INTER-RELIGIOUS COLLEGE
BREAKTHROUGHS

Henri BAUER
henri.bauer@wanadoo.fr

1.	Spirituality. Rediscover and establish the spiritual dimensions of humanity that inspire ethical values and social, ecological, political, etc., attitudes, capable of facing up to the risks that are threatening humanity and the planet. Far from being some kind of extraneous reality referring primarily to philosophical, metaphysical and even mysterious truths, or to excessive piety and escaping responsibility, spirituality is of central importance when it comes to establishing a cultural identity and common ethical principles and, in general, exploring the mysteries of life and death. Spirituality does not deny, but accepts, the material dimension of humanity, with all its virtues and contradictions, providing it with ethical values and points of reference and creating a project for it. Deep and open-minded spirituality is of the essence for forming a basic attitude based on peace, respect for nature, justice and brotherhood. It is not sufficient to provide projects and lines of action for humanity to follow. Some meaning has to be given to the future. 

2.	Ethics. Humanity, in all its diversity, urgently needs to establish common ethical standards, capable of bringing meaning to the world of tomorrow, and this is something in which different religious groups could collaborate. What humanity expects from religions, rather than rules, rites or prohibitions, is that they become involved in creating common ethical standards for all, encouraging activities to show our opposition to everything that goes against freedom, dignity or justice, such as racism, misery, exploitation, the new kinds of slavery, etc. On the other hand, these ethical standards should lead to specific types of actions, building societies in which every individual is able to feel fulfilled. These values and principles could inspire innovative attitudes relating to economic interchange, our relationship with the environment, how power is exercised, the production and distribution of common property, etc.

3.	Redistribution of resources. In the present world-wide situation, humanity has to make an active and effective effort so that everyone can have the same access to essentials, such as food, health care and education. The different religious families have to work towards a truly fair distribution of resources among the population, making sure that those who are now the least privileged, have access to their basic necessities.

4.	Peace. Religions must be actively committed to achieving world-wide peace. “War lords” have always made use of religion to justify their acts and call for the population to fight “in God’s name”. There is urgent need of a critical analysis of the reasons why religion is associated to violence and the consequences of this. A clear, permanent position is required. Believers must not fall into the trap of “the sacred nature of violence”, but they must become actively involved in the eradication of all kinds of violence and the creation of world-wide peace.

5.	Inter-religious education. Inter-religious dialogue provides a new challenge for conventional and confessional religious education. It shows the need for creating an education emphasising understanding and respect for all religious traditions. The experience of faith in a “global village” requires different religious teachings being capable of responding to situations that threaten peace and justice. Inter-religious education is conceived not only as a way of preserving and bringing new life to cultural identities and spiritual disciplines, but also as a way of facing the social challenges related, for example, with the lack of justice, discrimination, intolerance, violence, etc. All religious families need to embark on a profound and honest self-critical analysis of certain practices associated to religious education that have created divisions and provided support for repression. They also need to respond to situations in which the ideologies of some governments censure, control, distort and manipulate religious education in such a way that believers are unaware of both their own heritage and the heritage of their neighbours.   

6.	Inter-religious dialogue. The experience of the Alliance’s Inter-religious College shows the complexity and difficulties involved in an inter-religious dialogue aimed at religious families formulating a common opinion on society issues. Indeed, the different points of view and opinions on different problems relating to the future of our planet are more within each religious group than between different families. All of them are divided. It is possible, however, for certain groups and currents from different religious families to agree upon a common position. The inter-religious dialogue practised in “summit” encounters, meetings and conferences is neither popular nor adequate for the followers of these religious families. Inter-religious dialogue still requires practice and debates within each religious group, involving representatives of different viewpoints. Inter-religious dialogue has to include women and men, young people, religious officers and laymen, and it evidently has to make the most of the competition between the followers of different religious families. The quality and legitimacy of this kind of dialogue, based on society issues concerning the future of mankind, will depend on the will of those involved to share the results of their considerations with their respective communities. It is convenient, therefore, for the followers of each group to be aware of the results of the dialogue and put them into practice. Each religious family should undertake an inter-religious dialogue. The Bossey seminar’s proposals include the creation of a group to organise, in co-operation with different members, such as religious organisations that are active in inter-religious dialogue, the work of groups investigating and considering the issues related to society world-wide that should be approached by religious families in the 21st Century. 

The Breakthroughs
Women’s College

The arrival of women in public life has been a major event in history. Through this act, they have expressed their refusal of the private/public separation, a purely patriarchal social construction that, on the basis of a biological vision of things, associates women with home life and men with public life.
This arrival has caused an upheaval in dominant representations and raised a number of contradictions that are inherent to the organisation of social order.
Women have undertaken a dual approach, which is to consider themselves as subjects on the one hand and, on the other, consider society with the critical eye that their state of oppressed persons may have given them.  They have never stopped saying this and proposing transformations, but their voice has not been heard in debates on fundamental questions. To the question: “ What do women suggest? ” It would be more pertinent to change it by, or simply add: “Why is half of humanity deaf to the other half?”  
Is it is due to the fear of losing power and the legitimacy and benefits that power brings, or a real fear of change, of put into question things that are far too fundamental? Women do indeed recommend that the dominant values of the patriarchal system be fundamentally put into question, by condemning their responsibility for excluding a greater part of humanity, for the domination of the strong and for the destruction of our planet.
Far from being satisfied with changes that only benefit a few of them, they are calling for a radical transformation of relations between individual people and relations between people and their environment. 

A new culture: 
Inventing a new culture requires a transformation of dominant social representations both through efforts to destroy masculine and feminine models by making aspects denied by language and history visible and through a new awareness of a different relationship with the world.  A relationship, which would begin by relating personal concepts to politics and therefore beginning with one's self for implementing social changes. For about 30 years now, one of the most important principles put forward by the international women's movement is certainly “personal is political”, a concept increasingly supported by considerable research and reflection and which, as a corollary, refuses the private/public division. It is essential to begin by restoring self-respect - even more so, respect for the close circle of people around us, to be able to go beyond this point and establish changes on a more global level.

Social representations:
A sort of collective memory that constructs images not always based on reality or rationality, unlike true knowledge, is inculcated into personal existence very early in life on the basis of what are called thematics built on the good/evil concept. This binary categorisation where the second term is always defined in comparison to the first, and, therefore, in an implicitly negative hierarchical ratio, has conditioned methods of judgment in all categories: man/woman, strong/week, white/black, rational/intuitive, etc. Developing thoughts and any social project calls upon this method of classification and reactivates it permanently. Restructuring social organisation can only be done by questioning not only the hierarchical order of these categories but the categories themselves, followed by reconsidering the order of values, where life would be considered as a priority value rather than those which are prominent today:  money and profit.
As far as language is concerned, it is the main motor for constructing thought and developing conceptual frameworks. Sexist aspects of language over-evaluate what is masculine and generically devalue what is feminine. To structure representations differently, it is therefore essential to modify linguistic standards, which are often considered to be unimportant. However, the masculine gender represents neutral terms.
A transformation of representations and the arrival of this new form of awareness also imply creating and refashioning the links and interdependence between living beings. Contrary to the culture of dissection and categorisation, it is a question according to women, of renewing links, reducing distances, tending towards small units, re-establishing connections with one's self, with others, between the sexes, between generations, between different peoples and with other living beings. Accepting one's self at long last as being dependent on all the rest and being part of a whole.

Such changes would result from new perspectives and different views of a mutilated reality that has always seemed evident until now.
1.	For men this awareness would lead them to:
-	Refusing to exert their domination or being an accomplice to it. 
-	Renewing contact with their profound human essence and learning to exist without having a role to play.

2.	For women it would mean on a personal level:
-	Rediscovering self-esteem and learning how to increase their standing without this being detrimental to the others.
-	Stopping being transmission belts for patriarchal cultures that lack respect for life.
In society, this would be materialised notably by:
On political levels:
1.	Setting up non-hierarchical and egalitarian relations that would put an end to centralised, pyramid-formed conceptions of power, which are a source of competition and abuse, and provide collective and balanced management of affairs concerning society.
2.	Practising horizontality in balances of power that would promote respect of diversity, of free individual expression and the disappearance of all traces of hierarchy in our subjectivity. 
3.	Inflecting logics of war and dismantling the warrior myth because they would have become incompatible with political ethics respecting life and diversity.

On social levels 

1.	Religion:
Return his neutrality and impartiality to God
	To allow spirituality to be expressed outside balances of power. Not only must we carry out a general review of language - which makes God masculine - but we must also open areas of religion to numerous interpretations that tend towards promoting peace and equality between sexes.  
2.	Education:
Dismantle myths that are founders of patriarchal society by: 
-	A critical approach to myths that tends to enhance physical beauty, youth, motherhood and heterosexuality.
-	Questioning present dominant values on which a large majority of human societies are based and which are brandished as being positive by dominant patriarchal and capitalist systems, whereas, in reality, they are sauces of violence: competition, aggressiveness, individualism and a lack of respect for life and its diversity. 
-	Developing a culture of peace and education in non-violence, which will put an end to the myth that the violence is a means of submission
-	Enhancing the value of women’s unknown, invisible History and transposing their expertise (private) into theoretical concepts and tools of education.
3.	Science: 
Put into place new ethics and new approaches to knowledge by:
∑	Reintegrating laboratories with all other aspects of life and considering ethical aspects before and during research programmes.
∑	Developing new scientific approaches that integrate ancient wisdom, knowledge and traditions of survival with modern knowledge and which call upon everyone's physical, intellectual and intuitive aptitudes.
∑	Positioning the principle of subject-subject reciprocity at the centre of new science.  This presupposes that the subject under research will once again be considered as being a living creature and endowed with its own subjectivity.
4.	Medias:
Taking into account women's points of view would put an end to distributing traditional models that are sexist and/or degrade their image.  In this way popularisation of valid representations of women in terms of gestures, words and images in all public places by means of mass media would be privileged and the commercial use of their body and their image, which violates their human dignity, will be banished.

On economic levels: Realigning economies on human beings and social links
For women, the objective of economic activity is not systematically to produce more merchandise and money for an anonymous market, but to create and recreate life, i.e. satisfy fundamental human requirements mainly for producing values in use and not for purchasing merchandise. So they propose:
∑	Reassertion of what is free, of sociability, of non-economic activities and of non-productive time together with a re-distribution of riches by favouring productive activities in social relationships as opposed to opportunist financial activities
∑	That the value of women's work be enhanced in both non-mercantile activities and traditional economies.

Youth workshop breakthroughs

The youth workshop is a network that brings together young people throughout the world who are conscious of the richness of their diversity, of culture, of their visions and of the importance of unity for facing up to the challenges that they must win.

The ideas developed in this document are the fruit of several contributions made by different partners in our network throughout the world. Each one was able to imagine solutions that seemed important to him or her for creating change. 
What has stood out is the immense amount of action already undertaken by youth for development and social change. In addition, the responsibility of youth in building today’s and tomorrow’s world is more essential than ever. 

We have extracted a concentrate of proposals for essential changes required for building a better world from over 30 proposal files (see proposals file list). Before making concrete and practical proposals, it seemed urgent to us to fundamentally put into question our ways of thought so as to be able to conceive actions that are coherent with the reality of challenges, their interdependence and their complexity. These changes concern the very foundations of social relations, of the role of money, of the consequences of collective and social egoism on our own lives and the lives of our family and society.
It is also urgent to restart talking about ethics, morals, life’s real values (love, respect of differences, prudence, etc.) without, for all that, getting involved in a religious discourse, but with words that everyone can use these days, because we have been far too far in terms of destruction.
What is certain is that another world is possible, because we have the enthusiasm and willpower necessary to bring it to the forefront.

To do this several possibilities exist. Here are a few:
 
Accept innovation as an essential criterion for change: Enhance the value of positive experiments to give another possible alternative to the present system unfortunately considered today to be the one and only road to be followed.

Integrate the notion of “durability” in changes that have been initiated: As actors on today’s stage, our first responsibility is to envisage our action on the basis of consequences to past experiences and to show any possible consequences for the generations to come. Prudence is therefore an essential principle to be respected.

Necessity for change is a responsible act: All the facts that surround us demonstrate, day after day, the failure of a system set up on political economic and social plans. A system that recommends materialism as the only alternative by encouraging social egoism is no longer viable. Changing and bringing the values of “life” (love, solidarity, compassion, respecting differences) back to the foreground are vital notions. In the youth workshop, this aspect came out very strongly in our dialogues.

Initiate reflection on notions of power: Money, political power, etc. are no longer enough to turn a country or an individual into a unit of power.

Fundamentalism is not the heart of the problem: Whether it is religious, territorial or other, extremism of thought is the fruit of several social dysfunctions. Education, enhancing the richness of diversity and of identity, promoting constructive interactions between different cultures are all proposals for changes that should be put into place 

Societies’ view of youth must change: Society has a duty to support and accompany their younger members. War and its consequences that have been experienced by our elders must in no way be a burden for the younger generations. Accompanying youth in accomplishing its innovations and creations by accepting changes in social codes is an essential factor for generating harmony. Developing and setting up spaces for dialogue between different generations is an action that is fundamental for constructing a world, together, by basing our judgment on past and present experience.

Listen to young people’s and children’s dreams for building tomorrow’s world: Dreaming is not only an exercise for nourishing hope; it is also the first real stage in building future projects. At school, with the family, set up “dream traps” for collecting hopes which are the cornerstones of tomorrow’s world.

The school of life is just as important as normal school: Young people from 15 to 25 years old and their parents must be made aware of the importance of being involved in alternative projects for development and social change, so as to develop their personality and their skills through exercising responsibilities and methods of cultural exchange. This aspect of education, self-discovery, is essential for completing knowledge provided at home, in society and at school.

Our existence depends on EVERYTHING that surrounds us: Outside the family and school, from the very beginning children must be helped to become aware of the existence of relationships between them, society that surrounds them and the environment in which they live. These relations must be explained in terms of:
•	Responsibility and self-respect, respect for nature and others;
•	Continuous evaluation of their own actions and thoughts;
•	Richness of exchange and dialogue.
These principles will condition, amongst others, the birth of a society capable of accepting complexity and facing up to the challenges of its time.

Problems and solutions in perpetual movement: In our approach to developing observations or even preparing actions, we must integrate the non-static aspect of events and, because of this, be neither ashamed not frightened of changing course.

Social change requires a great deal of time. Rhythms must be respected: These projects bring the complexity and global nature of problems to the forefront. Human factors predominate in these processes. To really be able to construct solutions together, everybody must put him on herself in the other’s place before setting time schedules. Persistence is the main motor in projects for rethinking society.

Youth Parliaments: To develop formal spaces for dialogue, for constructing projects collectively and taking decisions, youth Parliaments must be set up in every country and all major regions of the world. These institutions must receive the support of existing States and must be open to all young people without any discrimination.

Journalists College

The history

The journalists‚ college of the Alliance is now more than two years old, having come into being in late 1999. It first started off as a forum to encourage journalists to contribute socially motivated articles to the press. Many important newspapers and journals in several countries participated in this programme. The programme was then called ŒThe Transforming Word‰. In December 1999, the first international meeting of the college of journalists met in Bangalore , India, and came out with a very meaningful analyses and a call for a e-mail forum, website and a news agency. At this meeting it was decided that the name Transforming Word was inadequate. After much consultation in the months that followed the name „ Firewords‰ was chosen to replace it.

At the moment Firewords has a website (www.firewords.press), an email forum for its journalists, and a programme to publish articles in the mainstream press.

The analyses behind the programme

For some the millennium is the year when millions of champagne bottles pop in celebration, while for billions of others it means dealing with their usual worries about food, health, education and shelter. Yet we are witnessing a world of extraordinary advances in communication technology and unparalleled wealth for a few. A recent study estimates that the wealth of the two richest people on the earth equals all those living in the forty-seven least developed countries. Among other factors, we are also witnessing global warming; pollution of air, water and soil; and water scarcity. A couple of years ago the United Nations stated that per capita availability of water went down by fifty percent in the last twenty years and would go down by another fifty percent in the next twenty years. Water famines are a real threat in the years to come.

What does the media have to say about all this? Many of us are worried about the  trend of the media to serve limited social functions. Some have referred to this phenomenon as candy-floss journalism. The media is increasingly concerned with lifestyles, celebrity people, sports and the more sensational political news. Jon Tusa, the former head of BBC, points out that today‚s journalism has " more choice, but less diversity; more information but less knowledge; more action but less news; more gratification but less satisfaction; more viewers but fewer audiences; more entertainment but less engagement; more immediacy but less depth," and so on. The abundance of newspapers, journals and TV channels has unfortunately not created diversity of content and social responsibility.
It is now just like any other form of business where profit maximization is a priority.

We examined the  hyper-concentration taking place in the media: for instance, in just a few years, the number of groups which control most of the US media has come down from 50 to only 6 (AOL Time Warner, ABC-Disney, Murdoch, Universal Seagram-Vivendi.). Most U.S. cities now have only one daily newspaper belonging to one of these big groups. According to FAIR, a media monitoring group in the US, 2/3 of the American population listen to radios that belong to only two large US media groups. The same trend is being witnessed in many countries. It seems likely that the world will soon be divided, in media coverage terms, among a few monopolies. How does an independent publisher fight such an unequal battle? Today the marketing cost of launching a new publication is much more than the operational cost. While the running cost of the new technology is low, its acquisition is very high. It takes successful publications many years to recover their investment on technology and marketing.

Keeping in mind the seriousness of the situation in the media the following proposals are suggested. Efforts should be made:

1. to encourage journalists,  publishers and producers to give greater attention to social issues and suggest solutions to them. Given the fact that we are in a new millennium the effort could focus on the responsibility of the media to tackle the issues which the 21st century is going to face- issues like governance ( local and global), democracy, poverty, ecological sustainability, values and culture.
2. to isolate particular issues and problems which need to be given greater attention. Example: the problems posed by lack of information during a war, which allows the warring parties to commit human rights atrocities and genocide.
3. to explore the possibility of writers, journalists and social activists forming informal networks that may lobby politicians and bureaucrats to implement social programmes.
4. to reflect on the role of the media in creating a vibrant civil society where local groups and organizations play a major role in tackling local issues in a participatory and democratic spirit. To see the media as a humanizing and culturally energizing force that can generate hope and initiative among a large number of people.
5.   to monitor the process of globalization in the interests of the poor and the  marginalized peoples.
6.    to run a socially conscious media business---by letting it be run by a Trust or non-profit  organization. Collective ownership (readers, writers, institutions, NGOs etc) can bring in the credibility and social sensitivity that seems to be rapidly disappearing in the mainstream media.
7.    to build a global horizontal portal (let's say--www.firewords.com or some similar effort) which could have four channels based on: socio-economic, socio-politic, environment and culture. Many socially sensitive writers could contribute articles here.
8.    to find funding for special journalistic projects which should be published in the mainstream media later.
9. to set up an alternative news agency that is reponsive to social and ecological issues.

Scientists’ College Breakthrough
Further to the meeting at Tête-de-Ran in Switzerland, on September 20th to 23rd,  2001 organised by the Association for the Promotion of the Studies Against Barbarism (Geneva).

Objectives
The conscience clause is a designed to re-establish a certain equilibrium between employers and scientific staff, who may be employed by private or public companies. The objective is to control the transparency and commercial use of new scientific knowledge, in particular everything to do with living matter biology and applying principles of precaution.

Explanations
Historically, recognition of the intellectual and technical value of modern scientific knowledge has always been made via publications in recognised scientific journals, after approval by the scientific community itself. It is a well-known fact that this method of recognition is endangered by the pressures and ties of dependence that finance exerts endemically on the scientific research community. In September 2001, thirteen internationally recognised scientific publications (Lancet, American Medical Association Journal, etc.), which fill this historical function, all condemned this situation: this is a significant event. Intellectual honesty, on which the credibility of all scientific discovery has been founded until now, is considered to be questionable by the interested parties themselves. This drift is due to the hold of financial power on both academic and applied research and on the development and commercialisation of products whose increasingly significant added value is provided by science. Scientists are in the best possible position for observing the often dramatic consequences that may occur when the industrial companies for which they work may “drift offline”. Therefore, it is normal that they are protected by a conscience clause if they make known information regarding scientific research and technological production that concerns continuous and deliberate actions that violate the principles of precaution, public health, environment, and ethical or deontological codes.

With this in mind, the Science and Conscience Foundation (FSC) and the Association for the Promotion of the Studies Against Barbarism (APSAB) who work in the scientists’ College within the framework of the Alliance for a Plural, United and responsible World, recommend that the International Labour Organisation (ILO) be questioned by civil society. This international institution, located in Geneva, which has the particularity of being the only institution to bring together states, employers’ associations and trade unions, must initiate negotiations for an international convention whose objective would be to get a “conscience clause” introduced into the Labour laws of the signatory parties, and whose text would be approximately as follows:

Text
Rights: All collaborators in any company has the right to inform the appropriate authorities in the country of the head office of his company of any continuous and deliberate actions exercised by the company that violate:
•	The principles of precaution;
•	Public health;
•	Environment;
•	Ethical and deontological codes concerning scientific research and technological production.

Confidentiality: Authorities contacted will guarantee the confidentiality of any information received and the anonymity of the informer. Any prejudice that informers may possibly undergo as a result of their initiative must be compensated legally by the company or administratively by the state if the information given constitutes real violation of the measures mentioned above. 

Extensions to proceedings: Proceedings must be instituted against an offending company by the state from the moment that the information supplied by the informer is valid. Equally, any organ of a company that is aware of any such continuous, serious misappropriation must be prosecuted individually.   

Widening perspectives in the conscience clause
 The main breakthrough made by the scientists’ College concerns a conscience clause for scientists.  Concrete action of this sort may help to solve other questions raised during the scientists’ College conference: making scientists more responsible for democratising the scientific production system, making scientists more responsible in terms of ecological durability, making scientists more responsible for everything that concerns looting indigenous peoples’ intellectual property.  

Strategy
To make this approach credible and politically efficient, the scientists’ College proposes submitting this action to the World Assembly at Lille and hopes to obtain participants’ formal approval for this action in December 2001. The science and conscience foundation (FSC) and the Association for the Promotion of the Studies Against Barbarism (APSAB) are capable of taking this project in hand in technical and judicial terms. They have started to prepare a web site for explaining the above. Via this site, all physical and moral persons who may be interested, in particular those who are active in science one way or another, can express their support and provide information on legislation in their own countries concerning a conscience clause. Lastly, an active lobbying campaign will be organised in the circles concerned, including scientific press, beginning in principle in March 2002 at the latest, in anticipation of the ILO General Assembly that takes place in June 2002. 

List of participants at the scientists’ College meeting
Participants present at the scientists’ College meeting in September 2001 came from five continents: 
Ms. Seden Ozel (facilitator), Turkey; M. Pierre Lane (secretary of the session), France; Mr. Charles Cange, Pomona College, USA; Mr. Krrishnamohan Kanduri, PhD student in Industrial Ecology at Griffith University, Australia; Prof. Joseph Tarradellas, Federal Polytechnic School, former vice-president of the Swiss Academy of Natural Sciences, member of the board of the Charles Leopold Mayer Foundation, Switzerland; Prof. Thomas Auf der Heyde, Dean of Research, Technikon Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South-Africa; Me Henri-Philippe Sambuc, Lawyer, president of the Science and Conscience Foundation, Suisse; Dr. Malur R. Srinivasan, Member Consultative Group of Senior Eminent Scientists, Government of India, Former Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Former Member of the Planning Commission, Government of India. M. Alessandro Dozio, Statistician, town of Lausanne, president of the APSAB, Switzerland. 

Geneva, November 1st 2001, Henri-Philippe Sambuc (FSC) and Frédéric Piguet (APSAB, coordinator of the scientists’ College) apsab@bluewin.ch  www.apsab.span.ch/clc

The Academics' College: Breakthroughs

The breakthroughs below, which emerged from the Academics' College's proposals to reform further education, are based on the following facts:
Universities in both the North and South and whether rich or poor all share the same concerns and challenges and raise questions on their reasons for being. The university must evaluate itself and thus re-evaluate its missions. Its responsibility is under question and appears to be losing its universality.
The four main breakthroughs chosen for a civic, plural and responsible university are as follows:

Making the university responsible in society 
The responsibility of the university and academics combines institutional and individual outlooks. 
Regarding research, the professor/researcher should be aware that all knowledge produced and diffused must be responsible knowledge and that this responsibility requires evaluation through contextualised judgements.
The university therefore has the responsibility of resituating research and knowledge within their social, historic, political, cultural and aesthetic contexts.
The university must develop the notion of individual responsibility. This entails reformulating and appropriating a concept of ethical and deontological responsibility  that does not only assess itself vis-à-vis the obvious and direct harm of technological applications, but also vis-à-vis the responsibility of academics in their relationship with the world.

The university faced with liberal economics 
The university has a duty to preserve knowledge and know-how, whether basic or not, since such knowledge is being undermined by cultural impoverishment. It should adapt itself to scientific modernity and integrate it, satisfy basic needs for education, provide teaching for new professions, and above all provide meta-professional and meta-technical teaching, i.e. culture. 
Although specialisation is vital so that research work and creation achieve their aims, and that partitions are sometimes necessary between disciplines, we feel that we have a duty to evaluate the challenge of knowledge and that we should be able to analyse them critically despite social pressure and internal and external constraints demanded by profitability and efficiency.
The university must maintain a fundamental relationship with culture, which means that it must not be an instrument of the market economy. On the contrary, it must safeguard basic knowledge - Universitas.
The university must become that privileged place that combines knowledge, teaching, reflection and education; a place where cultures and languages blend, where the intelligence of the public should be given possibilities of seeing, listening, appreciating, criticising and evaluating sciences, the quality of a text, a stage direction, interpretation and work of art. These tools are necessary so that each person can build their own vision of the world. 

Implementing cross-disciplinary approaches 
It is vital to constitute spaces that take an cross-disciplinary approach in projects of apprenticeship and education. Cross-disciplinary approaches and their application are not easily accepted by researchers. This requires a learning process backed up by epistemological, methodological and socio-technological support. This learning process favours principles to reform scientific thinking and actions by researchers and students. Three levels of implementation can be considered:
•	Regarding the training of researchers: promote the "epistemological due". The problem of education for all (epistemological due) corresponds to ten per cent of university education time devoted to the basic problems of knowledge. Complexity, the vector of the epistemological due project, should not be synonymous with completeness, but rather to incompleteness, an experienced and vital contradiction between awareness of insufficiency and the ambition to think globally. 
•	Regarding co-operation between researchers in different disciplines: Set up posts for cross-disciplinary co-operators, for example, who would have dual competencies or knowledge of epistemology. These posts would develop co-operation between multidisciplinary research projects  and dispense teaching on general aspects, questions of methodology and notions of cross-disciplinary approaches. The cross-disciplinary co-operator would serve as "frontier guide". They would promote dialogue and meetings by supervising a schedule and objectives and propose systematic syntheses of the progress of reflection, through epistemological monitoring. Thus they would contribute towards the practical implementation of bringing two distinct entities into contact. 
•	Regarding co-operation between the university and society so that research is not the exclusive realm of researchers. In order to prevent researchers and teacher-researchers from being the exclusive actors in research, it is important to involve partners inside the university (students-researchers) and outside it (companies, organisations, etc.), since they play an essential role in building knowledge and ensuring its recognition internally and externally.

