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Women are Heads of State and Government in only 21 countries, despite the strong case that their leadership makes for more inclusive decision-making and more representative governance, even during this pandemic. Credit: UN Women

By External Source
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 24 2020 (IPS)

The question has never been whether women can lead as capably as men. Women have always led, and women will always lead, especially when the times are hard, and their communities are in need. The question that we need to ask is, why is women’s leadership invisible? Why is their potential and their power stifled?

In the midst of a global pandemic, we find women on the front lines everywhere, as heads of government, legislators, healthcare workers, community leaders, and more. Although women’s organizations and community groups shoulder much of the responsibility of preventing the spread of the virus and serving those in greatest need, they are perennially left out of decision-making processes.

Today, women are Heads of State and Government in only 21 countries, despite the strong case that their leadership makes for more inclusive decision-making and more representative governance, even during this pandemic. Men are still 75 per cent of parliamentarians and hold 73 per cent of managerial positions. Most negotiators in formal peace processes are also men.

This year, International Day of Democracy comes as a reminder that unlocking the full breadth of perspectives, experiences and leadership of women is vital for building back better from this pandemic.

How women lead for the wellbeing of all, in just five stories that you may have missed.

 

Her Excellency Vjosa Osmani is a Doctor of Legal Sciences, former professor and mother of two girls. Photo: Office of the Assembly President

 

1. Demonstrating strong women’s leadership in the pandemic

From Germany to New Zealand and Denmark to Iceland, women leaders have shown clarity, empathy, and strong communication in their decisions and policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Vjosa Osmanu, the first woman assembly president in Kosovo, is among the many women leaders praised for their leadership during the crisis.

A former professor and mother of two girls, Osmanu is an outspoken advocate for women’s representation in politics. “When women participate in high-ranking political and state level [positions], they contribute to more balanced, gender-sensitive, environmentally considerate and forward-looking policies,” she says.

During the pandemic, women in Kosovo have faced high levels of vulnerability. Like many countries, Kosovo has seen a rise in domestic violence cases since lockdown measures were introduced. “I am consistently raising my voice about the pandemic’s gender dimensions, sharing relevant facts and information, while closely monitoring all government actions,” says Osmani.

Working to protect vulnerable populations from threats related to the COVID-19 crisis, she has joined the UN Women Kosovo campaign against domestic violence and has worked closely with UNICEF on issues related to children’s health and families’ wellbeing.

“A limited number of women hold leadership positions globally and the same applies to Kosovo. Social productivity cannot be reached while people are marginalized, discriminated and face gender-based barriers,” she shares, adding that both men and women need to contribute to efforts that put more women in decision-making positions.

 

Women at Peace Village in Jetis, Central Java. Women’s groups’ members have been taking central roles as community volunteers in stepping up to stop the spread of COVID-19. Photo courtesy of Wahid Foundation.

 

2. Fighting food insecurity on the front lines

Democratic principles are at the heart of the GUYUB project, an initiative providing essential support to women in Indonesia during the COVID-19 crisis. Guyub in Indonesian means “getting along” or “in togetherness”. It’s a philosophy that connects communities even as physical distancing and lockdown measures have disrupted social lives.

Jointly implemented by UN Women, UNODC and UNDP, the project provided recently distributed food and hygiene packages to families in ten Peace Villages across Java. Upon arriving in the villages, the packages were distributed by a women-led task force, in partnership with the Indonesian NGO Wahid Foundation.

“Large-scale social restrictions that were imposed in our city created a challenge for us… to buy, prepare and distribute food packages and hygiene kits,” says Siti Yulaikha, Task Force Member from Sidomulyo, Batu City, East Java. However, the women leaders made use of a facility that had previously served as a food bank, and although movement was limited, they managed to distribute the packages to community members most in need.

“The residents are thankful for the food packages as many shops and markets are closed. They also used the hygiene kits, such as disinfectant and soap, not only at home, but at public spaces, such as the village security post,” says Yulaikha.

To protect the health of their villages, task force members took up other important virus prevention roles as well, disinfecting public spaces, producing and distributing masks, and spreading awareness about health protocols. They have also set up a centre for coronavirus data collection, contact tracing, and health checks.

Their agile adaptation to the challenging circumstances doesn’t stop there; when many women saw dips in earnings due to closed markets and lost business opportunities, they recalled learnings from prior entrepreneurship training and created a WhatsApp group to serve as an online marketplace.

“Food stall owners utilized WhatsApp to arrange takeaway food orders and home delivery. These efforts have helped them with vital, sustained income during the pandemic,” Yulaikha says.

 

Women peacebuilders are using their mobile phones to support COVID-19 response efforts in Libya. Photos: Courtesy of Libyan Women’s Network for Peacebuilding.

 

3. Leading virus prevention efforts across Libya

A step ahead of much of the working world, the 36 women involved in the Libyan Women’s Network for Peacebuilding were accustomed to connecting via phones and computers well before the pandemic hit. Separated by their country’s divisions, the women leaders who come from diverse social, generational, and geographic backgrounds, have been communicating over WhatsApp and Zoom since July 2019 to discuss peacebuilding strategies.

“We believe that we should be one Libya,” says a member of the Network, created with support from UN Women. The members are experienced activists; each is linked to her own regional network of activists that work to support their community. When the threat of the pandemic became known, the women quickly adapted their online activism to respond to the situation.

They shared vital information about the virus and how it spreads on national and local radios, provided cleaning and sanitizing products to low-income households, and disseminated gender-based violence hotline numbers. They partnered with other organizations to distribute masks and gloves in prisons and detention centres and called for the release of prisoners who are either on a short sentence or near to completing their sentence, particularly those who are elderly or ill.

Because the network of women spans the country, they have valuable insights into regional needs and have been instrumental in highlighting population-specific humanitarian issues.

Despite their vital role in managing conflicts and making peace in families and communities, Libyan women are rarely allowed to enter male-dominated decision-making and negotiation spaces. Fighting against multiple issues at once – coronavirus threats as well as marginalization of women in peace processes – these women leaders continue to push for a safer, healthier, more peaceful Libya.

“Libyan women are at the forefront of response to problems; from COVID 19 to the horrific consequences of a conflict that has divided their country and inflicted unimaginable suffering on their communities,” says Begoña Lasagabaster, UN Women Representative in Libya. “It is high time that they had their rightful place in peace talks and their say on the future of Libya.”

 

Waleska López Canú. Photo Courtesy Waleska López Canú

 

4. Breaking down barriers to health services and information for indigenous communities

Dr. Waleska López Canú, Medical Director of Wuqu’ Kawoq or Maya Health Alliance, is proud to be Maya Kaqchikel. Her indigenous identity informs much of the work she does with Maya Health Alliance which provides medical services in the most impoverished communities in Guatemala.

Since the onset of the pandemic, López has coordinated telemedicine treatment for severe and chronic malnutrition, sexual and reproductive health, and complex and chronic illnesses so that patients can continue receiving life-saving care despite lockdown measures. Maya Health Alliance has also distributed food aid to more than 900 families.

In addition to providing treatment and aid, the organization seeks to reduce barriers to healthcare so that it can be accessed by all. In the ongoing fight against COVID-19, López has witnessed how language can be a barrier to communicating about virus prevention in indigenous communities. To better serve these marginalized groups, Maya Health Alliance, together with associated institutions, has created a series of videos, audios, and radio programmes, tailored to rural and indigenous contexts, to be distributed in seven Mayan languages, as well as Spanish.

With López as Medical Director, Maya Health Alliance has taken on several other vital roles in COVID-19 response: the organization facilitates the sharing of prevention measures among health professionals through a WhatsApp group of more than 180 members from more than 100 community-based organizations. They also provide personal protective equipment to students in their last year of medical school who offer services in the rural areas, and online assessment and training to medical professionals.

“The crisis caused by the pandemic has made visual our harsh reality, which has historically been neglected,” says López. “Indigenous women, little by little, are becoming conscious of our true role in the family and in society. We have much to contribute, from our life experiences and the knowledge of who we are and [what] we want, as well as the knowledge of the real needs of the community itself.”

 

Martha Achok raises awareness on how to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in Uganda. Photo: UN Women /Aidah Nanyonjo

 

5. Preventing the spread of COVID-19 in refugee settlements in Uganda

In the Bidibidi settlement for refugees and displaced persons in the Yumbe District of Uganda, Joyce Maka waits at the water collection point. The mother of three is a refugee from Sudan, arriving in Uganda after her husband was killed by rebels, and she is one of 12 women peace mediators in Zone B of the settlement now leading the fight against COVID-19.

Maka waits at the water station because, despite lockdown measures, people (usually women and girls) still need to frequent this spot in order to collect their water, making it a strategic point to pass on life-saving information. Since the onset of the pandemic, disseminating information about the virus has been challenging as most are confined to their homes.

“We encourage them to stay at least two metres away from each other; we also encourage them to wash their hands before and after pumping water,” Maka explains. In their role as peace mediators, Maka and others typically mediate community disputes, including issues of domestic violence, early marriage, and land rights. However, when the pandemic hit, the mediators transitioned to leading COVID-19 prevention measures.

The women have learned the importance of hand washing, physical distancing, wearing masks, testing, and quarantining, and they share this information with the wider community, through songs that they’ve composed in local dialect.

Gaining the trust and cooperation of the community is key to preventing the spread of COVID-19, so it’s important that the health information come from trusted community members, like the mediators. Their leadership and commitment to the wellbeing of all has never been more crucial.

 

This article was originally published by UN Women

The post Why Is Women’s Leadership Not in the Headlines? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Across power, industry and transport, State-Owned Enterprises emit in the aggregate over 6.2 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent annually, which is more than any other country except China. Credit: Bigstock.

By Philippe Benoit and Alex Clark
WASHINGTON, Sep 24 2020 (IPS)

President Xi Jinping announced on Tuesday China’s aim to become carbon neutral before 2060. Achieving this goal will require the support and engagement of China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs), as they currently generate more than half of the country’s energy sector emissions. SOEs are major drivers of greenhouse gas emissions globally, particularly in emerging economies. 

Across power, industry and transport, these companies emit in the aggregate over 6.2 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent annually, which is more than any other country except China.

SOEs are also major providers of low-carbon alternatives (over half of the world’s zero-carbon utility-scale power generation capacity is state-owned).  SOEs’ major role in driving emissions means that there will be no climate success without them.

Government officials and climate stakeholders currently meeting in New York (virtually) at the United Nations and for Climate Week need to give greater attention to engaging these SOEs on climate.

In this article, we present several tools that governments can use to prompt their SOEs to take climate action. We also describe the independent capacity of these enterprises to lead on low-carbon action, as well as their ability to resist government pressure to advance the climate effort.

Finally, we discuss one of the most important hurdles to effective engagement by most SOEs: what has often been too modest climate ambition from their government shareholder.

An oft-overlooked feature of SOEs is that the same governments that signed the Paris Agreement hold direct ownership over these enterprises (particularly in large, emerging economies such as China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia and Saudi Arabia).

Arguably, the most important determinant of how much an SOE engages in the low-carbon transition is the extent to which its government shareholder prioritizes climate goals. Even the most powerful SOEs respond to the preferences and directions of their country’s ultimate leadership

Ownership provides a government with several distinctive tools to “push” SOE climate action that are more direct than the legislative and regulatory instruments largely used to influence private sector behavior. A government can, as shareholder, issue directives to its SOE though the company’s board of directors.

It can also appoint and remove senior executives (both through the board and often even directly). Selecting appropriate executive leadership with the commitment and managerial capacity to implement low-carbon programs can be decisive in driving effective SOE action on climate.

Governments also provide direction to SOEs through more informal exchanges between public officials and the company’s CEO and board members.  Lastly, governments can work to incentivize low-carbon action by middle managers (frequently the critical decision-makers in larger SOEs) by directing the company to adopt climate-friendly personnel and evaluation policies.

Governments can also deploy financial and bureaucratic resources to “pull” SOEs towards low-carbon action. For example, they can direct public funding to low-carbon investments (and away from high-carbon ones). State-owned commercial and development banks are often mobilized to deliver this climate-targeted financing, typically on preferential terms designed to accelerate uptake.

