* Essay: Another Future Is Possible. Draft forwarded by Silke Helfrich.

This working document, in preparation for the seminar of May 9 and 10, 2012, pulls together the proposals set out in the texts produced by the Thematic Groups of the Thematic Social Forum that was organized in Porto Alegre from January 24 to 29, 2012.

Caution: this is an incomplete and draft version. Request updated version from Silke.Helfrich at gmx.de

Text

We are going to reinvent the world at Rio+20

The political moment offered by the Rio+20 Summit constitutes a unique opportunity to bring into sight the deep and many transformations sweeping through our societies and to spin and weave the various threads and proposals for the necessary task of “reinventing the world,” the historical, unprecedented, and incontrovertible task of conceiving a transition to a fair and sustainable world. Although it is legitimate to try to weigh upon international negotiations such as Rio+20—marked by the fact that that the principles previously agreed upon at Rio 92 have been neglected and by how weak the past years’ international agreements have been—we should have no illusions about the power of this effort to set off a virtuous cycle of significant compromises to deal with the deep problems humankind is facing. Basically, what the peoples and the world community are requiring is that a new paradigm be built for social, economic, and political organization that will be able to make social justice progress and provide humankind with continuity in its destiny, and life and the planet with sustainability.

Global geopolitics has been changing rapidly and forcefully, moving away from the permanence of the current power structures and ideologies. On the one hand, the rich countries are being hit by the economic crisis that arose in 2008 and they are entering a lengthy stagnation period, while corporations and speculators continue to accumulate profits, and the majorities of populations have to suffer austerity policies and unemployment, increasing inequalities, and rising waves of conservatism and xenophobia. On the other hand, the large “emerging” countries are continuing to expand their economies along the lines of global capitalism, stimulated by the constant growth of China and other blocs, where hundreds of thousands of people are entering mass-consumption society by consuming more and more natural resources and seeking to reach the way of life that Western capitalism has exported as the ideal for happiness. The improved living conditions of millions of people in Asia and Latin America notwithstanding, economic expansion is exacerbating inequalities and concentrating income, making work and social services precarious, and deteriorating the environment. All of these processes are having strong repercussions on the global environmental crisis and deepening social inequalities, all of which is generating new humanitarian crises.

Four years after the worse global economic crisis since 1929 bringing with it a huge rise in the prices of commodities and food, and after the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of the necessity for an urgent transition to a low-carbon economy, the large majority of problems are still dragging on with no solutions in sight. With no other civilization paradigm to challenge them, the dominant groups are trying to seduce with empty promises that all the problems will be solved through technological innovations, and to corrupt democracy with the power of money, going even as far as suppressing it so no threat to them can come about: today, coups d’état are being authored directly by the markets.

These past few years, the peoples and citizens in outrage in several parts of the world have invented unprecedented forms and responses to rebel against this situation. In 2011, we witnessed an unusual level of emergence of social movements and a vigorous unleashing of peoples’ struggles that have been able to change a few national and regional political frameworks. The dynamics of these anti-systemic forces are still fragmented, heterogeneous, and disarticulated, not only among the continents but also among the countries of a same region. Nonetheless, the deep questioning they raise about the architecture of power and social foundations clearly shows a break with the past and a need for in-depth change of the current economic, social, cultural, and political systems.

We understand that this outlook for transformation can only be materialized with common guidelines and by the greatest variety of social actors: networks and nongovernmental organizations, social and environmental movements, rural and urban workers, women, youth, grassroots movements, native peoples, discriminated ethnic groups, solidarity-economy entrepreneurs, etc., starting from the multitude of innovations and from experiences in struggles, and also from the fact that the material and technological conditions to establish new forms of production, consumption, and political organization are already here.

No matter how discouraged or threatened the negotiations in the UN framework,, the Rio+20 Summit offers the peoples and civil societies an opportunity to meet and raise their proposals, to place hope on the horizon of the advent of a future that is not the dead end in which capitalism is enclosing humankind and the planet in this early twenty-first century.

We have set out to move forward in the task of articulating the breakthroughs, guidelines, and proposals around four interdependent central themes:

I. Ethical and philosophical foundations

II. Rights, peoples, territories and defending Mother Earth

III. Production, distribution, and consumption: access to wealth, the commons, and transition economy

IV. Political subjects, the architecture of power and democracy

We are presenting below the different proposals related to each of these central thematic themes.

The following proposals, originating in different thematic groups, do not constitute an exhaustive program and should be supplemented with the groups’ discussion reports and full documents. They naturally need to be deepened. This consolidation mainly aims to present the lines of force that are consistent with an alternative civilization paradigm, different than the current one underpinning neoliberal globalization; it aims to delineate the horizons of an economy, a society, politics, and culture that have not yet come into existence as attempts to discern another possible world than can capture imaginations, mobilize energies, drive struggles, and stimulate convergences.

Introduction: Subjectivity, domination, and emancipation

In not-so-distant times, the challenges raised by major social dilemmas could be met by social struggles and major political disputes. Nonetheless, this view, which guided almost all of history’s progressive mobilizations, is not sufficient. Capitalism is much more than a mode of production, it is a social and political rationale that runs through the entire social body; it is a totalizing form of civilization with an enormous reproduction capacity. The current socioeconomic system is not only built on the basis of institutions and power centers, it is also internalized by most populations as domination, an ideology that several philosophers have called “voluntary slavery.”

In the past centuries, emancipation, liberation, and the elimination of all forms of exploitation and oppression have been the goals pursued by progressive, socialist, and left-wing movements. Taking up these goals again today, however, requires a lot more than reviving the ideals of “liberty, equality, and fraternity" or getting rid of exploitation of labor by capital. It requires questioning the bases on which were built modernity and European domination around the world, it requires a revolution of minds that will shake up the intellectual infrastructure shared not only by the capitalist élite but also by a good part of the movements trying to combat it.

For this, we need to change ourselves: institutions are made up by individuals, and they are the ones allowing these structures to work. It is impossible to undertake the transition required by humankind and the planet by maintaining consumerism as the ideal of happiness and a way of life based on competition, selfishness, productivism, and the destruction of the vital fluids of life on the planet. “Educators” need also to be educated and the training for this lies in their practical activity, in real, massive, and exemplary struggles.

Many of the dimensions of what can and should be a new form of subjectivity have been taking shape in these anti-systemic struggles and they should be systemized to be consistent if we expect to offer an alternative with credibility. They should be debated and systematized as values, forms of knowledge, world visions, and counter-hegemonic culture.

Foundations for a new civilization

It is an ethical imperative for humankind to reflect on the foundations of a new civilization and to embark on the long process of disarmament and the social reconstruction of culture, of the economy, and of power that this implies. Life, every form of life, has the fundamental right to exist; so do the complex ecological systems that are an integral, regulating part of planet Earth. This is a monumental challenge of both a philosophical and political order because it consists in disarticulating the thinking and action assumptions that have become part of common sense and that, for this very reason, are the pillars of the industrial capitalist civilization—productivist and consumerist, sexist and racist—invading our lives, shaping our heads and ethical values, and organizing the economy and power in society.

To be sustainable, human civilization needs to renounce anthropocentrism as philosophy, ethics, and religion, and to make a radical change in its view of nature and in its relationship with nature. The first task derived from this principle is to disable the current production “machine” designed to accumulate material and financial wealth. The core ethical question is, in this case: How can we replace the values and lifestyle based on “greater having,” producing more and more waste and destruction, with those of “greater being,” with greater happiness, greater solidarity, greater awareness of our responsibilities to regenerate, reproduce, and preserve the integrity of our natural foundation, and to share it with everyone now and with future generations?

Care is imperative for us as humans and in our relationship with the biosphere. A world without care has allowed the colonial undertaking to conquer peoples and their territories. In a world without care, the atmosphere has been colonized by carbon emissions from large economic corporations, companies, the richest, and the most powerful due to their unbridled consumption. Preserving natural species (seeds and animals)—biodiversity—means caring and, at the same time, setting up the conditions for living together and sharing. We need to rescue care as a principle for the de-privatization of the family and the sexist domination that it thrives upon. We need to build the principle of care as a core element of the new economy, the new management of this great home that is the symbiosis of human life with nature, indispensable community life where people live together and everything is shared, territories as a way of organizing to live according to the potential and limitations of the locus we are occupying, the economy and power that this leads to, from the local to the global. Sustainable economy is only possible when based on care, which leads to respect for the integrity of nature, to use that neither destroys nor generates waste but instead renews and regenerates.

It is not enough to color what we've got “green” and keep growing, feeding on social exclusion and the destruction of the natural commons. We need to recompose and rebuild our philosophical and ethical foundations in order to build a human civilization where the sustainability of all people—from which no one is excluded now or in future generations—and the sustainability of all of life, as well as of the integrity of the planet are the rule and not the exception.

Never has humankind been as unequal as in the current context of abundance to the exclusion of the many, of outrageous wealth and unbearable poverty, and never has this truth been so evident in the struggle for justice and equality. To face social injustice it is fundamental to face environmental destruction and the injustice inherent to it. It is not one or the other; it is both at the same time.

Rights, as common goods, refer to these two sides of the political relationship of equality. To enjoy rights, everyone needs at the same time to be responsible for everyone else’s rights. This is a shared relationship and as such, it is based on co-responsibility. This is why it is of the essence to bring this theme into the debate on the foundations of a new civilization. The growing awareness of human rights and responsibilities, in societies and in relation to the biosphere, brings to light the fundamental question of interdependence between the local and territorial level and the planetary one. Rights and responsibilities rely on the recognition of ecological and social interdependence as an indisputable condition to reestablish the foundations of the sustainability of life and of the planet.

A diversified culture is what enhances the potential value of the people that constitute it, what makes it possible to envisage the sustainability of life and of the planet. A vibrant culture is a culture of diversity, not the homogeneity imposed by the current overwhelming globalization. Imperialism, nationalism, arsenals, wars, and violence, all of these internalized in our current culture, social structures, and ways of organizing power and the economy, are the supporting points of industrial, productivist, consumer civilization, which feeds on conquests, exploitation, the servility of debt, inequality, and social exclusion on a global scale, and on the intensive use of natural resources. Thus peace is not only an objective for biocivilization, but an ethical condition and incontrovertible strategy policy for sustainability and the continuity of all forms of life.