Redefine intellectual property rights 
The university is the depository of scientific knowledge and recognition, thus it must be at the centre of the debate on intellectual property. Indeed, granting intellectual property rights to private laboratories or directly to a researcher generates struggles for influence inside the university (conflicts, power), and favours financially profitable projects.
Attributing these rights to the university would give it financial and strategic independence and the finance generated could be used, for example, for projects deprived of private funds. 

THE BREAKTHROUGH OF THE FISHERMEN’S GUILD

The traditional fishing sector contributes in a crucial way to human nutrition and to social and economic progress. Fishing and agriculture provide 6% of the total protein and 16% of the total animal protein annually consumed by humanity. Worldwide, the fishing sector indirectly gives employment to 50 million people in services, transformation, transport and commercialization. Thus, its social, economic, political and cultural importance is confirmed. Women carry out a very important role in the fishing sector in spite of this not being reflected in official statistics.

Despite this situation, the traditional fishing sector doesn’t receive the recognition it deserves. It is marginalized or excluded by diverse organisations responsible for coming up with development policies (international organisations, governmental and non-governmental organisations). On the other hand, artisan activity has to confront the progressive diminishing of it resources as it competes with industrial fishing that operates in the same spaces, with the same resources and for the same markets. However, they do so in totally unequal conditions.

In this context, the traditional fishing community and its organisations, as well as workers in the fishing sector organised in local or regional networks, international forums and traditional fishermen’s aid organisations are mobilising to reflect on and create strategies. They also demand real participation of the fishermen in the decision-making process at the local, national, regional and world level. They furthermore demand responsibility in the management world fishing, access to fishing resources and respect for the cultural identity of the traditional fishing communities.

The traditional fishing communities share common strategies and confront the challenges of the 21st century.

1. The craft of fishing constitutes an age-old form of social organisation, production, feeding and commercial interchange. It is based on the territorial rooting of the traditional fishing communities in coastal zones and their cultural and environmental relationship with fishing resources. The marginalization of the traditional fishing communities is a social constant that goes much beyond the diversity of places and ages. However, this hasn’t weakened their capacity to organise and conserve their cultural conceptions and privileged relationship with the marine environment. This isn’t about a social process “fixed in time”, but on the contrary. This is so because based on their own experiences, these fishing communities have been able to come up with development projects and proposals that permit the conservation of fishing resources. This has also led to obtaining territorial sovereignty over coastal zones, contributing to sovereignty and food security of the population, offering opportunities for relatively stable work and maintaining a family economy. At the same time, they contribute to the earning of foreign currencies through exportation that are so valuable for national economies.

2. The survival and development of the fishing communities depends a great deal on:

•	fishing resources being recognised as the patrimony of nations and humanity and the rejection of its privatization. In fact, this privatization would inevitably benefit the large multinational companies that in this way would increase their economic power. It would also concentrate world-fishing production in their hands and thus they would exercise control over foods from the sea.

•	alliances being forged with other sectors of civil society affected by the free-trade model, above all farmers and indigenous peoples. The marginalization so characteristic of the fishing sector thus begins to lessen, giving way to an active and participative social fabric. This social fabric would have the capacity to look over fishing resources production and marketing models, environmental protection, the co-administration and management of natural resources and allocating production principally to direct human consumption.

3. The application or not of the International Agreements and Treaties relative to fishing is a subject that fishermen’s organisations all over the world are currently raising. This is different from the situation that had prevailed over the last decades. Although the national framework continues being a privileged place for action, there are other levels that are also important:

-	the local level, it permits establishing the bases for participative management of resources, according to which the whole of the fishing workers must respect ecological conditions.
-	the continental level, where fishermen must keep in mind economic and political developments as well as ever broader spaces resulting from the progress of fishing techniques.
-	finally, the international level: a great number of decisions are taken at this level. Thus it is necessary to reinforce fishing workers’ organisations in order to guarantee their power in front of international agencies.

4. Thus, the issue of the contribution of living reserves from our oceans to the feeding of human beings is raised with greater insistence: Is it still possible to respond to the feeding challenges of the 21st century thanks to the sea? This question is crucial, above all, because nutritional needs are increasing. They are increasing due to the demographic growth of the world population and because agricultural production runs the dramatic risk of stagnating –or worse, diminishing– owing to the degradation of the soil.

5. It is necessary to introduce four great changes in the fishing sector:

-	To reduce the difference that separates the countries of the north from the south in terms of fish consumption and fishing resources.
-	To consider fish not as a resource to generate currency on the international market, but as a source of food and human well-being.
-	Not to allocate fishing production animal feeding, but to human consumption.
-	To develop sustainable agricultural models and to limit industrial agriculture.

We must always keep in mind that the traditional fishing communities, guardians of the universal maritime patrimony, constitute a human frontier that up to now has assumed the responsibility for avoiding the privatization of the living being and the sea. This is so because their existence depends on it.

BREAKTHROUGH FOR RESPONSIBLE AND SUPPORTIVE HEALTH IN THE 21ST CENTURY

DEFINITON OF HEALTH 
There are many definitions of health starting from the OMS one, dating from 1948, which is a utopian definition, unfeasible and extremely academic, that practically states no one can be considered healthy. Other definitions such as Milton Terris’s one establishes that health is not an absolute whole, but a continuum ranging from death - the disease highest point -, to optimum health. 
It is clear that health is a basic right and part of the human development. It has a subjective component, the fact one can feel good at different levels with a future perspective of being on balance with the environment, and an objective component, the functional capacity that enables a person to face the environment challenges. 
It is also the result of a multitude of processes determined by economic, social, political, biological, environmental, cultural and sanitary assistance factors. Any society, collectively and individually, will reach better or worse results in its life quality according to the action it has over these factors. 
The cultural diversity should be reflected in the definition of health, whenever this reflection does not go against any of the principles above. 

A NEW HEALTH MODEL 
The health systems have been structured by the supply of sanitary services defined according to the experts’ views and not to the population’s needs. Those models known as “Biomedical” are greatly influenced by the Cartesians, the Positivism and the scientific thought which lead to the over-specialization and to the fragmentation of knowledge and, hence, fails to see the human being as a whole.
That model was useful to solve health problems in the past, but nowadays it is unable to face the demographic, epidemiologic and cultural changes of the 21st century. 
The poor citizenry participation in those models leads to a lack of commitment to monitor the system representativeness and governability.
A new model is then required based on a health system in which the resources are managed chiefly towards getting more efficiency and equity in solving the population’s health problems. 
This perspective breaks up with the biomedical model and requires a social focus, with strong educational, participatory, and multi-sector perspectives. 
This new model should be grounded in the following: 
PRINCIPLES 
Respect towards persons’ dignity, diversity (cultural, ethnic, class etc), solidarity, equity (overcoming inequalities) and citizenry participation. 
MODEL CHARACTERISTICS 
Universality, integrity, continuity, accessibility: geographical and economic. 
Solvability. Effectiveness. Efficiency. Able to value alternative practices in health. 
Adaptability towards cultural diversity. Be promotional and preventive. Give priority to Primary Assistance regarding the resources, both as a process regulator and as a front gate to improve the assistance to the patient. 
Centralized public funding and regulation. Supply and services of public private or mixed assistance. 
Decentralized administration. Participation should be guaranteed through its integration with decision-making structures. The model should include all means, techniques and experiences that are socially recognized for the prevention and cure of diseases allowing the user to choose. 
SYSTEM PARTICIPANTS 
Government. Users. Financial Agents. Suppliers. 
OTHER PARTICIPANTS
Pharmaceutical and research industry. Universities. 
International Agencies. Mass Media. NGOs, associations and the like.
There are internal and external components that powerfully influence the health system. 
The government should regulate an array of activities and sanitary rules, ensuring the system’s participatory nature. On the other hand, the users must accomplish their task of main actors in the process, demanding their right to participate in the model’s elaboration, the quality of its activities and its assessment.
The government must ensure the suppliers’ participation as well as the respect for their dignity and their work conditions. 
Participatory places must be created to prevent participants from confronting, by seeking alliances that avoid corporative actions which put private benefits above common interests and deviate from the model’s essence and principles. 
The government’s actions must consider the programs and general policies, whose guidelines tend to favor the population’s health. Housing, environmental, cultural, educational etc policies must be health-promoters.

FINANCING AND INTERNATIONAL SUPPORTIVE FUND 
Health financing must firstly meet the principles stated by the health system, particularly, the ones related to equity and solidarity. The funds sources can be varied: direct taxes, general taxes, income taxes, employers’ taxes. Preferably, there should be a single fund. The regulation for using this fund must necessarily be centralized to ensure equity and solidarity. 
An International Health Fund (IHF) must be created to contribute for the enhancement of needy populations’ health state. The resources for these funds can come from many sources and their main target is to generate health development in the most deprived regions of the world. 
The funds source might come from the more developed countries, from the pharmaceutical industry, and in this case it could work as a means to make up for the inequities resulting from the high profit making of medicaments and, perhaps, from the funds which are presently being used by the many humanitarian help organizations. 
A new concept should be promoted regarding the way resources are given and distributed, by replacing the concept of charity with that of solidarity. (Charity: Christian virtue of showing benevolence to others. Money given to the needy. Solidarity: circumstantial support to others’ causes or pursuits.)
The fund must seek partnership with different organizations, international agencies and interested countries as a first step for its creation. At the same time, such partnership could be used for a better reallocation of the funds which are presently being distributed, and avoid the dilapidation that frequently takes place. 
It seems wise to avoid having those who are the biggest contributors of the funds as decision-makers and, at the same time, the one-to-one representativeness, the excessive centralism and high operating costs. 

RUPTURE FROM COLLEGE, PRECARIOUS SITUATIONS AND SOCIAL EXCLUSION

We have attempted to join the “socially excluded” together with the “socially accepted” who are determined to fight against a society that generates and trivialises precarious situations, and capable of working to achieve a different society, where property, power and knowledge are shared, and at times we have succeeded.

Is there another way of conceiving business, the market and society?

This implies:

-	That everybody is able to develop freely, respecting the freedom of others: one’s own freedom ends where another’s freedom begins.

-	That the notion of sharing is at centre of our concerns.

-	That society encourages creativity and the freedom to innovate, and develops civic debate.

Social links are of the utmost importance, since they are more important than good.

o	We must cease managing poverty, social exclusion and precarious situations.
o	We must work with, and not for, others.

What proposals can we present in such a distressing situation?

The Right to Respect
Our starting point is the principle that all men and women have qualities and that experience is sufficient qualifications. Albert Jacquard tells us that all men and women are marvels. To give, one has to know how to receive. This is called giving and receiving, and leads to social links.
The Right to education and to culture for all
We must create:

	- citizens’ forums, places of encounter to discuss issues that affect society.
- popular universities, so that the poor who are excluded from society have the opportunity to become educated and informed, enabling them to take care of themselves and releasing others from that responsibility.

Culture is the expression of dreams in daily life. Thinking and sensitivity are as important for mankind as eating and drinking, and we must give the best to those who have least.

The Right to information
Make information readable and accessible by creating comfortable points of information and for dialogue with people in the presence of a mediator who technically process the information so that it is accessible and understandable, with a view to developing a critical spirit and promoting personal autonomy.

The Right to Justice
For the unemployed, specifically trained staff in employment agencies and unemployment offices, and more attractive and welcoming places of refuge.
For immigrants, the creation of a local commission for equal rights.
For illegal aliens, the right of asylum is a fundamental right that has to be respected by all nations. Emergency measures: efficient examination of all asylum applications, appeals against refused admission that implies expulsion measures, legal aid, social assistance.

The Right to housing
The right to housing is a fundamental right, an integral part of human rights. Re-house the inhabitants of shanty towns and the streets. Build public housing other than in outlying districts.

The Right to health
A basic right and essential principle. It is more important  to prevent disease than to cure. Take steps to:
Apply prevention policies. Create health centres or decentralised units for users.  Promote public services that respond to local requirements.

The Right to a decent salary
A salary, a ticket for life.
This decent salary must be compared with reference to the GNP. This ratio can serve as a reference for other countries.
People with salaries should discover that living also means helping.

Promote a social economy of solidarity
Some have to much to administer, while others live in poverty and exclusion. The steps to be taken can be summarised as follows:
The right to an activity and to social acknowledgement. Support for local initiatives. The creation of alternative banks. Financing for sustainable, ethical and social projects related to the development of solidarity.
Bring the socially excluded and the socially accepted together, as the fervent supporters of an economy at the service of mankind. With the means and within the limits available, experiment with new kinds of businesses, where people are valued for what they are and not for what they have, where money is not an end in itself, but a way of creating more activity.

Unite Solidarity the World Over
There is increasingly more of the south in the north, and vice versa. The idea is to create projects that unite people from all over the world, as part of the economy of solidarity.

Work is a right!
A salary is an obligation!

The trade union movement at the dawn of the 21st Century

The Union College of the Alliance for a responsible, plural and social world brings together trade unionists and other activists on five continents, in an exchange of information and experiences across sectors and region. We try to identify strategies and tactics which can modernise and improve our movement’s response to the challenge of globalisation, precarious working conditions, and the communication difficulties which can arise between trade unionists and members of other social movements working for a better world.
This short text presents the College’s main proposals for a new strategy for the labour movement. You can consult our full proposals, including the interactive version of this dossier, at our web site: www.alternatives-action.
The Union College is co-ordinated by Alternatives Action and Communications Network for International Development, 3720 Park Avenue #300, Montreal (QC) H2X 2J1, Canada. Tel. +1 (514) 982 6606, fax 982 6616, email: alternatives@alternatives.ca
Responding to neo-liberalism
The individualisation and compartmentalisation of work, and the growth in subcontracting by the larger public and private employers has increased the gap between a core of unionised workers and a mass of unprotected and un-unionised working people. It will take much more than calls to unionise the un-unionised to overcome this division, and re-establish the universal vocation of the unions as defenders of the interests of working people. 
In particular, we must resist the general offensive against workers’ rights, in the workplace, as tenants and consumers, as women, as citizens… in other words; we must recognise the multiple identities of our members, and stand with them in their various struggles for a better world. In Latin America, many trade unions are active in campaigns against Structural Adjustment Policies. Further to the north, the US group Jobs With Justice campaigns on crosscutting issues of poverty and rights that affect the working-class majority in that country. Many of these successful campaigns represent a convergence between employed workers and various excluded or marginalised sectors of our societies. We see such convergence at the piquiteros barricades in Argentina, the demonstrations of the Unemployed Graduates movement in Morocco, and the European Marches against Unemployment and Insecurity. Other campaigns have focused on rejecting and renegotiating “orphan” clauses whereby new employees have second-class conditions compared to the unionised ‘core’.
Trade unions also need to present in the debate about new forms of misery in the workplace: be it the stress and insecurity of lower and middle managers, or the “training” contracts which all too-often hide unacceptably low wages and conditions. We need to find solutions to the informal sector, child labour and the sex industry, which improve the conditions of the working people involved, while gradually eliminating these extreme forms of exploitation.
We must also find new ways of addressing ourselves to an increasingly diverse working class, and overcome the image that sometimes exists of unions as clubs of older white men of a certain culture. The “Workers Clubs” in many parts of the USA are a positive example in this respect.
Social movements: what convergence?
Trade unionism is often caught in the contradiction between managing day-to-day activities, and needing to intervene in a constantly evolving balance of forces. To advance, we need to find convergence with the various social movements (ecological, immigrant rights, housing, unemployment, anti-globalisation, feminist) that testify to society’s irrepressible capacity to resist and revolt.
Convergence with the women’s movement requires trade union participation in feminist actions, and the involvement of feminist currents in the elaboration and implementation of labour campaigns on issues of particular relevance to women workers, such as part-time work, the minimum wage and sexual exploitation. The Worldwide Women’s March in 2000 was a good example of the difficulties and the successes of this type of convergence. What we need are truly feminist trade unions, with women-only structures wherever our female members think it useful, a fair place for women in leadership positions, and concrete union proposals to help women members deal with their “triple shift” (work, family, activism).
In the global south, trade unions can be an important non-clerical force in women’s struggle against macho and religious-inspired laws and traditions. Unions should also support women’s struggle against religious fundamentalists: because although the fundamentalists are mainly focused on women’s rights, they will surely attack trade unionists when they get the chance.
Convergence with movements for immigrants’ rights means more than just trade union support for anti-racist campaigns. Unions need to respond vigorously to the emanations of social insecurity (unemployment, precarious conditions) which encourage racism. Unions need a visible presence in struggles outside the workplace, to counter the “scapegoat” dynamic. The “sans-papier” movement to support undocumented immigrants in France is a good example of this convergence.
Convergence with movements against mass unemployment: Movements on these issues have emerged in many Northern countries in recent years. But links with the labour movement remain difficult, for two reasons. Firstly, the unemployed movements are based in a milieu that faces great existential difficulties and instability, and has difficulty being proactive in a sustained fashion. Secondly, many unions fail to appreciate the need of these organisations to be fully autonomous. But there are also significant differences over strategy. To simplify, unemployment activists stress the need to increase universal social welfare payments, and create some kind of guaranteed minimum income. Trade union activists, on the other hand, generally present a massive reduction in the working week as the preferred solution for reducing unemployment by creating new jobs. We must continue this debate, while everywhere privileging agreement over at least partial measures for which we can struggle together.
From international trade unionism to the globalisation of solidarity
International trade union structures often seem very far from the life and preoccupations of working people. Fortunately, active campaigns to support struggles in other countries often represent an effective way to mobilise and educate anti-globalisation forces. Trade unions need to get involved more in these campaigns, and seek to make them more permanent. The Clean Clothes Campaign is a particularly interesting example. It brings together trade unionists, consumers and feminists North and South, in a campaign to improve the working conditions of the feminised labour force of garment and footwear subcontractors of the major trademarks.
We also need to modernise and co-ordinate trade union activities within each multinational. These companies exploit the lack of international social legislation, and use every loophole of national law. Even in Europe, the multinational-wide works councils are very weak: they lack money, time, information and authority. However, these structures do represent an embryonic form of international labour organisation, and have the potential for articulating labour struggles within a given multinational. It is important to improve information flows, and recognise the importance of information as a weapon in labour disputes. We should also create better links between workers in the production and sales divisions of each multinational; initiate public information campaigns aimed at the consumers of the company; and demand social legislation that will give authority and resources to multinational-wide workers’ structures. We must continue to develop labour networks that stretch across linguistic, cultural and political frontiers. We must also strengthen the international sectoral co-ordination of labour, to prevent multinationals from playing workers and governments against each other in a downward spiral of competition.
The labour political project
It is difficult to generalise about the political role of trade unions. However, in many cases, the renovation of our political activity requires a better understanding of the relationship between organised labour and the political left. Unions should not accept domination by political parties, and insist on an equal relationship. We should seek to overcome the division that may exist between unions and parties, by recognising the autonomy of each project, and building common activities and campaigns in a transparent way.
The central axis of labour political intervention should be the advancement of the universal citizens’ interests that are of particular interest to our members. In the global north, this includes the search for a new role for the public sector, and for the voluntary/non-profit sector, within a new economic logic. In the global south, unions are intervening in defence of human rights in the workplace, for the application of those aspects of national legislation which protect working people, and for the withdrawal of the army and police from essentially civil conflicts between employers and employees.

Network proposals booklet
BUSINESS MANAGERS AND EXECUTIVES
on the responsibilities associated to private enterprise

BREAKTHROUGHS

1)	Private companies are now major agents in economic and social prosperity. They play a fundamental role when it comes to transforming scientific knowledge into production processes, assessing and exploiting natural resources, adapting products to different needs and cultures, developing new goods and services and distributing individual and general wealth. They are also essential social elements, because of the groups that they create, the jobs that they provide, the personal development that they encourage and their contribution to the development of freedom, through economic, scientific and technical progress. Their social legitimacy is based on all these positive aspects and not only on their contribution to economic development.

2)	They have considerably influenced the evolution of different societies, particularly because of how slowly traditional systems of political, economic and social regulation adapt to change: businesses, used to constant changes in demand, competition and the complexity of problems and organisations, and used to combining long-term visions with short-term capacity for adjustment, are the first agents to have reached the stage of globalisation.

3)	The progress that businesses have experienced in political and social systems, particularly large scale firms, has led to a lack of balance and deviations regarding the distribution of wealth, the response to primary financial needs, the preservation of cultural diversity, respect for freedom and human rights, control of scientific and technical progress, the exploitation of primary resources, the consumption of energy and protection of biodiversity and the environment. But businesses are not solely responsible for this lack of balance and deviations; the lack of sufficient world-wide regulations has been an open invitation, and some companies have made the most of the situation.

4)	Businesses consist of a “network of contracts” that associates a group a shareholders (to form what is precisely called a limited company), a number of people with labour contracts, and a series of suppliers and clients with trade contracts. This group has no real legal standing and is therefore unable to accept real legal liability. However, the fact that this liability does not exist from a legal point of view does not mean that it is not clearly perceived by civil society: in times of danger, attention is centred on the agents that evidently have more financial resources, competence and power. The different business associates therefore have to find a way to accept these new responsibilities, both individually and as a group. 

5)	A company’s responsibility is in proportion to its size and its impact on the economy, society and the environment, but it would be an illusion to think that only multi-national corporations would be affected by this change of mentality. The more important a company is, the greater is its responsibility. But even the smallest of companies can join others to exercise its responsibilities.

6)	The creation of wealth is one of the reasons behind businesses, either through the products or services that they provide or through the jobs that they create, and their primary responsibility is to respect this mission. Nevertheless, the social legitimacy of businesses is also based on their ability to fairly share this wealth with their partners, especially customers, workers, suppliers, local business fabric, professional partners and local environment.

7)	Above and beyond its economic role, a business plays a positive and essential role through the group that it creates, the jobs that it provides, the personal development that it encourages and its contribution to freedom, based on economic, scientific and technical progress. Companies’ responsibilities with regards to the respect for human rights and human development affects all its associates: citizens, workers, shareholders, clients, suppliers and competitors.

8)	The legitimacy of companies that manufacture goods and services are in direct inverse proportion to the impact of their activities on the environment and their consumption of natural resources. Companies have to discover new economic opportunities, preserving and valuing the environment.

9)	Many large companies have prepared declarations of ethics. However, we doubt the validity of some approaches with noble, but occasionally hypocritical, ethical principles, that fail to specify how their application is consistent with the development of the company as a whole. The only way in which business managers and executives can justify ethical measures, primarily to their shareholders, is by demonstrating that they not only will not have a negative impact on business results, but that they will in fact improve them. Therefore, the Alliance’s network of business managers and executives has considered that it is essential to justify their different proposals, both from the perspective of ethics and generosity and from the perspective of a “sure gain” process. 

10)	The employees and managers of each company has to draft their own code of conduct. Businesses have to define the proposals to be applied, their priorities, schedule and method of application. On the other hand, it is essential for each accepted proposal to be allocated sufficient means (in financial terms or management training programmes) and for each activity to be constantly assessed. This is not only necessary for the purpose of credibility, but also with a view to obtaining the results that the company expects. 

Responsible Shareholders' Booklet of Breakthroughs.

Responsible shareholders are acting by using several "openings".

First opening: with the decrease of the state's role and the increase of the entreprises' role, it became urgent to act directly toward enterprises.

Second opening: with the rising of privatisations, of pension funds, mutual funds, a lot a people - and in some countries the majority of them - became shareholders. They are owner of the enterprises -  at least in theory - and should exercise their responsibility regarding it.

Third opening: with the rising of the "Corporate Governance" – that means a movement from big US shareholders who aimed at making more profit and exercise pressures toward the management to increase the benefit of the enterprise – CEOs and boards of directors got used to shareholders' intervention, even if there are small and event if their preoccupations are to be found in the social and environmental field.

Fourth opening: under public pressure – sometimes by self-conviction – and following ecological disaster or human rights violations, more and more enterprises have adopted a code of conduct or an ethical charter. Responsible shareholders ask the enterprises to apply these codes or charters concretely. 

Fifth opening: with the globalisation and relocation, it became hard to keep in touch with the factories where we could find most of the employees of the enterprises – directly within subsidiaries or indirectly within sub-contractors – and from where could happen pollution of the environment. Thanks to another side of the globalisation (Internet), we are still able to get in touch with local NGOs, trade-unions, environmental movements.

srk, Geneva, 09.11.01

THINKING ABOUT TOWNS IN THE 21st CENTURY: A WORD FROM THE INBABITANTS

BREAKTHROUGHS IN PROPOSALS FROM THE COLLEGE OF INHABITANTS’ ORGANISATIONS

1.	Values and principles

For constructing a collective ideal, values shared by inhabitants are radically opposed to market values and values involving globalisation:
-	When inhabitants speak of inclusion, markets speak of exclusion (those who can’t pay). 
-	When inhabitants speak of liberty and autonomy, globalisation speaks of dependence (social and economical). 
-	When inhabitants speak of social justice, dignity and mutual respect, markets speak of inevitable inequalities. 
-	When inhabitants speak of building a united, interdependent world, rich in its diversity, globalisation speaks of a single way of thought

In principle, two languages that seem to be irreconcilable.

Solidarity as a value can be found in all the themes that have been worked upon by inhabitants’ organisations.

Inhabitants defend respect for diversity, recognise principles of equality for all, respect cultural identities and defend free, public, scientific and lay education.

Conclusion: Values shared by inhabitants today at the beginning of the 21st century are no longer based on values existing at the beginning of the 20th century, such as fatherland, order and morals. However, certain values born from major 19th century currents of social thinking are still retained (public education, justice, liberty dear to Jules Simon, etc..)

2.	Transform

In all the themes under discussion inhabitants have shown their will to transform society and also ways of thought. Constructing a collective ideal passes by enhancing the value of capacities and mobilising its potential. Inhabitants’ potential is notably ignored by consumer and market societies that only consider inhabitants as possible consumers and buyers. The collective ideal is not to consume, but to evaluate-decide-transform on the basis of the cultural heritage of the people themselves.