Governments also catalyze low-carbon investments by providing critical complementary infrastructure, such as the construction (often by another state-owned company) of a transmission line to an SOE’s remote renewable generation site. In addition, government funding for research and development can reduce costs for low-carbon projects, making them more attractive to SOEs (as well as the private sector).  Governments have even created new specialized SOEs to deploy specific low-carbon technologies. 

Government policies which pressure markets broadly, referred to herein as “press” tools, will also influence SOEs.

These include carbon taxes and emissions trading systems (ETS), which continue to dominate the policy discourse on emissions reduction strategies.  Although the two instruments are considered among the most effective for reducing emissions,  their impact on SOEs is likely to be more muted than on private sector companies, in part because SOEs often face multiple mandates beyond financial returns and profits.

For example, power sector SOEs are often required by their government shareholders to prioritize reliable electricity supply at low cost, as well as support other economic, social and political goals, such as employment, access expansion or using specific state-owned suppliers.

These factors lessen the responsiveness of SOEs to market-based instruments that make low-carbon alternatives more attractive in financial terms. Because costs and profitability do remain important considerations for SOEs even in the face of non-financial mandates, market-based instruments can still be useful climate tools to influence their operational and investment choices (such as the national ETS being considered for China).

These instruments, however, are unlikely to result in the same degree of meaningful decarbonization by SOEs foreseen for the private sector unless they are accompanied by some of the other measures described in this article.

Of course, an SOE might also simply decide to pursue low-carbon goals to serve its own corporate objectives, even in the absence of explicit government pressure. SOEs are often major corporations with substantial assets, financial resources, commercial know-how and technical capacity, enabling them to develop and implement robust low-carbon programs.

Motivating an SOE to act on climate in furtherance of its own corporate interests can be a highly effective way to advance low-carbon company action. A powerful SOE, however, is also able to exercise economic and political clout to resist government initiatives, including low-carbon ones.

Undertaking a strategic planning exercise to identify the corporate-level benefits of low-carbon action can help motivate an SOE to pursue climate goals (just as these benefits are increasingly influencing private sector companies).

Arguably, the most important determinant of how much an SOE engages in the low-carbon transition is the extent to which its government shareholder prioritizes climate goals. Even the most powerful SOEs respond to the preferences and directions of their country’s ultimate leadership.

To date, unfortunately, governments have exhibited only a modest commitment to these goals, especially relative to the perceived short-term economic and political gains generated by incumbent high-carbon assets.

The result has been tepid policies, programs and overall government signals on climate that have failed to produce the low-carbon actions needed from SOEs (and the private sector) to meet the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement.

Although there is some room for optimism given recent governmental pronouncements targeting carbon neutrality, a deeper understanding and appreciation among national stakeholders of how the low-carbon transition will best serve economic growth, poverty alleviation and social improvement objectives is needed to strengthen domestic resolve on climate and the government’s interest in using SOEs to this end.

For deep global emissions reductions to be achievable, SOEs must play a leading role in China and other countries where these enterprises are major actors in energy production and consumption.

Government ownership presents an under-explored avenue to engage these companies in advancing the climate effort.  A combination of “push”, “pull” and “press” measures will be needed.  In addition, a self-motivated SOE will further help to advance climate action.

As we move on from Climate Week into the lead-up to COP26 next year, governments and the climate community need to focus on developing initiatives that promote SOE engagement in low-carbon action.

 

Philippe Benoit is Adjunct Senior Research Scholar for Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.  He was previously the Head of the Energy Environment Division at the International Energy Agency and Energy Sector Manager for Latin America at the World Bank.

Alex Clark is a Ph.D. Researcher at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford, and former director of the GeoAsset Project under the Oxford Sustainable Finance Programme.

The views expressed are the authors’.

 

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Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of The United Nations. Credit: United Nations

By Robert W. Sandford
HAMILTON, Canada, Sep 24 2020 (IPS)

As we reflect on this week and celebrate the United Nations’ rise in the war-ravaged world some 75 years ago, humanity is again being asked to lay the foundation for a new world.

As in 1945, we are asked to envision the world that emerges from a global catastrophe. Similarly, as well, in our post-pandemic world we will need to make not a partial but a full transformation, one in which human self-interest again aligns with planetary realities.

Such a global reset can produce universal benefits in the form of a healthier, more just, safer, kinder and more spirituality connected society.

As UN historian Paul Kennedy noted, it is difficult today to recapture the optimism and high spirits of those who, in the latter days of the most devasting war in history, thought that a new world order was possible, or had already arrived.

Of course, these visionaries were overly optimistic. All who roll boulders uphill are.

The lesson and inspiration for us is that they were able to look at a world reduced to rubble and see in it a transformational moment for all. If they did that then, surely, we can also do so today.

In 1945, the UN inherited the same challenges faced by an earlier experiment in global cooperation, the League of Nations. For every voice favouring the creation of institutions committed to global cooperation, there was another warning against the erosion of national sovereignty. This fierce debate continues today.

Meanwhile, the UN remains unable to escape the fundamental paradox of all international bodies. It only performs as well as its member nations.

Former U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Richard Holbrooke expressed it famously: “Blaming the UN for a crisis is like blaming Madison Square Gardens when the New York Knicks play badly. You are blaming a building.”

And, by virtue of its founding charter conditions, action against rogue states cannot be pursued if a Great Power – that is one of the five countries possessing the veto in the Security Council – is opposed.

It is impossible to understand the history of the United Nations without understanding that this tension was baked into the system at the time of its birth.

That said, even with this structural limitation, the UN has made enormous progress in domains in which individual nations could not adequately or satisfactorily act alone.

And the UN is unlikely to ever collapse because of the growing range of world issues such as climate change that cannot be addressed alone by even the most powerful member states. As is often claimed, despite its many failings “if the UN didn’t exist, we would have to invent it.”

We live on a different planet than we did in 1945. How could it be otherwise when, in the span of a single lifetime, Earth’s human population has swelled almost four-fold to nearly eight billion in 2020 — and total global production has grown from $4 trillion to more than $140 trillion in the same period, with many consequences.

It is important to acknowledge that our current global situation is not all bad. There is, for example, the growing power of international opinion to expose human rights abuses and cause even the most recalcitrant and repressive regimes to consider the consequences of their crimes. We cannot allow that pressure to let up.

If the Great Pause imposed on us by COVID-19 is to become a transformational moment, the level of change has to emerge from the hearts and collective conscience of humanity.

At minimum, that change has to manifest itself in action in the form of implementation of the UN’s existing framework for creating a more just and more sustainable world: the UN’s 2030 Transforming Our World global sustainable development agenda.

Difficult as the UN’s sustainable development goals may appear to be, and distracted as we presently are by the pandemic, we cannot afford to lose sight of what this agenda can do for humanity.

This agenda, if implemented now, may well be seen in time as the greatest gift the United Nations has given humanity.

The problems facing the UN as a world body 75 years into its mandate have not and will not deter it from trying “to save generations from the scourge of war,” “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights,” and to promote “social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.”

Those ambitions in the original Preamble to the founding Charter of the United Nations had it right. The question now – in this new transformational moment – is, can we finally do it? And the answer is yes, we can.

The boulder is still only half way up the mountain. To advance it further, to create the future we want and the UN we need, much effort is needed.

Just as in 1945, this truly is a transformational moment — for the UN certainly, but also for the entire world.

*The UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health in Hamilton, Canada, is supported by the Government of Canada and hosted by McMaster University

 

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The post The Future We Want, The UN We Need appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Robert W. Sandford is the Global Water Futures Chair, UN University Institute for Water*, Environment and Health in Hamilton, Canada.

The post The Future We Want, The UN We Need appeared first on Inter Press Service.

President of the General Assembly opens 75th General Debate. Credit: United Nations

By Abby Maxman
NEW YORK, Sep 23 2020 (IPS)

President Trump took the UN stage to settle scores and shift blame as he sought to spin an alternate version of his administration’s response to the pandemic.

He condemned the ‘one-sided’ Paris Agreement as the US battles devastating wildfires, bragged about promoting peace while federal agents attack protestors in US streets, touted women’s rights while slashing longstanding US support for women’s health programs, and extolled his COVID-19 response as the US surpasses a death toll of 200,000.

President Trump also pitched his vision of a global order driven by narrow, competing national interests – one at odds with the UN Charter agreed 75 years ago to pick up the pieces from the Second World War.

The UN was founded to remind us that no matter our differences, we’re all on the same side when it comes to global problems like COVID-19 and the climate crisis. When humanity is faced with challenges that ignore national borders, there are no one-sided deals.

As this global pandemic has only reinforced, America can only be great – and safe – when we work with others to solve the problems facing humanity. An effective COVID-19 response must be founded on scientific evidence, cooperation, and meeting the needs of the most vulnerable in society.

But President Trump prioritizes the health of the markets over people and political spin instead of scientific information, deferring to the wealthiest 1% instead of the rest of us. His lack of leadership has cost American lives and delays the much-needed recovery.

While a safe and effective vaccine can be a way out of this nightmare, and researchers funded by the US government are racing to find it, making sure vaccines are available and affordable to everyone is equally important. COVID-19 anywhere is COVID-19 everywhere.

The Trump administration claims to have great pride for its leadership at the UN and as an agent of peace and human rights around the globe, while simultaneously undermining some of its most vital tenets and goals.

Indeed, the world listens closely, but what they have heard from the Trump administration has undermined our role as a leader and albeit flawed, proponent of peace in the world. Peace stems not from strength but from mutual respect and a shared commitment to rules that benefit everyone.

Solutions to the poverty, inequality, and injustice so many are experiencing both here in the United States and around the world can only be found by working together for shared progress, not by turning inward or trying to make gains at the expense of families and communities elsewhere.

We will prosper together, or suffer apart.

Meanwhile, Trump in his address said: It is my profound honor to address the United Nations General Assembly. 75 years after the end of World War Two and the founding of the United Nations, we are once again engaged in a great global struggle.

We have waged a fierce battle against the invisible enemy — the China Virus — which has claimed countless lives in 188 countries. In the United States, we launched the most aggressive mobilization since the Second World War.

We rapidly produced a record supply of ventilators — creating a surplus that allowed us to share them with friends and partners all around the globe. We pioneered life-saving treatments, reducing our fatality rate 85 percent since April.

Thanks to our efforts, 3 vaccines are in the final stage of clinical trials. We are mass producing them in advance so they can be delivered immediately upon arrival. We will distribute a vaccine, we will defeat the virus, we will end the pandemic, and we will enter a new era of unprecedented prosperity, cooperation and peace.

As we pursue this bright future, we must hold accountable the nation which unleashed this plague onto the world: China.

In the earliest days of the virus, China locked down travel domestically while allowing flights to leave China and infect the world. China condemned my travel ban on their country, even as they cancelled domestic flights and locked citizens in their homes.

The Chinese government, and the World Health Organization — which is virtually controlled by China — falsely declared that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. Later, they falsely said people without symptoms would not spread the disease.

The United Nations must hold China accountable for their actions. In addition, every year China dumps millions and millions of tons of plastic and trash into the oceans, overfishes other countries’ waters, destroys vast swaths of coral reef, and emits more toxic mercury into the atmosphere than any country anywhere in the world.

China’s carbon emissions are nearly twice what the U.S. has, and it’s rising fast. By contrast, after I withdrew from the one-sided Paris Climate Accord, last year America reduced its carbon emissions by more than any country in the agreement.

Those who attack America’s exceptional environmental record while ignoring China’s rampant pollution are not interested in the environment. They only want to punish America and I will not stand for it.

If the United Nations is to be an effective organization, it must focus on the real problems of the world. This includes terrorism, the oppression of women, forced labor, drug trafficking, human and sex trafficking, religious persecution, and the ethnic cleansing of religious minorities.

America will always be a leader in human rights. My administration is advancing religious liberty, opportunity for women, the decriminalization of homosexuality, combatting human trafficking, and protecting unborn children.

We also know that American prosperity is the bedrock of freedom and security all over the world. In three short years, we built the greatest economy in history — and we are quickly doing it again. Our military has increased substantially in size. We spent $2.5 trillion over the last 4 years on our military. We have the most powerful military anywhere in the world, and it’s not even close.

We stood up to decades of China’s trade abuses. We revitalized the NATO Alliance where other countries are now paying a much more fair share. We forged historic partnerships with Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador to stop human smuggling.

