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on the spirit of the Charter

answer from Oriol ALSINA, Aliado. España , 13 May 2005

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The proposal is right in its spirit but falls short in the application of the principles it endorses. In other words, I fully agree that the main problem of the Alliance is the lack of clear governance rules. Without any kind of mechanism to manage differences and conflicting opinions, having unanimity as the only decision-making rule, the Alliance has only been able to take a collective stand on very broad and rhetoric principles, those that everyone agrees upon. It has also been impossible to define a strategy for implementing -or even promoting as they should- a selection of its hundreds of good proposals.

Therefore, a proposal to create and implement a system of governance which allow us to precise what does “jointly adopted” or “jointly defined” exactly mean is more than welcome!!

Yet, I’ve had the impression that we want to create rules without daring to call them “rules”. Having an arbitration body representing all continents is a wonderful idea. In practice this arbitration body will end up covering some of the functions that a conventional board of directors does, so why not accept even in words that there will be some kind of structure. I don’t agree in stating that the non-institutional character of the Alliance is necessarily the guarantee of openness and diversity, nor in saying that the general goal for this Alliance secong stage is to increase diversity. Diversity is already there.

In my opinion, the general goal of the “new Alliance” should be to have an impact on reality by putting into good use (directly or letting social movements do it) some of the proposals that it has generated. For that, we need governance, we need to adopt mechanisms to be able to take decisions which cannot please such a diverse spectrum of opinion.

All this, taking into account that our vision, the building of a global community, is already underway and that spaces like the WSF have taken the lead in this process and have gained a legitimacy that we unfortunateky don’t have. It is only by accepting reality that we will be able to change it.

 

 

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