from within our societies themselves. In development work you have to go down and live with the people.”

The GRI proposals discussed at the Summit “go out from here and into the policy processes”, Lord Malloch-Brown, Vice-Chairman of the World Economic Forum, told participants. “We are the platform to follow that through to finish the last hurdles of the race and to get these ideas into national or government processes of different kinds.”

Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum said: “We will catalyse the work of the GRI into an ongoing Global Agenda Partnership. We all have to work together.”

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