We are standing with the people of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela in their righteous struggle for freedom. We withdrew from the terrible Iran Nuclear Deal and imposed crippling sanctions on the world’s leading state sponsor of terror. We obliterated the ISIS caliphate 100 percent, killed its founder and leader, Al-Baghdadi, and eliminated the world’s top terrorist, Qasem Soleimani.

This month we achieved a peace deal between Serbia and Kosovo. We reached a landmark breakthrough with two Peace Deals in the Middle East — after decades of no progress.

Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain all signed a historic peace agreement at the White House, with many other Middle Eastern countries to come. They are coming fast and they know it’s great for them, and it’s great for the world.

These groundbreaking peace deals are the dawn of the new Middle East. By taking a different approach, we have achieved different outcomes. Far superior outcomes. We took an approach and the approach worked. We intend to deliver more peace agreements shortly, and I have never been more optimistic for the future of the region.

There is no blood in the sand. Those days are hopefully over. As we speak, the United States is also working to end the war in Afghanistan — and we are bringing our troops home. America is fulfilling our destiny as peacemaker. But it is peace through strength.

We are stronger now than ever before, our weapons are at an advanced level like we’ve never had before, like frankly we’ve never even thought of having before, and I only pray to God that we never have to use them. For decades, the same tired voices proposed the same failed solutions, pursuing global ambitions at the expense of their own people.

But only when you take care of your own citizens, will you find a true basis for cooperation. As President, I have rejected the failed approaches of the past — and I am proudly putting America First, just as you should be putting your countries first.

That’s okay, that’s what you should be doing. I am supremely confident that next year, when we gather in person, we will be in the midst of one of the greatest years in our history and frankly, hopefully, in the history of the world.

 

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The post Trump Pitched his Vision of a Global Order — at Odds with the UN Charter appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Abby Maxman, in a response to President Donald Trump’s UN General Debate remarks.

 
Abby Maxman is President & CEO of Oxfam America

The post Trump Pitched his Vision of a Global Order — at Odds with the UN Charter appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Dominic Kimara, the farm manager at an agri-food company, stands in a rice field grown using conservation agriculture technique. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Isaiah Esipisu
AMURU, Uganda/NAIROBI, Kenya, Sep 23 2020 (IPS)

In Amuru district, 47 kilometres from Gulu town in northwestern Uganda, the Omer Farming Company has proven that it is possible to farm on thousands of acres of land using methods that conserve the environment and its biodiversity.

On a 5,000 acre piece of land, the company is growing upland rice with a yield of up to 3.5 metric tons per acre, using the conservation agriculture method.

“We do not plough the field, and we do not use fertilisers,” Dominic Kimara, the farm manager at the company, told IPS. “Instead, we grow a leguminous crop known as sunn hemp, and when it is 50 percent flowering, we roll it on the ground so that it can decompose and form green manure,” he explained.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, this type of farming technique has several advantages for the environment because it reduces the use of farm machineries (which often emit carbon), sequesters carbon, and is cost effective and beneficial to the soil.

According to the report ‘Fixing the Business of Food initiative‘ by the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition Foundation (BCFN), agri-food companies must consider the environmental and social impacts of business operations, including their production processes and other internal processes, with a focus on issues such as resource use (land, water, energy) and emissions, respect for human rights, diversity and inclusion, and decent work conditions that improve livelihoods of employees and their families.

The report, which was released on Sept. 22 alongside the 75th session of the U.N. General Assembly in partnership with the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), the Santa Chiara Lab (SCL) and the Columbia Center for Sustainable Investment (CCSI), identifies a four pillar framework for alignment of the food and agriculture sector with the Sustainable Development Goals.

“Indeed the four pillar framework is a sort of instruction manual to guide our efforts towards the active engagement of the private sector in the implementation of the 2030 agenda,” said Mariangela Zappia, ambassador and permanent representative of the Permanent Mission of Italy to the U.N. in New York.

However, the experts observed that despite a steady increase in investments in sustainable development and climate action, only eight percent of public climate finance is directed to the agri-food sector.

“There is one big risk: that a lot of our colleagues, a lot of other actors in the world of business feel the danger, but they do not have the courage to really take actions within their company to make these very difficult decisions,” said Guido Barilla, chair of Barilla Group and the BCFN Foundation, noting that the Barilla Group had to take a tough decision to stop the use of palm oil, which is the cheapest source of fat, but contributes to deforestation.

“We are late in the 2030 Agenda, we are losing time in completing the sustainability goals and to really rationalise the dangers and lower the dangers on climate change and on sustainability issues. It’s unaffordable. We need to make a call to action,” he said during a virtual launch of the report.

The report further points out that the shift towards more sustainable and healthier diets is a strong leverage to improve both planetary and human health.

This comes after a warning by another study about India that projects levels of undersupply and consequent malnutrition will significantly increase in 2030 and 2050 scenarios.

“Policy incentives in Indian agriculture since the Green Revolution have predominantly been focused on achieving caloric food security through increased production of cereals (wheat and rice),” wrote the researchers in a study titled ‘Sustainable food security in India—Domestic production and macronutrient availability’.

This, according to the scientists, has resulted in a heavy carbohydrate-based diet (65–70 percent of total energy intake) which may be significantly lacking in adequate diversity for the provision of other important nutrients.

The BCFN report points out that there is need for a radical transformation in order to cope with the environmental, social, and economic challenges of agri-food systems at global and local levels. “In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated global development challenges especially for the most vulnerable communities around the globe,” it reads in part.

So far, the European Union is already promoting such transformation through the European Green Deal and the ‘Farm to Fork’ Strategy, aiming to make European food ‘the global standard for sustainability’.

The authors explored the main gaps in aligning practices and strategies to sustainability principles through a deep qualitative analysis of sustainability reports for 2018 and 2019 published by 12 global companies with high reputations in terms of sustainability.

The other pillars include contribution to healthy and sustainable dietary patterns through its products and strategies, and the impact and influence of companies beyond the perimeter of their direct and outsourced operations. The report notes that in some contexts, companies have co-responsibility for enhanced sustainability throughout their supply chains, value chains and within the ecosystems in which they operate.

The last pillar considers companies’ external strategies and engagement: both with the communities where they operate and with the rules that govern them.

“We must generate partnerships between the private sector and the public sector so that everyone in the world has access to healthy diets that are produced sustainably,” said Rachel Kyte, the Dean, at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.

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Waorani women from Alianza Ceibo march for the protection of their forest in Ecuador’s capital Quito. Credit: Mateo Barriga, Amazon Frontlines.

By Jamison Ervin
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 23 2020 (IPS)

A spate of reports on biodiversity – the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystems, the Living Planet Report, the Global Forest Resources Assessment Report and the Global Biodiversity Outlook– paint a stark picture for the world’s biodiversity.

All point in the same direction: we are on track to lose more than a million species by mid-century, we lost 68% of all wildlife populations since 1970, we lost more than 11 million hectares of primary forest last year, and we have failed to meet almost all of the conservation targets in the decade-long Strategic Plan for Biodiversity.

Failure to halt the loss of biodiversity, let alone reverse historic trends, has grave consequences for all of humanity. The livelihoods, food, water security and safety of billions of people are at risk.

The stability of our climate is at risk. Half of global GDP is at risk. Buffers against the next pandemic are at risk. Indeed, the very future of humanity is at risk. Halting biodiversity loss and restoring the health of the planet requires several profound and systemic transformations.

We must place nature at the heart of sustainable development. Because nature plays such as fundamental role in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, all nations must take a closer look at how to integrate the protection, restoration and sustainable management of biodiversity and ecosystems into their national climate, health, water, security and development plans.

We must tackle the root causes of biodiversity loss – the unchecked economic and market forces that fail to account for nature’s values. Our current economic system favors short-term gain over long-term stewardship of nature.

Governments must find ways to ensure that their national expenditures align, and do not countermand, their national development goals, especially those goals that depend on healthy ecosystems.

At the same time, we must ensure that corporations and finance institutions place nature at the center of financial decision-making by holding them accountable to the impacts of their decisions on the health of biodiversity and ecosystems.

We must invest in nature protection and recovery. While the cost of inaction on nature is profound, the economic cost of investing in nature is not. We currently spend less than $100 billion a year on nature — about what we spend on pet food globally.

We only need an additional $700 billion annually to achieve ambitious biodiversity goals for 2030 – that’s less than 1% of global GDP, and only a fraction of the $5.2 trillion that we spend on fossil fuel subsidies every year.

We must increase our global ambition for immediate action on nature. We are facing a complex and interacting planetary emergency – a nature crisis, a biodiversity crisis, a health crisis and an inequality crisis all at once.

To fully respond to this emergency, we need bold ambition, commitment and action at all levels, from local to global. We must commit to creating a nature-based planetary safety net, in response to our planetary emergency.

One way to do that is through greening Covid-19 economic recovery and stimulus packages a step many countries have yet to take.

We must transform global production and consumption. For example, global appetites for beef are responsible for as much as half of forest cover loss worldwide, while unsustainable agricultural practices are responsible for nearly a quarter of our global greenhouse gas emissions.

We must increase global commitment and accountability for deforestation-free commodities, though initiatives such as the New York Declaration on Forests.

We must promote, celebrate and accelerate local action on nature if we are to tackle our planetary emergency – we need an all-of-society approach. Examples such as UNDP’s Equator Initiative showcase how the world is witnessing action on nature by youth, Indigenous peoples and local communities in every country and in thousands of communities.

By protecting, restoring and sustainably managing biodiversity, local actors can realize direct and tangible development dividends. To support local efforts, we must also strengthen governance and rule of law, especially for the 90 percent of Indigenous peoples who lack title for their lands, and who face murder, persecution and intimidation, often by multi-national corporations.

We must raise awareness of all levels of society of the value of nature, and of the risks inherent in biodiversity loss. In September, a campaign to promote the hashtag #NatureForLife has already garnered more than 50 million views.

But we must do more to raise global awareness. On the margins of the UN General Assembly, marking the 75th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, UNDP is convening more than 40 partners to create a virtual “Nature for Life Hub,” involving more than 300 speakers from every walk of life.

Join us, either during or after the event, and help us strengthen global resolve to bend the curve on biodiversity loss – for nature, and for life.

 

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The post Bending the Curve on Biodiversity Loss Requires Nothing Less than Transformational Change appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

The UN will be hosting the first-ever Biodiversity Summit – remotely – on September 30.

 
Jamison Ervin is Manager, Nature for Development Global Programme, UNDP, New York

The post Bending the Curve on Biodiversity Loss Requires Nothing Less than Transformational Change appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Million Belay and Timothy A. Wise
STOCKHOLM, CAMBRIDGE (US), Sep 23 2020 (IPS)

As COVID-19 threatens farming communities across Africa already struggling with climate change, the continent is at a crossroads. Will its people and their governments continue trying to replicate industrial farming models promoted by developed countries? Or will they move boldly into the uncertain future, embracing ecological agriculture?

Million Belay

It is time to choose. Africa is projected to overtake South Asia by 2030 as the region with the greatest number of hungry people. An alarming 250 million people in Africa now suffer from “undernourishment,” the U.N. term for chronic hunger. If policies do not change, experts project that number to soar to 433 million in 2030.

The evidence is now convincing that the Green Revolution model of agriculture, with its commercial seeds and synthetic fertilizers, has failed to bring progress for Africa’s farmers. Since 2006, under the banner of the billion-dollar Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa (AGRA), that strategy has had an unprecedented opportunity to generate improved productivity, incomes, and food security for small-scale farmers. African governments have spent billions of dollars subsidizing and promoting the adoption of these imported technologies.

According to a recent report, “False Promises.” evidence from AGRA’s 13 countries indicates that it is taking Africa in the wrong direction. Productivity has improved marginally, and only for a few chosen crops such as maize. Others have withered in a drought of neglect from donor agencies and government leaders. In AGRA’s 13 focus countries, the production of millet, a hearty, nutritious and climate-resilient grain, fell 24% while yields declined 21%. This leaves poor farmers with less crop diversity in their fields and less nutritious food on their children’s plates.

Small-scale farming households, the intended beneficiaries of Green Revolution programs, seem scarcely better off. Poverty remains high, and severe food insecurity has increased 31% across AGRA’s 13 countries, as measured by the United Nations.