Transforming a town into a educational town involves promoting and applying several projects: self-management projects in different domains (housing, micro-companies, independent work, etc.) and developing an educational project that is an alternative to the existing neo-liberal system and whose objective is not profit but education for all. Promotion of collective projects for reconstructing social fabric destroyed by neo-liberal policies. Schools created in the local districts seem to be the embryo of a solution for alternative education.

Transformation proposals for consolidating organisation and international strategies presented by inhabitants militate in favour of occupying decisional spaces in public politics. Up until now, there exists very little space where inhabitants’ organisations can express themselves and play a role in public politics.

Conclusion: The inhabitants’ collective ideal is no longer to consume, as was the case in the 20th century, but more a tendency to evaluate-decide-transform on the basis of their cultural heritages. Inhabitants want to participate in major transformations, be they economical, social or political. They are no longer prepared to be subjected to these transformations simply by following an ideology. Reading between the lines, the end of ideology is to be found here.

3.	Applying rights

Authorities do not forget to apply laws against inhabitants.  On the other hand inhabitants’ rights are forgotten especially when inhabitants are unaware of their existence. The proposal is therefore to inform and make inhabitants aware of their rights. 

Inhabitants’ proposals for an inhabitable town in terms of law revolve around collectivising and socialising their rights: for example, we can see an application of rights to good health and to environment through community experiments set up by inhabitants.

As a strategy of international action, inhabitants suggest implementing proposals to change standardised international legal frameworks on the basis of popular perspectives.

Conclusions: The question of rights is no longer put merely in terms of defending institutions, but, now, rights have become an instrument of defence for inhabitants.

4.	Organise

Creating democratic organisations contributes to constructing democratic towns, but it is also necessary to contribute to organising local government to attach it to inhabitant associations.

Organisational proposals for inhabitable towns include creating networks, decentralising public services, participative emergency plans, articulating experiments and reinforcing organisations.

Organisational programmes for international action begin by recognising all forms of organisations and fights in the world, by reinforcing international relations with existing inhabitant organisations and by starting up a process for building a worldwide alliance based on inhabitant organisations.

Conclusions: Inhabitants no longer intend to leave urban organisation in the hands of central power, proposals aim at generalising participation in all domains. Furthermore, faced with international institutions in situations of weakness (such as the United Nations), proposals aim at articulating inhabitant organisations on international levels to constitute a force, a world alliance capable of influencing decisions.

THE MILITARY AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF PEACE 

Although the landscape of war and peace, inextricably intertwined with human history, remains one of terrible contrasts, it has undergone radical change in recent times, with soldiers increasingly being called on to perform peacekeeping missions. This can also be seen in the titles given to the ministers concerned, which have changed in the most democratic countries from "Minister of War" to "Minister of the Armed Forces" and now "Minister of Defence". Moreover, the army is a condition of their strength and complies with the need of modern democracies to establish rules and ensure efficiency based on the following main observations: law requires the use of force; this force must used in conformity with the law; a soldier is above all a citizen; soldiers carry out missions to maintain peace.

The specificity of the military profession with its notions of service, and sometimes sacrifice, is that it is subject to a genuine code of behaviour. The definition of the latter not only implies reference to values – from those that regulate the confrontation between two adversaries to those on which democracy is based – but also taking into account increasingly complex situations involving several types of actor and types of action: soldiers, diplomats, economists, journalists, humanitarian workers, etc. In return, the soldier expects the different components of society to take on their responsibilities in full, each on his or her level. This is the case of policy in particular. The efficiency of the mission entrusted to soldiers requires that the power to which they are subject sets out a clear direction in which everyone can play his or her role. Likewise, while "civil-military" crisis management is becoming institutionalised, the role of civil society is coming to the fore thanks to the re-emergence of links between the army and the nation and also through the development of civil strategies which use non-violent means to avoid wars.

Another major characteristic is the increasingly international context of military operations, in which universal values are upheld at the same time as ensuring the inter-operability of soldiers and their equipment. Efforts at organising common European defence and the promotion of regional areas of stability that serve as examples are areas of progress for collective security. However, international coalitions, and action within the framework of the United Nations in particular, result in attempts to remedy the shortcomings of a global peacekeeping organisation. Observers and specialists agree and recommend the international community to set a rapid action force under the aegis of the UNO: several thousand well-equipped and well-trained men and women with realistic and detailed instructions enabling them to act efficiently to prevent or attenuate conflicts, protect non-combatants, supervise cease-fire agreements and ensure security in refugee camps. 

.

SMALL FARMERS FACED WITH THE CHALLENGE OF THE FUTURE 

"At the dawn of the third millennium where the entire world has become a global village, thanks to the lightning evolution of technology, humanity should be content and capable of escaping from problems of survival" (Kolyang Palébélé, leader of a farmers' federation in Chad).

The challenges confronting small farmers and rural populations are considerable: 
-	a technological revolution has and is still revolutionising production and communication methods, making the global population increasingly interdependent, but paradoxically lonelier in an overwhelming environment;
-	economic globalisation force-marched by major transnational corporations that consider the market to be the summit of humanity's creations and the world as just merchandise.
Small farmers and agriculture around the world are made to compete with each other according to the precept of comparative advantage, with totally different levels of agricultural productivity and support. We now risk seeing the disappearance of family and peasant farming throughout entire areas of the planet, with the consequence of social and cultural disintegration, the arrival of food crises and forever more conflicts and wars. It also implies abandoning regions dispossessed of social structures to the market in all its forms, organised crime and groups of extremists (cf. Colombia, Afghanistan, Liberia, Rwanda, Burundi, etc.).

The right of peoples to obtain balanced nutrition and food sovereignty 

Small farmers claim the possibility for peoples and states to choose how they supply themselves with food in the best interests of the community, both nationally and regionally. 

This objective of food sovereignty should be supported by multilateral organisations, and a world convention of food sovereignty should be set up.
This sovereignty implies:
-	the freedom for each country to choose its own agricultural policy measures,
-	the right to protection at borders against imports that harm small farmers,
-	the prohibition of dumping, i.e. the sale of products at prices below their cost price, without taking their social and environmental costs into account,
-	setting up production controls in exporting countries,
-	the promotion of sustainable agricultural methods and the preservation of local food related culture,
-	the right to refuse technologies deemed to be inappropriate or hazardous for health and the environment  (GMOs, hormones, etc.).

In relation with the objective of food sovereignty, the World Trade Organisation should only deal with international trade rules and not be involved in issues such as the formulation of national agricultural and food policies. The WTO must be reformed in the more global framework of world governance.
Forms of regional integration should be built or reformed in areas without major differences in productivity, with the participation of civil society and economic actors.

The right to land and access to and management of natural resources 
 
"Land should be considered as part of humanity's cultural heritage". (CCP Peru)
The implementation of agrarian reform constitutes the first public policy for implementation in certain countries where land ownership related inequalities are rife. This reform should take into account past experience at international level and be linked with agricultural policy that permits sustainable agricultural and rural development and encourage support from small farmers' organisations. Such reform would give security to small farmers by consolidating or granting individual and community rights, without necessarily requiring ownership of land.
In countries with fairer land ownership, the progression of agricultural structures requires management to ensure the viability of large numbers of farms. Small farmers' organisations should play an important role in managing land ownership.
The management of individual and community rights should be decentralised, as should authorities that manage public natural resources in regional territories.
Small farmers propose setting up a network/observatory to encourage the exchange of experiences at international level between peasant organisations and fishermen's organisations.
Peasant organisations are against patenting living organisms. A campaign is necessary to ensure that countries have the right to opt for national "sui generis" laws that protect the innovations of local communities. Furthermore, they demand that an international moratorium be decided regarding GMOs and the strengthening of national, regional and international legislations, based on the bio-security protocol of Carthagèna.

The right to information essential for humanity 

The rural world in particular has no access to information, since it lacks the means for communication. Furthermore, this information is polluted by major transnational and national corporations (Nestlé, Monsanto, etc.). The rural population in particular should have access to vital information in key areas: farming techniques, health, medicines, environmental management, meteorology, etc.
This information belongs to the human community and cannot be entrusted to the rules of the market.  It should be promoted by the international community, and governments should ensure that it is widely diffused and obtainable.
Thus small farmers demand more information and reflection concerning subjects representing current and future stakes for rural populations and also for the whole of humanity: questions of healthy nutrition, life and its protection and climatic changes.

The right to form autonomous peasant and indigenous community organisations

"Is it really possible to imagine a scenario for food security without taking into account proposals from small farmers who are both producers and consumers, made vulnerable by their rural circumstances, with no means of communication and no participation in decision making authorities?"
Peasant and indigenous community organisations should play an essential role in local, national and international life. They are a key element for building more democratic and social societies that incorporate the objective of sustainability. They must adapt and confront the current situation of globalisation in general and liberal economic globalisation in particular.
They must:
-	act in an organised way on different geographic scales,
-	set up forms of co-ordination between different actors at every level.
-	strengthen their capacity to negotiate by setting up new places for training that associate leaders in different sectors (fishing, agriculture, the environment, etc.), 
-	"globalise solidarity between peasants ",
-	build alliances with other social groups,
and peasant women demand:
-	that decision-making be shared between men and women in peasant organisations and independence for their own organisations  vis-à-vis governments.

Develop oneself with art

Poetry for drug-addicts treatment 

Culture challenges reality. Projects run by the needy communities spread in Rio making art into an alternative for the day-to-day and raw material for the future. 

These two pieces of news came out in August 2001, in Rio’s two greatest newspapers, respectively O GLOBO and JORNAL DO BRASIL. Sign of times? Cristovam Buarque, the sociologist who was Brasilia’s governor in the 90’s, has made a prophecy: “After decades of economists’ primacy we’re entering an age of poets, playwrights, and writers who will, through intuition, denounce and formulate; of thinkers who will, through analysis, criticize and propose a wide view of the human and national drama”.
It is early to tell how far Buarque has shown a new way. What we do know for sure is that there is a number of art projects searching for alternatives to experience the world in a different manner. And the answers have been stirring. Cláudia Martins, who takes part of a dance group, says, “It took me a long time to find out that I don’t have to stop studying at the secondary school, be a secretary or a receptionist just because I live in a slum. Today I know I can be a ballerina, go to college and make a living out of dance. This work has changed my perception of reality.” The kind of work that changes the perception of reality through art is what we aim at. 
Negotiating with utopias means to look for the balance between the dreams we have and the experiences that take shape in our daily existence. 
Creating is inherent to the human condition. Man only realizes and recognizes himself in what he creates, by transforming things, giving meaning to them. And as he transforms things he transforms himself, in a dynamic process in which he recreates the things and his own self. Potentially we are all creators, and art, in its multiple dimensions, is an immeasurable field of possibilities for the creation exercising, which enables a number of cultures to keep a dialogue through that common language.
In Fayga Ostrower’s words, art enables the link between men among themselves and the cosmos, what appears to us as a possible form of world re-enchantment. 
Through creation, through art, perhaps this reencounter between Man and a language common to all will come true. In this sense, it is important to reassure that art and creation are not only present in this recently made personage, the artist, but also in Man in his plenitude. To have this though, the world must be turned upside down. Invert the proposition that to be is to have. Search for the ludic in the daily life. Look at the world with bewilderment. The bewilderment of being alive, as mysterious as not being so. Amaze oneself. Like Heracles when he tells us that Man’s dwelling is the extraordinary. Perhaps this will be the key. If Man’s dwelling goes back to being the extraordinary, then Man will have re-enchanted the world. 
Art is constituent of our social life and powers up the relations between groups and people, by creating and renewing experiences, world views, strengthening solidarity bindings, and creating imaginaries and poetics vital to self-knowledge and the knowledge of the others. The artistic creativity can also provide human development and generate improvement processes related to perception and life quality. On this line, art and artists should seek the humanization of social and cultural scenarios, through their works, aesthetical experiences, and world views. 
In this sense the artists’ chantier has been giving an important contribution to redefine the role of both art and artist in the construction of a united world. Besides generating a conceptual reference, the chantier gathered experiences, views, and proposals from representatives of 17 countries in various continents. This product will be presented in the Proposals Book to be edited soon in many languages. 
However, in order to try to change what surrounds us we must have a project whose goal is collective, the reason for this chantier’s existence, that proposes reflections and permanent interventions in each country’s context and also in the global articulations.

INTERCULTURALITY NOTEBOOK OPENINGS
Aiming at contributing to reinforce a cultural-intercultural diversity in the present context of globalization, which by no means represents a cultural uniformity, more or less intense, neither a folklorization of cultures, these openings bring proposals at two different levels. 
At its first level, a number of proposals is presented to clarify basic notions of culture, cultural diversity, pluralism e interculturality.
At its second level, more operational proposals to interculturality are made based on the distinction between two elements:
-	the different thematic issues;
-	the different social contexts;
Hence, they are a first step we believe to be fundamental to turn cultural diversity, interculturality and globalization from conflicting poles into meaning-creating polarities.
1.	Clarification of basic notions: proposals
a) Culture
On the one hand,  we propose stop considering culture as a distinct aspect of politics, economy, science, education, communication, law, social organization, technology, without reducing it to the systems of values or to art and/or folklore.
Alternatively, we propose to speak of political culture, economic culture, juridical culture, scientific culture, educational culture, technological culture etc, to highlight the fact that each of these fields has thrived on concrete cultural motifs.
On the other hand, we also propose to consider that in every culture there are three distinct levels that are, however, articulated: the fundamental values, the institutions that articulate these values and the concrete practice.
b)Cultural Diversity
Regarding cultural diversity, we propose to take up the most adequate model, which is called “A world that understands many worlds”, ruling out the other two possibilities: “One monochromatic world” or “One colorful world”, because we feel that the point is not manage to get harmony despite our differences, but because of them.
c) Pluralism e interculturality
To articulate harmony thanks to cultural differences, these openings propose the development of the notions of pluralism and interculturality according to the following terms: 
i)	pluralism as a dynamic balance between an isolating plurality and a uniformizing unity, refusing both the reduction of cultural diversity to universal parameters and the dismantling relativism, by means of developing a radical relativity that takes into account the cultural text as well as its pre-text and context.
ii)	interculturality as a relational and contact situation between two or more cultures, which does not take place just under one side’s choice, neither aspires a syncretic and sterilizing miscegenation, but aims at an enriching mutual fecundation that does not rule out the differences.

2. Practical proposals according to thematic and contextual issues. 
The interculturality does not happen in abstract. It happens in relation to distinct issues and contexts. Having this in mind, this workshop makes the following proposals.
a) According to thematic  issues
We assume that the intercultural dialogue will essentially take place between modern western culture and other cultures and civilizations, more or less influenced by the former, but contributing with distinct and differentiated elements.
•	At the fundamental values level, the intercultural dialogue should be happen in relation to human rights and other systems of values that also guarantee human dignity. 
•	At the economic culture level, between the economic culture of trading and that of communitary reciprocity 
•	At the political culture level, between the democratic political culture based on the State-nation and the political cultures founded in community realms.
•	At the social culture level, between the social culture articulated around the individual and the society, and the social culture articulated around people and the community.
•	At the scientific culture level, between the scientific culture based on abstraction and universality, and scientific cultures based on experiencing and local contextualization. 
•	At the educational culture level, between the school educational culture and the educational culture not essentially done at school as well as that of continued learning based on experiencing. 
•	At the ecological culture level, between the one that considers nature as a human resource and those that consider it as an integrating part of the human. 
•	At the religious culture level, propose a dialogue that goes beyond exclusivisms, included the modern secular one, not only between religious tenets, but mainly and above all, among believers, aiming at contributing to human completeness and not to power enforcement. 
B) According to the contexts
There are three possible contexts:
•	in the Multicultural Societies, resulting from migratory movements, the interculturality must be proposed, not as a means of integrating the immigrant minorities into the cultural majority, but as a means to integrate all into the new social reality, culturally diverse, in which social cohesion will have a community basis. In other words, we should not aspire so much to have citizens’ societies, but people’s communities.
•	In the multiethnic and multinational States, the national-ethnic minorities should develop new ways of using the right of self-determination that do not require the constitution of new state entities.
•	In the context of international relations and cooperation it would be necessary to overcome the notion and the practice of development as the good life to be followed by most of societies. The interculturality should enable the knowledge and the unfolding of other concepts and practices related to “good life” that are different from the mainstream ones.

WAR, GENOCIDES, …  RESTORING HUMANITY IN HUMAN BEINGS FACED BY EXTREME SITUATIONS

War and genocide are collective situations. They affect every society concerned by them, sometimes for several generations, since they leave behind material ruin damaging economies, cultural heritage, and the health of populations. Lastly, they leave behind confrontations with barbarity, weakened laws, the disappearance of the values underlying civilisation and the symbolic foundations of societies and individuals.

Three perspectives should be explored in this major area of reflection.

1) The issue of traumas 
Restoring humanity to human beings who have been confronted by extreme situations cannot be achieved in the same way as repairing physical injury by medical care. 

The core of trauma is constituted by one or more psychological events that have pushed the individual or group of individuals outside the continuity of their history and values. A psychological trauma also involves underlying powerlessness and a collapse of the relations that link the individual with other human beings. With individual traumas and particularly major human disasters, the effects of the trauma can be passed down generation after generation. Traumatic suffering can last decades and even centuries when the very existence of a society is threatened (the genocide of the American Indians, the slave trade, the Holocaust).
Providing care for collective situations requires places and contacts for clinical treatment, action by community workers to rebuild links, and artists to recreate collective memory. It should also be treated by professional multidisciplinary action. The media can play an important role in spreading awareness and diffusing experiences. International aid should be used with discernment, taking care to respect the culture and competencies of already fragile societies. 
Another recommendation is to combine experiences that require modern means of communication. They can be interspersed by international working meetings that ensure the fair representation of different cultures.

2) The symbolic dimension
The recognition of humans by other humans is strongly based on symbolic ties, though war and genocide sap their substance. This process is an aggravation of a general process at work in our modern commercial mindset, undermining the stability of societies, culture and the deep ties that link us together.
The combat against social destabilisation, the domination of vested interests over the common interest, and the fact that the State is no longer a proponent of virtue, are all intimately involved in conflict prevention. A culture of peace can play an essential role in this prevention. Civic considerations are generally set aside during wars and genocides, since action by other states and international institutions takes precedence. However, all forms of resistance to the degradation of civilisation should be given active support, since they express the hope and kernel of a possible future that is not the continuation of war in another form. 
The aftermaths of wars are often decisive periods for reconstituting human links. The role of judicial law is essential since it states the price to be paid, in the name of social peace, for reforging the link between the executioner and the victim within human society. It is the law in particular that stops the rule of the jungle from setting in, perpetuated by a deleterious climate of impunity.
The issue of forgiveness is of great importance, since it affects both human emotions and the social control of conflicts; this is particularly so when forgiveness is incorporated in the judicial process.
The question of treating collective memory and places of remembrance is also essential since it can provide some tangible form that allows the survivors to communicate with the victims.
Pilot projects should be given direct support, since they provide nothing that can attract private funds. All forms of action, sometimes of a more modest nature than that mentioned here, should be monitored, compared and studied, in order to set up a world laboratory intended to restore meaning to the symbolic ties trampled by conflict.

3) The extraordinary harm done to human beings by wars and genocides
Wars bring about a general lowering of thresholds of interdiction, they weaken civic resistance and encourage organised crime. Moreover, they bring about extortion that would be far more difficult during peacetime. Such activities as criminal traffic in children corrupt international adoption, making it difficult and complicated to "stitch up history"; disappearances leave loved ones unable to go through the necessary psychological process of mourning; torture that harms victims physically and breaks them mentally, destroying their moral foundations and ethical values; the pollution of the human genome by chemical warfare, affecting an entire population and its biological and psychological regeneration and affecting the common genetic heritage of the entire human race.
These forms of barbarity should be condemned without ambiguity. Their consequences should be the subject of multidisciplinary reflection, since they all call for the restoration of humanity in human beings faced by situations where the rule of law is  flouted. 

Breakthrough of the workshop on 
social control for the scientific production system.
Further to the meeting at Tête-de-Ran in Switzerland, on September 20th to 23rd,  2001 organised by the Association for the Promotion of the Studies Against Barbarism (Genève).

Introduction
The workshop's breakthrough materialises a change in attitudes towards scientists. This breakthrough concerns three points, to which will be added a conclusion of a strategic nature that, in fact, represents the actual breakthrough. 

The liberty of scientific research
On numerous occasions, the group has insisted on the liberty of scientific research. It is a case of freeing science from deleterious choices imposed by the production system, i.e. governments and economies. As was often said in the electronics forum, which preceded the meeting, it is no longer a question of “setting up processes that will enable civil society to control scientists’ work”, but more a question of controlling the production system. 

Conscience clause
Scientists are in the best possible position for observing the often dramatic consequences that occur when the industrial companies, for which they work, “drift offline” (both private and public). It is therefore normal that they are protected by a conscience clause, if they make known any information regarding scientific research and technological production that concerns continuous and deliberate actions that violate the principles of precaution, public health, environment and ethical or deontological codes. This conscience clause is also a breakthrough for the scientists’ College and it is listed in the register of breakthroughs as a subject for an international convention of the International Labour Organisation. As a logical consequence to freedom in research, the conscience clause would tend to free scientists from any excessive hold on the part of their employers.  

Solemn oath
Scientists’ training requires deontological, moral and ethical aspects to be taken into account. Besides being simply the recognition of students’ technical attitudes for science, receiving a diploma should also be subject to pronouncing a solemn oath similar to the Hippocratic oath sworn by doctors. A pledge (still to be written) made for future generations containing a promise to put all the experience of preceding generations at the service of future considerations would have all the solemnity required. This oath will notably contain criteria subject to the conscience clause. From this point onwards, employers will be informed beforehand about ethical, moral and deontological criteria transformed onto judicial levels and available to the scientists they employ. This will make the conscience clause act as a deterrent (it will have an effect even before any real accusations).  

The workshop's breakthrough
- Caution: If the three points described above were accepted by the group, it must be remembered that the following elements of text below have not been presented to the group for approval. Therefore we assume alone total responsibility for this interpretation.

- Liberty of the research as a necessity: It seems that liberty of research is a psychological necessity for scientists. Generally speaking, scientists choose their professional career, because they prefer it to careers that are generally proposed in a context of social debate (social sciences, law, etc.). The desire to introduce social debate and its constraints into domains of science looks like a frontal attack on the very identity of scientists. Whence the idea, in a constructive sense, of putting the accent on liberty, so as to free scientific research from the production system. This means that the historical identity of scientists is taken into consideration and that the weight of criticism is henceforth on the shoulders of the production system.  

- The coherence of the tools used: If at first this breakthrough may appear to be essentially the result of semantics, it goes further. Liberty, considered as a principle, is materialised by the couple formed by the conscience clause and the solemn oath, a couple that possesses the legal and moral capacity to contribute to freeing scientists from constraints imposed by the production system. This new form of liberty will enable scientists to take on their responsibilities in conformity with their oath. 

-	Perspectives opened up by liberty: Liberty acquired by scientists in this way will bring benefits.  What will be the nature of these benefits? A simple corporatist type improvement in their working conditions, or an improvement that really benefits the whole scientific domain? If scientists are less subjected to the need to provide results, they could once again put the accent on studying the laws that govern the universe rather than try to transform this same universe to defend the interests of such and such a group. Wouldn’t this evolution towards liberty be the foundations for a new equilibrium on constraints undergone by scientists, who are increasingly pressurised today by requirements dictated by return on investment? This new liberty will force scientists to make decisions on the objectives of their research than beforehand. In this way, their perspectives will be made all the richer and their responsibility increased. 

List of participants at the workshop meeting
Participants present at the workshop on social control for the scientific production system in September 2001 came from three continents:
M. Frédéric Piguet, facilitator and coordinator of the APSAB workshop, Switzerland; Mme Isabelle Tarradellas, programme coordinator at the Charles Leopold Mayer Foundation, Switzerland; M. Ababacar Diop, legal expert, representative of the ARPA (“Aide à la Réalisation de Projets Africains” or aid for carrying out projects in Africa), responsible for the OSIRIS (Observatory on Information Systems, Networks and I-ways in Senegal) multimedia caravan, Senegal; M. Abdelhamid Chorfa, Former Director of Studies at the Algerian Republic Presidency; former  consultant and expert at the Algiers Strategic Institute; at present Secretary of the Algerian Association for Prospectives, Grenoble, France. Mme Ghislaine Jacquier, Project manager in Albania, Geneva, Switzerland; Ms Claudia Lenzner, Molecular Biologist, journalist, France; M. Lazare Ki-Zerbo, Responsible for the Multimedia Reading Space at the Centre of Studies for Development in Africa (C.E.D.A); Editor of the news bulletin DJIGUI (Hope); Researcher in the programme (2001 - 2002) "plea for the impact of liberalisation in Burkina Faso", Burkina-Faso; Prof. Jüri Engelbrecht, President of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, Estonia. Ms Manonmanii Krishnamohan, Laboratory Analyst (Nutrients) at the Queensland Health Scientific Services, Coopers Plains, Australia; Worked formerly as an Environmental Education Officer for an autonomous centre of Excellence of the Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India.

Geneva, November 8th 2001, Frédéric Piguet, Pierre Lane, apsab@bluewin.ch, www.apsab.span.ch/bi/

EDUCATION FOR ACTIVE AND RESPONSIBLE CITIZENSHIP

Even though we can learn from others, we must at least rely on our own wisdom.
Montaigne

The act of educating is to “lead to higher ground”, “raise”, “bring about one's fulfilment”… This is the challenge before us: to make available the resources to develop the personality and competencies of each person while showing how to participate in community life and play a role within humanity as a whole.

The implications of such a challenge concern the whole of society. Too many roads lack signs to show the way, and when these signs exist, the adult-educator is nowhere to be found to explain their meanings. This can be seen all too frequently in the street, where it is easier to look the other way than to intervene. Defining a district as an environment for education requires joint agreement on these signs and common values and learning how to express them at the same time as learning to listen to those that transgress them. This entails recreating the social fabric so as to rise above powerlessness and weave the social cohesion of space as "classroom" across the district.

To achieve this aim we must restore the law of the symbolic. Using education to signify the limit of transgression in relations with the other, means instituting awareness of otherness by prohibition within oneself and in the relations between individuals. It permits listening to the words of the other, since violence occurs in the absence of any law and any prohibition. It also permits the establishment of laws as the guarantees that make living together possible.

This common background can only function if the different actors in education learn to work together. Learning to accept conflict and refusing to blame others permits each protagonist to express their weaknesses and accept those of others, to establish a project together that requires personal investment to modify the course of events. These are three steps for breaking through the status quo and learning to co-operate.

A great deal of imagination is required to implement these directions. First, each individual must be able to explore the world of their fears and desires in order to free their imagination. This entails enrichment so that each person can participate in that which links them with others. 