Biocivilization is not possible without an ethics of peace and democracy. This is an essential condition for all the previously mentioned principles and pillars. Democracy is guided by the principles and ethical values of freedom, equality, diversity, solidarity, and participation, all together and all at the same time, as a basis for democratic action and active citizenship. A methodological basis of this nature can turn everything that was previously stated about the foundations of biocivilization into a possible Utopia. Connected and having recognized our shared interdependence, we can build from the local to the global, with the methods of democracy and in peace, a new architecture of power for biocivilization.

The education we want and the complexity of the present

The global crisis is also an education crisis—understood as lifelong education—a crisis in its content and its meaning as it has gradually stopped being considered as a human right and has been converted into the primary means to satisfy the needs of markets demanding manpower, for production and consumption. Not only has education given up on training people who can think about the major global political, environmental, economic, and social issues, it has also been stripped of its deep political content and, in particular, of its potential to produce citizens who can think in terms of a different economic and social order, in which it would be possible to overcome the complex of deep crises we are experiencing, and are manifested in growing inequality and discrimination and in the absence of dignity and justice.

It has become essential to rethink the purposes and practices of education in the context of the dispute over meaning, characterized by the subordination of most public policies to the paradigm of human capital on one side, up against the emergence from social movements of alternative paradigms seeking to restore education as a right, and as an ethical and political project. It is therefore urgent to save the concept of Education as a human right in its formal, non-formal, and informal dimensions, to open it to include the democratization of societies, such that they are made of critically minded citizens able to connect with movements demanding change in the social order, aiming for greater social and environmental justice, intending to understand and discuss solutions to problems at the global scale.

Developing critical “subjectivity” has become a central aspect in building a citizens’ pedagogics in the current situation. The idea is to reestablish a feeling of emancipation in empowerment processes, understood as the development of community resources to practice politics, generate knowledge, strengthen and promote the knowledge and teachings produced in democratic struggles, which need inclusive leadership, participatory organizations, alliances with democratic civil-society organizations, and the constant and necessary “radical-pragmatic ponderation” (unprecedented-possible, Paulo Freire would say) in how agreements, consensuses and associativity are reached among the diversity of actors participating in politics.

All of this implies a political and cognitive inflection, a paradigm change in how education is understood, an opening to new points of view on social ends, which would include good-living (buen-vivir), common goods, and the ethics of care, among others. A large forum for discussion and socialization of this should be opened on the road to Rio+20 and beyond, and these ends should be stated in an education designed for change and for personal and social transformation.

These new paradigms and points of view should not only be maps to guide us in the new contexts, they should also be consequent content sheets including the ends we are reaching for as a citizens’ movement that can involve the different actors of the education process—educations workers, students, parents, family, and more broadly all citizens needing and fighting for a deep change in education—to generate a radical turn in society toward more social and environmental justice. All of this is consistent with the liberating idea of popular education, fed by many experiences in education for another citizenship.

The paradigm change in education, as a condition for moving toward sustainable societies, with social and environmental justice, where the economy would be a means for this end and not an end in itself, supposes a change in the technical and economics-oriented focuses of current education policies. The right to “lifelong” learning needs to be claimed, and this is not meant to be continuous education designed to meet the needs of the markets and the requirements of the old and new industries.

The education we want starts with building many types of education—formal, informal, and non-formal—to develop human capacities, including cognitive, empowerment, and social-participation capacities, capacities for coexisting with others in diversity and difference, for caring and planning for one’s own life, for coexisting among human beings in harmony with the environment.

A pertinent, relevant, transformational, critical education needs to have as its highest end to promote human dignity, and social and environmental justice. Education, the human right sustaining all other rights, must consider children, young people, and adults as subjects of law and of rights, promote interculturality, equality, gender equity, the nexus between citizenship and democracy, care and a harmonious relationship with nature, the eradication of all forms of discrimination, justice, and a culture of peace and non-violent conflict resolution.

The education we want requires to promote strategically an education that will contribute to the social redistribution of knowledge and power (taking gender, race-ethnicity, age, and sexual orientation into account), that will strengthen the sense of autonomy, solidarity, and diversity expressed in the new social movements.

The idea is to promote critical and transformational education that will respect human rights and the rights of the entire community of life to which human being belong, that will specifically promote the right to citizens’ participation in decision-making forums such as, for example, the Rio+20 Conference.

Scientific knowledge should be a common good

The twenty years that have passed since Rio have seen one of the biggest explosions of techno-scientific innovations in the history of humankind. The Earth Summit in 1992 heralded the era of the so-called Knowledge Economy as governments began destroying the world heritage of knowledge on living systems. This has gone hand-in-hand with the destruction of the irreplaceable knowledge and expertise held by indigenous people and small-scale farmers, knowledge relating to land, soil, climate, ecosystems, biodiversity, and sustainable farming. This damage is so great that we could say that our generation will be the first in the history of humankind to have lost more knowledge than it has gained.

Although Rio introduced the precautionary principle and the need to assess technologies into global discussions, since then the capacity to monitor and assess technologies that existed in the UN has been dismantled while science has become increasingly commercialized. Moreover, a large proportion of scientific and technological efforts has been transformed into tools to maintain corporate power and profits.

Public science has systematically been sequestrated by private interests, scientific education has been subordinated to industrial interests, and the fruit of public science has been systematically patented by global corporations. New risky and untested technologies, such as nanotechnology and synthetic biology, have flooded the markets with a total lack of regulation and prior assessment. The countries and industries that have caused and profited from climate change are now telling the world that they need to take control of the global thermostat and manipulate the climate with geo-engineering.

Scientific knowledge is one of the common goods belonging to humankind: it should always be publicly accessible and should be considered as a knowledge-based common good. In the same way, traditional indigenous and small farmers’ knowledge is also a common good that represents the people’s heritage at the service of humankind. This is why we reject all forms of intellectual ownership of life forms.

Rio+20 provides an opportunity to reaffirm the precautionary principle, identify and reject mistaken and distorted interpretations, and extend its application. We call on Rio+20 to establish a participative mechanism for prior social, environmental, economic, and cultural assessment of technologies in order to monitor, debate, and provide advice on the implications and alternatives in the fields of science and technology for consideration by societies. We also call on social organizations, particularly indigenous and small-scale farmers, to monitor and assess new technologies independently from governments. Owing to the very high risks and the potential to destabilize the planet’s systems, we also call on Rio+20 to establish a ban on geo-engineering, similar to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty.

Asserting the ancestral knowledge of indigenous peoples

It has been demonstrated that the shelters of life are the peoples’ forests and territories, which are effective barriers against predation. The genetic resources of the indigenous territories and ancestral knowledge constitute a collective natural and intellectual indigenous heritage that has been preserved over the centuries and passed down through the generations. Access to ancestral knowledge and genetic resources must be submitted to fair and equitable distribution of the benefits as much of the genetic resources—including derived products—as of the traditional knowledge associated with them. This is why it is indispensable to change legislation and public policy to guarantee the demarcation of indigenous peoples’ territories and their collective title to their territories as peoples, and also to support—not attack or marginalize—“Full Life” strategies, different from those designed to commodify nature.

To avoid climate change, the system has to be changed. It is therefore necessary to denounce the contradictions of global and national forest policies, which behind declarations, plans, and small “sustainable projects” are aggravating the predation, deforestation, and deterioration wreaked by the mining, hydrocarbon, and mega-hydroelectric industries, by extensive and intensive farming, soy crops, agribusiness, “agrofuels,” colonization superhighways, genetically modified organisms, pesticides, protected areas superimposed on indigenous territories, biopiracy, and theft of ancestral knowledge. Ancestral knowledge must not be marketed, misused, or authorized for biotechnology patent claims. Ancestral knowledge is not in the public domain; it belongs to the culture of indigenous people. States and international agencies (such as the Convention on Biological Diversity—CBD) must adopt sui generis legal regulations for its protection. It is therefore necessary to consolidate the Right to Prior Consultation and to Free, Binding, Previous and Informed Consent for access to the genetic resources of indigenous territories and of the traditional knowledge associated with them.

Introduction to: Rights, Peoples, Territories, and Defense of Mother Earth

Rights are once again being threatened. Since time immemorial, peoples have been fighting for their dignity, justice, and freedom. The history of humankind is full of acts of struggle and resistance in which women and men have offered even their life to protect and care for what is most precious in the human condition: their very existence, their insatiable thirst for staying on course in a journey with an unforeseeable, hence irresistible destination. Peoples have not just cared for their lives, they have also cared for territories and the areas they have lived in, and they have forever traveled the world in migratory movements. For centuries, societies have been issuing Declarations, Manifestos, and Charters that have engraved the inalienable principles of dignity, protection, security, mutual respect, and care for Mother Earth.

In the current phase of history, the globalized capitalist market and its neoliberal ideology have launched a new offensive against rights, those written into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for instance, as well as the new rights that have emerged in this age of growing globalization, such as the right to a harmonious relationship between humankind and the biosphere and the rights of Mother Earth, ancient rights, which the peoples have succeeded in placing at the forefront of the debate on a world scale.

It is nonetheless indispensable to continue fighting for these rights without ever giving up, because neoliberalism and its new ideological, political, and technological avatars could make history reverse to times of oppression that endanger the very existence of life and of the planet.

The rights of Mother Earth pave the way toward a new civilization

Over the centuries, our model of civilization has gradually distanced itself from the remarkable balance of nature capable of protecting and regenerating Life on the planet. The world has irreversibly become a community of singular destiny, interdependent and interrelated. Our way of life, propelled by the positivist structure of modern science and capitalist expansion, has intensified the subjugation and destruction of human beings and nature. This model has imposed a logic of competition and unlimited growth, which has separated humans from nature according to a logic of domination over it. This model has taken us to dizzying heights today, its most tangible examples being the phenomenon of climate change, irreversible environmental damage and the disappearance of between 20% and 30% of the species. The carbon footprints of the wealthiest countries are 5 times greater than they can endure, presenting us with an unprecedented dilemma: continue down the path of production, depredation and death, or embark on the path to a new model of sustainable civilization, respectful of life and reconciled to nature.