Rwanda, the home country of AGRA’s president, Agnes Kalibata, is held up as an example of AGRA’s success. After all, maize production increased fourfold since AGRA began in 2006 under Kalibata’s leadership as Agriculture Minister. The “False Promises” report refers to Rwanda as “AGRA’s hungry poster child.” All that maize apparently did not benefit the rural poor. Other crops went into decline and the number of undernourished Rwandans increased 41% since 2006, according to the most recent U.N. figures.

Timothy A. Wise

Green Revolution proponents have had 14 years to demonstrate they can lead Africa into a food-secure future. Billions of dollars later, they have failed. AGRA wrapped up its annual Green Revolution Forum September 11 without providing any substantive responses to the findings.

With a pandemic threatening to disrupt what climate change does not, Africa needs to take a different path, one that focuses on ecological farm management using low-cost, low-input methods that rely on a diversity of crops to improve soils and diets.

Many farmers are already blazing that trail, and some governments are following with bold steps to change course.

In fact, two of the three AGRA countries that have reduced both the number and share of undernourished people – Ethiopia and Mali – have done so in part due to policies that support ecological agriculture.

Ethiopia, which has reduced the incidence of undernourishment from 37% to 20% since 2006, has built on a 25-year effort in the northern Tigray Region to promote compost, not just chemical fertilizer, along with soil and water conservation practices, and biological control of pests. In field trials, such practices have proven more effective than Green Revolution approaches. The program was so successful it has become a national program and is currently being implemented in at least five regions.

Mali is the AGRA country that showed the greatest success in reducing the incidence of hunger (from 14% to 5% since 2006). According to a case study in the “False Promises” report, progress came not because of AGRA but because the government and farmers’ organizations actively resisted its implementation. Land and seed laws guarantee farmers’ rights to choose their crops and farming practices, and government programs promote not just maize but a wide variety of food crops.

Mali is part of a growing regional effort in West Africa to promote agroecology. According to a recent report by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES), the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has developed an Agroecology Transition Support Program to promote the shift away from Green Revolution practices. The work is supported by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as part of its “Scaling Up Agroecology” program.

In Burkina Faso, Mali, and Senegal, farmers’ organizations are working with their governments to promote agroecology, including the subsidization of biofertilizers and other natural inputs as alternatives to synthetic fertilizers.

In the drylands of West Africa, farmers in Burkina Faso, Senegal, Ghana and Niger are leading “another kind of green revolution.” They are regenerating tree growth and diversifying production as part of agro-forestry initiatives increasingly supported by national governments. This restores soil fertility, increases water retention, and has been shown to increase yields 40%-100% within five years while increasing farmer incomes and food security. It runs counter to AGRA’s approach of agricultural intensification.

Senegal, which cut the incidence of severe hunger from 17% to 9% since 2006, is one of the regional leaders. Papa Abdoulaye Seck, Senegal’s Ambassador to the FAO, summarized the reasons the government is so committed to the agroecological transition in a foreword to the IPES report:

“We have seen agroecological practices improve the fertility of soils degraded by drought and chemical input use. We have seen producers’ incomes increase thanks to the diversification of their crop production and the establishment of new distribution channels. We have seen local knowledge enriched by modern science to develop techniques inspired by lived experience, with the capacity to reduce the impacts of climate change. And we have seen these results increase tenfold when they are supported by favorable policy frameworks, which place the protection of natural resources, customary land rights, and family farms at the heart of their action.”

Those “favorable policy frameworks” are exactly what African farmers need from their governments as climate change and COVID-19 threaten food security. It is time for African governments to step back from the failing Green Revolution and chart a new food system that respects local cultures and communities by promoting low-cost, low-input ecological agriculture.

Million Belay is coordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa.
Timothy A. Wise is researcher and writer with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and Tufts University, and the author of the recent book Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food. His background paper contributed to the “False Promises” report.

 

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By External Source
Sep 23 2020 (IPS-Partners)

 
On the eve of the United Nations Summit on Biodiversity, Dr. Anne Larigauderie calls on everyone to make ambitious commitments to protect #biodiversity and #nature.

 

The post Anne Larigauderie UN Biodiversity Summit #ForNature Video appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Itaipu, the largest hydroelectric power station in the Americas, shared by Brazil and Paraguay on their Paraná river border. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Rene Roger Tissot
VERNON, Canada, Sep 22 2020 (IPS)

Can the “energy transition” in Latin America help address the risks caused by greenhouse gases (GHG) on the climate, and the economic depression caused by the pandemic?

Energy transition refers to the shift from fossil-based systems of energy production and consumption — including oil, natural gas, and coal — to renewable energy (RE) sources like wind and solar, etc. Proponents of investments in RE highlight investments’ impacts on jobs and industrialization opportunities.

RE deployment implies a trade-off between the objectives of energy and industrial policies: The energy policy would seek the reliable supply of electricity at low cost while industrial policy would pursue an expansion and diversification of manufacturing capabilities impacting production costs.

Local Content Requirement Concept

Local content requirements (LCR) is a policy tool used to promote industrial development. The justification of LCR is based on the expectation that it increases economic linkages with local businesses resulting in more jobs locally. Any investment would have a “natural” level of local content, defined by the share of local procurement and jobs the investor would contract in the absence of LCR.

Latin America could achieve lower levels of GHG while also keeping electricity generation costs low by connecting regions with renewable energy surplus potential to demand nodes through transnational grids
That investment would generate a certain level of spillovers and learnings with the local businesses. Those spillovers can be expanded by requiring the initial level of investment to increase its local procurement level above its natural level.

However, there is an optimal level of LCR in which those linkages are maximized, beyond that point the costs of LCR would results in lower output or investment delays. If the gains from the linkages in terms of local procurement and job creation expected from LCR are higher thant the negative effects caused by their higher production costs, then LCR would be justifiable.

Most jobs in RE value chain are in the manufacturing of components. In the European Union, manufacturing accounts for 55% of all the jobs of the value chain. (Sooriyaarachchi, et al. 2015). Manufacturing of RE components requires the use of complex technologies and a skilled workforce.

 

Latin America’s experience.

Latin America’s GHG emissions from electricity generation are lower than world averages due to the reliance on hydroelectricity. But the region’s electricity generation matrix hides significant differences between countries.

Brazil, Colombia, or Costa Rica for example relied on hydroelectricity, while fossil fuels are the main source of electricity generation in the Caribbean, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, or Mexico. However, Latin America’s supply of hydroelectricity is becoming less reliable due to changing weather patterns, requiring an increasing use of fossil fuels to meet growing demand.

Moreover, hydroelectric projects encounter increasing communities’ opposition and environmental challenges. RE expansion would then have to consider both levels of dependency (hydro and fossil fuels) while keeping prices low and ensuring that intermittence challenges from RE are addressed. Until recently most of the growth of RE was on biofuels, then wind power and more recently solar energy.

Latin America could achieve lower levels of GHG while also keeping electricity generation costs low by connecting regions with RE surplus potential to demand nodes through transnational grids. Regional integration is believed to lessen the need for national investments while reducing overall GHG and electricity generation costs (Guimaraes 2020).

However, efforts of regional electricity interconnection have not always provided the expected results. Large cost overruns, expensive cost of capital, construction delays, and the tendency for governments to protect their own markets makes regional electricity integration and unlikely alternative.

RE deployment in Latin America has prioritized the expansion of installed capacity at the lowest cost over local manufacturing development.

 

Employees work on the solar panels of the El Romero plant, with a capacity of 196 megawatts, in the desert region of Atacama in northern Chile. CREDIT: Acciona

 

Market driven instruments such as auctions have been the preferred option for RE deployment since they tend to achieve lower prices by stimulating competition. Auctions have not included LCR clauses, but Mexico and Brazil adopted other mechanism promoting LCR in their RE deployment efforts.

Brazil’s LCR operated indirectly by offering companies that complied with the stringent local content access to preferential loans from Brazil’s National Development Bank (BNDES). Securing low cost of capital was an important competitive advantage during the auction process, encouraging companies to comply with the LCR.

The measurement of LCR was based on weight. Since a tower represents approximately 80% of the total weight of a wind turbine, it implied that developers would have to build in Brazil or acquire the towers from a local manufacturer the towers.

Manufacturing towers locally increased production costs since Brazilian steel was about 70% more expensive than imported one (Kuntze and Moerenhout 2012). The use of weight as a measurement for LCR helped to expand the manufacturing base, but it benefitted mostly a well-established industry (steel) as opposed to the development of new and more complex activities.

Mexico RE policy objectives were multiple but emphasis was given on capacity expansion and low cost of supply (Tyeler and Schmidt 2019). The government also opted for the use of auctions, but the development of a local value chain was not explicitly included in the design of the auctions.

Auctions attracted strong interest from large foreign RE firms. Smaller local developers struggled competing with foreign firms which had access to lower cost of finances from their home countries. Local manufacturers also had difficulty adapting to the discipline foreign buyers brought in terms of market competition and due diligence skills.

Many companies grew used to work through non-competitive procurement processes with CFE. Wary of the risks of entering a new market, foreign power generators opted to reduce risks by controlling what they could control such as their own supply chain.

Mexico meets several conditions for the expansion of solar power generation and the use of LCR to expand its manufacturing activities: The country’s photovoltaic and solar thermal resources are among the world’s best, it has a large market potential, and a strong industrial base. Since 2013 it developed a regulatory framework that, based on market response, was successful at attracting investments.

Even more, Mexico is well positioned to benefit from US re-localization of value chains. However, following the election of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (2018-2024) the outlook for RE expansion looks uncertain. The elected president preferred to support oil and gas activities, and protect the commercial interest of Pemex, even if that implied selling fuel oil to CFE although the power utility had already started to use RE sources as a viable source of energy. (Grustein 2020).

The government’s decision creates significant regulatory uncertainty, questioning the future of the entire RE deployment strategy, and the expansion of a local value chain.

Contrary to electricity generation, the main source of GHG emission in Latin Americas are from agriculture, forestry, and land use (AFOLU). This is where the region should focus its efforts (Guimaraes 2020).

The use of LCR in RE to expand manufacturing jobs of RE components has been modest. Most of the job opportunities from RE expansion would be on construction, operation, and maintenance.

As such, Latin America’s energy transition in electricity generation is unlikely to be the main solution to reduce GHG, nor will it be a significant source of jobs in the manufacturing of components if the priority is – as it should be- to ensure a supply of electricity at competitive prices.

This, however, does not mean RE deployment should be ignored. On the contrary, efforts should be on strengthening the stability of the regulatory environment on RE electricity generation to reduce dependency on hydroelectricity and fossil fuels.

To capture more jobs, focus should be on improving and expanding workforce’s technical skills on RE activities. As such, universities, and technical centers working in coordination with RE power generators and EPC companies should develop proper certification programs according to the expected market potential of each country.

 

Rene Roger Tissot, Energy Fellow Institute of the Americas, PhD Student University of British Columbia Okanagan, expert on energy economics and local content development programs. M.A. Economics, MBA, CMA.

The post Looking for Jobs in Latin America – Can the Energy Transition Help? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Trafficking survivor Devendra Kumar Mulayam, who hails from Shahapur in the Chandouli district of Uttar Pradesh, had to begin working at age 12 to help pay off the two loans his father had taken out. Credit: Rina Mukherji/IPS

By Rina Mukherji
PUNE, India, Sep 22 2020 (IPS)

One of the worst fallouts of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the closure of industries in India, which caused thousands of migrant labourers to return home to villages in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal. In a region where the poorest have always been subjected to bonded labour, child labour and slave trafficking, it has meant revisiting the past.

“Uttar Pradesh has seen 35 lakh [3.5 million] workers return home. Azamgarh district alone has seen 1.65 lakh [165,000] returnees. Of these, only 10,000 people could be given employment under MNREGA [Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act],” activist and Rural Organisation for Social Advancement chief functionary, Mushtaque Ahmed, told IPS

• MNREGA guarantees 100 days of wage employment to a rural household where the adults are willing to undertake unskilled labour.

Of late, as the country has progressed into a loosening of COVID-19 restrictions, and some workers — who comprised the bulk of the skilled labour in industrial belts — have returned to work.

Bonded labour – formally illegal but still continues

Bonded labour formally ended in India with the passing of the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976.