The workshop is open, all that is needed is a point of entry to incite the desire to embark on the journey. One very simple point of entry can be taken every day, i.e. one must ask oneself the questions "Why do I go to school?", "Why do I teach at school?", “Why do I send my children to school?”…

BREAKTHROUGHS  - TIME AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT 

I. Socio-economic time and space and the world of work

1.1. Humanise working time in the social and medical sectors. Frequent discouragement and economic pressure are factors that gnaw at the social and medical professions, where time is always lacking. The aim of these proposals is to give back to these professions the desire to work, by providing them with the opportunity to integrate concerns other than the immediate, by teaching nurses and doctors to reconcile patients and the socially excluded with themselves, widening psychological training to cover the importance of meaning, reorienting the profession away from mentalities imbued with mechanical work and therapeutic efficiency, and providing methods and resources (in terms of time) to deal with the unexpected. Thus the following are a number of initiatives proposed to practitioners, institutes and other places of learning. 

More concretely, the aim is to give value and a worth to time that is not directly productive.

1.2. Widen the area and duration of training. The training itineraries of persons receiving integration training have given rise to the following proposals: show the importance of time given to training not only in terms of satisfying a socio-economic demand but also to cultivate curiosity and the pleasure of learning; make the person receiving training a stakeholder in the process and combat the diktat of programmes; provide persons receiving training with the resources to learn by practising with tools during training; give teachers more freedom of movement and creativity; train trainers not only about coherency, but also about the discontinuities and openings in their training and experience; link an entire training course with multiple timeframes that can exist in teaching outside of fixed programmes.

II. Time and communication

2.1. Time and the acceleration of images. These proposals are aimed at everyone: consumers, creators, and actors and media producers concerned with the perception of children. These proposals aim to reconcile time and duration with the more or less accelerated flow of images. A large number of directions are possible: give a taste for new multimedia and iconography; teach the distinction between the emotional force of an image and its ethical and educational scope; show the steps involved in creating an advertisement or information, in order to highlight the different directions introduced; Read the history of communication in a group; systematically integrate the positive aspect of the future, in spite of appearances, and reject the sensationalism that generates fear; highlight the many points of view and different rhythms hidden behind a flow of images; integrate image culture in all human activity, even in the ecosystem.

2.2. Time and opinion polls. Making decision-makers aware. At a time when opinion polls hold sway, it is important to be aware of what statistical approaches consist and distinguish them from a classical scientific approach; train managers and political decision-makers to take minorities into account and listen to them; create forums so that majority and minority groups can meet; learn to understand the history and memory of problems, before analysing polls, and see them in relation to a global project.

III. Time and language for communication between generations  

3.1. How to make people aware and create a language for communication between generations? Here are a few suggestions: restore value and a price for experience and duration and diffuse awareness of the radical novelty of inter-generational coexistence in history; create informal places – forums where different generations can meet, outside of  private premises; learn not to fear conflicts and misunderstandings and fight against the spirit of consensus without genuine dialogue; try to solve  inter-generational violence  by educating the art of dialogue; combat the dictatorship of the new and the myth of youth, and reciprocally, combat age-old forms of fundamentalism; get generations to meet in their districts, etc.; teach synergy and awareness of shifts in time and mentalities.

3.2. The time for listening to the preconceptions of different generations in the world of work. A number of problems involved in the circulation of information in companies are caused by the transmission of knowledge by older personnel. Here are a few concrete proposals to change mentalities and practices: provide all young persons with information on the company's history and its integration in the local social and political context, and give them, whatever their position in the company, the means of learning about their colleagues' objectives and methods; show managers the value of knowledge learned from experience; recall what makes up the company's capital, and the commercial value of information; invite personnel who retire to write, transmit and read what they have learned; train managers and human resource managers in the multi-dimensional perspective offered by different ages and experiences; widen management and encourage the recruitment of managers with training in the humanities and ecology, in the scientific meaning of the term.

IV. The time of ecology

4.1. Ecology is the primary science of complexity. Proposals for ecological education. Ecology is foremost among the concerns dealt with in this booklet, this part proposes attitudes for concrete methodology: placing curiosity and amazement at the forefront of knowledge, before critical analysis; give scientific ecology priority among disciplines, on the one hand to separate it from its subordination to biology and, on the other, to counterbalance the political naivety of certain slogans announced by ecologists; integrate natural history, perceptions of nature, and relations between humanity and nature in the teaching of history in order to gain better understanding of the present; integrate teaching in a more general context that students can grasp in order to increase awareness of their responsibility for the future; constantly pay attention to historic and world events in ecological forecasts; learn of the links and necessary tension between balances and local requirements, and global organic perceptions (regarding the planet); teach complexity and global vision from childhood.
 
4.2. Ecology, the human sphere and work in the field. Taking as starting point a concrete example (forestry management), we propose the following: learn to take into account the multi-faceted character of all projects; develop research into achieving convergence between socio-economic interests and eco-systemic necessities; give the means (time and money) to actors working at the frontier between the economy and ecology to learn of the history of eco-systems (in the wide meaning of the term) their evolution; link continuous duration and different forms of time in ecosystems with the discontinuity that has appeared with human intervention; invite decision-makers and administrators to collaborate with all those concerned in projects or involved in maintaining balances; analyse the difficulty of the achieving harmony between these different times, between that of the public authorities, and between that demanded by work in the field and that of leisure.

FOOD SECURITY: MAKING THE RIGHT TO FOOD AND NUTRITIONAL WELL-BEING A REALITY

HALF OF THE WORLD'S POPULATION SUFFERS FROM MALNUTRITION 

The current situation of food in the world today represents an enormous problem for humanity.
- 800 million people are still underfed, 
- half of the world's population is affected by forms of malnutrition and diseases related to the lack or excess of food (lack of micronutrients, obesity, etc.), often with dramatic consequences.
- The gulf between the rich and poor is growing within both developing and developed countries, exacerbating the nutritional situation of the poorest.

LIBERALISATION POLICIES UNDERMINE THE CAPACITIES OF POPULATIONS TO FEED THEMSELVES

Now, at the dawn of the 21st century, humanity has accumulated knowledge related to traditional methods and scientific research capable of solving many existing agricultural problems; knowledge that in some cases has existed for several decades.
The main issue at stake is not to solve technical problems so as to produce more at world-wide level, but to face a more complex problem of access to sufficient food for populations in rural and urban areas and, in particular, for the poorest among them. We are also confronted by the challenge of product quality in terms of health and nutrition and respect for food related customs and culture. 

No answer has yet been found in far too many countries to the problem of access to production methods and natural resources, or to their optimisation and sustainable management. These raise issues related to sharing land and its ownership, and access to fishing area and coastlines for small fishing communities.

The very varied systems involved in food production developed over the centuries are undergoing profound change. Over the last fifteen years, they have been subjected to:
-	liberalisation and competition at world-wide level between very different agricultural, fishing and trade systems, which undermine peasant farming, small fishing communities and culturally diverse forms of food and nutrition;
-	the concentration of major agri-businesses involved in processing and trade;
-	the extremely rapid and generalised use of biotechnologies, particularly the use of GMOs, driven by the pursuit of profit by these multinational corporations with complete disregard for the food security of populations, environmental protection and the control by small farmers over the means to plant their crops with their own seeds;
-	the development of production and consumption methods in most societies that pay little  attention to the environment or to the state of the Earth we leave to future generations.  
-	This liberalisation has been given even more impetus by structural adjustment programmes and the WTO agreements (e.g., the agreements on agriculture and intellectual property).
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AN APPROACH THAT TAKES COMPLEXITY INTO ACCOUNT

Food is a complex problem world-wide that involves private actors (families, companies, etc.), NGOs and grassroots movements, and public actors (local authorities, governments, international organisations, etc.).
Solving food-related problems also requires action on questions of agricultural production, fishing, natural resource management, nutrition, health, education, processing, and national and international trade.
Solving these problems requires taking a new approach capable of dealing with this complexity. They cannot be solved by the market, governments, the major agri-businesses, NGOs, small farmers, fishermen or the FAO alone. We need new approaches that involve them all and new measures and arenas at international level such as this World Forum for Food Sovereignty in order to propose solutions an attempt to solve these problems. 

MAKING THE RIGHT TO FOOD AND NUTRITIONAL WELL-BEING A REALITY 

Various documents have been ratified at international level that emphasise the importance of right to food and nutritional well-being. 
-	Article 25 of the United Nationals Universal Declaration of Human Rights clearly sets out food security as a basic human right.
-	The international Treaty of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1966 also refers to the right to food as a basic right of humanity and demands that it be observed by both governments and international institutions.
-	 Since the World Conference on Food, convened in 1974 by the United Nations, following the food crisis of 1974, there has been general consensus in the international community to give explicit recognition to this right to food and nutritional well-being for all persons. This consensus was reasserted at the World Summit on Food at Rome in 1996.

We feel that the time has come, at the beginning of the 21st century, to make this right a reality at national and international level. Achieving this goal requires:
1)	The widest possible ratification by governments in the North and South of the Treaty on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, in order to give it even greater force;
2)	In the short term, the incorporation of the code of conduct to ensure adequate nutrition as a reference text at UN level. This text  was formulated by NGOs, including FIAN,  following the Rome summit in 1996, on the basis of the decisions made during it on an action plan;
3)	The adoption by the United Nations of a world convention on food sovereignty and nutritional well-being to permit using this right as a basis and an objective of civilisation. This text would take precedence over decisions taken in the framework of world trade negotiations and other areas.

SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE AND  FOOD SYSTEMS

We are in a situation of rapidly changing food systems whose main characteristics are:
-	a trend towards growing concentration in agri-business and food distribution;
-	the standardisation and homogenisation of food products at international level, guilty of  destroying variety in food culture;
-	growing complexity in food systems due to longer production, processing and  distribution circuits. This makes them more fragile and less safe;
-	strong dependence on intensive, productivist farming that destroys natural resources, biodiversity and peasant farming;
-	food crises (mad cow disease, dioxin polluted chickens, foot and mouth disease, etc.) that quickly take on international dimensions due to the relations between countries regarding food.

It is necessary to change direction towards production, processing and distribution that fulfils sustainability criteria, i.e. the preservation of natural resources, product quality in terms of health and nutrition, and economically viable companies that work according to equitable social conditions.

In agriculture, this requires well thought out choices at national and international levels to move towards sustainable and biological farming. However, the situation is different between developed and developing countries such as Mexico or the least developed countries. It is difficult to formulate and implement agricultural policies that incorporate sustainability without financial resources allocated by governments. Nonetheless, it is possible to include this dimension in support accorded to peasant farming in countries such as Brazil, Mexico, etc.
Generally, at national level, this requires a subtle combination of agri-environmental programmes and rural development, the application of the polluter-payer principle, cross compliance regarding subsidies and contracts drawn up between farmers and society to ensure environmental and social services.	
In addition, by allowing developing countries to use specific agricultural policy measures (refer to the section on the WTO), they could develop genuine means to act on these issues efficiently.
Overall, this means re-examining food systems by analysing the entire food chain from the standpoint of its sustainability (power, transport, transport, etc.).
We are only at the beginning of formulating and building sustainable food systems for the different communities and populations around the world.

BREAKTHROUGHS – Sustainable tourism

FACTS
Tourism is the biggest economic activity in the world. In 2000 665 million people travelled, generating US$476 billion (statistics from the World Tourism Organisaiton). 
Its principle characteristic is that it is the only activity that places the populations of the North and South in contact with each other. It is also particularly fragile (the Gulf War and, more recently, the terrorist attacks in the United States have led to immediate and dramatic economic slumps in tourism). 
Over the years, the approach to tourism as a societal phenomenon has evolved considerably in France, bringing our country closer to the practices of Norther European countries, especially Switzerland and the United Kingdom. The only French speaking member of TEN (Tourism European Network) that groups these organisations, the Transverses association has benefited substantially from its research and experience. 
Tourism has diversified immensely over the past few decades. New products and conditions have appeared that either provide almost total isolation for customers (e.g., “clubs”, cruises), or adventure and risks (trekking in remote places, deserts, the Himalayas and arctic regions). However, customers are always protected at great expense. New terms have appeared related to specific movements (such as "sustainable tourism" after the Rio Summit and, more recently, in a still disorganised way, "fair tourism"). The precise meaning of these terms is not always very clear and their reasons for being are not always taken into account: since tourism is a "leisure activity" it is subject to fashion, as can be seen in fantastic advertisements. The effects of certain types of tourism on local populations and their environment can be dramatic. 
Recently, much has been said of tourist products with ethical labelling, though this raises doubts given the complex nature of tourism, the instability of the products offered and the problems of applying traceability. 
1- Tourism plays or can play a decisive role, either negatively or positively, in a country and its development. 
2 – Tourism is a fragile activity (bearing in mind current international political situations), and it cannot be a sustainable driving force for a country with difficulties. It can only be a not inconsiderable contribution to pre-existing impetus.
PROPOSALS
A hierarchy of public and private bodies of varying importance currently defines the organisation of tourism and the decisions concerning it. These are governments (more or less democratic) with their specialised schemes, the tourism industry and international organisations. Then, far behind are the tourists themselves (through their choices) and, at the bottom of the ladder, come local populations, which, in developing countries, are poorly informed and used as operatives that carry out the stereotyped sub-occupations of tourism and are unable to give voice to their preoccupations. 
We suggest taking a pragmatic approach and setting up a system to change this traditional hierarchy, by identifying actions to be carried out and their priorities. 
The order chosen for these priorities would be the following: 

1 – Local populations. They should no longer be those "born to serve" but become actors playing a full role. Thus an initial step would be to start up systems for reciprocal information (before involving "training") so they can express what they hope from tourism, what they want and what they refuse. 
2 – Organisations that call society to account (ATTAC, the Foundation for the Progress of Humankind, the Laboratories of the Future, Le Monde Diplomatique, etc)..
2 – Development NGO's, due to their knowledge of the terrain. Largely indifferent to tourism up to recently, they have started to take tourist related issues into account. 
3 – Potential tourists in their capacity as active citizens (through existing organisations).
4 – Indispensable international institutions: they should neither be over nor under estimated. Attempts must be made with them to open up appropriate forms of dialogue and questioning, by making use of their actions in specific areas (World Tourism Organisation, international organisations, supranational organisations (Europe), and the national and local organisations of countries from which most tourists come. 
5 – The tourism industry via its components (products, transport, hotels, training, etc). It should not be considered as an enemy or as an ally but as a vital interlocutor. 
Organisations that already work for tourism that gives greater respect for local populations and their environments should be privileged, by forging links with them and carrying out significant actions in various areas. 
--------------------
Initially, work must be done to identify specific targets (even if provisional) among the following categories. 
1 – Networking with organisations in developing countries.                             Conditions appear ripe for giving priority to different regions in Latin America where movements exist already. This would serve as the first platform. The competent organisations should be identified and the most interesting experiences selected for reference. Such movements also exist in India which would be another target. 
2 – Specifically, in the area of tourism, the TEN Network (Tourism European Network) and its satellite organisations have a lead over French-speaking networks with respect to their practices and publications. Account should be taken of this. 
3 – Development NGOs: identify already existing partnerships and seek priorities with them. 
4 - Analyse, in relation with the above, possible links with international, national and regional organisations, with particularly attention being given to programmed events (Eco-tourism Year decreed by the United Nations, Conventions on Biodiversity, etc.), 
Laboratories: 
1 – Give priority to certain regions: Palestine, where tourism is currently non-existent, but where tourism could be a factor for peace, should be given especial attention so that, when tourism does restart, existing organisations would receive immediate support in contributing towards peace in the region. 
2 –Start or incite partnerships with tourist companies that uphold the ethics of respect for local populations and their own aspirations.
3 – Develop multimedia tools to create a dynamic exhibition and its spin-offs, and create a truly international French language review intended to parallel many such instruments that already exist in English. 
4 – A experimental session, grouping all the different local populations of the world could be organised very quickly.  
5 – The work done by the "Conseil Général de la Seine-Saint-Denis" on the subject “Via the World for Peace" could rapidly give rise to impetus in several of these subjects to which the leaders of this programme are sensitive. 

 LABOUR, EMPLOYMENT AND ECONOMIC ACTIVITY

OPENINGS

1.No more associating access to and involvement in society’s productive and creative process to participation in employment. The solution for unemployment and social exclusion is not employment, but breaking the link between work and income (understood here as the right to access wealth –which is always, ultimately, socially originated–) that now subordinates labour. The fight to de-alienate labour, although it is necessary to build a new world, is unlike the fight for mechanisms that guarantee the intrinsic dignity of man (and is, therefore, not a sufficient condition). 

2. Other human activities (other than labour conceived as employment) have to be valued according to their significance for social life and its reproduction. The profound transformations that society is experiencing, besides revealing that “the salaried system is no longer of use for workers", are also indicating that citizens and human dignity no longer have to depend on the volume of socially necessary labour (which is decreasing as the productivity of social work grows), and that countless other human activities that can hardly be considered “work” also count for the reproduction of social life.

3. Fight to share the labour required, so that there is work for all, and we are able to spend time on higher human development. The technological advances that go hand-in-hand with globalisation have saved human energy and labour, increasing the productivity of social work. All workers in general should benefit from these savings. However, capital tends to privatise these benefits, unless the way in which productive goods are controlled and managed is altered. To bring democracy to productivity gains implies creating time to develop greater human dimensions.

4. Building a new world implies building new social images, new political subjects and another culture. The contemporary crisis in the sense of a more human world (establishing the new social pact necessary to transfer the profits from productivity to society-based corporations) will not be overcome unless social agents become organised and enter the political arena, and unless they build a new social image: the creation of political subjects also implies the creation of a new culture.

5. The Economy of Solidarity is at the heart of a new perspective of social change. The Economy of Solidarity, since it is configured on another paradigm of consumption and production (an alternative to the current consumption/production-oriented model that subordinates labour as a means of reproducing capital), becomes the focal point of a new perspective of social change, in which the dimension of values plays a fundamental role. It is not enough to merely identify the “agents” and the “leaders”, but the change has to result from an organic transformation process, not restricted to or centred on a strong moment.

6. To build the Economy of Solidarity is to build a political and educational project. Although it is all one process, it is not spontaneous. There is an urgent need for a political project, particularly because the ES involves few economic relations. The focal point here is Solidarity: it is around Solidarity that we build a broad political project for a new national and global society. The ES does not develop automatically and mechanically. To become an agent for social change, one has to be a political and educational force. Solidarity is only actively created as part of a process that is also of an educational nature.

7. Building from below, another “development”, with strategies on the micro, meso and macro levels. The challenge is to build another feasible “development” from the bottom up, generating integrating systems that include micro-experiences, strengthening the counterpowers that arise from society so that they become a social force capable of implementing ES universally. The territorial approach creates solid links, particularly the integrated construction of the “productive atmosphere”. The ES strategy consists of starting with local and micro-socioeconomic experiences and gradually establish feasible relations on horizontal (integrating consumption, production, technology, trade, finance and different sectors of the economy) and vertical (integrating the productive chains for each good and service) networks, acting simultaneously on the micro, meso and macro levels, to eventually create a self-organised system as an alternative to the predominant system today.

8. Reinforce “citizens’ surveillance” activities, to make sure that the agreements reached and policies defined are implemented correctly. Here we call attention to the experiences in Peru and Chile, where there are indicators that assess human rights in private enterprise, effectively validating the idea of a “citizens’ enterprise”.

10. Control and regulate the activities of multinational corporations. This perspective implies a "new internationalism". The idea is to control the activities of multinational corporations, regulating and controlling their behaviour with regard to labour rights and environmental management in the different countries where they operate.

11. Promote direct means of involvement and local self-management development; public control and management of the goods and services common to all humanity. Citizenship in the labour field implies instruments with which workers are able to develop resistance, and the control and management of the labour organisation (self-management of production, marketing and finance). On a geopolitical level (rural and urban), citizens may directly exercise democracy by means of instruments such as participative budgets, city forums, etc. We call this social self-management. Therefore, power on a local level is expressed in work areas related to urban and rural public spaces. This is the essence of what is called the “citizens’ union”.

Business and solidarity network

Breakthroughs – The new regulations 

The national regulations and social commitments derived from the post-war period have ceased to respond to the challenge of the social and environmental consequences of business strategies on the continent and the world over. Companies are not considered to be collective goods from a legal perspective. However, they do have responsibilities to society and the environment. But if nations are unable to apply laws that make companies do their duty to society, who regulates their social responsibilities, and how? 

To answer this question, we have to consider the new types of public and private economic regulations. A good example are international events such as were held in Seattle or Porto Alegre. We also find that consumer (boycotts, Clean Clothes European opinion campaign) and investor (creation of social rafting agencies, organisations that analyse companies’ social and environmental results, salary savings) reactions are becoming increasingly significant. Some companies are drafting ethical charters, establishing codes of conduct and performing social acceptance audits.

When the social responsibility of private enterprise is solely based on private standards established voluntarily by management, and on the experience of large consultancy firms, the limits are soon reached if the initiatives are not within a public regulation framework, negotiated with all social agents and controlled by civil society. 
Supranational regulation
United Nations agencies and companies create alliances. They are, however, ambiguous relationships, since they can be sources of financing. Multinational companies wish to create associations to increase their competitive levels and improve their images : patronage and philanthropy are developed with regards to a stricter legislation and more intense social activities. 
National regulation
Globalisation questions national regulations. Companies question their legitimacy and efficacy. On the other hand, civil society considers that the rules are insufficient and badly adjusted. Nevertheless, the State should continue to play a regulatory role: 

1.	Generalise and reinforce consultation with unions and workers’ committees when large groups make strategic decisions, particularly relating to redundancy plans;

2.	Create legal frameworks that promote negotiation between a growing number of agents involved (shareholders, managers, workers, consumers…); 

3.	Encourage companies to be socially responsible, including social clauses in public calls for tenders. 

4.	Favour the consumption of biological and fair-price products by public administrations and bodies.

5.	Encourage companies to promote shareholders, users and workers’ involvement in management. There are evidently social economy-based enterprises (mutual companies, co-operatives and associations) and business innovations such as the parity-based management company model. “Neutral” points of encounter and dialogue are required between social agents on an international scale.
Citizens’ regulation 
Civil society, with its protests and claims, is seen as a way of regulating globalisation, at a time when national regulations are weakening.

6.	Increase the number of agents participating in social dialogue in private enterprise. Social dialogue is no longer a fight between management and unions on a national scale. New agents are involved: shareholders, consumers, local authorities, NGOs... 

7.	Continue with the intervention of social movements in large multinational companies to create the possible conditions to enter negotiations with the agents involved. The question lies in the identification and legitimacy of the social agents in company negotiations. This legitimacy is now the result of force, rather than the will of business managers.

8.	Reinforce dialogue and alliances between unions and NGOs. NGOs are at times considered as union competitors, even though they are mutually complementary. On the other hand, neither of them is familiar enough with the other to be capable of preparing common strategies and performing coherent activities. 

9.	Support the emergency situation and reinforce alliances with the NGOs and the unions of the South. 

10.	Teach unions and civil society about private enterprise. A greater involvement of unions and NGOs when it comes to defining and controlling companies’ social responsibilities implies more information and better knowledge of business management, financial and industrial logic.

11.	Only use boycotts as a weapon when they are the result of an organised and common action by unions and consumer movements. 

12.	Promote “buycotts” (which are not the same as boycotts). By means of opinion campaigns among consumers, promoting the purchase of fair trade products manufactured by biological co-operatives and social responsible companies. 

13.	The aim is to attempt to educate consumers, providing them with the information that they require to make a choice. The involvement of final consumers is at present limited. It is also difficult to apply ethical consumption. The lack of transparent information, the insufficient distribution of fair products and the high cost of ethical products are some of the factors that explain why a consumer’s change of mentality does not always have an impact on the purchases that he/she makes.

Production, Technology & Investment

Exchanges on an electronic forum and a meeting at Bangalore, India on the 5th and 6th of May 2001.
Has been written by Ramesh Ramaswamy

The proposals and strategies put forth in these notes are based on the premise that ultimately it is each individual society that has to decide on the final course of action. Forums such as these can only sensitize and play the role of enablers of the process. This is also congruent with the principle that each society has the right to decide for itself what it needs. 

It is proposed that the Alliance should play a proactive role in implementing the initiatives that are listed above.

Towards this end, the following actions are proposed:

An international multi-disciplinary team (A Technology Advisory Group) must be set up as an advisory body to evaluate technologies and advice governments (particularly of poor countries). The mandate of the team should be to ensure that:

1.	Adequate information should be made available to governments/ civil societies about the new technologies – their advantages and dangers

2.	A regular evaluation should be undertaken at International and National levels to continually evaluate such impacts on various aspects of life. Measurement systems must be developed to evaluate these changes. 

3.	Multi-disciplinary professional teams should be set up in each country to work with the international team mentioned above.

4.	Analyzed information dissemination should be undertaken to the public at large in different countries, through media, seminars and meetings
.
5.	Anti-corruption groups should be created, which will advocate the use of technology to fight corrupt practices in the delivery of public services to citizens in developing countries (often a bigger problem than kick-backs from stray defense deals)

6.	Regional Networks (especially among developing countries) must be created for knowledge sharing. For example, a network in the Asia-Pacific Region could be created, which will network the small-medium industries and the research institutions.. This will help sharing of knowledge and research facilities.

ALLIANCE FOR A RESPONSIBLE, PLURAL AND UNITED WORLD 
Socio-economy Pole 

ETHICAL CONSUMPTION 
November 2001

The challenge is now set on the changing of a model in which there are no limits for self-regulated markets, and the economy is focused on the accumulation and the consumption – unlimited –of goods. Changing this culture means a real revolution in social, economic, political, moral, cultural, intellectual and spiritual aspects, which rules out radical social inequalities, and proposes the organization of another kind of economy and consumption. And this should be a slow process based on the strengthening of transversal networks that use ethics in the day-to-day and hence attracts political support for this. This action articulation should involve the production and economic areas, the State, the social movements as well as each individual’s attitude. 

We present below some brief proposals to tackle each of the above aspects: 

1 – Promote the responsible and conscious consumption paradigm– Encourage the debate about the ecological and human consequences of consumption patterns, at local, regional and global levels so as to build up individual and collective patterns that are not harmful to the environment, for the future generations and for the democratic assistance of human necessities. In other words, promote those that strengthen equity, sustainability and quality of life. 
 
- 2 – Encourage the breaking up with the paradigm that links consumerism and human achievements -  Value ways to meet necessities for a ‘good-living’ that are not purchased but acquired through social living, love exchange and cultural identity. Question consumerism as a need of the productive system in the era of mass capitalism and not a tool for human achievement. 