The urgent, yet feasible and necessary, task of searching for a new civilizatory path at the dawn of the twenty first century is that of building a system capable of transitioning from a patriarchal order that enslaves nature and is founded on a reductionist and separatist vision of the relationships between nature and human beings to a system capable of reestablishing complex and harmonious relationships between the two, integrating them into the extensive cycle of Mother Earth. The first step of this task is profoundly philosophical: we need to change our vision of humanity in order to situate human activities within the broadest context of Life and Mother Earth. As human beings, we are only a part of this interdependent matrix that gives us a source of life. It integrates us and opens the horizons of a common planetary destiny to us in an indivisible relationship, complementary and spiritual with other living beings. Each being, each ecosystem, each natural community, specie and other natural entity, is defined by relationships as an integral part of Mother Earth. These relationships are simultaneously the source of life, food and teaching and they provide us with everything that we need to live well, fairly and balanced.

The second step to advancing the new civilizatory model resides in establishing new ethical bases and principles capable of guiding the insertion of human activities within the system of Mother Earth. The proceedings emerging from the Peoples’ World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth organized in Bolivia in April 2010 formulated seven ethical guidelines: 1. Harmony and balance between everything and with everything; 2. Complementarity, solidarity and equity; 3. Collective wellbeing and satisfaction of basic needs all in harmony with Mother Earth; 4. Respect for the rights of Mother Earth and all human beings; 5.Recognition of human beings for what they are and not for what they have; 6.Elimination of all forms of colonialism, imperialism and interventionism; 7.Peace between peoples and with Mother Nature. These principles state that goods and services are required to satisfy the needs of the population but presume that the means of production of these goods – that include financial and technological measures, adaptation, capacity building, patterns of production and consumption – cannot be of unlimited destructive development at the cost of other peoples.

A rupture is at the heart of these principles through the acceptance of Mother Earth and living beings as the subjects of rights in concrete and immediate form. They maintain that a balance with nature can only exist if there is equity between human beings. As a result, in an interdependent system, it is not possible to recognize rights only for human beings without causing an imbalance in Mother Earth. Moreover, to guarantee the rights of humans it is necessary to recognize and defend the rights of Mother Earth and all the beings of which she consists. The rights of one being must be limited by the rights of others and conflicts between rights must be dealt with in a way that maintains the integrity, equilibrium and health of Mother Earth. Just as human beings have rights, so too all other beings on Mother Earth have rights specific to their existential and evolutionary condition in the communities in which they exist: the right to life and to exist, to be respected, to regeneration and biocapacity, the continuation of cycles and vital processes, to maintain their identity and integrity and integrity as different beings, self-regulated and interrelated. Each being has the right to carry out its role on Mother Earth for is harmonic functioning, benefitting from fundamental rights such as water; clean air; complete health; to be free of contamination, pollution and toxic and radioactive waste; to not be genetically altered and structurally modified, threatening its integrity; to a full and prompt restoration of the damage caused by human activities.

Recognizing these new ethical guidelines underlying the rights of Mother Earth also carries with it the recognition of a collection of new visions and responsibilities, running from the most individual and subjective to international institutions and regulatory norms. As human beings we are all agents for living in harmony with Mother Nature and participating in the civilizatory transformation that this implies. Therefore, it is necessary to empower ourselves, promote and participate in the learning, analysis, interpretation and communication concerning how to live in balance with Mother Nature. To this end, we call on building a world movement of Peoples for Mother Earth that will be based on the principles of complementarity and respect for the diversity of the origins of its members, in the process becoming a democratic space for coordinating action on a global level.

The responsibility for the new economic and regulatory systems is critical. These must be capable of strengthening the rights and respect of all beings comprising Mother Earth, whatever their own cultures, traditions and customs may be. Therefore, dealing with the measure and articulation of human wellbeing in economic systems means dealing inseparably with the wellbeing of Mother Earth, now and for future generations. It is for this reason that we propose the re-appreciation of the knowledge, wisdom and ancestral practices of indigenous peoples, affirmed in the experience of a wellbeing rooted in the concept of “Living Well,” to the peoples of the world. Likewise, the economies must establish precautionary and restrictive measures to prevent human activity from leading to the extinction of the species, the destruction of the environment or the change of environmental cycles. As a corollary, they must guarantee that the damage caused by human violations of the inherent rights of Mother Earth will be rectified and make those responsible pay the consequences in order to restore the integrity and health of Mother Earth.

These principles aim to guide the emergence of a new regulatory order of international life by creating rules and laws within the sphere of the States, of all public and private institutions, including the General Assembly of the United Nations.

Reinforcing the struggle for collective rights

Rights -human rights and citizen rights- are a permanent and never-finished sociocultural construction. They have turned into a field of dispute regarding their conceptualization, their content, their practice, and their scope. The problems that accompany this dispute are of a different order. The most significant of these have to do with the prevalence of a liberal (and neoliberal) and clearly Western view—and its claim to universality—of rights, seen only as related to the rights of individuals and not in their relationship to the social context, obscuring the fact that human and citizen rights are core political elements and that their violation constitutes an aggression against society. From this perspective, individual rights and collective rights are part of a comprehensive and complex view of the dispute for dignity and recognition. To consider rights as universal in their application without considering the recognition of differences as a dimension inseparable from equality accentuates inequality and exclusion and obviates the political, subjective, and paradigmatic consequences of diversity.

It is of the essence to assume the diversity of lifestyles, collective imagery, and worldviews not only for the many different social protagonists and actors who are struggling with insistence for their recognition, but also because this allows us to deconstruct homogenous visions of the state, the nation, democracy, and equality.

The right to land and territory is built and reproduced collectively. It is also pivotal for opening new dimensions of rights not considered in the traditional perspective, such as the ethnic racial dimensions of rights, and the dimension of the body as territory. All these are dimensions that cut across and structure the political horizon. It also brings in the dimension of de-patriarchization to oppose the exclusion of women from the right to land and territory. It is a struggle of enormous significance for imagining other development models aiming for harmony with nature and connected to the many other rights of benefit to all of humankind and at the core of the demands of social movements: the right to sustainable development, the right to water, to adequate nutrition, to non-use of genetically modified products, to a healthy environment, to decent housing, to work, to participate in issues of common interest, to association, and to equitable relations—social and sexual—between men and women.

In the interdependence between humans and nature, we are facing the ethical crisis we are experiencing, and generating the bases for a new ethics that is also a permanent source of rights. This requires coming up with new ethical dimensions in which the imperative is to not affect the life of the planet, half of which is made of human beings and common goods, and asserting a shared ethics, which should be rooted in the different cultural and religious traditions. We need to promote an ethics of care of human beings and their relationships around common goods: water, air; an ethics of social, environmental, ecological, and gender justice; an ethics of equality in diversity, of rights and responsibilities. Responsibility is at the core of this common ethics and is expressed as reciprocity and care.

Recovering the right to water and to its fair and sustainable use

In the past years, social and ecological crises have aggravated this issue, and concern with the lack of access to drinking water has grown both in terms of quantity and quality, according to the criteria of the UN Resolution regarding the right to water and sanitation, these being big causes of mortality, especially for children in our poor countries. we came nowhere near reaching the objectives agreed on in Rio with respect to the universal access to water. On the contrary, the alternative of privatizing drinking water and sanitation services, which was presented in the nineties as a solution to accelerate access to water, turned out to be inadequate for addressing an issue that demanded public investment and administration in the public interest (not in the financial one), with social and democratic oversight.

We want to promote a culture of “water is life” which emphasizes ethical values, cultural aspects, sacred dimensions, and the symbolism of the cosmic vision of traditional and native people. We affirm that defending the right to water is a strong vector for uniting social movements. We express our repulsion to all forms of unrightful appropriation of water in industrial and agricultural use, to the detriment of its free circulation to nurture populations. We also express our concern regarding the existing and potential conflicts between people caused by controlling water to the detriment of the poor.

We also highlight the increasing levels of pollution of seas and oceans from the contamination of rivers and the uncontrolled dumping of garbage and sewage. In this sense, we also reject the processes of desalinization of sea water that do not respect precautionary principles and that are environmentally unsustainable.

We want to promote a culture of “water is life” which emphasizes ethical values, cultural aspects, sacred dimensions, and the symbolism of the cosmic vision of traditional and native people. We affirm that defending the right to water is a strong vector for uniting social movements. We express our repulsion to all forms of unrightful appropriation of water in industrial and agricultural use, to the detriment of its free circulation to nurture populations. We also express our concern regarding the existing and potential conflicts between people caused by controlling water to the detriment of the poor.

Challenges and Strategies

Fight against private financing of investments in the water sector and, consequently, fight for the reinvention of forms of public financing, with the purpose of emancipating communities and public institutions from dependence on private capital

Fight against the privatization of water and against concessions that are using public resources to finance private companies in the water sector

Raise awareness and increase knowledge on this theme together with national and international civil society, through campaigns and actions designed to aim at common objectives for Rio+20

Fight for access to information and for free communication, education, and citizenship regarding water issues

Social oversight and participation in all aspects related to the common good of water in a broad sense

Fight for the right to water and sanitation and fight for a sustainable environment, achieved by means of harmonizing public policies in the administration of common goods (water, earth, air)

Health Is a Universal Right, Not a Source of Profit

In almost all countries, health systems are being attacked by privatization an increasing commodification, exacerbating North-South inequalities, as well as internal inequalities within each country. The poorest populations are the first victims of the reforms demanded by the financial markets, and health and drug corporations. Around the world, the constant search for productivity gains (exacerbated by the crisis) has led to deteriorate health at work in huge proportions (160 million new cases of occupational diseases each year in the world - ILO).

For a health system guaranteeing universality, accessibility, and quality:

The construction of international trade unions and social movements with "health without borders" in their unions or social movements. An alternative system of social welfare without borders, a system without boundaries based on the existence of indivisible economic, social, civic, and political rights.

A system based on the democracy of health and determination of populations’ needs by the people and health workers based on state funding.