• The  Act seeks to end forced labour in all its forms, and is supported by other legislation, namely the Minimum Wages Act, 1948, the Contract Labour ( Regulation & Abolition) Act, 1970, and the Inter-State Migrant Workmen ( Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service ) Act, 1979.

But in the underdeveloped districts of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, where feudal lords exploited the lower castes and had them work for free on their lands in the past, it continues to exist in invisible forms, drawing sustenance from within the casteist social structure that has confined Dalits and Mahadalits to illiteracy and grinding poverty. 

The Mahadalits, are especially vulnerable, with their abjectly low literacy of 9 percent, as compared to the Dalit literacy level of 28 percent. First-generation learners for the most part, the Dalits and Mahadalits are generally unable to access government schemes that guarantee a better future. Often, the inability to pay back a small loan of Rs 5,000 ($68) or Rs 2,000 ($27) sees entire families being bound into slave or bonded labour in brick kilns, or farms owned by the person they are indebted to for generations.

Children also at risk

At times, families are forced to pledge a minor child to work for an unscrupulous trafficker, according to the Freedom Fund. 

The health infrastructure in eastern Uttar Pradesh and in Bihar districts along the Nepal border has always been wanting.

While the COVID-19 pandemic may have worsened the situation but matters become compounded as many villages in Bihar faced the fury of unprecedented floods last month, which saw almost 8.4 million people affected.  Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) centres in Bihar have collapsed, with the unprecedented floods straining them to the hilt.

• The ICDS  is a nationwide government programme under which children under six and their mothers are cared for through nutrition, education, immunisation, health checkup and referral services. The programme has managed to stem anaemia and other health problems mothers face in underprivileged, rural communities all over India.

Children are more at risk because of the current circumstances than previously.

Human trafficking for slave or bonded labour may either see a child being sent to a place thousands of kilometres away from home, or across the border into Nepal. Within India, the modus operandi involves sending children from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar or Bengal to a southern state where unfamiliarity with the local language prevents the child labourer from escaping or negotiating a way out and returning home.

With so few options, parents are sometimes lured with a lump sum of Rs 5,000 ($68) to Rs. 10,000 ($136) paid in advance, as Manav Sansadhan Evam Mahila Vikas Sansthan ( MSEMVS) executive director Dr. Bhanuja Sharan Lal told IPS. MSEMVS is an NGO that focuses on the eradication of child labour.

No option but to make children work

But the stories many of the survivors have to relate are harsh.

Wage labourer Umesh Mari from Mayurba village in Sitamarhi district in Bihar, had to take a loan of Rs 300,000 ($4,080) for his wife’s medical treatment.

Since Sitamarhi lacks healthcare facilities needed for serious medical problems, the family had to admit her to a hospital in the adjoining district of Muzaffarpur.

Unable to repay the loan, the family, comprising of four children and son-in-law, had no option but to look for additional, better-paying jobs.

It is how 13-year-old Ramavatar and his brother-in-law Kesari were recruited for a tile fitting job across the border, in Malangwa in neighbouring Nepal. The job promised a wage of Rs 300 ($4) per day. Once there, they found that the conditions entailed working from 9 am until 7 pm with just a half-hour break. It was bonded labour.

There was little food, and erratic or no payment for months. The recent COVID-19 lockdown helped Ramavtar escape and return to his village, as IPS found. However, the family remains worried on account of their unpaid loan. Chances are, Ramavatar may find it hard to resist the trafficking mafiosi, and may have to return to an enslaved existence in bonded labour in another factory once again.

Take the case of Devendra Kumar Mulayam, who hails from Shahapur in the Chandouli district of Uttar Pradesh. The second among five siblings of a landless Dalit family, Mulayam  told IPS how the family became desperate for a source of income following two loans that his father had to take — one was for the marriage of his elder sister marriage and second following an accident that resulted in this elder sister sustaining a sever head injury, which occurred after her wedding.

As the eldest son in the family, 12-year-old Mulayam had to drop out of school and start looking for a job, while his younger siblings had to forgo their education.

Courtesy of a recruiter, Mulayam soon found his way to a textile factory in Coimbatore, where he was hired as a loader, at Rs 150 ($2) per day in 2010.

He was made to work for 12-15 hours each day, and the payments were erratic. Worse still, he had to pay for his own treatment wherever he was injured during work. 

Mulayam and his fellow-workers remained closely guarded and were never allowed to move away from either their workplace or living quarters.

Any breach of “discipline” or error at work invited severe beatings. In 2011, when things became unbearable, Mulayam and 18 other fellow workers decided to protest. Theirs was one of the worst forms of bonded labour.

Recounting the horror, Mulayam told IPS, “We were heavily assaulted, and thrown out. Scared of being rounded up by the police and sent back to the clutches of our tormentors, we kept hiding in the forested tracts adjoining the town, for five days. Thankfully, I could manage to tell my family members back home of my plight. They sought the help of a local NGO, which managed to secure my release and arrange for my  return.”

Despite the pandemic, children are still being bonded.

“We recently rescued nine children from Jaunpur in Uttar Pradesh who were trafficked to a panipuri [an Indian snack]   factory in Telangana after their parents were paid an advance of Rs 10,000 each.  Once there, they were made to work from 2 am every morning to 4 pm in the evening. They were only given their meals, and had to work for free. Similar circumstances had driven eight children from Azamgarh (in Uttar Pradesh) to a textile factory in Gujarat where they were used as slave labour,” Lal told IPS.

• This is the first in a two-part series on bonded labour in India. Next week IPS will look at the government initiatives and impediments  in overcoming the problem.

 

This is part of a series of features from across the globe on human trafficking. IPS coverage is supported by the Airways Aviation Group.

The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ) is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7 which ‘takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms’.

The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths, gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalisation of indifference, such us exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking” and so forth.

 

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The post Fighting India’s Bonded Labour During the COVID-19 Pandemic – Part 1 appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Antonio Guterres
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 22 2020 (IPS)

The ideals of the United Nations – peace, justice, equality and dignity — are beacons to a better world.

But the Organization we celebrate today emerged only after immense suffering. It took two world wars, millions of deaths and the horrors of the Holocaust for world leaders to commit to international cooperation and the rule of law.

That commitment produced results. A Third World War – which so many had feared — has been avoided.

Never in modern history have we gone so many years without a military confrontation between the major powers.

This is a great achievement of which Member States can be proud – and which we must all strive to preserve.

Down the decades, there have been other historic accomplishments, including:

Peace treaties and peace-keeping; Decolonization; Human rights standards – and mechanisms to uphold them; The triumph over apartheid; Life-saving humanitarian aid for millions of victims of conflict and disaster; the eradication of diseases the steady reduction of hunger’; the progressive development of international law; Landmark pacts to protect the environment and our planet

Most recently, unanimous support for the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change provided an inspiring vision for the 21st century.

Yet there is still so much to be done. Of the 850 delegates to the San Francisco Conference, just 8 were women. Twenty-five years since the Beijing Platform for Action, gender inequality remains the greatest single challenge to human rights around the world.

Climate calamity looms; Biodiversity is collapsing; Poverty is again rising; Hatred is spreading.; Geopolitical tensions are escalating.; Nuclear weapons remain on hair-trigger alert.

Transformative technologies have opened up new opportunities but also exposed new threats.

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the world’s fragilities. We can only address them together.

Today we have a surplus of multilateral challenges and a deficit of multilateral solutions.

I welcome the General Assembly’s 75th anniversary declaration and commitment to reinvigorate multilateralism.

You have invited me to assess how to advance our common agenda, and I will report back with analysis and recommendations.

This will be an important and inclusive process of profound reflection. Already we know that we need more — and more effective — multilateralism, with vision, ambition and impact.

National sovereignty —a pillar of the United Nations — goes hand-in-hand with enhanced international cooperation based on common values and shared responsibilities in pursuit of progress for all.

No one wants a world government – but we must work together to improve world governance.

In an interconnected world, we need a networked multilateralism, in which the United Nations family, international financial institutions, regional organizations, trading blocs and others work together more closely and more effectively.

We also need as the President said, an inclusive multilateralism, drawing on civil society, cities, businesses, local authorities and more and more on young people.

 

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Excerpt:

Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary-General, in a statement marking the 75th anniversary of the United Nations

The post A Third World War – Which so Many Had Feared — Has Been Avoided, Says UN Chief appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Vladimir Popov and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
BERLIN and KUALA LUMPUR, Sep 22 2020 (IPS)

‘Ethno-populism’ has emerged and spread in recent decades in response to the mixed consequences of neoliberal globalization. It appropriates nationalist rhetoric for narrow ethnic, religious, cultural or other communal ends, typically with a chauvinist, jingoist rejection of selected Others as politically expedient.

Vladimir Popov

Politics of macroeconomic policy
Most elected governments in the world typically rely on the political support of coalitions among different interest groups, including classes. Hence, unsurprisingly, most political platforms involve what are essentially populist coalitions, within a political party or among several such groupings, seeking popular electoral support.

Mancur Olson’s notion of ‘distributional coalitions’ — i.e., political alliances cooperating to secure shared, complementary, not conflicting demands — presumed that such populist regimes typically have to raise enough tax revenue for redistribution in response to demands and pressures from interest groups.

Thus, fiscal mechanisms became central for such redistribution by determining not only the sources of state revenue, especially taxation, but also the beneficiaries and consequences of government expenditure.

Alleged ‘macroeconomic populism’ in Latin America has been used to explain its 1980s’ ‘lost decade’ as due to irresponsible fiscal policy. Other factors, such as abuse of the ‘non-system’ after US President Nixon ended the Bretton Woods system, are ignored in this narrative.

Thus, macroeconomic mismanagement, especially fiscal indiscipline, was blamed for the developing country debt dilemmas of the 1980s and the transitional economies’ problems of the 1990s.

Retrospectively, the problems of communist party-run states were misleadingly blamed on both enterprise and national level ‘soft budget constraints’ (SBCs) when, in fact, these were much more pervasive during the problematic 1990s’ transitions of ‘post-socialist’ economies.

Coping with fiscal deficits
Constrained by the unwillingness and inability to raise enough tax revenue, and the desire to redistribute in favour of particular interest groups to remain in power, governments are left with four options to indirectly finance subsidies.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

The first is to maintain control over particular prices, i.e., selective price controls. But controls over the prices of non-resource goods still require budgetary subsidies to companies producing the goods and services.

By contrast, price controls for fuel, energy and other resource commodities can redistribute resource rents to consumers. This option, only available to resource rich countries, thus contributes to the popular ‘resource curse’ story.

A second mode of subsidization, when funds are not available, is inflationary government budget financing. The government is said to cause inflation by spending beyond its (revenue) means, i.e., the tax revenue shortfall supposedly causes inflation, i.e., ostensibly ‘imposing an inflation tax’ on everyone.

A third option is debt financing, using either domestic or external borrowings. Debt financing buys some time to maintain subsidies, but debt servicing imposes an additional burden on the government budget to service the debt with payments for both the principal and interest.

A fourth option has been to maintain an overvalued exchange rate, effectively favouring consumers over producers, importers against exporters, and consumption at the expense of savings. Rising consumption, associated with increased imports financed by external borrowings or foreign exchange reserves, can only temporarily ‘kick the can down the road’, before balance of payments problems come home to roost.

There has long been a near consensus that persistent exchange rate overvaluation is detrimental for economic growth and transformation in developing countries. Needless to say, exchange rate overvaluation is favoured by governments collecting taxes in domestic currency having to service external debt in foreign currencies, and import lobbies, i.e., those earning at home and spending abroad.

Macroeconomic populism and deficit budgets
There seem to be two ways to deal with demands for populist redistribution and to ensure macroeconomic stability. First, by eliminating demands for redistribution by reducing inequalities, especially to maintain political support for the ruling distributional coalition.

Second, those leading the ruling distributional coalition in power can redistribute income explicitly via direct subsidies, rather than indirectly. They can also try to reduce the costs of preserving political support by other means.

Research on Latin American and other countries suggests that ‘transitional democracies’ are less effective than either authoritarian regimes or well-established democratic regimes in resisting macroeconomic populism. Hence, some populist distributional coalitions have proved more politically stable and less wasteful than others.