- 3 – Promote the democratic control over the advertising industry – Set up regulating agencies for advertising, with a strong representativeness from the organized civil society, to curb lying, data manipulation, and the artificial building of needs. Denounce the subtle psychological way used by the advertising industry to mold needs and desires according to the capital interests. 

- 4 – Enhance transparency and honesty of consumer-oriented information – Set up discussion and information centers, wide open to public opinion, to provide index and data on products quality and the social and ecological impacts of their production. Democratize the elaborating processes of prices, production and service, enabling the consumer’s intervention in the construction of fair prices. 

- 5 – Strengthen the public power’s actions towards a sustainable consumption – Stimulate democratic governments’ actions to make them key partners, without centralizing decisions, in the process of regulating the private sector and of meeting the population‘s basic needs. Encourage the enforcement and the fulfillment of laws that guarantee consumer’s rights and follow the precaution principle when authorizing products and services that are potentially harmful to the collective well-being. Implement fiscal/taxing policies that stimulate economy in solidarity and charge the production systems that favor wasting, pollution or social apartheid. 

- 6 – Strengthen ethical consumption in the collective infrastructure production - Sensibilize and inform legislators, politicians and civil servants in general about ethical consumption, reducing water, paper, and energy consumption, changing the bidding laws, privileging social and ecological criteria as well as  planning and implementing alternative models of transportation and energy that use sustainable technology. 

- 7 – Strengthen collective actions against goods that promote injustice and non-sustainability – Set up an information network and an effective movement to run campaigns and public actions denouncing enterprises that exploit workers or harm the environment. This can be done by developing and strengthening international networks focused on monitoring and collaborating on national and regional movements for an ethical consumption. Organize a collective boycott against the products generated under exploiting relations of human beings, animals, and nature, and also against the products and services from countries that wage wars or where human and nature rights are not observed, even if these goods are cheaper.

- 8 – Strengthen collective action towards sustainable and beneficial products – Make known the benefits of individual and collective choices for ecologically correct products (those with non-polluting technology, little packaging, minimum energy consumption etc) and socially fair (products that are yielded by local initiatives founded on autonomy, cooperation, and also on the fair distribution of wealth and in the promotion of a dignified life for the workers). 

 9 – Enhance the provision of social consumption needs through economy in solidarity – Systematize and publicize updated information about the existing enterprises in solidarity to potentialize ethical options, facilitate exchanges and restructure in a complementary and supportive way the production chain starting at consumption needs. Set up retail selling spots and distribution channels that maximize the direct relation between producer and consumer, helping to build rich social and cultural relations beyond the market exchange. 

10 – stimulate the ethical consumption culture – Mobilize and sensibilize towards ethical consumption through education (to stimulate critical thinking and the defense of an ethics that respects and takes up responsibility in relation to all) and through information (to allow the option, the choice, the consumer’s power to discover the exploitation relations inherent to goods trading) to discuss the articulation between the relations that we establish in our work and life, and the exploitation relations that underlie the goods we purchase. Include in educational syllabi, in teacher development courses, and professional training courses, critical thinking about economy, advertising and consumption. 

11 – Encourage the development of committed social actors in the field of ethical consumption – Insert ethical consumption as an agenda at union and social movements meetings, since they are also consumers, stimulating the development, the action, the strengthening and the enlarging of consumers and producers’ associations and in-solidarity collaborative networks. Value the family, specially the women, as important agents in the citizens’ development towards practicing socially and ecologically responsible consumption. 

WORKSHOP 5 – FISCAL POLICY - TAXES, NATIONAL WEALTH DISTRIBUTION, AND SOCIAL SECURITY 

INNOVATIVE PROPOSALS

1- Universal Minimum Income

This is a totally revolutionary proposal since it allows distinguishing work from employment, employment from survival, profit from market; it also breaks up with necessity to sell work force under the myth that productive capacity can be sold without selling oneself. The minimum income must be considered a social right, insuring every individual from birth to death, regardless their social insertion in the economic process. 

2-Participatory Budget and Social Money

Budgets always require resources and financial viability. That is why we believe it is necessary to link both issues in one single proposal. 

Social money is a sort of anti-currency from the institutional viewpoint because it lacks the gold reserve required from developing countries, and also because it can stand as a symbol for society to fight against foreign financial capital, against the harmful way central and commercial banks use their power, treating money as any other good, subject to speculation and extortion. We are for the utilization of social money as a means to build a compensatory fund for the social debt, funded by currency royalty rights transferred from the State to the society, and by additions yielded from an increase in the national production. More than serving to pay current expenses, this fund should be destined to build a minimum patrimony for each individual, to ensure housing and the possession of capital assets required for the social production.

The participatory budget allows sharing the authority in terms of allocation of public resources and socialization of decisions related to the public budget, with positive effects on efficiency levels and social expenditure productivity. Although historically linked to municipal governments elected by the Brazilian Labour Party (PT), the participatory budget is acknowledged as an important innovation by many countries and international institutions. We also consider important to widen the democratic debate towards tributary issues and the analysis of fiscal incidence.

3-The struggle against fiscal adjustment and zero deficit plans.

The IMF models and those used by the World Bank for the elaboration of adjustment plans for developing countries are flawed and present proposals that go totally against the perspectives of development and social justice. We reckon they represent the consensus of high international finances and do not incorporate the needs of working populations, middle and poor classes, leading to policies that enhance the vicious process of wealth concentration and social exclusion. Besides this, they also encourage the high debt of poor nations, weakening their fragile sovereignty 

4-Foreign debt audit

In the developing countries, the foreign debt is an instrument of submission to the dominant nations’ interests and their economic and political elites. Certainly, it was not taken to improve the population’s well-being but they have to pay for it. Its high value is due to interest rates established by oligopolistic markets, following moneylenders’ principles rather than the ones expected from international cooperation. Most of the times, the international credits are not directed to the economic development of the receiving nations. In many cases, the debt increase occurs together with tax evasion from the great national and international enterprises that frequently use fiscal paradises. For all this, we urge to have an audit of the foreign debt.

5-Support taxes and expenditures linked to Economy in Solidarity

In order to make an efficacious State reform, they must be linked to a new ethics and a new social organization of production which will have ruled out exchanging values, goods and, hence, the lex mercatoria. Because of this, in a society in solidarity the fiscal emphasis must be on two taxes: income and possessions tax, which has universal collection according to social justice, and a tax on foreign trade. Income tax is an essential concept for total citizenship, for equality before law, and it is also the tributary counterpoint to the sharing of authority among the multiple powers. Foreign trade taxation is a necessary tool to achieve some national aims, such as food sovereignty. As for public expenditure, the production of social-oriented goods should follow the decisions made collectively.

6- Defense of Public Social Security based on co-management

We believe that pension and social security funds, when open and individualized, embed vicious mechanisms of revenue concentration. They can also simply help the elite’s enrichment or the financial market, real-estate and public bonds speculation. So far, the best Social Security system is that of co-management with public resources, which is widely accepted, and compatible with levels of the minimum needs for a dignified survival.

Setting up the above proposals requires a double strategy: defensive, in face of consumerism and individualism, but constructivist and apt to get support from consistent groups focused on the reproduction of the material means which is necessary for individuals and society. We mean specifically cooperatives, associations and unions, privileged places to identify the social actors who are committed to a new society, where everybody can lead a decent and dignified life. It is highly probable to design a realistic utopia stemming from the consolidated principles and those on course inside the social groups dedicated to economy in solidarity.

Alliance for a responsible, plural and united world – Socio-economy of solidarity
Finance of Solidarity Workshop
Breakthroughs

1)	Reinforce the empirical bases on which to demonstrate the added value of Finance of Solidarity

•	Intensify research on the impact of micro-finance on social links. 
•	Prepare studies on the impact of micro-finance programmes on capital in a number of specific cases (known MF enterprises), using different methodological approaches. 
•	Based on these cases, identify the methods and instruments that strengthen or weaken the creation of social capital. Prepare result indicators to reinforce social capital and social links.

2)	Analyse the costs and benefits of MF enterprises that reinforce social capital

•	Perform a strict analysis of the costs and benefits of MF enterprises produced by reinforcing social capital. 
•	Define the pertinent scope of application of the finance of solidarity, with regards to public interest or social utility.

3)	Define the Finance of Solidarity from a professional perspective

•	Define the Finance of Solidarity from the viewpoint of specific competences, the profession and management and operating standards. 
•	Convert these standards into professional regulations to create a new type of financial institution, within the framework of banking legislation.

4)	Position the concept of the finance of solidarity on the international scenario

Dialogue with credit institutions: make them aware of the concept, help them to distinguish the different types of micro-finance (prebanking or solidarity-based), get them interested in the Finance of Solidarity and make them apply measures aimed at promoting MF enterprises and reinforcing social capital. Suggest that they accept longer terms for reaching financial stability for MF enterprises that are clearly acting within a context of general interest.

5)	Obtain national policies including tax benefits for the finance of solidarity

Obtain tax benefits for solidarity-based savers and solidarity-based financial instruments that promote these initiatives, increasing social capital and tending towards a sustainable solidarity-oriented society.

6)	Enlarge the network of “allies” of the Finance of Solidarity

•	Maintain dialogue in the FINSOL forum, use the Internet and include case studies in the forum. 
•	Give “faces” to the Finance of Solidarity so that it is easy to identify those who put it into practice. 
•	Link this network to others with similar aims.

7)	Promote the Finance of Solidarity between all agents

•	Organise the promotion of the Finance of Solidarity by publications, participation in international conferences and seminars. 
•	Organise lobbies. Attempt to influence not only the decision-makers, but also other professionals, to create alliances for a quality finance system.

"Towards Sustainable Finance" Workshop 
Paths for getting out of the labyrinth of financial globalisation
Finance Observatory (www.obsfin.ch)
Taking into account the change in the role of finance is essential in order to obtain a clear view of the stakes in play concerning finance. It is obvious that the political, institutional and conceptual mechanisms at work when finance was confined to playing an exclusively technical role are no longer adapted to the current situation. The time when it was possible to regulate and perceive finance as being isolated from social concerns has come to an end, since it has become an increasingly important component.
Thus certain paths can be discerned on the horizon. They all have as common denominator the aim of seeking better correspondence between financial activities and the general good. Each in its own way and a different levels of action, they seek to reduce the hold of financial globalisation, first with respect to mentalities, and then economies. They seek to increase openness to the Other in economic and financial activity and thus to strengthen social cohesion threatened by financial globalisation.
1.	Strengthening subsidiarity in the organisation of economic activity  at local, regional and global levels	
As in the political sphere, the principle of subsidiarity should be included in the organisation of the economy locally, regionally and globally. This does not mean a return to the all powerful nation-state, but recognising that excessive dependence is dangerous. Subsidiarity applied to the currency market, for example, raises the question of its legitimacy, since the daily lives of many become the object of speculation by a few by virtue of market fluctuations. Likewise with commodity markets, where speculative transactions are frequently those that occur most. The application of subsidiarity in the realm of the economy undoubtedly calls for decisions from political communities; just as importantly it demands self-discipline from individuals, companies and societies.
2.	Stabilisation of relations between the three major currencies by international agreements 
The world economy is now framed by a triangle of currencies: the US dollar, the Yen and the Euro. The relations between these currencies are governed by the market, whereas the other currencies are satellites gravitating around one of the main three or around the entire system. These secondary currencies are sometimes used as a means of expressing tension between the major currencies, resulting in fluctuations that endanger the weakest and most vulnerable economies.
The application of subsidiarity has become urgent in order to stabilise these situations. This  could be achieved by international agreements to regulate the relations between the three major currencies and subsequently this would stabilise the secondary currencies. To be credible, such an agreement would have to rely on close collaboration between the three major world powers. A fixed or almost fixed rate exchange system would reduce the weight of one of the major sources of volatility in modern finance, i.e. the currency markets.
3.	Recognition of the monetary and financial market as a universal public utility by a new world structure based on collaboration between the public and private sectors 
The new world financial structure should be based on new principles to replace those stemming from the Bretton Woods conference of 1944. On the one hand, it should be resolutely world-wide and not merely inter-governmental. On the other hand, it must explicitly cover money and finance and be invested with the power to regulate and monitor, especially regarding criminal finance. Finally, the new structure should be based on close collaboration between the public and private sectors. The latter should bear considerable responsibility – something that is completely new – for the smooth running of this structure. Such co-responsibility, whose procedures remain to be found,  is the only way of ensuring that the financial system serves its users, whether big or small, and thus put an end to the current situation, which results in the contrary of good governance.

4.	Setting up mechanisms to prevent the financial exclusion of individuals, companies and states and the reorganisation of debts 
Finance generates exclusion at both international level (the Third Word Debt) and within countries. It is vital to set up mechanisms for inclusion. This does not mean abolishing finance or undermining the discipline that it imposes on the actors involved, simply ensuring that the verdicts leading to exclusion by declared by finance are not definitive and that a procedure exists for return to economic life. The procedures of defeasance and reorganisation of past debts belong to the same logic. Furthermore, the world requires bankruptcy procedures for companies and individuals that give them a chance, contrary to measures that condemn them definitively. The non-repayment of an "intolerable" debt should not only be accepted as a principle of international finance, but also of national finance, with recourse, for example, to a court of arbitration.  
Whatever method is chosen, it would result in sharing the risk of non-repayment more fairly than the current system between the debtor and creditor. Moreover, setting up “return” mechanisms would decrease the importance of finance.
Responsible financial decisions in the service of the common good 
No regulation can be efficient if it is not accompanied by awareness by the actors involved of the fact that their responsibilities go beyond purely legal factors and encompass taking account of the other, of he that can neither punish nor reward. Seeking the common good demands opening out to the Other, to he that has no voice in the affair. Better consideration of the other in normal financial decisions would be a major step towards acting for the common good. It should be done without harming financial activity itself, since it is an essential activity of the economy. Three areas in which explicit consideration of the Other appear most urgent are those of loans, investment and inter-mediation.
5.	Towards responsible indebtedness: The relationship between the external debt of poor countries and the corruption of their leaders must be tackled. One of the ways of reducing impunity in the short term would consist in including a clause in loan contracts whereby, in the case of renegotiation of the debt, the lending authority would have the right to pursue the persons responsible for embezzling the resources loaned. This procedure, though imperfect, would make it clear to the leaders of governments that, should they abuse their positions, it is in their personal interest to ensure that they do so is such a way as to avoid the debt from becoming intolerable for their country.
6.	Towards responsible investment: Responsible investment is one important element among others to ensure that investments and financial operations are carried out in the service of the common good. A charter of good conduct drawn up on the basis of several initiatives in this area would lead to ensuring that listed companies respect such principles. Other approaches calling for joint collaboration could also be considered. In parallel, in line with the example of the United Kingdom, specific demands regarding investments should be imposed on pension funds whose role in long-term investment cannot be denied. For all that, no legal or institutional solution can replace the need for operators to act, by taking the common good in account as one of the decisive factors of their daily decisions. 
7.	Towards responsible remunerations: One of the major reasons for the volatility of financial markets – and the harmful consequences it causes to the rest of the economy – is due to the salaries of traders and operators. Furthermore, these salaries should be stabilised by a drastic reduction of the part linked to volume, turnover, profits and capitalisation. Several approaches can be taken here: encouragement for self-regulation (e.g. the Basle Committee and the Cook ratio), drawing up a charter to which institutions can adhere, spreading ethical principles and best practices.
All these efforts converge to form a virtuous circle that takes better account of long term economic and social requirements. Obviously, the transformation mentioned above requires radical changes in the current practices of the financial world, which, protected by the philosophy of market solvency, profits from the unforeseen.

SOCIAL MONEY AS A TRIGGER FOR THE NEW ECONOMIC PARADIGM 
Social Money Workshop – Summary written by Heloisa Primavera
We strongly tried to avoid the “single thought” trap or the “best alternative” issue, in which some “well-succeeded” forms slip in, and went on to get inspiration from local experiences that tell about their “knowledge” based on practices developed by the actors themselves, a condition for their sustainability.

1.	Highlight and spread the different types of experience of fair trade to other forms of economy in solidarity and to the rest of society, comparing specific index in each case: exchange, social money exchange, mutual credit, time banks. Recover the positive and negative points of each model, featuring their various contexts of application.

2.	Deeply study the uses of social money, so as to understand its evolving logic, its constraints and possibilities to make headway with the construction of an economy in solidarity that benefits from these advantages, without succumbing to the temptation of premature centralization. Cultivate the local-global: promote local experiences which aim at cultivating the local resources and the empowerment of people and small organizations, which form the sustainability processes, inserting them into the main context of neo-liberal globalization, in order to make its impact less strong.

3.	Monitor the processes on course, from an instance acknowledged by the PSES, so as to establish network communication among the different existing experiences at present. This is important, principally in Latin America, where there are better opportunities to follow the socio-economy in solidarity model, for which there is already an initial systematization that allows gathering the advantages and avoiding the problems presented by some of the pioneering models.

4.	Implement a continued training system inside the local systems, in order to upkeep an exchanging information line among the different experiences, both within each initiative and in the establishment of new strategic alliances.

5.	Integrate the different stages of the production process of economy in solidarity: mass production, fair trading (with social money) and ethical consumption for the training programmes. Renew the ways to solve the tension between “individual desire” fed by lack of consumption and the “compulsion” for the construction of a transforming social model: one that tends to cultivate simultaneously the ingenious, supportive and political abilities.

6.	Show and value women’s role in the processes of social networks creation, from home to community.

7.	Question the volunteer’s work as a part of economy in solidarity’s reformulation, following the criterion of social money. Highlight the role of volunteer work in the traditional economic conception: covering up the value of unpaid work. Trigger businesses that help solve the chronic phenomenon of volunteers’ “turnover by breakdown”.

8.	Integrate forms stemming from micro-economy in solidarity into medium forms of pre-existing networks. Highlight local experiences and create gradual processes to set up innovations, to make them sustainable and adequate to each community. Articulate exchange networks with other in-solidarity or associate managed (State, civil, market) networks.

9.	Optimize the existing websites and the electronic forums to monitor common interest projects: www.socioeco.org; http://money.socioeco.org; www.redlases.org.ar,www.redesolidaria.org.br,rgses@yahoo.egroups.com, www.economiasolidaria.net among others. Avoid duplicating and overspreading means. Organize virtual debates and meetings with closing dates and the publication of the results in paper media. 

10.	Create and carry out a Socio-economy Training Programme specifically directed to Latin America, taking into account its long-run experience. Elaborate materials for the Economy Literacy Programme, with hand-outs for the beginners and tutors, videos, workbooks, best practices manual. Include new issues to work on: “the consumer’s power: ethical consumption”, “Advantages of collective and sustainable production”, “Fair trade: local and south-to-south”, “Social Capital: how to build in our community”, Surveys: social, organizational, financial and cultural. Socio-economy in solidarity files: clubs and exchanging networks, LETs, SELs, Time Banks.

11.	Use Local Development as a place to set up Socio-economy in solidarity. Highlight experiences, reports, limits, and possibilities to recover and follow up projects: integrated and sustainable development networks.

12.	Define exchanging projects between universities to ensure public and governmental agenda with issues on economy in solidarity, innovations in monetary theories. Give international support to governments that experiment with economy in solidarity for local development.

13.	Deepen the study of proposals related to hybrid systems of social and official money. Create strategies to enable the use of consumer’s and money powers to strengthen economy in solidarity. Create a strong internal flow network among the movements concerned with the three stages of economic production (production-trading-consumption) already included or likely to be converted to the socio-economy in solidarity: ethical, responsible, sustainable. Create strategic alliances with productive sectors. Build and publish examples (“show cases”) with rigid studies that highlight their historical and cultural particularities, their successful aspects, and mainly, their difficulties.

 DEBT AND ADJUSTMENT

BREAKTHROUGHS

1.	Toward participatory budget mechanisms. Promote community participatory mechanisms in budget planning. Civil society participation in budget planning will guarantee that the basic social needs, accumulated for so long – the social debt – be given priority over financial debt service.

2.	The conditionalities should be imposed and sustained by the debtors. Conditionality should be reconsidered and defined by civil society. Otherwise, it appears that civil society imposes no conditions at all. A condition for society to benefit from debt reduction or cancellation is that there be transparency about funds released by reduction or cancellation. Such funds should be used primarily for socioeconomic recovery and the elimination of the factors of impoverishment – including domestic and external overindebtedness, unjust terms of trade, the inappropriate tax structure that saves the rich from paying taxes, incentives and subsidies to foreign investors and lack of democratic control of the country’s development process. This should be achieved through democratic participation of civil society in those countries.

3.	Conditions related to economic, social and cultural rights are proposed as the basis for economic adjustment. This includes the democratization of the control and management of productive goods and respect for the dignity of work, including the respect for women and children. 

4.	Promote the audit of overindebtedness with social participation and transparency, as well as international arbitration mechanisms empowered to acknowledge debt illegitimacy. There is a need for considering the subject of international arbitration and seeing how it can be related to the subject of the illegitimacy of the loans. A comprehensive audit of the overindebtedness process through local tribunals, with the participation of civil society organizations to guarantee the transparency of information to all citizens will be the instrument to distinguish the legitimate from the illegitimate debt and to substantiate the case for the international court of arbitration.

5.	Strengthen the international campaign to end SAPs. Transform SAPRIN in a global campaign that calls for an end to structural adjustment programmes. Such campaign should also focus the costs for the poor of official debt reduction programs, such as the HIPC initiative and ESAF, all of which are thoroughly dominated by the creditors. It should include among its demands the consideration of reparation to compensate for the economic, social and environmental damage incurred by the people – above all, Africa - to be directed into rebuilding society and the environment and into restoring human dignity. 

6.	Protection for the basic needs of the debtors is fundamental. Areas of negotiation should be established in which creditors do not have the leading role. 

7.	National referenda on the debts should be promoted. Establish civil consultations all over the world, like in Spain and Brazil, as a way of creating awareness through a referendum on the cancellation of the debts and the policies of deindebtedness capable of cancelling the illegitimate debt and paving the way for socioeconomic and human development.

8.	Churches should remain supportive. The different churches should not remain apart from these initiatives, but should continue to support them. Among the goals proposed by Christians is that to recognize ourselves in all permanently poor pilgrims, immigrants, social outcasts, victims of discrimination, ensuring we all enjoy the same rights.

9.	Illegitimate debts should be clearly defined and legally recognized. Illegitimate debt should be defined as:
•	Debt that violates human rights, or the payment of which would have a negative impact on the population,
•	Debt created by illegitimate debtors or creditors acting in an illegal manner,
•	Debt established for illegitimate purposes, such as the debt derived from the cold war,
•	Debt created illegitimately. This includes private debts that become public debts,
•	All debt that is created to re-finance the above.

10.	An arbitration system in which creditors and debtors respect basic social spending in the debtor country. The idea of international arbitration is based on protecting fiscal spending against a decrease in income. This would imply an arbitration system in which creditors and debtors negotiate in an independent area, based on respecting basic social spending in the debtor’s country. This is not possible to date. An international financial code should also be established to ensure the legal independence of the process, since the laws now applicable to loans belong to the national legal systems of the creditors. It is important to use the historic reference of Germany in 1953 and the Hoover year in 1931 and to introduce the notions of (a) Force majeure and (b) Acts of God. These concepts are used in foreign trade but not in loans. They should be introduced to establish fairer and more fluid financial relations in the future.

11.	The Ponzi scheme, where debtors capitalise unpaid interests and the debt thus increases, should be declared illegitimate. In theory it does not exist, and in theory banks can not make loans that are not going to be paid, but this does indeed happen, although it should not continue. A standstill mechanism should be created to ensure that unpaid debt will not grow over and above normal interests and that it will be payable. Otherwise, liquidity problems could turn into bankruptcy, due to the world financial architecture.

12.	The IFIs should recover their dimension of multilateral development institutions guaranteeing equitable world stability. There is a debate on whether the IFIs should continue to exist, return to what they used to be or disappear. The proposal is for the IFIs to recover their dimension of multilateral development institutions guaranteeing equitable world stability, instead of being an authoritarian world government, answerable to no-one. Multilateralism is important, in view of the unilateralism that has arisen in the United States since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

International trade workshop

From the failure of the WTO in Seattle

… to the conditions for global governance

RONGEAD, November 2001

Breakthroughs

History is making it increasingly evident: globalisation is a fact. If we fight it, we get into the wrong discussion. If we ignore it, we run the risk of suffering from its evil effects, and being at the mercy of terrorism, criminal organisations and the law of the strongest.
Trade, with the WTO, could be the starting point for the creation of global governance that covers other aspects: environment, labour, the fight against poverty, literacy, the prevention of conflicts, justice … The apocalyptic events of September 11, 2001 have proved it: together we have to create an interactive, interdependent, and above all, balanced planet based on solidarity, if we wish for a future of global peace and prosperity for future generations.

1	The reform of the WTO: a breakthrough towards global governance.

2	The Marrakesh agreements and their application have to be evaluated. 

3	A new round of negotiations should start. Its results will be related to the evaluation.

4	The ambiguous rulings in different agreements must be clarified to avoid controversies. 

5	There has to be a negotiated reform of the DSB, whether or not a new round is started. This implies, among other things:

- having professionals in the groups of experts and in the appeal body : 
The members of the groups of experts and the appeal body do not depend on governments and they must be full-time professionals. They must be impartial, independent and have good judgement. 

- right to receive legal assistance :
Within the WTO, a legal aid office has recently been created for developing countries, thanks to financing by some Developed and developing countries. This initiative should promote negotiations on the right to legal aid for developing countries within the DSB framework, to help to re-balance its obligations.

- reform of the sanction system: towards “collective” and/or “proportional” sanctions :
The current mechanism is primarily based on the following possibility: the member that wins the controversy can suspend trade concessions so that the member that loses has to obey the conclusions approved and validated by the group of experts. For developed countries, the cancellation of their concessions does not represent an economic cost large enough to force them to apply the conclusions reached by the group of experts. In this case, all concessions would have to be removed, consisting of retaliation applied by all members. This process is technically complex but politically necessary.
Proportional sanctions allow the country to be punished from a budgetary perspective by means of a fine in proportion to the GNP. This would have a limited negative impact for poorer countries, which would affect private producers in a less direct and random fashion.

- Listen to third parties, including NGOs 
Article 10 has to be modified to allow for the involvement of civil society organisations (explicitly defending the common good and not private interests) within the framework of the DSB procedure, particularly when they consider that a measure established within the DSB framework could damage commitments relating to development and the environment on an international scale.  

6	Promote negotiations that are as transparent as possible
Suitable consultation mechanisms should be established by NGOs to make sure that transparency is evident on the levels where it is necessary and demanded.
 