Statutory and healthy work conditions for health professionals, and training to ensure quality of care and caring.

Turning cities into organized actors from the local to the global level

In a world where urbanization is growing fast, the city, along with its surrounding rural areas, constitutes a basic unit of social management and a key link in political organization. Each city comes up against the need to elaborate integrated policies that can combine a variety of dimensions, such as social inclusion and the fight against poverty, basic sanitation, managing solid waste, access to social policies, sustainable construction and mobility, law and order and environmental education. The multiplicity of local authorities and the similar or complementary challenges they face has triggered a planet-wide collaborative process covering territories and cities that have linked together in networks to share their experiences and together learn new regulation and government mechanisms.

In order to build sustainable cities, we need to move forwards together and work on four strategic lines of action that tie in closely with the four paradigmatic concepts covered by this document’s proposals.

1. Encourage the emergence of cities as a new organized actor on the local to local level

Strengthen the representation of local authorities within the overall multi-lateral decision-making system.

Promote policies for decentralized financing and local authorities’ right to implement sustainability projects.

Encourage the creation of integrated city systems at the national, regional and municipal levels.

2. Formulate perceptions, mechanisms and tools for information and training

Build a system that fosters scientific and technological exchanges with the aim of training cities to work together to build sustainability policies.

Direct the production of national and regional policies for training managers towards local integrated and sustainable development.

Adopt local systems for social, environmental, political, economic and cultural indicators that measure the quality of life in cities, allowing local populations to participate in and assess implemented sustainability policies; support the implementation of these systems at the global level.

3. Make cities the breeding ground for new balances of power, citizenship and social inclusion

Support sectoral policies for the right to housing and right to the city (“build neighbourhoods and cities, not a few houses”), combined with the elimination of poverty, promotion of social inclusion, reduction in inequalities, promotion of good health with the practice of physical and sporting activities and incentives for innovation in the areas of technology, management and the participative government of cities.

Promote the integration and linking up of policies on housing, sanitation, mobility, adaptation to climate change, protection of fresh water sources and promotion of human development and well being.

Encourage the setting up of participative structures for governing cities and revitalizing city centres.

Improve financing mechanisms, subsidies and institutional agreements to cover deficits and guarantee inclusion and access to healthy cities.

Implement national policies for regulating urban and land development as well as development of favelas and other forms of housing.

4. Support cities in their transition to a new inclusive and sustainable economy

Implement the strategic management of land occupation with the aim of encouraging sustainable use of natural resources and guarantee the quality of life for all human beings.

Increase the treatment, disposal and reuse of industrial and inert waste, paying special attention to cities undergoing accelerated growth and expansion and to waste from civil engineering.

Develop policies for replacing oil-based energy sources, encourage the adoption of cleaner fuels, prioritize public transport within urban transport systems and set limits on polluting emissions in line with the World Health Organization.

Migrants should be citizens of the 21st century

Migrants, the majority of whom are women, bear the right of everyone to live, transit, reside and work with dignity on the Planet Earth. We must, therefore, urgently affirm that migration is consubstantial to the human being and that walls are not sustainable. Neoliberal Capitalism imposes migration the policies of including some and of excluding many. This reveals a more and more acute conflict, of which migrants are the most evident indicator. This conflict is found between the appearance of the state based on the interest in nationality, on one hand, and the search for a new sovereignty of planetary scope in order to establish a minimal and inalienable respect of the Human Rights of everyone, on the other. Migrants are an indicator of this conflict and of the necessity of change for humanity in times of growing relationships of peoples and societies; they are the objective evidence for the need for redesigning the treatment of migration as a part of redesigning world governance, which implies tackling the task of overcoming the institutional residue of the modern Nation State and redesigning the criteria of identity, belonging and citizenship.

This necessity becomes even more urgent given the massive migratory compulsion, an expression of historical, structural phenomena, and is manipulated by the corruption of public institutions and the “black industry” of migration, which, according to various evaluations moves between 15,000 and 30,000 million dollars annually (the second largest generator of illegal money in the world). This is the huge business of the disappearance of human beings, the victims of which are estimated to be two million people each year, through the compulsive disappearance of migrants in search of a country of destination as the only possibility of survival or of improvement of life. The conversion of borders into spaces of encounter and the humanization of migratory flows and interchanges is the only viably alternative when faced with these growing threats to safety and living together. This conversion of the borders can only have sense for the redesign of governance if it has as a future, programmatic objective the gradual construction of large geographic cultural areas of free circulation, residence and work, that is to say, of spaces of regional integration in large unit blocks of countries which occupy a large and common geographic and often cultural territory.

Regardless of daily suffered discrimination, these migrants who exercise an amplified citizenship in their countries of origin and of destination are also a prototype of a “regional citizen,” as an emergent reality and normative objective in many of the geographic and cultural spaces which have been established in recent years. They continue to be members of their societies of origin, although simultaneously they are, in fact, members of their society of residence. This has to do with identity and belonging that do not stop being one in order to then become the other, but rather that are added, collected and enlarged. This concrete enlarging of citizenship into a double belonging constitutes the potential, viable basis of an even larger, regional and universal citizenship. The fundamental operative criterion is to gradually homologate and to homogenize the norms and to establish an institutionality common to those countries of the integrated space, starting with the diversity and community of existing instruments, which make regional citizenship effective, by reproducing this model in all the dimensions of citizenship that become necessary (education and professional training, validation of degrees, political and labor rights, etc.).

Although the rights to work of migrants are asserted in regional spaces, violations of these rights occur on a daily level, and weaken the entirety of the democratic system and generate exclusion and resentment which bring about worsened social stability. Therefore, migrants and their families should be allowed to exercise, in conditions and opportunities of full equality with the local receptor population, all rights, economic, social, of health, education, housing, social security and recreation etc., without discrimination.

In order to turn migration into a living cultural wealth, we must strengthen our pluri- and inter-cultural abilities and overcome racism, and xenophobia as expressions of backwardness of human conscientiousness. In everyday life, migratory flows are outlining a new world for everybody, and changing the way of thinking about and living culture, and heading towards a growing, human pluri-identity. Therefore, it must be explicitly and unmistakably stated of all levels and segments of society that all forms of racism and cultural intolerance are forms of human degradation. Therefore, the principle of “unity in diversity” should be accepted as the main pillar around which particular identities remain intact when encountering other and different ones.

Introduction: the crisis of capitalism is a crisis of civilization

The economic and financial globalization of the last thirty years has brought societies under the sway of widespread competition, private ownership and maximum economic profitability. Assertion of the idea that the market is the best possible instrument to govern societies and nature has ended up subjecting societies to the rule of the market and led to an acceleration in the ecological crisis and a democratic crisis. This neoliberal phase in the globalization process that began in the 1980s is now undergoing a deep-reaching crisis.

This crisis is expressed in the failure of capitalism to live up to its promises on a global level. The trend to turn nature, work and the whole range of human activities into merchandise is destroying societies’ capacity to reproduce.

The social crisis is a key element in the global crisis: the dramatic increase in social inequalities, collapse of social protection systems, downwards pressure on wages and reduction in income generated by family-scale farming together with the need to sustain capitalist growth have bred an economy based on widespread debt, which has in turn led to the subprime crisis and the public finance crisis successively. The solution to the crisis cannot realistically be envisaged in terms of the paradigm of limitless growth in effect since 1945, when the Western powers were governing the world and seizing a major part of the world’s wealth for themselves.

The ecological crisis should highlight the need to take a new direction in terms of the dominant production and consumption models. Instead, it is strengthening the technical-scientific paradigm and belief in technical solutions and accelerating the process of privatizing common goods such as water, land, energy, air and the living world.

Neoliberal policies, by extending this productivist model to the entire planet, have increased and accelerated the pressure on resources to an unimaginable extent. They have also created new balances of power between different countries. Although the traditional dependency of southern countries on northern countries still exists in many areas, it is also obviously and indisputably changing, with factors such as the economic and financial dependency on emerging countries and the major reliance on raw materials that are running out. Economic globalization has revealed the limits of global capitalist expansion. The current crisis is therefore far more than an economic crisis: it is a crisis of the economy’s domination over the whole of social and political life.

This crisis confirms that capitalism is not solely a form of organizing the economy. It is form of civilization, or rather, of de-civilization, which affects everyday ways of living and representations and, in particular, creates a relationship to the world based on the domination of nature and work. This is the civilisation we need to break free from—as a matter of urgency.

The Green Economy constitutes an attempt to relaunch a new phase in capitalist expansion

In the 1980s, faced with a crisis of profitability, capitalism launched a massive offensive against workers and peoples, seeking to increase profits by expanding markets and reducing costs through trade and financial liberalization, flexibilization of labor, and privatization of the state sector.

Today, faced with an even more complex and deeper crisis, capitalism is launching a new attack that combines the old austerity measures of the Washington Consensus—as we are witnessing in Europe—with an offensive to create new sources of profit and growth through the Green Economy. Although capitalism has always been based on the exploitation of labor and nature, this new phase of capitalist expansion seeks to exploit and profit by giving a price value to the essential life-giving capacities of nature.

The Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit of 1992 institutionalized important foundations for international cooperation on sustainable development, such as “polluter pays,” common but differentiated responsibilities, and the precautionary principle. But Rio also institutionalized the concept of “sustainable development” based on “sustainable growth.” In 1992, the Rio Conventions acknowledged for the first time the rights of indigenous communities and their central contributions to the preservation of biodiversity. But, in the same documents, the industrialized countries and corporations received the guarantee that the seeds and genetic resources that they gained through centuries of colonial domination would be protected through intellectual property rights. The Green Economy is an attempt to expand the reach of finance capital and integrate into the market all that remains of nature. The Green Economy aims to do this by giving a “value” or a “price” to biomass, biodiversity, and the functions of the ecosystems—such as storing carbon, pollinating crops, or filtering water—in order to integrate these “services” as tradable units in the financial market.