Contrary to prevailing economic mythology, fiscal constraints in socialist economies were harder than in developing countries and no less hard than in most developed countries. SBCs in socialist economies were not pervasive, as widely presumed, but selective, i.e., involving subsidization of some enterprises or industries at the expense of others.

Such selective subsidization is typically part of industrial policy, whether successful or otherwise, but is neither an intrinsic feature of centrally planned socialist economies, nor of fiscal constraints. In many countries, especially in East Asia, such selective subsidies, not pervasive SBCs, have been successfully used to promote export oriented and high technology industries.

With democratization, small and well-organized lobbies, e.g., for resource and military interests, have been able to influence public policies far more successfully than the far more numerous, but typically poorly organized consumers, producers and others amorphously constituting the public interest.

The generally weak post-socialist states were generally unable to resist pressures from influential interest groups. Thus, subsidies and other policies supporting such industries and enterprises increasingly undermined the strict national fiscal constraints under socialism.

Fiscal indiscipline myth
Thus, increasingly widespread enterprise-level SBCs engendered deficit financing, which became associated with permanent government budget deficits, debt accumulation and other macroeconomic imbalances, resulting in high inflation, in turn worsening macroeconomic instability during such transitions.

The combination of weak states and competing powerful interest groups thus caused governments to ‘kick the can down the road’ by accumulating deficits and debt, ‘printing money’ (inflationary financing), keeping domestic fuel and energy prices below world levels and maintaining an overvalued exchange rate.

Deficit spending is just one possible ‘populist’ macroeconomic policy. This was actually rare in socialist countries, but widespread in transition economies, especially the former Soviet republics, and also common to many developing countries, especially in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.

The recent and ongoing rise and consolidation of ethno-populist regimes underscore the need for more rigorous understanding of the socio-economic bases for new distributional coalitions, the conditions enabling their emergence and sustenance, as well as their likely implications.

 

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By Mabingue Ngom and Shoko Arakaki
NEW YORK, Sep 21 2020 (IPS)

The countries of Central Sahel—Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger—face an unprecedented crisis, marked by violent extremism, forced displacement, and rising insecurity. The sharp increase in armed attacks on communities, health centres, schools and other public institutions and infrastructure has disrupted livelihoods and access to social services. The impact on affected people is devastating.

As the international community responds to the crisis, we must meet immediate needs, and invest in long-term development. We must also work on shaping peace together, the theme of this year’s International Peace Day.

In Central Sahel, shaping peace together requires the full participation of women and young people. Engaging, employing, and empowering women and young people offers the best hope for peace, stability and recovery.

While the responses to address this complex crisis to date have centred on humanitarian and military interventions, collective investments are required simultaneously in all sectors including humanitarian response, economic and social development, and peacebuilding to foster a sustainable and resilient society.

As a priority, governments and partners must take action to reduce massive human suffering. It is important not to lose sight of the centrality of protection in our collective response to this crisis. Of 63 million people, more than 13 million, about 1 of 5, need humanitarian assistance. More than 1.5 million people are displaced, fleeing from non-state armed groups in the Central Sahel region and from neighboring countries, and violence is taking a massive toll.

Assistance is needed to address gender-based violence, lack of basic health services, growing food insecurity, rising poverty, and COVID-19. In Central Sahel, as in countries around the world, women and girls bear a disproportionate impact during crises, and face increased risks of sexual exploitation and abuse. During COVID-19, reports of violence against women are rising.

Given overstretched health systems and health worker capacity, it is vital that frontline responders are equipped with personal protective equipment to prevent the spread of COVID-19, respond to the needs of survivors, and provide much needed services.

An estimated 12 million girls in the Sahel are out of school due to the pandemic, which puts them at greater risk of sexual assault, child marriage, and early pregnancy, according to the Sahel Women’s Empowerment and Demographic Dividend (SWEDD) programme.

Launched by the United Nations and the World Back Group in response to a call made by Sahel governments, the ambitious SWEDD programme, led by UNFPA with the West Africa Health Association and partners, is a benchmark initiative to reduce gender inequality and convert population growth into an economic dividend.

To move forward, the vulnerabilities and violations of women, adolescents and youth affected by the crisis must be addressed to avoid a disaffected and dependent generation, from which to draw young people (and young men in particular) to armed groups and extremism.

It is time for collective action to put women and young people at the center of efforts, support social reform, and invest in social services while responding to the pandemic. Dynamic partnerships between governments and humanitarian agencies could provide women and young people with opportunities and support protection, health including sexual and reproductive health, and education.

Enabling women and youth to develop their skills, receive training, and earn an income would foster social cohesion, reduce economic dependency and extreme poverty, and promote peace, resilience and recovery in a more sustainable manner. Building more inclusive and healthy communities diminishes risks such as early marriage and early and unintended pregnancy.

Enabling women and young people to become self-sufficient creates an atmosphere of ownership and empowerment.

To drive progress, there is a need to develop economic incentives for private sector companies to employ young people, including young women. A strong partnership with the private sector will allow governments to spur innovation, progress, and a more diverse funding base supporting longer-term youth employment strategies. A win-win with young people is one where companies can find a balance between philanthropy and business, and young people can achieve financial goals and independence as they transition into adulthood.

To succeed, the governments of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger should lay the institutional and structural foundation for youth employment by promoting programmes and partnerships for skills training and establishing small and medium-sized enterprises. This is especially important in remote communities to benefit young people and the communities in which they live.

Efforts should reflect the rights, and drive to self-determination and economic prosperity, of young women and men, and promote gender equality, social cohesion, and access to quality health services and care, including psychosocial support and family planning.

Given growing funding constraints, the UN system must demonstrate new and innovative ways of working and efficiency in “doing more with less”. A complementary humanitarian, development and peacebuilding approach is the only way to address the complexities of the Central Sahel crisis. Investments across these three pillars can address immediate needs, root causes, and fund efforts to build back better with women and young people at the centre.

 

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The post Central Sahel – Shaping peace together with women and young people Statement for International Peace Day appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Mabingue Ngom, Regional Director, West and Central Africa Region, UNFPA and Shoko Arakaki, Director of Humanitarian Office, UNFPA

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By External Source
Sep 21 2020 (IPS-Partners)

Vietnam is the ninth country to submit its updated NDC to the UNFCCC. The submission followed a comprehensive process over three years, under the guidance of Prime Minister Nguyễn Xuân Phúc. Vietnam’s inclusive NDC review and updating process, which was coordinated by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MONRE), involved active participation by scientists, ministries, agencies, non-governmental organizations, research institutes, enterprises, international organizations, and development partners. MONRE also spearheaded a series of national, sub-national, sectoral, and thematic workshops to assess feasibility, content, and implementation measures.

The more ambitious NDC features stronger mitigation and adaptation commitments. Vietnam’s updated NDC identifies economy-wide mitigation measures for the period 2021-2030 that spans the energy, agriculture, waste, land use, land use change and forestry, and industrial sectors. The plan is distinct for tackling greenhouse gas emissions by optimizing industrial processes, while changing its base year from 2010 to 2014 and increasing its unconditional emission reduction target to 9 percent by 2030. Vietnam’s new plans to decrease emissions from industrial processes includes replacing construction materials and improving cement and chemical production processes, as well as reducing HFC consumption. The successful implementation of this enhanced NDC is projected to increase emission reduction by 21.2 million tons of CO2e, or a third (34 percent) compared to the INDC, to a total of 83.9 million tCO2e. Vietnam’s conditional emission reduction target is now 27 percent (or 250.8 million tCO2e), which is 52.6 million tons of CO2e more than the emissions reduction target in the first NDC.

Vietnam’s updated NDC also includes robust adaptation components. The national climate plan identifies targets and pathways to improve adaptive capacity, enhance resilience, and reduce risks caused by climate change. The updated NDC is directly linked to the National Adaptation Plan (NAP), and includes loss and damage, health, gender equality, and child protection. In addition to the strengthened mitigation and adaptation components, the updated NDC features new elements and significantly improves the means of implementation. Vietnam outlines clear commitments to mainstream the NDC with socio-economic development plans and strategies and draws clear overarching and discrete linkages with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The country’s commitment to linking climate and development is typified by explicit links between elements of the updated NDC, SDG 11 on sustainable and resilient cities and human settlements, and SDG 12 on sustainable consumption and production models.

As the first cycle for updated NDCs heightens, Vietnamese officials are rightly celebrating their climate leadership and collaborative approach. “This is a great effort of all relevant government agencies with strong leadership from MONRE and cooperation from development partners. I am proud of the achievement and would like to thank all for the support that we have received during the last three years. I look forward to working with all for the implementation of Vietnam’s updated NDC,” states Mr. Pham Van Tan, Deputy Director General at MONRE and NDC Partnership Focal Point for Vietnam.

NDC Partnership support for Vietnam’s three-year long review and update process

Vietnam’s ambitious updated NDC paves the way for sustainability and demonstrates country ownership. The NDC Partnership congratulates the people of Vietnam and is proud of our collaboration since 2017. The Partnership’s engagement with Vietnam contributed to the NDC review and updating process, both directly and through the efforts of many of Partnership’s institutional members. Coordination and collaboration among Government ministries and with development partners and other stakeholders for the implementation, review and update of the NDC was enhanced by an inter-agency matrix developed by GIZ, UNDP, and the World Bank at the start of the process. NDC Partnership members GIZ and UNDP played a key role in supporting the government, with GIZ focusing mainly on the mitigation components of the NDC (including agriculture, energy, industrial processes, LULUCF, and waste), while UNDP supported the adaptation component as well as co-benefits, synergies, and impacts of mitigation options on socio-economic development. At the same time, the World Bank contributed to the process through sectoral studies such as identification of investment and technical options for solid waste management in support of achieving the NDC mitigation targets, technical assessments to inform the development of policies to enhance water use efficiency in support of NDC priorities, and research with the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MOIT) on getting to a low-carbon energy path to achieve the NDC target. The support of GIZ on the NDC mitigation component and the World Bank’s additional research with MOIT aided the inclusion of the industrial sector in the updated NDC. “It is an important milestone that the updated NDC now also covers emissions from industrial processes, which in 2014 accounted for about 12% of the country’s total emissions,” says Kia Fariborz, Chief Technical Advisor of SIPA at GIZ Vietnam. Mr. Fariborz added that “the updated NDC now calls for designing and implementing ambitious sector strategies and policies.” UNICEF, UN Women, and other partners also provided support for the Vietnam’s updated NDC.

NDC mainstreaming across provinces through CAEP

Vietnam is already taking action in line with its updated NDC. The country is leveraging support through the NDC Partnership’s Climate Action Enhancement Package (CAEP), delivered by the World Bank, WRI, and SNV. CAEP support is focused on translating the NDC to the provincial level through mainstreaming of targets in socio-economic development plans. As part of these efforts, SNV is developing model approaches and a gender-sensitive framework for mainstreaming NDC targets and actions in provincial socio-economic development plans.

Accelerating implementation and coordination of the NDC with Partnership support

Vietnam’s strengthened climate commitments are an opportunity for greater collaboration to support coordinated and effective climate action. The updated NDC outlines clear needs for the implementation phase, including challenges and response measures. As the Government of Vietnam looks to collaborate with partners to increase support for climate change adaptation and mitigation actions, the Partnership stands ready to support the coordinated implementation of its updated NDC. We value the opportunity to support accelerating climate action in this early (since November 2016) and longstanding member of the NDC Partnership.

Source: NDC Partnership

 

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By External Source
Sep 21 2020 (IPS-Partners)

 

Special Issue on the contributions of non-governmental organisations and civil society
to agricultural and rural development

– Involving local communities in setting the agricultural development agenda
– Ten years of opportunities to improve the lives of family farmers
– BRAC’s contributions to agricultural development
– Updated data sets for more efficient investment strategies for family farms
– Can food production keep up with population increase in Malawi?

– Northern civil society in agriculture in the South: a failure?
– A systems approach to unlock the potential of African agriculture
– Promoting biodiversity and livelihoods through community forest restoration
– Introducing the new Chair of TAA
– Alternative livelihoods in an opium-based agricultural economy
– News from NGO institutional members

Source: ‘Agriculture for Development’ journal

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The SDGs require renewed support and financing, experts say ahead of the United Nations General Assembly. Credit: Amanda Voisard / UN Women / CC BY-NC-ND

By Tim Mohin
AMSTERDAM, Sep 21 2020 (IPS)

The unprecedented challenges posed by COVID-19 have reminded us that we are an interconnected global community. While this crisis rightly has dominated our attention, we must not lose sight of progress on the broader aims of the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement.