7	In favour of an abritration body, independent of the WTO, created by the UN
The other components of global governance (environment, finance, money, work, health, human rights, etc.) and their relationships can not be forgotten on a global scale. How can these relationships be controlled, especially when the other components do not have an instrument to solve controversies?
There should be an international arbitration body, created by the UN, to solve conflicts related to different international agreements. This was in fact proposed by the Havana Charter ... in 1947.

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The events of September 11, 2001 have demonstrated the unacceptable scope of the less-known aspects of globalisation. These elements will reveal a new era, the planetary dimension of social and environmental problems, the less known aspects of globalisation and, above all, new agents such as civil society without borders. 

A civil society without borders has to face the challenge of creating a multilateral trade system at the service of Humanity!

THE REGULATION OF INTERNATIONAL TRADE IN THE SERVICE OF FOOD SOVEREIGNTY AND SECURITY

The process of liberalising trade by reducing or eliminating trade barriers with respect to agricultural products started on 1 January 1995, with the WTO Agreement on Agriculture. In fact this agreement covered far more than trade barriers and directly affects national agricultural policies, since it regulates the use by countries of measures applied to protect and support agriculture. 
This agreement was very unfair from the outset. It legitimises expensive forms of support that can only be used by rich countries (such as direct aid), it takes no account of production methods (sustainable or not) or farmers, since it favours agriculture for export, and it privileges intensive farming to the detriment of small farming.
Agricultural activity cannot be considered as merely the production of merchandise. The most efficient agriculture policies have always aimed to protect farmers fromm the fluctuations of the world market rather than to deregulate markets. Agriculture is at the heart of food security. It provides jobs and rural development. It permits the management or resources, the fight against desertification and, when well applied, it plays a major role in environmental protection.
Nonetheless, international trade is necessary for tropical products and to supply countries with food current and long-term food shortages.

The principle of food sovereignty 

We emphasise the principle of food sovereignty so that agriculture can fulfil all its missions, especially that of food security. Every government should have the power to choose how it supplies itself with food products in the common national or regional interest. Compliance with this principle demands rules for each country that should be adopted globally:
•	Freedom of choice of agricultural policy measures for every country as a function of its societal choices determined democratically. 
•	The right to barriers at borders to protect family farming: this right, which has been, and still is, widely used by developed countries, must be extended to all countries. 
•	Prohibition of dumping, i.e. the sale of products at below cost price, including social and environmental costs. In particular, all forms of direct and indirect support that lead to the sale of products at dumping prices should be eliminated. 
•	Offset the structural instability of world market prices: this entails both stabilising the income of small farmers for products exported on the world market (e.g., tropical drinks, spices, cotton) and guaranteeing conditions of supply on world markets at reasonable prices for countries with structural and conjunctural deficits. This requires implementing production controls in agri-exporting countries, In order to permit better regulation of prices. 
•	The promotion of sustainable agricultural practices: to be sustainable, farming systems must take into account local, environmental and social constraints. The myth of the "technological miracle" imported from outside is an illusion. 
•	The right to refuse techniques and technologies judged inappropriate: a country should be able to refuse the introduction of production techniques (or products stemming from these techniques), such as GMOs, growth hormones in livestock breeding, dangerous phytosanitary products, etc. on the basis of the principle of precaution.

Regulate markets 

International trade is indispensable either for certain products or for the supply of countries with structural or conjunctural deficits. The latter should be able to obtain supplies on the world market at reasonable and stable prices. Food aid cannot be considered as a substitute for deficient markets and should be reserved for emergency situations. Practices used by exporting countries to win over shares of markets, such as export subsidies, export loans, and unlimited support given to farmers in developed countries, which are indirect export subsidies, result in prices equivalent to dumping. These practises must be abolished. This entails that the regulation of international trade should be entrusted to a multilateral organisation that is transparent, democratic and with the means of sanctioning the divergences that we have mentioned with the rules, without calling the principle of food sovereignty into question. 

Radical reform of the WTO

This organisation could be the World Trade Organisation, provided that it undergoes radical reform. It should only concern itself with trade, be subject to other international conventions and texts (economic, social and cultural rights, conventions on the environment) and not intervene directly in the formulation of national agricultural and food policies. Its dispute settlement body should be reformed to become a more independent tribunal and permit sanctions that can be applied to every member state.

Forge international alliances 

Regarding current debates on agriculture and the WTO, it appears that since Seattle, the developing countries have taken up interesting positions that we proposed as long ago as 1996. The proposal for a development box that permits developing countries to use certain measures goes in this direction. It would receive even more support if it took into account the necessary protection of small farmers in developed countries.
In the combat against unbridled economic liberalisation and the current misdeeds of the WTO versus small farmers, we feel it is important to forge wide-ranging alliances to push for changes in the right direction and avoid isolation. Consequently we support the proposals made by developing countries that base their arguments on food sovereignty and the protection of small farmers. It is up to civil society to put pressure on the negotiations so that they take into account the convergent interests of small farmers around the world against those of industrial and productivist agriculture.

COMPLETELEY SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT,
AN ALTERNATIVE TO NEO-LIBERALIST GLOBALISATION

"Sustainable development" Workshop
Post meeting summary following the general meeting of the Socio-Economy of Solidarity Workshop at Findhorn

Compiled in Spanish by Mario Eduardo Firmenich

1)	To move towards a new system of procedures and institutions for world government.
2)	To reform the system of international institutions in such a way as to favour a certain democratic balance between political, economic, judicial, etc world powers. Propose the reform of the International finance system, by starting with the transformation of the General Assembly of the United Nations into a world parliament, with elected members and a weighted system of proportional representation. All international organisations must inform and submit accounts to the Assembly General. The latter must convene: a) an international conference to reform international finance institutions, so that they can stabilise economies and facilitate a fairer globalisation b) an international conference to reform the WTO in order to facilitate fair trade.
3)	Thus, political institutions of a new world order will generate a permanent wide public sector, defined by natural resources (the atmosphere, space, the oceans and the biodiversity) which are subjected to negative externalities and by public goods (international peace, including cultures)
4)	A global regulation of Principles of Protection for the eco-system, humanity, the moderation of consumption, precaution, protection of diversity,citizenship, minimising pollution emissions, cooperation, “ polluter-payer ”, not only at the microeconomic level but also at the level of States and continental organisations, making sure that the latter do not benefit from a licence to pollute and denaturalise.  The image of “ global citizenship ”  can help to contribute to correcting the imbalance between capital and labour at the global level; that which must anchor populations to their region of origin must not be the legal impossibility to emigrate, but the completely sustainable development of their place of origin.
5)	To promote the setting up of an International Tribunal on the Legitimacy of the Foreign Debt of the South. A moratorium until the moment when the distinction is made between legitimate and illegitimate debt allowing the financing of sustainable development processes in the South. In the case of reorganisation, social expenditure must be protected in respect of financial expenditure. In the same way that perpetrators of crimes against humanity merit to be subjected to the decisions of an International Penal Tribunal –in the process of being formed ––, financial delinquents must submit accounts to an International Tribunal of Foreign Debt.
6)	Establish indicators of social and ecological debt that measure the ecological and social debt and include them in international conferences about debt. Redefine the concept of humane development and develop new indicators that take into account the conservation of the environment, social durability, and non-discrimination of people and the effects of negative externalities.
7)	Find a solution to the debt crisis in the South, using the precedent set in Germany in 1953, including the limitation of repayments to 3.5% of public budgets. Countries in debt would only be able to pay back their debts if they attain a surplus of foreign trade and a balanced balance of payments.
8)	Create openness in national financial systems and abolish tax havens. Private institutions must adhere to an international charter that  defines the responsibilities of international loan organisations.
9)	Actions must be defined to oppose the monopolistic offensive, supported by the major nations through patents, which at the same time appropriate popular knowledge in function of economic  interests and attempt to impose their rights to patent knowledge and goods which constitute the social heritage.
10)	At the same time as setting up systems of sustainable production and more rational processes of change in land use, it is necessary to optimise the mechanisms of alert, prevention, resolution and mitigation of natural disasters and those caused by human factors.
11)	Establish a tax on international financial transactions in order to stabilise monetary transactions, to contribute to the financing of sustainable development and in order to eliminate poverty. Create importation taxes targeted against social and ecological dumping.
12)	A possible reform (albeit insufficient) to mitigate the materialist culture and the production of symbolic value  for merchandise would be the Introduction of a tax on advertising revenues for the media and a progressive tax on income from activities associated with advertising (up to 80% or 90% of revenues). Furthermore, this would encourage the independence of means of communication with respect to their advertising revenue, and to have a press that has fewer links to the interests of corporations and other controlling interests. The creation of alternative channels of interactive social communication must play an important role in the promotion of sustainable development.
13)	A solid base for political sustainability requires a re-definition of the role of municipalities; in effect it is in the local domain that community life is most directly  expressed. To do this, it is necessary to promote participation at neighbourhood level for all issues linked to the improvement of the family, social and institutional quality of life, and also to favour the setting up of participatory budgeting. 
14)	 Education for sustainable development must be set in its context, by putting the emphasis on new forms of needs perception and resource use. This should be concerned with: a) training in terms of values that strengthen the understanding of the responsibility  necessary for a sustainable development that is all-embracing and b) training in the knowledge necessary for solving the problems associated with sustainability.  The formation of useful knowledge pre-supposes sustainable forms of behaviour, such as watching over the conservation of drinking water and fertile soil, slowing down the advance of desertification or preserving public health, not only known epidemics but also new illnesses springing from technological manipulation of food production or broughtabout by the poor quality of life associated with the urban industrial civilisation. Traditional knowledge accumulated by humanity over the millenniums has to be re-valued. It is necessary to globalise the issue of sustainable development as soon as the student enters the school; the content should be given in an interdisciplinary way, putting together the concepts of Sustainable Development/ Non Sustainable Growth, Social inclusion/ Social Exclusion, Responsible Consumption/Irresponsible Consumption, Globalisation of Solidarity /Foreign Debt of the South, Respect for the Environment/Flow of Raw Materials and Energy towards the North, etc.

WORKSHOP 13 – ECONOMIC POLICIES, IDEOLOGIES AND GEO-CULTURAL DIMENSIONS

BREAKTHROUGHS

1. Make the State more democratic as a guarantee for civil rights. Consolidate the state as a space of democratic guarantee for conflicts, by ensuring that the diversity of actors and themes, such as social economics, environment, peace, human rights, gender, races, etc. can express themselves politically through participating at state institution decisional levels. If all these intentions have no room to reveal themselves and to promote debates inside the state, this is because the latter is at present far away from democratic rules, and because it persists in annulling differences by refusing to recognise civil rights and, also, by cancelling public spheres of activity.

In the face of this context, in which we live today, marked by mistrust of mechanisms of direct democracy, of Republican powers remote from social aspirations, and from the reductionist predominance of a dominant single way of thought, civil society must assume forms of representation that go beyond traditional political representation and which guarantee the state as a public space where social interests are represented. Materialise the role of a democratic state; on the basis of dynamics created by new relations between state and society, this is the big challenge to get round the crisis that has made its appearance today.

2. Political participation to guarantee a democratic state. Today, political participation amplifies the traditional activities of voting, of being militants in political parties and other social institutions, by sketching out a democratic ideal that presupposes citizens, who are attentive to the common weal and intensely interested by direct or indirect forms of participation in political decisions. Real participative practices for orientating democracy are those that represent and incorporate social demands under various forms in an attempt to modify government agendas. In this sense, participation may be understood as making management more democratic and dividing the powers of political decision. The objective of democratic participation is to build alternative forms of power, which, by acting outside constitutional limits, tend to transform them.

3. Promote participation in management of local public spheres. Experiments on democratic management, which are being carried out at present in localities in several countries, are a reflection of the efforts made by progressive administrations and organised civil society to take advantage of the best conditions of “governability” they possess and to occupy space left empty by the inefficiency of central governments. Municipalities, the entities that are closest to citizens, are best suited to reply to social demands through more appropriate solutions, by enabling communities to be mobilised for implementing policies that directly affect their daily life and be committed to them. Local space is considered as space with a potential not only for forming sector-based committees on public policies, but also for a whole range of experiments and alternative production systems based on the principle of social economics. One of the present challenges is developing these practices in other local, political spheres of activity.

4. Promote participation in local and national election processes.  The most successful democratic management practices take place in places where communities are organised in municipal zones to be able to discuss demands which, from their point of view, are priorities for their communities, and which would be satisfied by using municipal budgets. This political instrument for direct social participation not only means that communities must be organised, but also that citizenship be reinforced. The success of these experiments generally coincides with the arrival of progressive administrations and political parties that have democratic ideals.

5. Promote participation in budgetary and tax policies. Participative practices in budgeting, which mainly consist in participating in resource assignment, must also be developed at other times and for other purposes. Social participation must not be restricted to selecting resources and allocating them proportionally and coherently in the public domain and for sector-based policies. Other control and tax mechanisms must be put into practice, so that budgetary proposals that have been voted are really applied in accordance with deliberations approved during discussion. In this case, we are talking about social presence in the complete process of implementing budgets.  Viewed from this angle, civil society's participation must be developed to influence the tax policies that govern resources. 

6. Work on developing and adopting new indicators.  Several workshops have pointed out the need to create information that illustrates the disastrous results of neo-liberal policies. Although it may appear to be a paradox, the official economic growth indicators, such as the Gross National Product – GNP - and the Gross Domestic Product – GDP –, emphasise economic growth in countries where the amount of social exclusion is increasing. Transparency and statistical amplitude could be obtained through public institutions administered under civil society control. New indicators would be published thanks to an integrated vision of social and environmental economy and would give information on the social and environmental costs of economic policies and investments.

7. Draw up economic policies based on new data. Promote education on interdependent, communal values of cooperation as a prerequisite for consolidating the project for a new, profoundly human, political economy, especially in cultural milieus. This must be materialised by economic policies in coherence with the objectives that have been set.  Develop economic policies as a means of supplying material bases for well-being and the development of individuals, peoples and nations by respecting biological, human and cultural diversity in dynamic and durable cooperation with nature. Amplify participation mechanisms in sectors of production, money, trade and finance by trying, above all, to respect human requirements, durable social development and civil rights.

 Summary of the "women and economy" workshop (version 2 p.)

This proposal booklet is the synthesis of the works of the "women and economy" workshop in which fifty people participated via discussion on an electronic forum (women@socioeco.org) and two meetings, one at Paris on 9-10-11 October 2000 and the other at Havana on 9-10-11 April 2001.  It was written by Cécile Sabourin, with the collaboration of Josée Belleau.

1- A brief summary of observations and criticisms 
The specific position of women in society, in which they take an over-preponderant place among the poor, the disadvantaged and the "voiceless", and the fact that they are largely responsible for the reproduction of the human race, causes them to take a particularly critical view of society and economic problems. Social and political movements that give women the possibility of fighting for their survival and attaining their objectives in different economic spheres have existed for a long time. They are active in every issue of how life is organised in society, but they are often excluded from the places where political and economic decisions are made. The unequal relations and domination in the lives of couples and families make the effective participation of women even more complicated.
The initiatives of women respond to contextualised needs, i.e. the physical, political, economic and cultural environment is decisive regarding these needs and initiatives. The swarm of initiatives in certain sectors and milieus demonstrates the disaster caused and dictated by "dominant" economic philosophy on human development.  These initiatives shed light on aspects of the economy that up to now have not been recognised and taken into account. Women also want to express the urgent need for another form of individual and collective development that recognises:
•	equality between women and men,
•	the spiritual, mental physical and social dimensions of the individual,
•	harmonious and balanced development between the "centre" and the "periphery";  between the North, South, East and West;  within the territory of a country, etc.
More specifically, the proposals put forward by the "Women and Economy" Workshop aim at meeting three challenges:
•	building a new economic paradigm based on the analysis and social actions of women,
•	develop methodological tools to gain recognition for these actions,
•	highlight the activities of women and develop social actions in the field.

2-Proposals 
Using as basis the social actions carried out by women, the Workshop has identified eight principles, directions essential for deepening and enhancing the foundations of a new economic paradigm. These foundations are intimately related to the "reconceptualisation" of basic economic concepts. The eight principles are follows: 
•	The multifunctionalism of the "productive" activities and work done by women; 
•	The elimination of barriers (decompartmentalisation) and the sharing of work and responsibilities; 
•	Recognition of the need to conciliate roles and activities and fair sharing of time and tasks;  
•	Recognition of traditional know-how and experience acquired outside the sphere of the "dominant" economy;
•	The organisation of production and life on the basis of the time and needs of persons and communities;
•	A hierarchy of priorities that takes into account people's lives and their identities as human beings;
•	Transparency in activities at all levels.
Proposal 1: Deconstruct myths (stubborn prejudices that convey ideas of female inferiority and non-productivity)
We propose to deconstruct the myths that generate negative images of women as well as the obstacles to their participation, their credibility and legitimacy in many, if not all, societies.  This is the first step to their elimination.
Proposal 2: Reconceptualise basic economic concepts 
Among the economic concepts to be reconceptualised, women give priority to the following: the human being, her/his position in the economy in the widest meaning;  nature;  time; the economy, the economy in all its diversity; growth; value;   wealth;  work;  the conditions of trade; productivity.

Priority directions were identified at the Findhorn meeting.  They are inspired by the proposals formulated by several workshops. 
•	Recognition of the different forms of work and breaking of the link between wealth and financial/material accumulation, breaking the link between work and income, since it leaves no choice other than to offer one's services under continually degrading conditions due to economic globalisation and growing competition between persons and territories.
•	The development of production chains on the basis of needs and potentials identified first at local level.  This calls into question the choices made in terms of consumption, production and trade dictated by the major multinational corporations.
Proposal 3: Formulate adapted and diversified indicators of wealth and work
Indicators must be modified in order to bring to light the traditional activities carried out by women, the voluntary activities of both women and men, the immaterial aspects of the quality of life, activities that create social cohesion, the importance of free, convivial and "non-productive" trade.  This requires:
•	developing the means to account for them fairly, by using standards other than measurement by money,
•	giving women the means to influence decisions in economic spheres and make known, discuss and accept a new economic paradigm.
Proposal 4: Contribute to bringing into contact and consolidating existing networks active in the area of "women and the economy"
The synergy between potential allies and possible partners on the basis of similar and complementary objectives is essential in order to forge economic relationships collectively in view to transforming the present situation. This supposes work, time, dialogues and the genuine "political" will of the people and networks concerned.
Proposal 5: Claim creative expression and diversity in economic initiatives 
The "dominant" economy and the technocratic State are two very inhibiting barriers to the expression of creativity and diversity in economic activities. Supporting women to express their creativity requires:
•	backing approaches and processes aimed at developing women's identities and capacities;
•	demanding legislation, policies and administrative measures essential for permitting fair access to, and sharing of, physical resources (including ownership, obtaining ownership and the succession of land), as well as material, technological and monetary resources and knowledge.  
•	Encourage interest in procedures used in trade based on social actions and the values of women.
Proposal 6: Develop political actions to support the development of social economic relations 
Decisions capable of changing economic relations largely depend on the existence of a political project, thus it is vital to encourage the active participation of women in political procedures. The resulting challenge for women can be expressed by the following directions:
•	the development of mechanisms to get the "dominant" spheres to use social practices;
•	the development of communication and awareness aimed at public opinion, the diversification of targets (other than activists and specialists) and means (e.g., press articles, television, etc.);
•	encouragement of women and women's groups to speak out, and consequently provide support for their activities (teaching tools, arenas for debate, resources for co-ordination and communications, etc.);
•	setting up places for diverse forms of expression (speech, art, festivities, etc.) adapted to contexts, equipped physical facilities, places for gatherings permitting shared and public expression;
•	developing mechanisms to permit participation in decision-making levels having authority over the place of women in the economy and the inclusion of solidarity and justice between men and women in economic relations at local, national and international levels.

Workshop 15: Economy of solidarity

The economy of solidarity is the activities of production, distribution and consumption that helps to democratise the economy by means of citizens’ commitments on a local and global scale. The economy of solidarity is practised in different ways on all the continents. It includes the different ways in which people organise themselves to create their own employment resources or to access quality goods and services, with dynamics based on reciprocity and solidarity that bring individual interests together with the general interest. In this sense, the economy of solidarity is not a sector of the economy, but a global process including initiatives in most economic sectors. 

The economy of solidarity, since it is based on a different logic of production, distribution or consumption, examines the predominant representation of the market-based society. As a project to be defended and promoted, the economy of solidarity attempts to present an alternative to the model of capitalist development based on neoliberalism. 

The main proposals resulting from the exchanges of opinion in the electronic forum, the meeting in Paris in March and the Findhorn encounter in June, 2001, refer to conceptual representations, to the practices of the individuals, groups and organisations related to the economy of solidarity, and to the kind of pressure that has to be brought to bear on local, national and international political and financial institutions. They can be summarised as follows: 

Create wealth and economic indicators (multi-dimensional) for another development model based on the democratisation of economic and political institutions.

1.	Consolidate non-monetary indicators, complementary to the GNP, to show the different types of wealth produced.

2.	Create methods and tools to analyse, measure and value the specific characteristics of businesses related to the social economy of solidarity, such as their social and environmental goals, their ability to share resources and risks, their democratic and participative operations, and the scope of the non-monetary involvement of volunteers and users. The concrete idea is to develop suitable legal frameworks to promote fair relations in family economies, acknowledging the contributions of women and children.

3.	Analyse and systematise the experiences and/or significant proposals of the economy of solidarity as an alternative to the current development model. Some concrete ways in which to respond as a group to new social requirements, at the same time attempting to create a new economy, are as follows: finance of solidarity, fair trade, proximity services, sustainable agriculture, urban management by inhabitants, intercultural restaurants, local exchange systems, etc.

4.	Review international co-operation based on the paradigm of solidarity (producers-consumers, workers-employers), rather than on financial or technical aid. 

5.	Broaden the criteria with which to assess business results (whether the businesses are private, public or belong to the economy of solidarity), integrating the social and environmental impact of their activities and proposing alternative ethical codes.

Consolidate positive experiences and create sustainable systems of production, distribution and consumption among the different components of the economy of solidarity on a local, national and international scale.

6.	Develop areas and tools to organise in the different components of the economy of solidarity in the territory, so that their activities complement each other and reinforce self-administered economic units (particularly integrating financial and technological elements).

7.	Position the different kinds and sectors of the local economy of solidarity in the global scenario, reinforcing experiences and networks by means of circuits of the economy of solidarity, related to other economic, political and social agents in specific territories. These last two proposals are related. The difference between the two is not very clear.

8.	Create new kinds of contracts and financing between the economy of solidarity and the public and/or private sector, especially creating innovative mechanisms to pay for non-remunerated labour.

Promote the acknowledgement of the economy of solidarity as an essential part of multi-dimensional sustainable development. 

9.	Develop the network structuring on a local, national and international scale of the different agents related to the economy of solidarity, so that they are mutually acknowledged as an agent that can contribute to the social and economic development of specific territories and as a promoter of social change.

10.	Bring pressure to bear on multilateral continental institutions (UN, WTO, IMF, World Bank, WLO) so that they review their policies and integrate the economy of solidarity as an inevitable component of sustainable development. Form an international group to bring pressure to bear on the UNDP so that the methods used to measure human development indicators include the aspects of associations and solidarity.

11.	Promote the development of public programmes aimed at family economies that include considerations of solidarity and gender.

12.	Promote and value the economy of solidarity by applying communication, education and information strategies designed to create currents of opinion and facilitate national and international lobbying.

FOOD, NUTRITION AND PUBLIC POLICIES

Persistent and emerging food problems 

The world scene is dominated by major nutritional problems that persist, or are that are starting to emerge, in spite of efforts to remedy them. The following facts come from reports supplied by the nutrition sub-committee of the United Nations and WHO:

•	Foetal malnutrition: 30 millions children in developing countries are born underweight, i.e. 24% of annual births;
•	Over 150 million children of under 5 years old are affected by retarded growth and/or insufficient weight;
•	Nearly 250 millions adults in developing countries, especially women, suffer from malnutrition expressed by insufficient weight;
•	Two billion people are affected by various degrees of shortage of micronutrients, in particular iron, vitamin A, iodine and zinc;
•	Non-transmissible disease related to food - obesity, non-insulin dependent diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, certain cancers – are emerging and/or spreading rapidly in many developing societies;
•	300 million adults are already obese and nearly a billion are overweight. Infantile obesity is increasing in many countries.

Today, over half of the world's population is affected by malnutrition and illnesses related to shortages or excesses of one form or another. In spite of efforts and some progress, the targets set by the major world summits of the 1990s are far from being reached. What is more, the gap between rich and poor is growing both around the world and within countries, with the poorest suffering from increasing malnutrition and bad health.
Scientific research has revealed the enormous burden malnutrition places on human and social development. Progress towards genuine, fairer and sustainable development will greatly depend on how families, governments and the international community deal with nutrition and food issues in the coming decades. Awareness of the stakes is spreading, but many politicians and businesses remain insensitive. What is more, information and action among citizens has been insufficient. Sectors of agriculture and the food industry continue to produce without giving enough concern to the implications of their production on health. The health sector must pay the huge expense of diseases caused by inadequate food and diets. These modes of production and consumption also raise the thorny question of the sustainability of our food system further complicated by the effects of globalisation.

Going beyond a purely medical approach to take a variety of factors into account 

The complex causality of nutritional problems and their close links with political, socio-economic and environmental factors, as well as resource management, require going beyond traditional biomedical approaches and isolated solutions. These have shown their limits in reducing malnutrition, despite the fact that certain actions such as those to promote breast-feeding and improve the supply of micronutrients have proved efficacious and should be continued.
Another, more global and more complex approach is possible in terms of its applications. Initially, it consists of placing nutritional well-being at the centre of lifestyles, production and consumption; this demands rethinking the theoretical and practical foundations of a host of policies and actions. In particular, it implies dealing with human rights in terms of nutrition and the emergence of a new paradigm for world agriculture; thinking in this direction has already begun. 

Making the right to food and nutritional well-being a reality 

- adopt an approach that resituates access to food and nutritional well-being at the centre of lifestyles, production and consumption and which makes nutritional well-being an obligatory component of policies, in particular health, social, agricultural, economic and environment policies.
- social action by individuals and the community associated with continuous education and information to change production methods and progress towards more balanced food and healthier lifestyles.
-	the world-wide promotion of sustainable agricultural and food systems favourable to nutrition, health and well-being,
-	the guaranteed nutritional quality of food that takes into account respect of food culture and preferences.