As a result, the Green Economy treats nature as capital—“natural capital.” The Green Economy considers it essential to put a price on the free services that plants, animals, and ecosystems offer to humanity in order to “sustainably manage” biodiversity, water purification, pollination of plants, the protection of coral reefs, and regulation of the climate. For the Green Economy, it is necessary to identify the specific functions of ecosystems and biodiversity and assign them a monetary value, evaluate their current status, set a limit after which they will cease to provide services, and concretize in economic terms the cost of their conservation in order to develop a market for each particular environmental service. For the Green Economy, the instruments of the market are powerful tools for managing the “economic invisibility of nature.”

The main targets of the Green Economy are the developing countries, where there is the richest biodiversity. The “zero draft” even acknowledges that a new round of “structural adjustments” will be necessary: “developing countries are facing great challenges in eradicating poverty and sustaining growth, and a transition to a green economy will require structural adjustments which may involve additional costs to their economies...”.

The postulates promoted under the Green Economy are wrong. The current environmental and climate crisis is not a simple market failure. The solution is not to put a price on nature. Nature is not a form of capital. It is wrong to say that we only value that which has a price, an owner, and brings profits. The market mechanisms that permit exchange among human beings and nations have proven incapable of contributing to an equitable distribution of wealth. The main challenge for the eradication of poverty is not to grow forever, but to achieve an equitable distribution of the wealth that is possible under the limits of the Earth system. In a world in which 1% of the population controls 50% of the wealth of the planet, it will not be possible to eradicate poverty or restore harmony with nature.

The Green Economy is a cynical and opportunistic manipulation of the ecological and social crises. Rather than addressing the real structural causes of inequality and injustices, capital is using “green” language to launch a new round of expansion. Corporations and the financial sector need governments to institutionalize the new rules of the Green Economy to guarantee them against risks and to create the institutional framework for the financialization of nature. Many governments are willing partners in this project as they believe it will stimulate a new phase of growth and accumulation.

The extractive industry is a new form of colonization and dependency

The expansion of the so-called extractive industry is one of the characteristic signs of the current phase of neoliberal globalization. In recent years, socio-environmental struggles and resistance to the extractive industry have marked the geography of social protests, especially in conflicts associated with the devastating effects of mega mining. In Latin America, Asia, Africa, Europe and North America the increased mobilization of thousands of communities against transnational mining projects demonstrates the peoples’ growing rejection of the social, environmental, economic and cultural effects of mining mega projects.

The model of extractive production has focused on the exploitation of nature’s goods that, without significant processing or modification, are appropriated and commercialized on the world market. Traditionally referring to activities such as mining, fishing or logging, in the last two decades this model has expanded to include agribusiness and other activities, such as tourism.

The “new extractivism” causes serious damage in southern countries by imposing a new international division of work and reproducing mechanisms of re-colonization and dependence, re-primarization and the well-known logic of enclave economies. Extractivism is based on the appropriation of tangible and intangible, once common, public goods that remained unexploited or oriented toward local reproduction. There is a direct connection between the process of commodifying common natural goods and the privatization of common social goods, such as public utilities, education and health.

In addition to the negative impacts of mining mega projects characteristic of extractivism, the handing over of concessions of millions of hectares to transnational companies for 60 or even 90 years must be added. These as yet unexploited mining concessions are a latent threat to the survival of the peoples and territories of the south. These policies, especially in relation to mega mining, are promoted by governments of various political markers and ideologies. Since the worsening of the crisis of capitalism in recent years, governmental policies have for the most part intensified the commodification of common goods through extractivist activities. They attempt to justify these policies by establishing a false dichotomy between the social and environmental, insisting that in periods of crisis maintaining social policies assumes the sacrifice of environmental conditions.

In order to confront these challenges, it is necessary to strengthen and expand the networks of social movements and organizations committed to the process of resistance and challenges to extractivist policies, particularly those related to mining, gas and oil. It is necessary to transcend the questioning of the extractivist model to rescue, make visible and strengthen alternative experiences and proposals. The participation and contribution of the indigenous peasant movements, labour unions and different networks and collectives, that question and challenge the extractivist dynamics from different horizons and diverse perspectives, is indispensible in this endeavor.

Energy Transition Is Urgent and Possible

Delivering truly sustainable energy requires a re-think of the way we produce, use and distribute energy. We need to produce energy using renewable sources, we need to use energy efficiently and we need efficient local distribution networks and smart grids. Many reports recognise this and various scenarios have been produced that show how changes can be implemented.

Consistent across these scenarios, reports and case studies is the need for supportive government policies. In other words, the barriers to the uptake of green energy sources are mainly political not technological, although the perception that renewable energy sources are not adequate to meet needs and that they are expensive is also a barrier. Other barriers include lack of appropriate policy or poor policy implementation; inadequate fiscal and subsidies policies, difficulty accessing finance; inappropriate grid integration and infrastructure; poor planning, and lock-in of existing technology.

Changing Energy Sources

The climate imperative demands that we shift to low and zero carbon energy sources. These are readily available and becoming increasingly economically viable. Wind, solar (PV and concentrated solar power), small-scale hydro power, geothermal are all technologies that are rapidly expanding use around the world.

Changing the energy system is not just about renewable energy technology.

Renewable energy systems are fundamentally about enabling access to sustainable energy services for everyone, hence such systems include:

the national and international policies needed to create the framework that encourages and supports the uptake of renewable energy systems;

the need for a massive increase in energy efficiency programmes and decentralised energy systems;

the need to provide access to energy services for the 1.4 billion of the world’s poorest that currently do not have such access, this would bring particular benefits for women and children;

the need for adequate resources for research and development as well as deployment.

Decentralised energy and efficiency

Conserving energy and using it more efficiently are among the first, easiest and cheapest ways to embark on the sustainable energy pathway. What society, communities, people need are the services that energy delivers – whether this be power for industrial plant, or for an office, or heating, lighting, cooling for a community. Such services can be satisfied by a range of measures, not simply increasing energy production – which often results in periods when the increased production is not being used. A shift is needed from supply-side to demand-side management, where energy needs can be satisfied by a range of means, not simply by creating more capacity.

The current way that energy is distributed – using large production centres and distributing power over long distances is highly inefficient. Increased efficiency can be achieved by generating the required energy near to the place it is used using decentralised energy systems.

The benefits of a massive uptake of sustainable renewable energy systems are not just about providing energy services without further destabilizing the climate through increasing emissions. The benefits of clean sustainable energy are manifold and include cleaner air, land and water that protects human health, livelihoods and ecosystems as well as providing safer systems that are resilient to natural disasters, do not produce hazardous or toxic wastes and can be relatively rapidly deployed. They are also often the cheapest option for the 1.4 billion poorest, mostly off-grid communities, who have no access to any basic energy services. Furthermore they offer community empowerment and localised control.

Governments set the regulatory framework within which markets operate hence policies ranging from financial instruments to the setting of targets and timetables must support clean energy systems and discourage dirty energy. Investment programmes for energy infrastructures require long term planning and in order to avoid locking in to dirty energy systems it is necessary to adopt appropriate policies and measures to ensure we embark on the sustainable trajectory.

Both technical and financial supports are needed for providing the clean energy services that sustainable society needs. According to the IEA US$ 40 trillion will be needed over the coming 30-40 years for energy developments. But currently many resources are channeled to unsustainable energy sources. It is estimated that US$409 billion are used each year as subsidies to dirty fossil energy sources. The G20 has recognised the need to phase out “perverse subsidies”. These subsidies to the oil, coal, gas and nuclear industries are one of the primary barriers to the rapid global expansion of renewable energy.

However, in addressing the issue of subsidies we need to challenge the production subsidies that are essentially handouts, incentives and tax breaks that are given to corporations – whether private or state owned – that maintains the status quo. These are distinct from consumption subsidies that are, or should be, targeted at the poor to support poverty alleviation. However, it is clear there needs to be subsidy reform if even this part of the subsidy issue can be made to operate well as many reports show that even the poor targeted subsidies are benefiting elites and corporations and are not helping alleviate poverty. The need to provide energy access to the poorest

Over 1.4 billion people have no access to basic energy services that impacts health, welfare, education, sustainability. Poverty renders people more vulnerable to climate impacts as they lack the resources to cope. It is a false dichotomy to say there is a choice between addressing poverty and protecting the environment. Sustainable development will only happen if poverty is tackled and the environment is protected. Halving the amount of poverty by 2015 will not be reached without energy to increase production, income and education, create jobs and reduce the daily grind involved in having to just survive. Halving hunger will not come about without energy for more productive growing, harvesting, processing and marketing of food. Improving health and reducing death rates will not happen without energy for the refrigeration needed for clinics, hospitals and vaccination campaigns. The world’s greatest child killer, acute respiratory infection, will not be tackled without dealing with smoke from cooking fires in the home. Children will not study at night without light in their homes. Clean water will not be pumped or treated without energy.

A renewed political commitment is needed because voluntary measures alone do not deliver what is required. Governments must lead and set the framework to send the necessary signal to the markets.

Governments must seize Rio+20 as the opportunity to create a political environment that eliminates the obstacles and barriers and to commit to clear targets and timetables to provide the framework that will encourage the uptake of clean energy systems (energy efficiency, renewable technologies and decentralised schemes). A concrete outcome would be governments to commit to produce time-bound action plans which incorporate ambitious nationally appropriate targets for the uptake of renewable energy systems.

Frameworks must include the removal of policies that undermine and suppress clean energy systems (such as production subsidies; legal frameworks that support large centralised dirty power; loans and aid that support fossil and/or nuclear fuels). A part of the action plans we call on governments to abolish fossil fuel production subsidies over the next three years.

Action plans need to reassess the energy production and distribution infrastructure to determine how best to supply needs. Developing countries in particular that are looking to expand energy use need support in ensuring the most efficient systems are deployed. Those with large sections of their population without access to modern energy services will require support for appropriate decentralised systems.