Like the pandemic, our response must transcend national boundaries, engage the public and private sectors – and the pace has to quicken.

Corporations are absolutely essential to sustainable development. We live in a globalized economy where some multinational companies have revenues that exceed the GDP of many countries, workforces in the millions and supply chains that touch every corner of the world.

The good news is that most large companies recognize their responsibility and voluntarily report their progress, using the GRI Standards, which are the world’s most widely used for sustainability reporting.

It is crucial that all businesses recognize their impacts on society. This means a changed outlook in boardrooms and C-suites – from a solely inward facing consideration of financially material business impacts to a broader recognition of the full impacts to society.

Yet, without a full understanding of these impacts, businesses cannot enact the changes needed to improve their sustainability performance. At the core of the issue is transparency. And, not just any transparency.

For more than two decades, GRI has advanced the practice of reporting and managing impacts – those material to the company and the world around it. This kind of disclosure is needed to advance sustainable development and provide the accountability demanded by investors, consumers, employees, governments and civil society.

The quality of reporting is a critical issue. For transparency to be an effective tool, the disclosures must be complete, accurate and timely. Many companies do an excellent job, but more work is needed to raise the bar when it comes to the robustness and relevance of sustainability data.

Credit: United Nations

Companies and their accountants play a big role to help improve quality. Policy makers must also step in with mandates that require consistent, reliable, high-quality ESG disclosure. I am very encouraged by the commitment from the EU to enhance the non-financial reporting directive under their ‘Green Deal’.

The accountancy profession plays a major role here. For example, the Accounting for Sustainability call to action in response to climate change, signed by 14 accountancy bodies around the world, emphasised the influential role of accountants in supporting businesses to respond to the climate emergency.

This includes using their expertise to provide “financial and strategic analysis, disclosure, scenario analysis and assurance” while “ensuring transparency and appropriate disclosure around climate related risks and opportunities.”

As Michael Izza (CEO of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales) put it at the World Economic Forum 2020, “it’s not just about collecting the data, it’s what you do with it”. He then identified the importance of accountants using their skills to measure, report, audit and assure data. I wholeheartedly agree.

The reality is that good corporate governance requires a long-term perspective that understands, considers and balances the multiple and competing demands of stakeholders.

Robust, reliable and complete ESG disclosure, based on global reporting standards, is one of the tools available to corporate leaders to make this possible. If the pandemic has taught us anything it is that we face multi-faceted challenges as one interconnected global society. Now more than ever we must all be good stewards of one another and the global commons.

A version of this article was originally published in the ICAEW Quarterly (magazine of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales).

 

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Excerpt:

Tim Mohin, is Chief Executive of Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)

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By Kirla Echegaray Alfaro
LIMA, Peru, Sep 21 2020 (IPS)

On the eve of its bicentennial, Peru is addressing climate change with the needed sense of urgency and ambition. Our inclusive, ‘whole society’ approach aims to awaken new opportunities that are within reach of all of our citizens. Like COVID-19, climate change is a landmark which will have a clearly established before and after period. Without a doubt, it is paving a path towards sustainable development that will improve the well-being of all Peruvians.

In this context, Carbon Footprint Peru is a government-led initiative aimed to recognize the efforts of public and private organizations in reducing their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. By doing so, they also contribute to reaching the 35 percent GHG reduction target established in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) by 2030.

To encourage more organizations to join the Peru Carbon Footprint, Peru’s Ministry of Environment (MINAM) created a symbolic figure, named Nono. Nono is a curious and observant Peruvian spectacled bear who uses his large glasses to seek out and monitor the carbon footprints left by companies. He also encourages new organizations to join this environmental initiative through the platform created for that purpose. In this way, they will leave a record of their contributions to face the climate crisis and contribute to the construction of a resilient and low-carbon country.

More than 165 organizations have already registered with the platform and 61 have calculated their GHG emissions. Our goal for the bicentennial is to have at least 100 organizations measure their carbon footprint, thus strengthening the country’s climate action and demonstrating that companies, in a COVID-19 context, are increasingly migrating towards a new coexistence that respects the environment, so ignored in recent times.

MINAM seeks to convey a clear message: climate change is a fact that should concern us as much as the COVID-19 pandemic currently threatening the health of all humanity. Today, Nono needs the help of all citizens to promote his message through social networks and to invite brands to join Peru’s sense of urgency and ambition to face climate change.

Kirla Echegaray Alfaro

Nono, Peru’s Carbon Footprint Bear, is part of the work being done in the country through the Climate Action Enhancement Package (CAEP). CAEP is an initiative of the NDC Partnership, a global coalition of more than 180 countries and institutions supporting countries in improving the quality, increasing the ambition, and accelerating the implementation of their national climate plans. It also has the support of Peru’s NDC Support Programme, implemented by the MINAM, with technical assistance from the United Nations Development Program, and is also part of the International Climate Initiative.

The work conducted under CAEP strengthens Peru’s comprehensive vision for managing climate change by addressing five dimensions: (1) strengthening the institutional framework; (2) multi-sectoral implementation; (3) multi-level implementation; (4) multi-stakeholder work; and (5) NDC funding. Through this initiative, Peru is working with various partners such as the AVINA Foundation, the Global Green Growth Institute, ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability, SouthSouthNorth and its local partner Libélula, the United Nations Capital Development Fund, and the World Wide Fund for Nature. The work includes, as an example, the development of sectoral implementation plans, the preparation of emissions inventories at the regional level, training programs at various levels, the elaboration of a technical proposal for the National Strategy for Climate Change 2050, the design of a reporting and monitoring system for international climate finance, the design of a guarantee fund for climate responsible investments and, of course, raising awareness and creating ownership in various societal actors through campaigns such as Nono’s.

The work done through CAEP is part of Peru’s broad and ambitious action to catalyze transformational change towards resilient, sustainable, low-emission development. The involvement of the private sector in climate action is essential and entails a win-win relationship. There is a growing demand for highly efficient, low-carbon products and services. Thanks to the Peru Carbon Footprint, organizations are reducing their costs, promoting innovation, improving their reputation, and meeting Sustainable Development Goal 13: “Climate Action”.

Nono’s voice today is the voice of all. The time to act is now. Let’s share his message and leave a positive footprint.

 

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• Put Climate at the Heart of COVID-19 Economic Recovery Plans

The post Nono the Carbon Footprint Bear—Part of Peru’s Ambitious Work on Climate Action appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Minister Kirla Echegaray Alfaro holds a law degree and a Master's degree and specialization in Management and Public Policy. She has more than 15 years working with the government on issues of environment, technology, and health.

The post Nono the Carbon Footprint Bear—Part of Peru’s Ambitious Work on Climate Action appeared first on Inter Press Service.

David Mande shows the walls of a house made out ecobricks. The ecobricks, according to Mande, are filled with moist soil to ensure that they become hard. The bottle top is then tightly closed to ensure that the moist sand and soil bond to make a brick that can be turned into a strong wall. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS

By Wambi Michael
MPIGI/MUKONO/KAMPALA, Uganda , Sep 21 2020 (IPS)

About 40 kilometres out of Uganda’s capital, Kampala, in the Mpigi area, you can find an entire village hill with houses that have plastic bottles walls and car tyre rooftops.

Plastic bottles, which you can usually found littered almost everywhere in rural and urban Uganda, could help alleviate the country’s housing shortage as well as avoid environmental harm. An innovative idea of turning plastic bottles into “ecological bricks” is one of the latest solutions being promoted by environmentally sensitive individuals and NGOs here.

The village in Mpigi is part of a project by the Social Innovation Enterprise Academy (SINA), which promotes the use of ecobricks as an upcycling solution to the plastic waste problem rather than reverting to recycling.

• Recycling would involve the waste being reduced or destroyed from its current form to create something new. Whereas upcycling uses the existing waste and incorporates it into something new.

The initiative has spread out to a number of refugee camps in Uganda.

Uganda’s plastic headache 

Like many other African countries, Uganda is faced with the threats of plastics arising from the packing and beverages industry.

The plastics from bottled soft drinks end up in landfills, scattered all over the streets and block roadside drainage. Most of the plastics waste has been found floating on shores of Lake Victoria, it’s swamps and wetland or are simply burnt in the open air.

It is estimated that Kampala, the country’s capital, alone generates more than 350,000 tons of solid waste every year, only half of which is collected. So plastic remains one of the huge environmental concerns for the country whose plastic consumption increases by the day.

David Mande is a promoter of the ecobrick solution. He works as a builder and a trainer at SINA. The plastic waste have huge significance for him. Mande’s younger brother died tragically after trying to cross a swamp. After several hours of searching for the dead boy, his body was found concealed under a pile of bottles.

“I need to make use of these bottles. I found out that in Nepal and Nigeria, they were using those bottles to build houses in rural communities. And it has worked too in Uganda,” he told IPS.

He has become an enthusiastic promoter of upcycling plastic bottles instead of recycling.

The ecobricks, according to Mande, are filled with moist soil to ensure that they become hard. The bottle top is then tightly closed to ensure that the moist sand and soil bond to make a brick that can be turned into a strong wall.

Ultimately, Mande said, the aim is to maintain a green planet.

“So we collect the bottles and tyres from the environment and turn them into ecobricks and tiles. Then we use them for the construction of beautiful houses like the ones you are seeing across there,” said Mande. 

Are ecobricks a solution to the country’s housing shortage?

Mande estimates that three million plastic bottles that were littering the environment have been used to construct some 117 houses across this East African nation.

Though it may take a while yet to alleviate the country’s housing shortage. According to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics, the country has a deficit of 2.1 million housing units, growing at a rate of 200,000 units a year. It is estimated that by 2030, the country’s housing deficit is expected to reach in excess of five million units.

Edison Nuwamanya, who runs a shop from one of the houses constructed with plastic bottles or eco-bricks, told IPS that he had not seen these types of buildings until he moved to Mpigi area.

“Nature always provides the cool environment; it is rarely hot in here. It looks nice and it feels good to be in,” Nuwamanya told IPS of the house.

Back in Kampala’s Kamokya slum, a group of young people have turned plastic waste bottles to their advantage by promoting ecobricks as an alternative to mud and wattle houses common in this area.

The men and women from the Ghetto Research Lab collect plastic bags and bottles and repurpose them into ecobricks. From a distance one is welcomed by piles of bottles and polythene bags, which they use to make the bricks.

Rehema Naluekenge is one of the women involved constructing houses using the bottles. She uses a metal rod to staff soil and polythene bags into the bottle.

“I compact polythene bags and soil into the bottle until it gets hard. Because if the bottle remains soft as it was meant to be, it can’t make a brick,” she explained to IPS.

“The houses constructed with bottles or ecobricks are proving to be quite durable. We have not seen any develop cracks,” said Nalukenge. “Our operating principal at Ghetto Research is that waste is only waste when you waste it.” 

Women in eastern Uganda’s Mbale city collect plastic waste for recycling. Proponents of upcycling say that in recycling waste one ends up polluting the environment. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS

The demand for Uganda’s plastic waste has dropped

It has been common to find huge heaps of plastics in urban areas, these are usually collected by women and children for recycling into plastic flake products, which would be exported to China and India.

Manufacturers in India and China would recycle the flakes into products like polyester fibres for cloth and carpets or back into plastics bottles. But the market seems to have dried up. A middleman who was supplying these plastic flakes to China told IPS that the closure of particularly the China imports has had huge blow to the recycling industry in Uganda.

“There is no demand from our usual customers. It is not a COVID-19 effect. China’s demand reduced [before the outbreak], followed by India in mid-October last year,” the middleman, who declined to be named, told IPS.

A kinder method of construction

In the central Ugandan district of Mukono stands another upcycling project — this one is by high school teacher Allan Obbo. Obbo is the owner of the Bottle Garden Resort, whose entire perimeter wall and a number of cottages have been constructed from waste bottles.

“Research tells us that plastics are very dangerous to the environment … look at our lakes, the lakes are choked. And research tells us that for this bottle to degrade, it will take 300 years.

“So if I use one for building, it has more life than when left in the soil. So using this bottle as an alternative for construction saves the environment,” Obbo told IPS.