Set up food and nutrition policies 
	In an integrated, participatory, multi-sectorial public nutrition approach: 
-	Organise national workshops to define and monitor food security policy and nutritional welfare that groups decision-makers, researchers and actors: producers, companies, distributors, consumers and NGOs. 
-	Pursue proven programmes such as the promotion of breast-feeding and the adequate consumption of food supplements and micronutrients;
-	Strengthen regulations on food labelling and the content of food advertising, especially that aimed at children;
-	Tax products with low nutritive value: a low tax to generate funds for preventive actions and to promote health, or else a heavy tax to dissuade the consumption of these products. Countries that apply value added tax could lower it for foods of high nutritional value;
-	Get agriculture to improve the production and consumption of foods rich in micronutrients: vegetable, fruits and leguminous products;
-	Adopt nutritional quality objectives in industrial fabrication and collective catering: less salt, sugar and grease, and more micronutrients and fibres;
-	Continue enriching foods, by taking care that these enriched foods are consumed by those that need them most and that they are appropriate to local traditions;
-	Privilege the fabrication of foods to supplement breast milk by local agri-businesses in situations of limited resources.

This requires setting up nutritional monitoring activities that bring together different actors in society. Action is vital at individual and community levels, associating the young, women and consumers, by getting them to analyse nutritional problems and organise education and communication activities. 

Social Leaders in the 21st Century: Challenges and Considerations
                  							
Fernando Rosero Garcés
         Sebastián Betancourt

I.	Clarifying Concepts

The use of the term “leadership” went through a transformation at the threshold of the 21st century, as social movements and social scientists began to employ the concept in a broader manner, to refer to the men and women, young and old, who motivate and facilitate the organisation of social agents and their activities on a local, national, regional and global scale, as demonstrated by the World Social Forum of Porto Alegre.
The expression “training of social leaders” is currently used to designate the complex processes of education and training for change, which includes the genesis and development of a series of guidelines, and a wide range of educational practises that centre around values such as instrumental knowledge and a wide variety of skills.

II.	Contributions of Social Leaders’ Education and Training Experience

1. Committed to change: It has been affirmed that the education and training experiences studied emerged and developed internally, or in close relation to social movements focused around agricultural modernisation, or the transformation of the field and society toward models of sustainable development. 

2. From a corporate vision to an integral proposal and construction of global citizenship: The background of the “Juventud Agrícola Cristiana (JAC)”, or “Young Christian Farmers”, shows evidence of how the French rural workers movement evolved from being a struggle against Notability and their particular form of domination, through the modernization of practises, toward a proposed integral concept of rural-urban citizenship. Equally, experiences of the Dutch Public Schools illustrate the progression from a peasant corporatist vision to a sectoral integral vision, which later evolved into a holistic vision in which producers and consumers joined together in the common interest of protecting health and the environment. However, the Larzac experience most clearly illustrates this latter tendency, with the move of traditional producers of the 1970s to becoming peasant-workers and settled “neo-rural” workers, alongside the battle against nuclear armament, and the subsequent focus on a proposal for global citizenship.

3. Rupture of paradigms: The model of experiential consideration, as it recognises the value of both popular and scientific knowledge, contradicts the traditional paradigm that assumes a rupture between the two. 

4. Diversity of political cultures: The new practises and thinking follow along the lines of what has become known as platykurtic or chaordic systems culture, apparent in new organisational considerations which are characterised by such factors as: the dynamic play between multiple centres; construction of coalitions between diverse agents; rupture of hierarchies; “gentle” organisational adjustment; work with thematic focuses, and according to the changing dynamic of the global arena. The achievements and results of these systems are very different from traditional models, not only because of limitations in resources (economic, hardware, software, telephone connection), but more importantly due the presence of a corporatist or clientalist political culture.

5. Methodological approaches: The experiences studied show that teaching-learning processes occur through their practise, and develop denotative techniques. However they do not remain as initial practises, as they naturally lead to a pause for reflection as to how to enrich or improve on new practises. 

6. Pedagogical strategies: A generalised contribution to the alternative training experiences of social leaders is the organisation of medium and long-term programs, which centres on themes, levels, and modules. Training instruments have radically changed in recent years, as personal and group, and rational and recreational aspects are combined. This in turn creates a “dynamic force” that feeds local culture and seeks to reproduce new values and identities. 

7. Financing: The financial dependence of the training experience of social leaders puts in question the sustainability of alternative educational programs and their focus. 

 8. Results: The results obtained from the experiences studied are very positive from the viewpoint of the multiplication of experiences, training of social leaders, communication and spreading of information, and the impact on local governments. Nevertheless, there is evidence of limitations in the move from the local and national level to a global scale.

9. Current role of social leaders: Principal roles include: internal and external communication: job creation on a local, national and global scale; internal integration and cohesion; training; a combination of protest and proposal; creation of alternative proposals.

III.	Proposals with a Vision for the Future

The new era requires complete change in the vision and practises of social leaders, that is, in their political culture, given that local challenges depend on global challenges, and the response to international challenges is in action both on a local and global level. 

1. Towards the creation of leaders with synergetic thinking: Social leadership in the 21st century is defined as the capacity to promote collaborative actions that are focused toward collectively constructed projects, that is, the capacity to inter-relate the various forms of capital –particularly the human, social and symbolic– in order to change economic, political and cultural relationships on a local, national or international level. Up until now, social leaders, and other social agents, have been active in areas that were previously defined by groups of local, national or global power, and have attempted to carry out their proposals using the game rules dictated by other groups in power. It is time for those who are committed to change to break free from traditional patterns and participate, in a proactive way, in defining new game rules for various work environments. 

2. Principles of new social leaders: autonomy, reliability, social and gender equality, lawfulness and legitimacy, social responsibility, coherence, broad-mindedness, flexibility and creativity, a new world view, shared leadership, aesthetics, world or global citizenship, and peace building.

3. New roles: the shared creation of a new common ethos; construction of a collective memory; information management; communication strategies; a wide variety of partnerships; teaching-learning.

4. Strategies: capitalization and systemization of experience; promotion of South-South and South-North exchanges of significant experiences in the formation of social leaders: changes in the cultural policy and net practices (inclusion of youth and women that display new ways of thinking and feeling); new pedagogical methods supported by a holistic cosmo-centric vision, that are focused toward the construction of active planetary citizenship that combine contributions from local cultures and scientific and academic knowledge, and that express responsibility for social control; structure and development of a network of centres and spaces for the training of social leaders that fits with training programs of social movements and organisations, schools, secondary schools, universities and higher education programs that are focused toward the development of leaders: financing for education and training activities through a tax on international financial transactions.

IV.	Attachments: Files on experience capitalisation; individuals interviewed; addresses; information sources. 

Santa Cruz de la Sierra, 11 November 2001

AGRARIAN REFORM ,
LAND OWNERSHIP MANAGEMENT
AND ACCESS TO AND MANAGEMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES 

Many of the world's conflicts are still more or less directly related to problems of access to land and access to fishing and coastal areas for fish-farming and other activities. These conflicts are related to:
Insecure access to land and resources: lack of recognition of rights:
-	traditional rights, i.e. the lack of guarantees for farmers and share-croppers and no established rights for hunters and gathers;
-	very unfair distribution of land, leading to the need for agrarian reform;
-	claims made by social movements and ethnic groups such as indigenous communities, to exercise their rights over a territory; 
-	the pillage of fishing resources by industrial fishing along the coasts of developing countries, diminishing the stocks available to local fishermen; 
-	conflicts over land along coasts related to new activities, such as tourism.

We put forward five basic proposals concerning these issues:

1) the rehabilitation of agrarian reform as an indispensable part of public policy in countries where land distribution is unfair.
We feel that speedy and efficient action by governments to redistribute land to small and medium sized farmers is especially necessary wherever land distribution is unequal (for example, in Brazil, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Philippines, etc.). Agrarian reform is thus the first stone of public policy to be laid in strategies to combat poverty. In fact, most poor people living in rural areas are peasants or former peasants that do not have enough means to survive.
However, the agrarian reforms to be enacted should take into account former experiences and not repeat past mistakes. 
2) systematically seek to improve the process of agrarian reform
Contexts favourable to agrarian reform are rare since they require trials of strength, internally or externally, making it possible to fight the interests of large landowners. 
Improvement of agrarian reform first of all requires action by peasant organisations and implies:
- seeking support from different social classes;
- the combination of individual and community rights to build viable systems capable of giving security to individual farmers who set up thanks to agrarian reform, and to formulate the procedures for the collective management of public property:
- preparation of the “post-reform period”, by avoiding the constitution of a reformed sector cut off from the reality of other small farmers;
- the creation of local land management competencies, without waiting for the end of the reform process,
 - linking agrarian reform with agricultural policy to permit the development of production by peasant farmers.

3)	Setting up policies to structure and regulate land property markets in which fewer inequalities exist.
This proposal applies to countries that do not require agrarian reform and to those that have just implemented one. In both cases, the evolution of agrarian structures requires management to ensure the economic viability and progressive modernisation of as many farms as possible.
Here again, strong, democratic peasant organisations are needed that represent the majority.
The measures that can be taken in the framework of these structural policies are:
-	measures taken to tax large estates, over-extensive use of land and use that destroys natural resources;
-	measures to regulate and improve land markets (co-management of the land market by the government and peasant organisations, as in France), land loaning facilities for those without access to long term finance to purchase land;
-	policies that facilitate the redistribution of parcels of land.

However, farmers should be given the right to work on the land independently of the right of ownership. This is one of the only ways of solving the problems caused by the equal division of land in successions between generations in the peasant economy.
This requires:
-	protecting the rights of tenants, share-croppers or beneficiaries who are not owners. But this is only possible if strong peasant organisations exist capable of fighting so laws are voted and applied.
-	Setting up specific authorities that own the land and whose legal status may take different forms provided that the rights of those who farm it are guaranteed.

4)	Substantial decentralisation of administrative procedures related to individual rights to land 
National land registries and other such systems that argue that the only way to guarantee the rights of peasants is give them deeds of ownership have proven to be inadequate. The cost of operations and the way in which they function often dispossess the beneficiaries; moreover, the non-existence of local procedures for updating rights means that efforts made on the behalf of small farmers will be useless in only a few years.

The idea that rights can only be guaranteed by the acquisition of property should be vigorously contested. 
Decentralised management of property rights at the level of local authorities, those holding customary rights, and ad hoc committees is a priority and condition to ensure the viability of land registries at national level and that the rights of all users can be updated at reasonable prices. These purely administrative functions should also be combined with functions to solve disputes and mediation, adapted to the needs of today, which can take on different forms.

4)	Enlarge coastal fishing zones to avoid pillage by industrial fishing.
These fishing zones must be enlarged to preserve resources and ensure management by local interests.
Coastal area development plans drawn up in participation with the fishing industry, including fishermen’s organisations, are needed to make out areas for maritime activities.
 
5) Set up authorities to manage common resources at territorial level 
	The capacity to manage a large number of public elements (soils, water, forests, biodiversity, fishing resources, etc.) is necessary in the same territory or coastal area.
This holds for indigenous territories and all other spaces and territories.

To ensure the effective application of these proposals, we think that it is necessary to:
-	set up an experience exchange network on these between peasant organisations and between fishermen’s organisations;
-	emphasise that the combat against poverty and the sustainable management of resources requires agrarian reform, interventions related to land ownership and agricultural policies in favour of small farmers;
-	lobbies to influence finance and decision-makers;
-	setting up new alliances outside the small farming and indigenous sector concerned with subjects of interest to urban populations (links with urban poverty, the impossibility of becoming a small farmer, the poor remuneration of small farmers, the environment, food quality, rural territorial management).

State and development

The ideological issue of “more State” or “less State” is no longer an issue. The State plays an essential role in development, not only correcting market errors, but also defining strategic guidelines with economic agents and compensating the serious deficiencies of the private sector in certain fields (research, strategic investment, etc.). Nevertheless, the nation State, as it has been created over the centuries and as the primary agent in international governance, is facing the growing complexity of an interdependent world. The globalisation of trade, transnational flows and community claims are some of the phenomena now questioning the State’s role. 
Coinciding with this crisis, we are observing the failure of our production-oriented development models, which all too often waste non-renewable natural resources and are incapable of reducing the differences between the rich and the poor. 

•	The State should be considered as a link in the chain of governance: the role that the State should play in development can no longer be considered as a strictly national issue. 
Absolute sovereignty is deceiving, and the international system based on the State as a cornerstone is no longer fitting for the interdependent world in which we live. We must abandon the idea of absolute sovereignty which, although it is in all our minds, is now obsolete. The activities of multi-national corporations, transnational trade and the economy on which international delinquency is based are evidence against absolute sovereignty. There is a difference between State representation and reality.
We observe another difference: the difference between the scale of the problems (increasingly global) and the scale of competences (national territory, where democracy is exercised). Indeed, this is a transition period. The State is inadequate and essential at the same time, because issued are no longer considered in terms of national intervention but in terms of adjustments between territorial hierarchies (transborder co-operation on a regional scale between different countries, world-wide environmental regulations, etc.).

•	The State plays a federative role between different territorial levels (local, national and international), and between different time issues (between immediate interests and long-term objectives.)
The State is a link between different regulations. It therefore has to co-ordinate initiatives, be a place for dialogue and a catalyst for energy. 
The State has a vision of society as a whole. It is the agent that has more relations with the exterior, so it obtains a global view. Because of its vision of the future, the State is what links the short-term vision of economic agents with the long-term vision required to preserve common welfare.

•	The State is no longer the only responsible public institution that affects public interest.
The State is not the only regulatory agent, but one of many. The activities of a large number of private organisations affect the public field (multinational corporations, NGOs, etc.). It is also true that some States, under the influence of private groups, are not working towards the common good. Therefore, there is an urgent need to judge the private sector and the NGOs by their impact and not by their objectives.
Public objectives have to be combined with multiple statute agents. The public and private sectors are not opposing, but complementary, forces.

•	
Nevertheless, the State continues to be essential with regards to solidarity and the redistribution of wealth
If the State abandons its role as entrepreneur, it is with a view to reviewing major social infrastructures: national solidarity, education, redistribution of wealth, health care, education... It should, however, co-operate with other agents and take existing solidarity into account, co-operating and establishing a real dialogue with civil society and with the agents in different fields.

•	Development can not be purchased: it is based on experience, personal abilities, learning and knowledge.
Development does not only imply building modern infrastructures, industrial units and effective telecommunication systems. Development is based primarily on the general mobilisation of the population and the assessment of its potential within a long-term global vision. Positive development experiences have shown that anchorage to the past and local experiences related to external activities (representing adjustment to technical progress) create innovation-oriented dynamics. These processes, with their roots in a territory and history, do not function when they have to face obstacles but when they are supported by the State.
As far as education is concerned, it is important to mention that priority has to be given to primary education, as is the case in Asia.
Development also implies familiarity with the mechanisms with which regulations are established on an international scale; considering the complexity of the international system, international aid should be more centred on training (for example, legal experts to control WTO mechanisms) than on technical assistance, which can create badly balanced situations if it is not suitably adapted. Technical aid, moreover, does not guarantee learning. 

•	For the State to be legitimate as well as legal, it should make every effort to obtain a global view of the society of which it is part. We also need to ask ourselves the following question: what is the present meaning of citizenship? 
Are we citizens of the world, of Europe, of a region, a nation or a place? Neither of these exclusively. There are plural citizenships that depend on each individual’s history. Citizenship depends on civic education, and on the opportunity that individuals have to belong to society as persons and not as mere economic agents, and to fulfil themselves, for themselves and for others, beyond the perspective of material benefits.

CONVERSION OF THE ARMS INDUSTRY 

The repercussions of the geostrategic revolution brought about by the end of the Cold War are many, not least in the arms industry, as might be imagined. The fall of the Berlin Wall immediately caused a large number of people to think that converting the arms industry had become a real possibility. Ten years after the end of the Cold War, what progress has been made to achieve this goal? 
	
Firstly, the miracle announced by some has not occurred: the massive conversion of the arms industry is far from being achieved. However, many changes have occurred during this short lapse of time which have has deep impacts on the arms industry.  Firstly, production volumes have fallen considerably (by about 30%).  This has occurred in parallel with major reorganisation of the industrial fabric, with many corporations consolidating their positions through mergers in order to create more solid structures so as to avoid conversion being forced on them. 
Secondly, modernisation within the industry has encouraged diversification, with the development of dual technologies capable of civil and military applications. Although arms companies have shied away from conversion, they have nonetheless used these changes to rebalance production between the civil and military sectors.  For example, Thomson-CSF, a French company, has seen its civil sector  grow from 20 % to 50% of its turnover in ten years.  In the United States, new strategic orientations favour the modernisation of the military and high technology sectors (in particular with the anti-missile shield), thereby encouraging arms industries to diversify with greater participation in the civil sector. Very good results have also been achieved over the last ten years in specific areas such as the conversion of former military bases in the United States whose success, has encouraged American leaders to continue down this road, thereby accelerating the transformation of the American military structure into a tighter body with greater focus on high technology. 

Although no miracle has occurred over the last ten years, real openings can be perceived regarding conversion. Above all, attention should be drawn to the magnitude of this phenomenon of conversion that affects the entire economy and society, not merely a handful of companies. Indeed, conversion concerns governments as much as industry, civil societies and local communities. Therefore, a whole range of parameters has changed, as have mentalities. However, the holistic and interdependent nature of this phenomenon requires concerted action at different levels that to a great extent remain to be defined, thought out and organised. The evolution of these parameters will occur in parallel with that of the societies concerned and a constantly shifting geopolitical checkerboard. 

European Continent -  Breakthroughs

Summary of the original breakthrough document (6 pages) drafted by the co-ordinators and the organisers of the European continental assembly at Peles. 

The political unity of continental Europe as a region 
Continental Europe must build its political unity in order to become a centre for regional governance.
The purpose of this European regional governance is to contribute towards wider, world governance whose optimum configuration would be polycentric, with agreements between regions. Each region would be given the power of exemplariness, in order to bypass vetoes by vested interests to block progress (the example of the UN Security Council), and thereby counter the current system based on trials of strength. 

A new concept of citizenship 
Until recently, the "citizen" placed his or her confidence regarding many situations in disinterested and uncontested experts: doctors, teachers, farmers, political leaders, etc. Today these institutions and persons should accept reconsidering their roles, seeing them contractually rather than as a mission. In return, it is obvious that citizens must take on more duties. They will have to take responsibility for the consequences of the decisions made with them, since then nobody can plead ignorance or powerlessness. Citizens will have a voice in their own destinies, with no more clerks to speak in their name.

Governance based on active/participatory subsidiarity and solidarity 
Institutional subsidiarity : This means that all decisions are taken at the level closest to the issue concerned, and thus the people involved, however it is important to check : financial viability ; solidarity between territories ; level of knowledge of the issue ; respect for the opinion of minorities when taking decisions ; participation by citizens ; efficient decision-making and agreement of the local community.
Participatory subsidiarity : All political power must ask for the participation by citizens and/or civil society, and it must ensure the collaboration of the administration. It must therefore dialogue with civil society and set up a participation process so that any citizen can participate in the reflection and decision-making involved. For that it requires a mediator who would ensure they are trained and that what they say is taken into account.

The role of civil society 
Current political organisations do not generally associate citizens in their actions or in formulating their decisions. This "shortcoming" is offset spontaneously by citizens who organise themselves : this is the vast though often loosely structured movement known as civil society which generates new forms of collective action. Today this type of organisation is gradually finding its place. These social relays that compose civil society have the following essential functions: stimulation ; crucial intellectual, cultural and social role ; bring issues to light on the national and international stages ; participate in formulating alternative solutions.

Evolution of democracy
The elements have changed : societal complexification, higher level of knowledge, economic globalisation, growing insistence for democracy, etc. The elitist argument that citizens are incapable of making complex decisions falls flat once they have the necessary information. To answer the need for more democracy, and to cease relying on our establishments, we propose instilling the idea of "democratic quality" in society. This implies that representative democracy should be completed and strengthened by participatory democracy at different levels. What’s the "price" of democracy ? Part of the public budget (for example, of the European Commission) could be allocated (in the same way as for elections). This change would be in the public interest and taking this "wealth" into account (agreement and social cohesion) can hardly be considered as a non-productive expense. 

Basic income 
Full employment has become a myth : we need to examine alternative solutions such as the basic income. Unemployment leads to irreversible situations of social exclusion, whereas a solution avoiding any exclusion by paying out a minimum basic income would allow everyone to return to the labour market if and when there is a shortage of labour. The basic income cannot be compared to other conventional social revenues that are invariably linked to specific social conditions; on the contrary, it would be unconditional and non-discriminatory.

Freedom of movement and opening up borders 
Harmonising the European Union's immigration and asylum policies is necessary. But, neither opening them without restriction, nor negating constitutional laws can be considered. For most European citizens, this option that respects the right of human beings to circulate freely between countries is the cause for violent emotional reactions. Acting on these fears demands opening up a debate through which they can be expressed and exorcised. Such a debate would give Europe the opportunity to innovate and formulate policies that correspond to both its democratic ambitions and its future challenges.

Reversing the concept of productive work
It is urgent to dissociate social and individual recognition from employment and productivity. Respect should not only be given to work as a tradable value, all forms of activity should be recognised according to a scale that integrates social, cultural and political dimensions too. 
The right to human dignity is still based on work and social recognition is founded only on the "productive" activity it involves. Meaningful production of all kinds should be given social recognition and be taken into account by the community as a whole. 

A new conception of territorial management 
Europe has such limited space and a very large population. We must above all think of this territory as fulfilling a host of functions, but in an integrated way : each part of the territory must fulfil the largest number of functions possible: environmental, production, social, etc. This implies radical change since it entails subordinating economic policies to territorial management. It is manifestly absurd at present to continue an independent agricultural policy. 

Modification of how wealth is calculated 
The mechanism generally used for measuring and/or comparing the quality of life and well being of our societies, i.e. GNP (Gross Domestic Product) is no longer adequate ; because it is unable to express the distribution of this wealth, it is generally limited to official markets while it excludes informal activities, and makes no distinction between the growth generated by industry that satisfy consumer demand and the economic activity that merely serves to offset the destructive consequences of industrialisation. For all these reasons, we ask our political leaders to give up this mechanism and use other indicators such as HDI (Human Development Indicators) that does not only take into account economic values, but also values such as health, education, culture and environment.

Renovating education
Education must have several objectives: it must no longer only focus on awarding professional qualifications but must be restored as a "free" service and teach people how to use their spare time ; it must educate on civic responsibilities and analyse the social and political environments ; it must educate citizens to have open minds. This requires leaving behind purely national visions of education in order to instil an education with European vision. It also entails recognising the diversity and cultural plurality of individuals. 

The transformation of international relations (co-development and contracts)
Europe currently imposes its economic and political interests as well as its Western system of democracy in its development activities. The aim is, on the contrary, to change this outlook and demand that Europe take a contractual approach to all its development actions. The contract should set out the rights and duties of each party, clearly explaining the interest of each of them. The concept of development would therefore change into one of co-development. 
Europe could use this contractual method in an independent way in other regions of the world, in view to creating polycentric world governance. (Why not draw up a contract between two regions to reduce the greenhouse effect, without being held up while waiting for world-wide consensus.)

New foundations for legitimate world governance (breakthroughs)

The handling of the crisis of 11 September 2001 demonstrates the weakness of world governance in dealing with terrorism and its financing, resulting in authority being given to one country, due to its power, to exact justice itself. The divide is widening between the leaders of states and public opinion and between the peoples of the North and the South. Most feel that current world regulations have no legitimacy and are ill-adapted to increasing interdependence between societies and between humanity and the biosphere. We cannot be satisfied by modifications made on the sidelines of the present system; a new architecture based on another vision of the world and governance has become indispensable .

1-	The issue of “world governance” is no longer simply a question of relations between sovereign states. Since it is not possible to set up democratic world governance elected by universal suffrage in the short term, an original system must be invented that is capable of dealing with complex challenges common to humankind. This means new regulations, laws and constraints. For them to be accepted by the world’s peoples, they must be seen to be legitimate, with clear objectives and to apply to rich and poor countries alike. Moreover, their definition and control requires the participation of all peoples.

2-	“World governance” is no longer a system to be considered “apart”, operating according to principles different to those of states and territorial authorities. Every level of government is a part of the same edifice and must be based on the same principles. Their relations are regulated by the principle of active subsidiarity.

3-	World governance requires common foundations: a) common objectives: sustainable development, the reduction of inequalities, peace; b) a common ethical basis: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Charter of Human Responsibilities. These are the foundations on which it is possible to define the areas of action by the international community, since the hierarchy of norms and standards apply to every area (trade, the environment, health, security, etc.), and to the great world causes in which both states and multilateral institutions must co-operate.

4-	An international community conscious of its unity and diversity must emerge in order to break away from the present system of relations between states. This community does not simply consist of co-operation between “blocks”. It is also composed of relations between social and professional "milieus" that occupy very different positions in society and the economy, with every milieu claiming its rights but acknowledging its responsibilities vis-à-vis the others. Rethinking governance also means rethinking the “social contract” that links different milieus with the rest of society. This is why the construction of the international community must include: a) the emergence of regional communities that group the countries of the same region, in the same way as the European Union; b) the institution of international "collegial communities” that gather people from the same 
milieu and share the desire to apply the Charter of Human Responsibilities to their field.

5-	A community needs founding actions: a world parliament held in 2008 could be the solemn occasion for bringing together regional and collegial communities. The Lille Assembly is the first step in this direction. 

6-	The world is not a merchandise. World governance defines the principles that state what does and does not belong to the realm of trade. The following should not be subject to trade: world public property (air, water, etc.), the use of natural resources, goods that multiply through sharing, especially that which belongs to the realm of sharing knowledge and experiences .

7-	World governance is based on a new vision of the world in which less attention is paid to each person’s activity and competency than to the organisation of relations and the methods of co-operation between levels of governance and between actors in the public and private sectors. This puts an end to the black and white division between public actors that manage public interests and private actors that serve private interests. Most importantly, a private actor whose activity has an impact on the public therefore takes on public responsibilities. This is the framework in which new relations are forged between multilateral institutions and civil society, resulting in a new philosophy of partnership and contract linking public and private law. Application of this philosophy to the international debt, for example, would bring about the conditions making it possible to judge the validity of a contract between a government and an international financial institution. 

8-	An arena must be built for world public opinion and community debates encouraged to ensure the emergence of an international community and democratic world governance. The democratic use of Internet could be a powerful tool to this end. Organised civil society constitutes the counterbalance required, in particular by calling governments to account and contributing to a permanent audit of multilateral institutions. 

9-	Regarding international public policies the "power of proposals”, over which the United Nations General Secretary would have complete authority, in the same way as the European Commission, must be dissociated from the “power of decision” which would belong to an Assembly of World Regions, with each regional community being represented fairly.

An essential goal for Environmental Education:
to educate responsible citizens.