To promote sustainable, social and cooperative agriculture and fishing

Industrial agriculture has become generalized in the world as the agricultural model to follow from the perspective of market-oriented production, without managing to satisfy the nutritional requirements of human beings and planetary balance. One thousand million people suffered hunger in the year 2010 (the great majority of whom were peasants and farm workers who produce foodstuff within the framework of peasant farming); while a hand-full of agro industrial corporations accumulated millions of dollars of profit and around 500 million people suffered problems of obesity. Being a major cause of climate change through its contribution of 50% of the emission of greenhouse-effect gasses, of forced migrations through the expansion of the agricultural frontier, of the destruction of soils and cultural knowledge, and of biodiversity, this model finds itself at a complex crossroad, at which the crises of the ethical, technological, energy, sanitary, economic and financial systems, as well as that of the architecture of world power meet simultaneously. Therefore, to work towards a more sustainable model of agriculture suspends making more sustainable and viable each one of the systems of which it is composed; the technical or sectoral proposals which have been made as solutions have tended to worsen the problem; while ecological agriculture, which has proven to be an option which avoids the deterioration of nature significantly, has, until now, not been considered, or worse, has been destroyed by the prevalent model.

Facing this reality, social movements and popular organizations persist in promoting a list of proposals oriented around the construction of food sovereignty, conceived as an integral form of agricultural production, which defends peasant and indigenous agriculture as a generator of food with dignity, identity and gender equality. These proposals aim at nurturing processes of reconstructing territories of life and at demanding agrarian and fishing reform in order that communities of peasant farmers and of fishers, their cultures and ways of life recover a main role. These proposals are oriented around three points: 1) knowledge, possessions and culture of peasant farmers and fishers, 2) rights and regulations of local and global exchange, and 3) co-participation and social control of the system of production.

Cultures sustained by peasant farming and fishing are, first and foremost, shared knowledge gathered with the passing of the ages, which forms a part of the heritage of peoples and of humanity. These cultures consisting of cosmo visions, values, knowledge, technical and of all other types have been left to deteriorated and have been debased by agro industrial logic oriented to overproduction and the consequent phenomenon of nutritional uniformization at global level with high nutritional and environmental impact. In this context, efforts are made to recover and once again give value to agro cultures and local ways of life, of peasant and native farmers and those systems of passed-down knowledge of the production of food. Peasant movements have clearly identified this challenge of ample information and communication about their cultures. Here, the states have the decisive role of insuring respect for the collective character of the bodies of knowledge of peasant and fishing communities, and therefore, the right to collective decision on the access to and use of this knowledge. Formal investigations carried out with public support form part of this common possession. To give value to knowledge implies promoting and consolidating an integral education at all levels, formal and not formal, associating spiritual, material and social dimensions, to sustain the many transformations related to food sovereignty. This education has to be built from being pluri-cultural and with a total participation of the communities found in each territory. Native seeds are also part of the heritage of the peoples and form a fundamental base of food sovereignty. They have always circulated freely in the hands of peoples, cared for and made multiply by those in charge of seeds. Each and every intention of patenting and imposing intellectual possession on life and these possesions, immaterial and material, runs against nature herself and must be prohibited.

Neither sustainable agriculture nor food sovereignty can exist without the dignity and identity of the producers, without affirmation of the primacy of their rights as well as those of Mother Earth, and the assurance of the fair circulation of possessions and resources. It is not only necessary to change the logic of industrial food production oriented towards the global market and profit, but rather, more profoundly, it has to do with changing the vision of considering the earth as a resource to be exploited with the sole goal of satisfying the desires of disproportionate growth. All living beings together with Mother Earth have rights and must be allowed to have access to and enjoy water. Hence, this implies the recognition of the right of peoples to control and regulate the use and the respectful management of water in solidarity within the framework of international agreements and common rights, which prohibit the commercialization of water in any manner whatsoever. Only by recognizing these rights will biodiversity be able to place itself above the mechanisms of the privatization of intellectual property and whatever other business agreement intended to control international right to such privatization. The implementation of new policies and norms of protection of small-scale production of foodstuffs confronted with international commerce also constitutes a fundamental basis of this understanding. Both the practice of selling products at costs below those of their production (dumping) and those commercial practices which distort food prices and are thus disloyal to industrialized countries must be condemned. It is inevitable to place tariff barriers equivalent to any subsidy or other incorporated in exported products allowing free circulation of local production. It is, therefore, necessary to reject, condemn and prohibit any politico-military or commercial strategy which attacks peoples’ food sovereignty and makes them more vulnerable to climate change.

Social control and co-participation in production systems is another key for disputing the power in the food system held by economic groups. Innumerable technologies and technological processes place ecosystems in danger of survival, and furthermore, they give impetus exclusively to the increase of production and of profit distributed amongst an ever smaller number of companies. These companies accelerate climate change through their solutions of bio-fuels, through genetically modified organisms, through nanotechnology and through geo-engineering. It is, therefore, not only necessary to build social control of technology to conter-arrest its expansion, but also to make production systems adequate in the context of local production. This implies promoting and assuring the financing of policies and participative and public social control mechanisms capable of combining investigation and investment for eliminating the use of agricultural supplies based on petrochemicals, for improving the organic content of the soil, for strengthening local markets and urban agriculture, for protecting sources of water and for supporting family agriculture.

For responsible, just and sustainable consumption

The model of growth of the stimulus of consumption is based on production with programmed obsolescence and the offer of unrepeatable and incompatible technologies and products, nevertheless, desired by so many consumers thanks to the finesse of advertising and marketing. This model is directly responsible for the increase of the consumption of natural resources and of the generation of waste.

Backed up by the action of governments which give priority to the ecologically and socially unsustainable interests of the market, instead of to public interest, this model remains dominant by reproducing and strengthening itself by means of advertising and the media. With extreme ability, these instruments promote ways of life in which the power of consumption is ever more directly associated with the idea of happiness. In practice, this process favors the deregulation of the markets and grants unlimited powers to companies which operate exclusively in their own interest, and yet have impact on the lives of the citizens of the whole world.

Discussion about new ways of production, consumption and life, in general, is crucial. Governments should commit themselves by means of public policies which stimulate and multiply more just and sustainable manners of production, distribution and consumption. Companies should be stimulated by governments to change their business models. It is not enough to incorporate procedures which classify production as “green.”

Companies should take responsibility for the socio-economic impact of their chains of production. This requires the redefinition of power structures with the objective of achieving that those areas which are the responsibility of CSR policies receive due attention and action within the life of the company itself. Mechanisms must urgently be created, which commit companies to increase the quality of their products and services, including goals set for reducing consumer complaints and softening the impact of their activities. This happens out of respect to the right of information, the principal of precaution and compensation for personal or collective damage proportional to caused impact.

It is indispensable to discuss a just agenda of transition of the systems of production which respects workers and consumer rights. This agenda is not completely negative; it should be viewed as an opportunity of obtaining solutions and of constructing other business models.

Companies stimulate products programmed to deteriorate with little use; that is without a reasonable life span, without economic feasibility of repair, with social and environmental impact, and which become obsolete at a speed incompatible with a world of limited resources. Products and services of quality are needed, that is, merchandise which respects the principle of precaution, which is reparable, longer-lasting and has less packaging, products and services which incorporate in their prices investments made to minimize the social and environmental impact of their production. The incentives of production should, primarily, be aimed at the satisfaction of the most basic needs of the population and eliminate the perverse subsidiaries which stimulate unsustainable production and consumption.

The consumer needs information and education about the socio-environmental impact of his or her choices. Inversely, deceiving and green-tinted advertising is one of the biggest traps of the present. These practices should be inhibited be means of regulating advertising. The media should emphasize the contents related to social and environmental justice, which will only be achieved with information systems and multi-disciplinary education based on the participation of the citizen. In the field of product information, it is essentials to regulate labeling in order that it is made into a promotion instrument for individual awareness and choice, with positive collective consequences. Formal education is fundamental for the promotion of citizenship; however, lowering consumer vulnerability also includes strategies of similar nature. Campaigns and processes of integrated information are strong allies of environmental consciousness education and sustainable consumption. New technologies cannot be only be focused on product and service perfection or on the efficient use of resources on the part of companies, but they should rather assure the quality of life for everyone.

But solutions do exist; they only have to be more visible and accessible. An alternative future is based on the logic of cooperation and the construction of shared solutions, of which many have been in existence for years. Self-managed, cooperative economies and marketing, as also, ecological, family agriculture are real examples of the principle of transformation of the current parameters of production and consumption. There are innumerable local groups, for example, women’s production cooperatives responsible for community resources, groups for responsible consumption, marketing cooperatives, mobility, media and free culture collectives, creative economy, community based tourism, communities which share and exchange cooperatively. Such alternatives offer a new development which will overcome the logic of competition and scarcity. Nevertheless, in order that such solutions are applied at a higher level and interconnect, the support and incentive of governments are necessary to increase the resilience in opposition to social inequalities worsened by climatic change. With the goal of reaffirming international commitments, national governments must protect common wellbeing, regulate and correct the errors of the market and support the mechanisms of strengthening local participation and protagonism in solving problems of global scale.

Healthy and attainable nourishment is everyone’s right, although the world food system serves the interests of few. Four corporations dominate the world commercialization of seeds and grains. To the contrary of what the producers of trans-genic seeds and agro toxics claim, studies show that there is sufficient production of foodstuffs in order that nobody suffers from hunger. Governments should cut off the stimulus of agro-production based of the intensive use of agro toxics y extensive monoculture, and instead guarantee food security and just distribution and consumption. It is necessary to adopt coordinated measures and create clear incentives for local production based on socially and environmentally sustainable parameters, promote an adequate labeling, regulate the advertising of foods and drinks which provoke risks to health, guarantee the offer of healthy food in schools and give priority to the distribution of local products, thus strengthening family and ecologic agro production and recognizing the function of women in care, production and their influence in decisions concerning consumption.

Waste is resource; governments, companies and consumers share the responsibilities of making an efficient model based on the rational and sustainable use of resources. This implies their immediate action to amplify a responsible management of recourses but also to alter the logic of unnecessary production. This requires continuous action in information and education for the consumer, tax incentives and technical support for the use of reused and recycled prime materials, and also the design of products which promote reuse and disposal of least impact, above and beyond the universalizing of the services of selective collection and recycling with the inclusion of enormous contingents of presently marginalized workers.