“Construction materials are detrimental to the environment. When you get the bricks, sometimes you are using soils that you could have used for farming. Then on top of that you go on cutting down trees, but when you are using the bottles, you are retrieving them from the environment,” said Obbo

Obbo doesn’t know how many bottles he has retrieved from waste bins to construct his Bottle Garden Resort. 

“I have one unit I took the time to count and it has 12,000 bottles. But if you put all the structures together, they are over a million bottles. It would have choked the environment,” he said

Lack of awareness and government support

While Obbo thinks that eco-bricks can serve as alternative building material, he told IPS that he was disappointed that construction engineers in the country’s urban areas cannot approve building plans for developers planning to construct houses using waste plastic bottles.

Obbo thinks recycling has not helped to retrieve all the bottles and that it cannot be comparable to upcycling.

“Remember recycling it into a reusable plastic, again there is that carbon emitted. And when that carbon goes to the ozone layer, it will affect the environment. With this one, there is nothing that goes in the air to pollute the environment,” he said.

Architect Patricia Kayongo, the managing director of Kampala-based Dream Architects Ltd., has been involved in supervision of construction projects in government and the private sector in Uganda. 

She told IPS that while the ecobricks have not been tested and approved by the country’s bureau of standards, they, together with other buildings materials, can be used as a sustainable building solution.

“And not much research has been done on them. It means that people have been denied of more options for constructing houses cheaply,” said Kayongo.

She said recycled materials like glass and plastics are good for construction but they were not being utilised to solve the housing deficit in most countries.

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A landmark handshake-former Prime Minister Raila Odinga & President Uhuru Kenyatta bridge their differences and sign a declaration of peace between the two political leaders. March 9, 2018. Credit: State House

By Siddharth Chatterjee and Walid Badawi
NAIROBI, Kenya, Sep 21 2020 (IPS)

Amid various global conflicts in the 1980s and 1990s, the International Day of Peace (IDOP) was established to commemorate the strengthening of the ideals of peace globally. Today, peace is not just the absence of conflict, but a key prerequisite for development. It is in recognition of the crucial linkages between peace, respect for human rights and sustainable development that more than 36 indicators for peace were included across the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Just like charity, peace begins at home.

Kenya stands out as a paradigm of locally crafted peace processes and cross-border initiatives with Ethiopia and Uganda that are gaining global visibility.

March 9, 2018 will go down in Kenya’s history books as one of many defining moments when the country took a step closer towards peace. On this day, on the steps of Harambee House, President Uhuru Kenyatta and Rt Honorable, Raila Odinga, shook hands. This averted a major political crisis that was characterized by calls for regional secession, economic boycotts and mobilization for civil unrest.

The theme of this year’s IDOP is ‘building peace together’ which reminds us of what has been achieved, and what remains to be done to secure a peaceful and just world. In the midst of continuing conflicts around the world, the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, has appealed for a global ceasefire, urging all warring parties to lay down their weapons and focus on the battle against the common enemy, the COVID-19 pandemic. This call was by no means directed merely to armed parties, but is a call to Member States, regional partners, non-State actors, civil society organizations, to return to the fundamental values of the UN Charter.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed a host of inequalities and vulnerabilities in our societies that threaten human progress. For the first time since 1990, human development is on course to decline, affecting the most marginalized in our societies disproportionately, women, the elderly, unemployed youth, refugees, and other vulnerable groups, especially those in humanitarian settings. That is why it is more important than ever to work together across all sectors and at all levels to “build forward better”.

But with every crisis comes opportunity. The UN is working with countries around the world, including Kenya, to take immediate bold action to stem the socio-economic impacts and put in place recovery strategies that are sustainable, transformative and innovative. Together, we have a chance to take a bold leap forward to a sustainable, inclusive, peaceful, and resilient future, with the SDGs as our compass.

In its support to the Government and people of Kenya, the UN is not only responding to the dire health and economic needs of COVID-19, we are also engaging closely on the impact of the crisis on stability and social cohesion.

The National Peacebuilding Strategy on Covid-19, being launched during IDOP 2020, sets out an inclusive and integrated framework for the governance, peace and security sector to respond to and recover from the impacts of COVID-19. The Strategy is a great opportunity for all Kenyans to shape peace together and steer the national debate in the direction of a united, peaceful and prosperous Kenya.

The 17 SDGs provide a framework for improving the conditions which will engender peaceful societies while addressing the underlying causes and drivers of conflict. Peace enables every individual to attain their human capability, dignity and choice. It creates an environment for optimal development. The mutually reinforcing nexus between peace and development places prevention and peacebuilding at the centre of the work of the UN.

This year’s observance of IDOP is particularly special, coming as the UN celebrates its 75th Anniversary. The UN General Assembly will mark the occasion at a time of vast and unprecedented stress on people and planet under the theme: “the future we want, the United Nations we need: reaffirming our collective commitment to multilateralism – confronting COVID-19 through effective multilateral action.”

Kenya’s unwavering commitment to the UN and to multilateralism has received international recognition, evidenced by the recent election to the Security Council from 2021 to 2023 and President Uhuru Kenyatta’s leadership as a global youth champion.

As Kenya continues to shine on the global stage, so must she continue to demonstrate her resolve to maintaining peace and social cohesion domestically. The inclusion of women and youth in all institutions and decision-making processes as enshrined in the constitution, must serve as the basis for governance, no matter how bumpy the road ahead may be.

Effective implementation of the National Peacebuilding Strategy is the right way forward.

 

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Excerpt:

Siddharth Chatterjee (@sidchat1) is the UN Resident Coordinator to Kenya. Walid Badawi (@walidbadawi) is the UNDP Resident Representative to Kenya.

The post Peace is the North Star During and the Post COVID-19 Pandemic appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By External Source
Sep 20 2020 (IPS)

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death has generated an outpouring of grief around the globe. Part of this grief reflects her unparalleled status as a feminist icon and pioneer for women in the legal profession and beyond.

There is already considerable interest in what her departure means for the future of the US Supreme Court, and indeed, the wider political landscape. But to understand that, we must reflect on her legacy.

In 1956, Ginsburg enrolled in Harvard Law School, one of only nine women in her year alongside about 500 men. Reflecting the prevailing mindset of the time, which regarded the study and practise of law as the proper domain of men, the Harvard dean, Erwin Griswold, asked each of the nine women how they could justify taking the place of a man.

Ginsburg’s answer, that she wanted to better understand her husband Marty’s career as a lawyer (he was the year ahead of her at Harvard), belies the reality of the enormous contribution she would make to public life in the subsequent six decades.

 The number nine would come to be significant in marking her success in a profession traditionally dominated by men. In 1993, she took her place on the nine-judge Supreme Court as the second woman appointed in its history.

In more recent years, in response to questions about when there will be “enough” women judges, Ginsburg replied there would enough when there were nine women on the Supreme Court. Acknowledging that people are shocked by this response, Ginsburg famously countered,

there’s been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.

This exchange points to just how ingrained the idea that judging is men’s work had become.

 

A formidable mind

Long before President Bill Clinton resolved to nominate Ginsburg to the Supreme Court, Ginsburg had established a reputation as an academic (she was the second woman to teach law full-time at Rutgers University and the first woman to become a tenured professor at Columbia Law School). She was also known as a feminist litigator, leading the American Civil Liberties Union’s campaign for gender equality.

Ginsburg’s nomination to the Supreme Court was an uncontroversial appointment. She was regarded as a restrained moderate and was confirmed by the Senate 96 votes to three.

Although there were some concerns she was a “radical doctrinaire feminist”, her credentials were bolstered by her record on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (she was appointed by President Jimmy Carter in 1980).

 

 

Ginsburg had spent the 1970s pursuing a litigation strategy to secure woman’s equality — although she would describe her approach in broader terms as the

constitutional principle of equal citizenship stature of men and women.

In a series of cases, she sought to establish

sex, like race, is a visible, immutable characteristic bearing no necessary relationship to ability.

By extension, she argued, legal classifications on the basis of sex should be subject to the “strict scrutiny” required in cases where there were distinctions or classifications on the basis of race. To put it more bluntly, pigeon-holing on the basis of sex should be unconstitutional. The nub of her argument, whether acting for men or women plaintiffs, was that treating men and women differently under the law helped to

keep woman in her place, a place inferior to that occupied by men in our society.

 

Outside the court — and inside, too

Feminist theorists have sometimes expressed reservations about the extent to which a legal system designed by men to the exclusion of women can ever be fully appropriated to achieve equality for women.

While some feminists have seen much promise in the possibility for law reform, others have been more circumspect. This tension is reflected in the two-pronged strategy proposed by Professor Mari Matsuda — that there are times to “stand outside the courtroom” and there are times to “stand inside the courtroom”.

Ginsburg’s legacy in life and law reflects the latter approach. Her faith in the law is reflected in her approach to stand inside the courtroom (literally as a litigator and a judge) to transform existing legal categories. In this way, her approach was reconstructive rather than radical (which is not say that some of her thinking wasn’t radical for its time).

Ginsburg sought to reconstruct sex roles and emphasised men and women alike were diminished by stereotypes based on sex.

Importantly, Ginsburg did not simply pursue formal equality (the idea that equality will be achieved by treating everyone the same). Rather, she advocated for affirmative action as a principle of equality of opportunity.

She favoured incremental rather than radical change, reflecting a view that such an approach would minimise the potential for backlash. Her critique of the strategy adopted in the landmark 1973 case Roe v Wade (the case upon which US reproductive rights are based), and her departure from the feminist orthodoxy on this point, reflected her preference for incrementalism.

 

Legacy on the bench

Ginsburg’s jurisprudential contributions on the Supreme Court continued the legacy she began in the 1970s.

One of her most significant majority opinions in 1996 required the Virginia Military Institute to admit women. Importantly, this was because it had not been able to provide “exceedingly persuasive justification” for making distinctions on the basis of sex. Although this standard fell short of the “strict scrutiny test” required in cases involving classifications on the basis of race, it nonetheless entrenched an important equality principle.

But it was perhaps her judicial dissents, sometimes delivered blisteringly in the years where she was the lone woman on the bench (prior to President Barack Obama’s appointment of Sonia Sotomayor in 2009 and Elena Kagan in 2010), that seem to have really captured the wider public imagination and catapulted her into the zeitgeist.

It was in the wake of her 2013 dissent in a case about the Voting Rights Act that she reached the status of a global feminist icon. A Tumblr account was established in her honour, giving her the nickname “Notorious RBG” (a title drawn from the rapper Biggie Smalls’ nickname Notorious B.I.G). A 2018 documentary RBG chronicled her legacy and status as a cultural icon, and a 2018 motion picture On the Basis of Sex depicted her early life and cases.

Ginsburg’s celebrity certainly expanded during her time on the court — but this is not to say to it has been without controversy or critique, even from more liberal or progressive sources.

She has been criticised for her decisions (for example, a particular decision about Native Americans and sovereignty), for her comments about race and national anthem protests, and for being too partisan — particularly in her criticism of President Donald Trump. (She called him a “faker” and later apologised.)

 

A great legacy

Did Ginsburg’s feminism or celebrity undermine her legitimacy as a judge? Questions of judicial legacy and legitimacy are complex and inevitably shaped by institutional, political and legal norms. Importantly, her contributions as a lawyer and a judge have done much to demonstrate how legal rules and approaches previously regarded as neutral and objective in reality reflected a masculine view of the world.

Over 25 years ago, Ginsburg expressed her aspiration that women would be appointed to the Supreme Court with increased regularity:

Indeed, in my lifetime, I expect to see three, four, perhaps even more women on the High Court Bench, women not shaped from the same mold but of different complexions. Yes, there are miles in front, but what distance we have travelled from the day President Thomas Jefferson told his secretary of state: ‘The appointment of women to [public] office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared.’

That Ginsburg came to share the Supreme Court with two women, Kagan and Sotomayor, must have given her some hope that women’s access to places “where decisions are being made” was at least tentatively secure, even if hard-won feminist gains sometimes felt tenuous at best.

Ginsburg was a trailblazer in every aspect of her life and career. The women who follow her benefit from a legacy that powerfully re-imagined what it means to be a lawyer and a judge in a legal system that had been made in men’s image.

Kcasey McLoughlin, Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Newcastle

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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