Turning Point in Jo’burg
-Ernst Ulrich von
Weizsacker, Scientist, Gerrmany
The World Summit on
Sustainable Development was a start: issues like the environment and development are back
on the agenda of the community of states.
For ten years, interest
in environment and development issues had been dwindling. Simultaneously, the state of the
environment had been deteriorating and the gap between rich and the poor widening all this
time. People simply had other things on their minds. And not only the Germans: all over
the world, there had been a growing sense of environmental awareness—and resignation
in the light against poverty—since the Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro.
What had happened?
"Globalization" was one of the central causes. The word first appeared in German
press—and in the media of other countries—in 1993, one year after Rio. In
practice, globalization meant that international cost competition was intensifying to
previously unheard-of levels. Any one who wanted to survive in the market had to work on
extremely low margins. Whether they wanted to or not, nations were forced to make
competitive tax reductions to attract capital and business. In the end, the OECD termed
this "harmful tax competition". In line with the ideology of neo-liberalism,
globalization was characterized as being " self-evidently" good and, in the
final analysis, beneficial to all.. Criticism of it was tabooed or dismissed as
"romantic". If a country failed to keep up in the ice-cold competition, it only
had itself to blame: the corrupt elite lacked "good governance".
GRANTED, GLOBALIZATION
has produced many winners, and not only in business. Consumers enjoy stable prices,
bureaucracies have been pared down, and democratic movements have achieved their
objectives in previously authoritarian countries. Similarly, some export-oriented
economies, not least the Chinese, have experienced an upswing. And the global distribution
of some environmental technologies has also made progress. Nevertheless, the gap between
the rich and poor has grown even wider, even within countries. Long-term issues like
climate protection or the decline in biodiversity were forced out of limelight.
Governments everywhere were strapped for cash. Development aid was shrinking all over the
world, even though the heads of state in Rio de Janeiro had solemnly committed themselves
to the magic figure of 0.7% of gross national product. In the meantime, average aid in
OECD countries has fallen to a pitiful of 0.22 percent.
That was the situation
when the World Summit for Sustainable Development started work in Johannesburg. The fact
that the Summit was held at all, therefore, already constituted a success for the
environment and development. In retrospect, I regard the summit as a turning point. The
disastrous collapse of interest in the environment and development has been halted. The
March conference on Monterrey stopped—we can assume—the decline in development
finance. And in Johannesburg there has been noticeable progress on some ecological topics.
We can rate the following as success:
# the new urgency given
to the issue of drinking water, with the expectation that nearly all people will gain
access to drinking water and sewage treatment technologies;
# the decision to
enable fish stocks to recover—if possible—by 2015;
# the aim of
"minimizing" stocks of toxic chemicals by 2020;
# the aim of markedly
reducing the decline in biodiversity by 2010;
# rejection of the
US/Australian suggestion to give free trade fundamental legal priority over international
environmental treaties;
# a ten year program
for sustainable consumption and production patterns;
# the challenge to all
hesitant countries to ratify the Kyoto Protocol—and Russia’s immediate positive
reaction.
THE SUMMIT WAS LARGELY
a failure on issues such as renewable energies and the need to give greater priority to
the UN’s environmental work. All the same, about a hundred countries voluntarily
committed themselves to promoting renewable energies, after an odd alliance of the USA,
Australia and Arab States had sabotaged the conference’s progress on this issue.
Incidentally, according to the UN’s Environmental Program, UNEP, Klaus Topter,
Johannesburg was not meant to be a summit of declarations, but of implementation:
implementation of the agenda 21 launched in Rio requires not only "type 1"
agreements, on which the governments negotiated up to the last minute, but also voluntary
"type 2" agreements, in which primarily companies cooperate with the governments
or NGOs. US firms in particular are pinning their hopes on these agreements. Washington
was quite politically isolated at the summit since, long before the conference, the US
government had issued the uncompromising demand that no binding agreements were to be
decided in Johannesburg. US firms are worried about this. That gives NGOs a chance to
divert corporate goodwill money into good projects.
As a turning point,
Johannesburg was only a beginning. I can understand those who are disappointed. On the
other hand, without the summit we would probably not even have started overcoming the
decline of the last ten years. This would have condemned many more millions of people to a
quiet death and thousands more species to extinction. And it would have postponed climate
protection for many more years, probably causing even more extensive and worse flooding
over the next 50 years.