It is known that the transportation sector is one of those most responsible for the emission of greenhouse-effect gasses, which are causing climatic change. Instead of incentivizing an industrial model which dates back to the first decades of the last century, in which the automobile industry was the base and paradigm of national development and growth, governments should promote policies and investments which give priority to public transportation and alternative means such as the bicycle. The elimination of subsidies for fossil fuel is essential. This transition ocurrs with the stimulus of vehicles which are less contaminating and more efficient from the point of view of fuel consumption. Current urban parameters do not only consume natural resources extravagantly; they drain a large portion of the investments and the quality of life from the inhabitants. Cities need to be friendlier, more compact and democratic, and less violent.

Transition to a fair, sustainable, and solidarity economy

The goal to be reached consists in getting the world out its subordination to global finance and to give societies back control over credit, currency, and finance. Currency has been confiscated by the economic and financial powers: it is in fact a social institution, a common good that needs to be de-privatized. Regulating the financial markets The proposed measures have to do with regulating the financial markets, prohibiting speculative practices, and exercising control over finances. But they will only make sense if the scope of financial activity is reduced and regulated, especially where the financialization of agricultural and food goods are concerned, as well as of the common goods that are essential to life (water, biodiversity, air, energy, land), the social common goods (health, education), and the common goods of knowledge. Finally, it is necessary to put an end to shareholder dictatorship and to move toward economic democracy

Proposals:

socialize financial institutions and banks: separate investment banks from lending banks; prohibit derived products; recognize and support social and complementary currency, and have solidarity finance deployed by local and regional authorities and under social solidarity economy;

prohibit tax havens and persecute all forms of corruption and financial piracy;

integrate the international financial institutions into the United Nations system and subordinate these institutions to social, ecological, and political rights as defined within this framework;

carry out a citizens’ audit of the global debt;

increase public funds; tax financial transactions; make differentiated state contributions to public funds mandatory, have these managed within the United Nations framework in order to put an end to the financialization of natural resources (soil, forests, water, biodiversity), and commence the ecological and social transition;

regulate agricultural and food markets and prohibit derived products;

define rules to get common goods out of their domination by finance;

set up an international court to judge ecological and social crimes, and non-compliance with these rules.

Beyond a growth-based economy

Global economic growth, including green growth, is the problem, not the solution: although it can lead in the short run and at the microeconomic level to reducing monetary poverty, it generates unbearable global inequalities, uses up non-renewable resources and engenders wars to control them, locks work and nature into a productivist system, and denies the rights of peoples, in particular those of indigenous peoples submitted to extractivist policies. The societies we want are those of good living, of temperance, and of the collective and democratic definition of their needs and limits.

Proposals:

apply the principle of a minimum income and a maximum income;

give priority to development of collective consumption in order to improve, in particular, the living conditions of the most precarious populations and to guarantee ecological sustainability: transportation, housing, education, health, energy, and culture.

these goods and services will be guaranteed by the states as well as by grassroots communities within the framework of social and solidarity economy;

define new rights to guarantee access to fundamental goods; these rights can be guaranteed by making these goods free or practically free up to a certain amount, then through progressive rates depending on consumption.

Reversing capitalist globalization in favor of international cooperation

Globalization destroys the diversity of societies and their capacity to build themselves autonomously. As a consequence, international cooperation has regressed dramatically and left behind it the temptation to withdraw into nationalism or identitarianism.

Proposals:

In order to recover the political capacity to choose paths for the transition into international solidarity and its construction, the following is necessary:

recognition of food sovereignty: peoples and communities must once again be able to manage for themselves what they grow, and decide on how they will grow it and on their nutritional choices;

recognition of energy sovereignty: implementation of temperate energy systems and fight against energy insecurity; recognition of the right to quality, non-polluting energy services as a fundamental and inalienable human right; a publicly managed, relocated, and decentralized energy system, as well as energy options decided democratically; promotion of renewable energy and implementation of simple and appropriate technology instead of moving toward geoengineering and artificialization of the Earth;

relocation of activities according to the subsidiarity principle: priority to everything that can be produced locally or regionally;

promotion of local and regional trade and bringing free-trade agreements into question; promotion of fair and equitable trade;

social management of land; the right to access land for farmers; the right to access land for women;

protection of traditional knowledge and promotion of simple and appropriate technology.

The Commons: toward another economic, social, and cultural logic

Strengthening the social actors who are changing the world in the twenty-first century requires a deep change, not only in ways of acting to make these changes possible, but also, and as a prerequisite, in ways of seeing and thinking relationships among humans, among societies, and between humans and Mother Earth. The commons are a fundamental contribution to this search.

The commons (some call it common goods) are not simply shared “goods.” The term refers to social practices based on the principle of commoning (the making of a commons). The goals of a commoning process are clearly different from the typical practices of the state / market duopoly. Furthermore, the commons are a useful conceptual framework to analyze the future that we want. The commons functions like a different operating system at the level of community and probably (here is where the challenge lies) for the entire society, provided we devise appropriate institutions and policies. Hence, the construction of this conceptual framework is a dynamic process. It requires everyone to listen to what each social movement understands to be a commons. It is necessary to know more about the specific practices of commoning, whether they are embodied in indigenous and peasant communities, local seed banks, non-market-based initiatives of urban housing, or communities of developers of digital culture and software. We must understand the similarities of enclosure that each field is suffering, the silent as well as the well-known ones. This mutual awareness can help us to find a way to overcome crippling dualisms like public and private, state and market, individual and collective. In this way we aspire to create new settings that are structured according to creative principles of governance that arise from the bases.

Resistance and Construction: Commons, Commoning

The processes of enclosure face resistance. And most of them can be analyzed from a commons perspective. The resistance is also propelled by proposals for alternatives that emanate from the social practices of the commons. These practices form an alternative framework for the transformation of daily life as well as for the design of new public norms and policies that recognize self-management as the central element for a necessary social transformation.

Some examples of the variety of experiences, innovations and productions based on the commons are, among many others: strategies of collaborative consumption associated with barter and the practice of sharing; systems of community management of shared resources like forests, waterways and fishing grounds; and numerous initiatives that are building digital commons. Together these commons constitute a rich kaleidoscope of working models based on self-determination and collective management of shared resources. The social practices related to this paradigm naturally vary and yet they also have common features. A principal one is that they exemplify the idea that one's self-fulfillment depends on the fulfillment of the others, and vice versa, and that this mutual concern blurs the borders between individual and collective interests.

Contradictions, concerns and challenges

Obviously, during this process of building a Commons Sector, the challenges are manifold. One of the most recurrent is the tension between the local, the regional and the global. It is impossible to think of commoning without thinking about a social subject, a “community.” It is therefore easiest to think about the commons paradigm at a local level. But thinking about the commons at a global level is a great challenge, and even impossible to escape because there is only one earth and we have not only the right but the responsibility to share it. Confronted with this challenge, it is fair to ask: What should be the role of a state that conceives itself as a defender of the commons?

Even while these explorations must proceed, it is necessary to name the commons in order to consolidate alternatives to the current state/market model and to visualize and communicate the alternatives. Nevertheless, our language is so permeated by the terminology of the state/market system and that of ideologies having a different mindset that a major challenge is to develop a new vocabulary that truly describes the world we want. Resolving the conundrum of “common goods that are not goods” cannot be a closed process. This is why we invite you to help us build this vocabulary collectively in a way that we can adapt to the diversity of contexts in which we each act.

The commons are right before our eyes. Together we will find methods for naming them and, even more important, for converting them into a diversity of governance systems based on the principles of commoning.

Knowledge Commons

Commons can be both natural resources, such as the fruit of social production, and material and immaterial elements. New information and communication technologies are having a profound impact on the economy, society and culture. These technologies are the battleground for, on the one hand, constant attempts to make use of digital persecution, control and criminalization of the act of sharing files and, on the other hand, the increasingly available access to knowledge and culture now that they are in digital form—a move in the direction of decommercialization.

However, commons have the potential to play an important role in the fight to transform relationships governing power, production and the distribution of wealth. Free media, culture points, community radios, hackers, the development of free and accessible technologies, the emergence of copyleft, digital self-organization projects, collaborative productions and other phenomena of networking culture all represent knowledge commons experiences. They provide new opportunities in the fight for the right to communication and to culture as well as providing help in the establishment of a new kind of relationship to a planet ruled by the common good, where that which is produced by everyone profits everyone. This requires taking a critical look at intellectual property, both in terms of authors’ rights and patents, and working on ways of encouraging creation in harmony with current decommercialization processes. It also means directing public expenditure at free technologies and open source programmes, supporting the open software production chain, including within online platforms, as well as support for the use and development of open and unifying social networks.

It is important to promote public policies that fight for communication as a mechanism that guarantees the exercise of citizenship and not as a process exclusive to institutions and private communications companies. The media are a public concession and as such need to be subject to social controls and regular reviews. The new technologies make is easier for individuals to associate freely and create new media, which should have access to public funding. The electromagnetic spectrum should be nationalized, open and allocated according to the growing opportunities offered by digital technologies in order to encourage media democratization.

Finally, the fight for commons is also part of the fight to guarantee access to the internet as a fundamental right for all and the privacy and anonymity of its users, and to ensure network neutrality, a combat that entails opposition to restrictive legislations, such as ACTA, the Sinde Law in Spain, SOPA/PIPA in the USA and the Azeredo Law in Brazil.

Civil society organizations and networks

The new actors that have emerged in recent years include the civil society organizations and networks that play a major role in the world. These new actors have made a real impact on a global level thanks to their capacity to respond to the multiple economic, social and environmental problems of communities and organizations in various parts of the world. They form networks and forums at the national and international level, incorporating the specific demands of groups into broad agendas rooted in universal values such as human rights, equality and diversity, democracy and common goods.

In this context, in addition to specific themes such as women’s rights, children and teenagers’ rights, native people’s rights, AIDS prevention, anti-racism, fair trade and agro-ecology, NGO groups and platforms play a hugely important political role, confirming their legitimacy as the promoters of social transformations in the quest for social and environmental justice.

These organizations are increasingly adopting a position in defence of social, economic, political and environmental rights, demanding that states and multi-lateral agencies produce public policies that fully guarantee these rights. In addition to leading innovative projects in social, political and economic domains, civil society organizations are increasingly linking together within global citizens’movements fighting for democracy and social and environmental justice.