The Alliance Environmental Education Workshop works to exchange information and promote research and training in the sector of Environmental Education. It gathers educators, actors in the media and professionals working on environmental issues from nearly sixty countries. The workshop's proposal booklet has been written collectively in three stages: 
A first text of proposals was written in October 2000 by the workshop co-ordination team and submitted for debate on its Internet discussion forum from January to June 2001. This forum permitted gathering reactions from around twenty participants from eleven different countries, and different disciplines and professional fields.
A meeting of fourteen people from among the forum participants was organised on the Greek island of Syros at the end of June 2001. There we debated basic issues, formulated a draft of proposals and wrote the records to illustrate the proposals. 
The final phase of writing the text as such was ensured by the co-ordination team. The  writing of the illustrative records by the participants of the meeting was finalised at the beginning of July 2001 and the records were presented via the Internet forum. The participants gave their critical opinion on the records written by the others and the authors modified the texts by incorporating the comments.

For us, Environmental Education is political education aimed at promoting community participation in the management of the environment and the search for solutions to ecological problems at local, regional and world-wide levels. 

This is the framework proposal and the basis for the analysis developed by our workshop, which makes use of the following observations:

•	We are confronted by a terrifying acceleration of degradation of every natural balance that now affects the entire planet.
•	This gulf between humanity and nature is accompanied by intolerable social inequalities within societies, between social classes and nations, by the propagation of violence and the edification of a philosophy of death.
•	As we enter into the 21st century, we can perceive how this crisis is leading us to the point of no-return: that where humanity will become powerless to check the havoc it has caused or continue hoping to remedy some of the damage already done, supposing it has the will to do so.
•	Thus we are confronted by an emergency situation that calls on the participation of the community to permit better and permanent democratic control of choices, political orientations, and actions regarding the environment, development and the management of resources.
•	Although some educators involved in Environmental Education feel that it is enough to promote the goals of awareness and the acquisition of knowledge on the interdependencies of all the systems participating in natural balances, these goals no longer meet the challenges that face us.
•	Environmental Education should contribute towards educating responsible citizens in their individual and collective behaviour who are capable of acting and confident in the value of community action. It entails "political" education in the noble meaning of the term, calling on the participation of all in managing common issues. We also need to widen our scope of action, political participation and responsibility. Demanding the application of local and immediate community action opens up the horizon for a more abstract and extensive form of citizenship, that of world citizenship.

On the basis of this analysis, we have formulated our proposals as follows. We aim to:
•	Promote the introduction and/or the development of Environmental Education as community education within education systems and in relation with traditional disciplines.
•	Develop specific training courses for teachers and educators for implementing the education of active citizenship, by making use of research into adapted teaching techniques.
•	Promote the acquisition of basic competencies (scientific and technical) to encourage commitment by citizens to act on issues that affect their daily lives (health, food, risks, etc.).
•	Encourage specific organised groups (organisations) and certain socioprofessional groups  (engineers, scientists, etc.) to act as relays and driving forces in developing environmental and community education for the general public.
•	Create collective tools for the acquisition of competencies, based on structuring and selecting information, intended for all those fulfilling educational roles in the wide meaning of the term and, through them, for every citizen. In practice, the possible directions for action are as follows: 
•	The exchange of experiences "useful for action", which implies making use of the working methodology developed by the DPH network – Dialogues for the Progress of Humankind – and used by the Alliance Environmental Education Workshop. However, in addition to the continuous enhancement of the DPH experience "bank", we propose the creation of multimedia educational tools on the environment and development, by using the thousands of records that exist, and will exist, as raw material. These materials will be aimed in particular at those who are unused to reading, in order to share the "bank's" collective intelligence with the largest number of citizens.
•	The development of specific training (for educators, players in the media), by using the collective experience of Alliance gained from a large number of Internet discussion forums. The aim will be to design and set up remote training on the environment and development based on the Internet discussion group method, by combining more traditional communication methods. 
•	Set up an international network composed of organisations and administrative structures active in the sector of EE. The members will be dedicated and specific to EE related fields. Each node of this network would commit itself to setting up a documentation and resource centre in its area of "specialisation" and  answer the needs of educators concerning the design, implementation and evaluation of projects at international level. 

There is certainly nothing new in the idea of situating Environmental Education in the perspective of community responsibility. Moreover, it does not stir unanimous agreement. What we have tried to do with this booklet is to propose realistic and viable strategies in line with this perspective and suggest directions for concrete action. We address target-publics that could act as relays to reach a wider public: educators (instructors, co-ordinators and teachers in every discipline), administrators and politicians, journalists and other actors in the media, activists in organisations, and socioprofessional groups whose activities have a considerable impact on the environment. 

The six proposals and directions for action proposed by our Proposal Booklet should be considered as points of departure. New collective work should continue this initial reflection and debate. The directions for action we propose in fact correspond to the work we have done within our workshop and the Alliance and that we are continuing to pursue. They also draw from the work done by partner networks and individuals with the intention of using their valuable experiences and contributions  .

THE WATER WORKSHOP OF THE ALLIANCE FOR A RESPONSIBLE, PLURAL AND UNITED WORLD 

THE BREAKTHROUGHS

Thanks to its network of friends on five continents, its experience records and the working meetings it organises at Casablanca, Penang, Teheran, Alexandria and Cochabamba, the WATER Workshop proposes below several breakthroughs liable to lead to strategic "leaps" and "breakthroughs" propitious for action.

The global hydrological cycle is a striking illustration of the interdependencies between humanity and the biosphere. It is the manifestation of a strong organic relationship between all living organisms and between their ecosystems: it envelops them in the Hydrosphere, the very matrix of life.
Paradoxically, since the Industrial Revolution, the blows of humanity against this primordial cycle have underlined the unique nature of this resource and the need for its global governance in the name of a universal ethic of responsibility. Only generalised dialogue and co-operation are capable of eliminating acid rain, the abiotic lakes in Scandinavia and Northern Canada and the continuing pollution of major water tables, such as at  Ogallala in the centre of the United States.
It has taken three decades for humanity to become progressively aware of the threats against this precious resource unlike any other. These threats are multiform pollution and invasive commercialisation.
Thus the certainty that water must remain the common property of humanity and that it calls for another type of globalisation based on solidarity. Although water is a saleable commodity, it is above all a social necessity. Equal access to this common property must be structured and protected. In parallel, water is essentially a political problem as emphasised with great force by our Ecuadorian Indian friends at Cochahamba in June 2001.
Water and its management are complex subjects involving natural, social, political and economic phenomena; however it would be a mistake to ignore traditional and socially adapted know-how. They should be taken into account in a voluntarily multidisciplinary and transversal approach, since many exclusively technical and economic studies are incapable of solving or covering the question completely.
The laudable objective of "access to drinking water" should not obscure the fact that the places that most lack this precious liquid suffer from poverty even more than thirst. This lack is visible for the most part in shortages and hunger, since growing rice and wheat obviously require water.
This observation is based on the following. A new campaign for irrigation must be implemented to ward off a major crisis caused by the salting of soils, hydromorphism, the silting of dams and reservoirs, etc. Furthermore, there is no ideal form of managing this resource: they are all necessary and interdependent. However, effective participation (active subsidiarity in the meaning of the Platform) and transparency are essential for water management of different types according to territories, cultures and so forth. For example, water users' committees exist at Lille. Cities will be among the largest consumers of water in the future. The role of women in its management is vital. As long ago as the Dublin Conference in January 1992, it was declared that "The development and management of water must be based on the participation of the users, planners and decision-makers at every level".
Management must be governed by ethical considerations, especially with respect to everything that concerns water. Thus independent expertise representing all interests must be implemented to ensure the confidence of users and consumers.
Water can and must be a factor that brings human beings closer together: an integrated approach to catchment areas is one of the most effective ways of achieving this. This has been done in the case of the Mekong and encouraging signs can be seen in the Nile valley, in spite of what else is happening there.
At the dawn of the new millennium, we are seeing the emergence of a water saving society that has assimilated the need for multifunctionalism. It is important to save water but we must also ensure equal rights to its use.
This water saving society is governed by the priorities of sustainable development whose aim is to produce more well-being with fewer resources. Science and technology have a primordial role to play here, though they must leave their ivory towers and aim for the well-being of all, unobstructed by scientism. Education is the fertiliser of all sustainable and lasting actions regarding water.

Water is a subject with strong mobilising powers, as has been seen recently in Cochabamba, Karachi and Mexico City. It is an excellent catalyst for building a responsible, plural and united world.
Such is our dream, and, as George Steiner said, its diffusion is a powerful weapon. Together, we can make it a reality.

Larbi Bouguerra
25/10/2001.

Breakthroughs of the Soils Campaign

The SoilCampaign is founded on the following observations and analyses:
•	The soil, with all its diversity and by virtue of its multifunctional character, is one of the most important bases for life on Earth, one of the major factors in the balance of nature.
•	Soils are at the heart of current human development problems; in particular, they are at the core of the food and environmental concerns experienced nowadays worldwide. We notice, however, that the issue of soils has been evaded or given scant attention by decision makers, the media and the general public.
•	Soils, despite their scarcity or vulnerability, are still used in an unsustainable way by human societies. Little is done to mitigate soil degradation or to improve the situation of degraded soils. Local and global economic systems are accountable for this neglect.
•	This situation, which involves risks for natural systems, including human habitats, is mostly due to ignorance in all spheres of society, from the ordinary citizen up to centres of power, about what soil is and why it is necessary to preserve it. Hence, soil is absent from public debate, especially when social choices are concerned.
During the period 1995-2001, a dialogue stimulated and supported by the Soil Campaign allowed :
1- To work and to verify these ideas and observations:  which permit the Soil Campaign to be in the position to state that:
11-	Soils is one of the challenges of the 21st Century. It should concern the human community as much as, for example, global climate change or the loss of biological diversity, to which, incidentally, soil degradation contributes significantly in ways which have been ignored for a long time. Soil, on account of its fertility or its degradation, and by its influence  on the air, water and life, is a factor of potential conflict for the 21st Century.
12-	In order to turn soil into a factor of stability and peace, the human community should fulfil at all levels the conditions that enable different soil systems to fully accomplish all their functions, which are, in effect, free services offered to the biosphere and humankind.
2- The emergence of number of initiatives and proposals which are intended to contribute to bring into life behaviour and practices favourable to soil.
16 proposals for change are made.
All these proposals can be achieved within the framework of nowadays societies systems, provided that willingness exists.
they are aiming at:
21-	The rehabilitation of soil in popular culture (proposals 1 to 5)
It is a precondition toany change in attitude towards soil whose success must be founded, in priority, on education, on information and communication concerning soil and on the construction of a strong symbol as the World Soil Day.
The conventional education must allow all children of the world to acquire an adequate knowledge on soil as a natural body and acultural heritage, fulfilling fundamental functions. Then, at university level, it must permit the acquirement of a common basis of knowledge for all disciplines that deal with soil.
The popularization and public awareness require the setting up and the monitoring of innovative educational practices based on the concept of diversity: drawing from the range of knowledge, taking account of the multifarious of teaching, information and communication resources, and continuously adapting the process to changing situations.
22 - The inclusion of soil in the field of the governance (propositions 6 to 13)
Sustainable use of soil and satisfactory land management should be a permanent duty for all. Soil must be included in the field of the governance. It should first bea local authority responsibility.  
At regional and international levels, soil protection requires to straighten and to implement existing legal mechanisms and instruments and, to complete them by instruments specific to the sustainable use of soils and land management.
Considering the negative effects of the market on soils, it is necessary to mention soil and impact on soil into the processes that lead to making regional and international trade agreements.
As poverty affects first those that live directly and solely from soil, struggle against soil degradation must not be dissociated from poverty alleviation worldwide.
Finally, mechanisms and incentives are necessary to facilitate transformations in the various activities in relation to soil, in order to underline the primacy of sustainable soil management.
23 - The human solidarity to save a worldwide heritage (propositions 14 to 16)
Soil is a natural and cultural heritage of humanity. It is a spatial and temporal link between living beings. It is a factor of interdependence and crucial seat for biodiversity processes and species survival.
Soil protection request gathering and sharing knowledge on sustainable soil uses. Establishment of soil information networks is necessary.
Mutual assistance, in addressing soil problems, is necessary. Funds must be mobilized for soil conservation, restoration, improvement and where practicable creation. One can consider the initiation of a World Soil Fund.
It is necessary to reinforce the action of the civil society, notably raising awareness of environmental NGOs to the fact that soil is a key component of the environment and the sustainable development. It should be one of the  major items that they address in their fieldwork.

 Energy efficiency: a decisive breakthrough in re-appropriation of energy by citizens

The road to durable development requires radical changes in the conception of the role of energy in economic and social development. It is not question of technical or financial problems, but of human intelligence.
It means inverting views of the place taken by energy in human activities, by using requirements for development as a starting point and not the requirements of the energy industry. Social development is materialised by constant improvement in conditions of housing, food, transport, information, health, education, etc.
Most of these needs require an energy supply to be satisfied, but these supplies are extremely dependent on the means used to achieve this.
For providing adequate comfort to its occupiers, a well-insulated house facing the right direction consumes four times less energy than an ordinary house; for the same amount of light a fluo-compact bulb consumes up to five times less than an incandescent bulb; trains and public transport systems consume much less than cars and trucks.
Nor can a system based on renewable energy remain stable at long-term if it is not completely integrated into an energy efficiency strategy.

Using requirements as a starting point and acting on consumption conditions, instead of concerning ourselves solely with producing energy, represent a real cultural and technological revolution.
In this way, energy questions will no longer be entrusted exclusively to the dominators of the main energy systems or possessors of resources, but to all citizens who can intervene on individual level through their own behaviour and their choice of equipment (or means of transport) and, above all, on a collective level in their city (organisation of public transport, urbanisation), in their region and in their country (housing policies, national planning, and major transport infrastructures).
Energy efficiency consists of implementing all possible means at all levels and in all sectors of activity for modifying energy consumption conditions so as to end up with energy requirements that are significantly lower than those resulting from present practices in industrialised countries (or their reproduction in developing countries).

The breakthrough is crucial and multifaceted:

-	Cultural and conceptual:
 We begin with needs and requirements and not the energy offer.

-	Strategic:
The energy question depends on the quality of buildings, means of transport, consumer habits and lifestyles, as much as, if not more so, than the production of coal, oil or natural gas. It becomes a transverse affair for all activities and is not just limited to specific industrial sectors.

-	Technical:
The major objective becomes improving efficiency of use, design of buildings, organisation of transport, development of financial mechanisms suitable for requirements, etc.

-	Political:
Energy is no longer a hunting ground reserved solely for energy companies.  In this new context of re-appropriation, questions on energy and new actors will come forth who will play decisive roles: individuals and families, companies and local and territorial communities.

The fundamental challenge is to make sure, by using information, training, dialogue and network dynamics, that all these new actors will be in a position to intervene and take affairs in hand.

The proposals of the energy efficiency workshop concern the means required for applying an energy efficiency strategy on a worldwide level, a strategy that is adapted to everybody’s realities and requirements and that can be implemented by citizens throughout the world.
Amongst all the themes discussed on this matter, our proposals concern three fundamental questions:

- Information and training for a new conception of the role of energy 
The way in which energy is perceived requires a radical change in culture, to make the notion of energy service requirements predominate over production requirements, which are the cornerstone of present energy policies.
This requires considerable efforts to be made on educational and training policies at all levels.

- Development of institutional and human means 
The impetus for “capacity construction” must come from as worldwide a level as possible. Energy efficiency is a world strategy that can and must be applicable in every situation. It calls for a world programme of capacity construction and the creation of agencies (global and regional) for energy efficiency whose primary vocation would be to give intellectual and financial support to creating or developing local capacities, to developing information, training programs and exchanges of experience and to mobilising international financing for energy efficiency programs and projects.

- Means of financing investment.
Difficulties in financing investments constitute a major obstacle in generalising energy efficiency. It is a question of creating mechanisms and procedures of intervention that are adapted to small sized projects shouldered by numerous partners, and no longer adapted to major infrastructure projects borne by big operators, and, over and beyond, by networks of associations. Political leaders at all levels must be called upon directly for getting these financial systems set up and for making financial institutes and development banks aware of the need for them to put these systems into application.

“Breakthroughs” in Industrial Ecology (Suren Erkman, November 7, 2001)

A)	Starting Point

Industrial Ecology considers the industrial system to be a particular type of ecosystem (and not something that is foreign to the Biosphere).

In this case, the term “ecology” means scientific ecology (western) and the adjective “industrial” is applied in its broadest possible sense, since tourism, agriculture, the health system, services, etc., are also part of the industrial system.

Industrial Ecology studies the long-term evolution of the industrial system in its entirety and its relationship to the Biosphere, not only with reference to issues related to pollution and the environment.

The purpose of Industrial Ecology is make the Industrial System as a whole develop into an ecosystem that is:
-	intrinsically sustainable in the long-term
-	compatible with the normal functioning of other ecosystems and the Biosphere in general.
 Note: Industrial Ecology refers to the material substrate of the Industrial system (flow and reserves of material and energy), aware that this is only one component of industrial society.

B)	In the first place, the application of Industrial Ecology implies the following:
1)	Adopting the aforementioned perspective (considering that the industrial system is an integral part of the Biosphere, a particular type of ecosystem, etc.) in the broadest manner possible, not limited to environmental issues.
2)	For Ecology Scientists, seriously considering the analogy between the industrial system and natural ecosystems. Systematically studying industrial ecosystems in order to favour their evolution towards sustainable operations. Involving the entire research and development sector in this process.
3)	For Economists, radically changing perspectives: instead of reasoning based on abstract monetary values alone, they must systematically take into account the material substrate of all economic activities (material and energy flows, how ecosystems work), which can not be reduced to financial flows.
4)	Establishing national accounting systems that not only consider monetary flows, but also integrate the statistics available on material and energy flows and reserves, the backbone of national wealth.
5)	Adopting an integrated evaluation of the combination of the industrial system’s scale resources as the focal point of public policies. In other words: cease to handle the problems associated to water, air, land and waste, etc., separately, and consider ecosystems in which all these elements are considered in a global fashion (according to a four-way operational strategy: promoting a quasi-cyclical economy; minimising pollutant emissions; dematerialising; and decarbonising).
6)	Alter legislation to establish an adequate use of resources, and primarily valuing both residues and raw materials. Integrating this approach into insurance and finance circles.
7)	Teaching new management models in business schools (and applying them to actual companies), where co-operation between businesses in order to manage resources properly is as an important a strategy as the competition involved in selling products and services.
8)	Adopting industrial metabolism methods (resource flow and reserve studies) in order to plan territorial and socio-economic development, especially on a regional scale.
9)	Fully integrate this approach into the doctrines and activities of international organisations (bilateral development agencies, World Bank, UNDP, WTO, etc.).
10)	In general, promote the creation of organisations aimed at “watching over the system”, leading it to evolve towards sustainable industrial ecosystems: inter-ministerial structures, grassroot organisations, professional organisations, business networks, citizens’ associations, etc.

CIVIL SOCIETY AND GMOs: WHAT INTERNATIONAL STRATEGIES ARE POSSIBLE?

GMOs represent real hazards for the world and humanity: uncontrollable food risks (especially allergies, resistance to antibiotics, etc.), sterilisation of seeds, the loss of autonomy of peasants, loss of biodiversity and the inevitable and irreversible generalisation of GMO crops in the long term.
Our proposals attempt to define a change towards farming free of GMOs, though by leaving the door open for specific GMOs under certain cultivation conditions (closed environments, bioreactors, etc.), use (supervised medical applications) and limited objectives (transgenesis as a laboratory tool is not in question).
The main risk is that that the onset of a transgenic world is irreversible. Since it is impossible to totally separate sectors, the authorisation of transgenic crops on a large scale will inevitably lead to their generalisation. So now is the time to act.

We put forward proposals and demand keys 

1)	Set up an international moratorium
Faced by the proven and potential risks of GMOs and the propensity to self-multiplication of transgenic species, there is an urgent need for an international moratorium on the cultivation of GMOs (and on the dissemination of transgenic animal species such as salmon).
The principles of this moratorium are:
-	The prohibition of all commercial crops, with the exception of research under protected conditions, provided that research into sustainable forms of agriculture is carried out in parallel with as many resources.
In the meanwhile, moratoriums could be set up at local, regional and national levels. 

2)	Strengthen national, regional and international legislations
It is important to use as reference the Protocol on Biosecurity of Carthagena, which recognises the principle of precaution concerning cross-border movements of all GMOs. However, this protocol must be ratified by a maximum number of countries to have any force. It sets out procedures for prior agreement, in full knowledge of the merchandise transported, for cross-border movements of GMOs. This requires the explicit consent of the importer before the GMOs can be imported. 
However, the precedence of the Biodiversity Convention, which provides the framework for the Carthegena Protocol, must be acknowledged in WTO agreements.
Therefore the Biosecurity Protocol must be written into national and regional legislations (the application of labelling showing entire processing procedures) and the application of zero-tolerance for traces of GMOs in agricultural products.
What is more, it is also necessary to introduce a clause invoking the overall responsibility of GMO producers (regarding the health of consumers and damage to the environment) applicable world-wide.
 
Carrying out these changes requires:
-	Developing information systems that are completely independent from multinational corporations and political powers,
-	Independent public research for sustainable agriculture without GMOs; 
-	Setting up wide alliances that bring together consumers, farmers, and public research;
-	Opening up public research to societal concerns by promoting forums for dialogue with researchers.

THE REFUSAL TO PATENT LIVING MATERIAL

Originally, the patent was an instrument of public policy whose objective was the protection of innovations in products and procedures that served to grant the inventor a monopoly of production, utilisation and sale for a fixed period that generally consisted of 20 years. Its authority was based on the innovation of the patented idea, originality of its concept, and the industrial potential of its use. In 1980, the United States Supreme Court set a very important precedent in the history of intellectual property when it confirmed the patentable nature of a genetically modified micro-organism clearly classified as living material. 

The privatisation of living material is carried out through the concession of industrial patents on biotechnology. Contained within the whole of bio-technology is a special category that groups together patents relating to genetic engineering, that is to say, molecular surgery that directly operates on our genetic heritage. Every act, every consequence of this surgery, and every organism or fragment of an organism resulting from this surgery can be considered as “biotecnology”, and therefore patented as “technology” with possible industrial applications. In this manner, privatisation through bio-technological patents in genetic engineering simultaneously affects living material, its reproduction, and related information on living matter. 
Patents on living material, presented as a societal decision, are in reality a political decision made by powerful international economic agents. Industrial politics has stipulated the necessity to revoke classic criteria in the definition of an invention (novelty, precise description). This is a clear example of the specific nature of the relationship between biotechnology and the general right on patents.
The signing of the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (Rio de Janeiro) attempted to palliate this deviation in international law. Affirming the State’s sovereign right to biological resources, the Convention gives countries the power to negotiate the material use of its resources and their legal use. Through contracts based on the legislation regulating access to resources, countries of the South are able to determine access for any category of reserves: from the ban to protect the invention as a right to intellectual property, to diverse requirements such as carrying out joint research, or sharing in the resulting profits. 
The creation of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 1995 radically changed this situation. The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) is a regulation instrument developed by the WTO. With this agreement, industrialised countries want to promote intellectual property rights that result in the privatisation of biological resources that have been altered by biotechnology that only they control.

Six Important Challenges.

1.	The unlimited expansion of patent rights: the system developed by the community of patent supporters shows a process of expansion and harmonisation worldwide. 
2.	Obstacles in public research: Public research in life sciences is under debate in a jungle of patent law that is increasingly more hostile to its free operation.  
3.	The world is increasingly artificial: in a matter of a few years, genetic heritage, long considered a common good of humanity, has become a patentable genetic resource for industry.
4.	The monopolization of living material: In 1992, countries of the South demanded that genetic resources be made sovereign jurisdiction of the State. However, private companies in industrialised countries have continued to act on biodiversity and patent rights. Bioresearch often appears in the form of bio-piracy.

5.	Farmers expropriated of their seeds: Farmers have always kept a portion of the seeds they have grown to plant the following season. Seed industry considers that this “ farmer’s privilege ” is unnecessary competition for the growing costs of research. 
6.	Revision of the TRIPS international agreement: Industrialised countries approved the GATT agreement, later the World Trade Organisation (WTO), to ensure the enforcement of an international agreement on the legal aspects of intellectual property rights that affect commerce (TRIPS). It requires countries to have an intellectual property system on varieties that protect private appropriation rights and do not recognise communitary rights. Developing countries and countries in Africa are those most interested in the revision of TRIPS article 27.3.

Proposals  

 Refusal of Patents on Living Material as a Decision of Universal Ethics

Whether it be through the modification of the WTO’s TRIPS agreement or through the inclusion of this requirement in other documents and conventions on a world-wide scale, we demand: on the one hand, that plants, animals, micro-organisms, and other living material –or parts thereof– be considered as unpatentable, and, on the other hand, that the natural processes that allow plants and animals to develop be considered equally unpatentable.
The patent system developed to protect inanimate innovation is an inappropriate legislative instrument for living organisms and their structures. The system must be completely revised, and alternative methods for recompensing innovation must be developed. A wide-ranging community of representatives from a variety of cultures must appropriately consider the issue of patents on living material to ensure that alternative systems reflect a respect for ethical and religious beliefs. 
Support must be given to the beliefs of communities and countries who have demonstrated a solid ethical position against patents on living material and natural processes, such as the WTO’s African group, and countries that are trying to impose compulsory licenses, such as in the field of medicine (i.e. South Africa). The main objective of the European Union should be the repeal of the Directive on the legal protection of biotechnological innovation.

Democratic Control of the Patent Community

A court that is independent from the patent community must regulate the extent of patent rights on the technology of living material.

Regulation of Access to Biological Resources and Distribution of Rights

Biological resources, their components, by-products, information and activity in local communities can appear in databases that consist of material and immaterial elements. Formation of these databases is very important as they avoid the loss of information and natural and cultural resources. The regulation of access to biological resources must be promoted, as well as the means for a country to choose a national “sui generis” law that protects the innovations of local communities and is consistent with the FAO’s Convention on Biological Diversity and the International Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources. This legislation authorises traditional agricultural practises, and includes the right for farmers to sow their seeds and commercialise former varieties. The OUA serves as an example. 

Revise the Protection of Innovation

A different form of financing and recognition of innovation can be achieved through organising for the participation of citizens in the definition of research objectives, or through the parliamentary annual report on said objectives. Whether it is public or scientific, innovation must always be intrinsically related to human and environmental needs. 

Where living material and the conservation of biodiversity are concerned, a thorough study for an alternative protection system to patents is essential. It is essential to both the collective rights of communities and recommendations and controlled denominations of origin, and to procurement rights of vegetables and animals that respect access to genetic resources and basic human rights.