The author is a
scientist and a member of the Germany Budestag for the SPD. Text courtesy"’:
Deutschland E4 N 5/october 2002, Embassy of Germany in Kathmandu.
Masculine
plural:
New possibilities for men
—Christine
Castelain-Meunier, Sociaologist, France
As we enter this new 21
st century, a great many factors have led to a transformation of men’s role and
position in the family in western countries. Masculinity and paternity are undergoing
radical change. This transition period, marked by greater freedom but also greater
complexity in the relationships between men and women and between parents and children, is
opening up new possibilities of identity and communication. It is a genuine Cultural
Revolution, in particular for men, who can now put a lot into their private lives.
In contemporary western
societies, based notably on equality between the sexes, women’s assertion of their
civil and social rights has given rise to three types of reaction among men: the ‘new
man, the ‘changing man’, and the ‘defensive man’, nostalgic for
traditional male power, which is today losing its legitimacy.
In France debates on
parenthood and, above all, on fatherhood are forming a real cultural movement in itself.
Embarking on fatherhood is profoundly marked by the contemporary questioning that
accompanies the transition from couple to family, which, behind the roles, relates back to
each one’s personal path and identity. This is especially true since the family is
nowadays no longer centered on the father, but revolves, as a rule, around the conception
of the child with rights. The position and the function of the father are a matter of
controversy, while the child is the object of interest, including that of men.
A new paternal
culture
Let us remember that,
in France and in many Western countries, the majority of fathers-to-be are present at the
scan and at the birth and that early childhood is now part of paternal culture, which was
not the case even thirty years ago. Nevertheless, this does not mean that fathers are
taking much care of children.
As they themselves say,
conceptions of fathers are halfway between the type of relationship they had with their
own father(Whom they generally describe as not very communicative) and contemporary
representations of father who is close, more available, and who nurtures his child, in
contrast with the old view of the distant institutional father, who personified the law.
Over time, the old
institutions that guaranteed the power of the father (marriage, religion, politics when it
was a male monopoly) have lost their influence with the advent of a modern, democratic,
egalitarian society committed individual liberties. On the other hand, our present-day
societies are even more focused on the imperative of the "Godmother’, which
weighs heavily on women and contributes to playing down the role of fathers.
The importance of
paternal authority is also tempered by the possible separation between bio-logical
parenthood and the family (families where the father is not the natural parent), which
follows on from the disconnection of sexuality and recreation (with the development of
contraception, abortion and medically assisted conception).
So we are emerging from
a single culture of parenthood and moving towards a diversity of forms of relationship
between parents and children, symbolized by the recent changes to the family with, among
others, step families, the debate on the position of the stepfather, the stepmother, or
the question of gay parents. Being a parent is now a matter of cultural choice, of
commitment and taking responsibility in relation to the models chosen, or, quite simply,
in relation to the situations people find themselves in.
Reaching the deepest
part of ourselves and our social organization
These major
transformations have fundamental effects on the symbolic and cultural representations of
men and women in general and on the redistribution of roles within the family, reaching
the deepest part of ourselves and the organization of society.
While the old models
persist and are still highly regarded, especially in France, we have come a long way today
from the rural and religious patriarchal society, synonymous with paternal power and male
domination, which accorded particular importance to a father’s blood relationship
with his children since it concerned ensuring the continuity of a highly hierarchical
society. We are also coming out of the industrial patriarchy based, on the one hand, on
the superiority of the head of the family, representing law and reason, and, on the other
hand, on the inferiority of the woman, without civil and social rights.
In French Society
particularly, we are today seeing a combination of these traditional models with this new
paternity that is less attached to the notion of authority than to the values of dialogue,
communication and affection. A paternity of "relationship", based on the culture
of the individual and respect for the other, which calls for paternal awareness in the
man.
In France, recent
government initiatives such as the introduction of a "livert de paternite"
(Father’s record book), the increase in paternity leave when a child is born or the
promotion of shared custody of children where the couple separate, are aimed at
encouraging men to become involved in their role as father. The future of their
relation-ship with their partner and their children is more than ever in their own hands. |