Civil society organizations and networks therefore defend:

freedom of association and expression;

the right to access public and private resources using legitimate means within a reliable legal framework;

social participation in the elaboration, execution, monitoring and assessment of public policies, including countries’foreign policies and multi-lateral agencies’policies;

the increase in financing for the promotion of democracy, social and environmental justice and international cooperation, including new mechanisms for taxing financial transactions and large fortunes;

an end to restrictive bailouts and conditions attached to international cooperation policies.

For a new World Governance and a fair and democratic Architecture of Power

The need for a paradigm shift

It has become evident that we have reached a historical stage in which a deep change of the system of governance is urgent. This is not only about an institutional change, setting up a Council or other institution for sustainable development. We need to change the paradigm, not to continue with obsolete visions that claim they can respond to the new challenges by setting up institutions en el marco de un modelo de gobernanza ya superado por la historia.

Self-determination and the Sovereignty of peoples

Today like yesterday, it is imperative to reaffirm that the self-determination and the sovereignty of peoples, and the absence of discrimination among peoples constitute the founding pillars of international relations. Any reform of the United Nations system must be guided to protect them, reinforce them, and demand their justiciability. In order to guarantee these principles, world peace and security are essential conditions.

The new principles of governance

The new principles must go beyond national borders and make states, companies, and also citizens responsible, each according to their possibilities, in their individual and collective responsibilities to the general interest, that of the planet and of its inhabitants. These principles imply new requirements regarding the legitimacy of collective action, citizenship exercised in respect of human rights, and the resolution of tensions between the local, the national, and the global.

A new world governance will only be possible if the people build it

Building new governance is not only an institutional or theoretical question confined to the political or sociological spheres. All governance proposals and plans depend on the action and mobilisation of a huge majority of people, actors, movements and populations. This is a critical issue.Architecture for a citizen, solidarity-based and fair governance must be rooted in solid ethical and philosophical foundations. It must also both support and enable a new economy centred on social and environmental justice. What is needed is to work together to devise responses to today's challenges, rooted in the contexts relevant to each person and each population. This involves recognizing the different forms of knowledge that exist in all continents, among all peoples, without trying to impose one of them as the unquestionable reference. The key conditions for a new governance must be formulated within a critical and democratic approach..

Overcoming the historical limits of the structure of dominant power

it is evident that the governance of relations among states as regulated by the United Nations system after World War II, and in the later decolonization period, is no longer valid. The world has continued to change, deeply, quickly, and the challenges are not only still pending, they have become urgent. Added to deep social inequalities are the planetary risks of an irreversible deterioration of life and of the planet caused by the systematic crisis of the dominant capitalist model, a regime based on the appropriation and private control of production and on consumption guided to maximizing profit.

However the state as the regulator and organiser of society, a role that reaches beyond its boundaries, is subject to attacks by the de facto transnational economic and political powers that seek to reduce it. However, people continue to see the state and protection of the state as a tool for regulating these powers and guaranteeing citizen rights. It would not therefore be appropriate to promote anti-state proposals. A state that respects its citizens' rights is a requirement of democratic institutionality. We need to rethink the notion of the nation-state within a given territory. Today, the direct link between state and nation in many states no longer reflects the ethnic and cultural diversity of the people living there. The notion of the plurinational state is increasingly being used, a notion that has even been included in the constitutions of some countries. It is clear that flows such as migratory, trade and internet flows ignore states' territorial limits, and we need to explore the idea of deterritorializing the state's role, a difficult task given the historical weight of borders.

Today's state has an ambivalent role. It is necessary for regulating governance primarily at the national level—although even there it is moving away from the role of local democracy—and at the global level it is not the best means of meeting global challenges. States are also institutions in conflict and need to be guided towards democratic and efficient governance. Furthermore, looking at the medium and long term, the form of state that once played an important role in, for example, the decolonialization process, is being diminished. It is therefore vital to explore how to transform it.

Changing the systems of participation and representation

Representation systems do not correspond to the demand for active participation. The priority must be on promoting participation by implementing transparent information systems and open consultation mechanisms to ensure efficient decision-making.

But we need to take this process even further. It is important to radicalize democracy, both in terms of state institutions and society as a whole. The state and representation systems will thus gradually be transformed by devising new political institutions. This denotes an historical challenge, since we are experiencing a crisis of legitimacy towards elites. The current crisis of democracy is primarily rooted in a questioning of elites and how they have developed historically. Protests in various countries levelled at the political party system is above all an expression of this questioning of elites. But above and beyond these questions, we need to invent new systems for organizing political systems, with citizens as the main actors working to take democracy to a new level and to ensure that leaders are legitimate and institutions are transparent and efficient. This process goes far deeper than political engineering alone: it has to do with the ethical foundations capable of supporting the new lifestyles, within society and civilisations that support life and the sustainability of the planet, that are needed at the outset of the third millennium.

Asserting the role of territories

It is worth at this point highlighting a fundamental pillar of the new architecture of world power: localizing and territorializing the economy and power as much as possible, since citizenship can only be fully achieved in a citizen-based territory. This is based on the interdependency of the local and global levels, wherein the principle of subsidiary is fundamental. For example, let us consider the climate question. It is clear that this is a worldwide question that requires world governance. However, such governance cannot work without citizens making real compromises in their local territories. Lo mismo se podría decir de la urgente regulación del sistema financiero y monetario.

The territory is thus an element specific to the relationship between society and nature, between citizens and the world. The new political architecture is being built simultaneously on two main levels: locally, and globally, a level that not only corresponds to the inter-state context but also, and especially, to new transnational and global spaces. The local dimension is where people's daily lives are played out, and the global dimension is where policies affecting these daily lives are increasingly decided. The scale of phenomena such as migrations, pandemics, climate crises and financial crises keeps escalating. In this context, local territory and local democracy provide the keystone for building a new governance architecture. Nevertheless, in an era characterized by increasingly accelerated globalization, financial and trade flows and the circulation of people and information, the global dimension conditions daily life at the local level. We therefore also need to propose and introduce changes to governance at both the local and global level. There is a dialectical relationship between these two key dimensions of governance.

For new regional and continental spaces

There is also an intermediary dimension that lies between the local and global levels: the regional level. This space has gradually been taking shape, and continental organizations play an important role in governance architecture. These regional bodies usually create regulatory systems that meet the interests of major states and corporations; however, they also constitute spaces in conflict. Among the innovations that need to be implemented, it is vital to support the emergence of this regional level, the intermediary between states and the global level. The example of the construction of Europe should not be devalued by fruitless tensions between states. Europe has been an historical construction process on a supranational scale, based on economic convergence and community law. It is therefore important to look to regional spaces to act as agents for strengthening the links between territories, organizations and social actors seeking to bolster their capacity to counter the power wielded by states and transnational corporations. These spaces, lying between the local level—including country-states—and the global level, could provide a path of transition to a truly global future architecture.

The process for building a new architecture clearly needs to focus on bottom-up mechanisms. Existing regional groupings, such as Mercosur, Asean, the European Union, the African Union, Unasur and so on, mainly created by inter-state agreements, should not be seen to provide the definitive model for regulating regional trade and political agreements. Social forums and citizen assemblies, for example, provide a means of linking territories to local levels within countries, and to regional, sub-continental and even multi-regional or multi-continental levels. Nevertheless, the linking up of territories, civil societies, communities and people on a global scale remains a distant prospect, one that reaches far beyond the goals achieved over recent decades by citizen initiatives in various regions of the world. Plenty of tasks still need doing to reinforce the social construction of territories and democratize them.

The major organizations that currently seek to regulate world governance are divided into two main groups of actors:

- geopolitical groups: G8, G20, OECD and BRICS attribute authority to themselves and are the most powerful actors, although they do not all adopt the same policies for tackling current crises;

- the UN and inter-governmental conferences.

These geopolitical groups, mainly the G8, supported by the IMF and NATO depending on the context, delegitimize the UN's role and impose their policies at the global level. Nevertheless, the deep-reaching and recurrent nature of the crises points to these actors' incapacity to deal with them. This is why spaces and opportunities to build a new architecture for world governance remain important, provided that citizens and peoples, their organizations, movements and networks prove capable of questioning them and putting them to good use. This is certainly one of the most testing challenges in today's world.

Any reform of the United Nations system must be genuinely democratic

In this perspective, Rio+20 is an opportunity in the short run. We must take advantage of it to the utmost, but knowing that the new architecture of democratic governance is a long-term process. Against this background, any reform of the United Nations system that will open new democratic spaces is an urgent necessity. But the important thing is that the reforms do not only seek to reduce the fragmentation related to the agencies concerned with the social, economic, and ecological pillars, but that, above all, it is imperative to make sure that the social representation of non-state actors and movements are neither monopolized or confined to a few already established NGOs or corporations. Representation must be democratized by giving forums to delegates elected from the different territories and regions and from the different networks and articulations of indigenous peoples, workers, fishermen, women, young people, local and territorial authorities, consumers, migrants, inhabitants, and other democratically organized social actors on a global scale.

Rethinking and changing the international security system

These proposals for the democratization of the United Nations agencies related to sustainability issues will inescapably have to be defined and implemented in the issues related to international peace and security. A democratic rebalancing of the balance of power in the Security Council and its opening to new actors, not only to states that will remain marginal, but in addition to social actors and organizations from the different territories and regions, as well as to networks and organizations at a global scale, will also have to be part of the bodies that watch over the security of life, of the peoples, and of the planet. Thus sustainability and peace will be the two legs with which humankind will be able to keep moving forward in this transition phase we are crossing.

For a new democracy

The exigencies of a radicalization of democracy require deeper changes than reforms of the institutional UN systems. Inventing the new political systems able to express democratically all the energies of the peoples and of each citizen in the 21st century has become a historical task. This challenge calls for a politically committed Utopia and creative thinking so that, as in the periods of historical change that have come up in all civilizations, today at the beginning of the 21st century, we, the citizens and peoples of the world, can build the new social and political instruments that will make it possible to solve the deep problems of this age."

Preparing for the People's Summit at Rio 20

Text

We are going to reinvent the world at Rio+20

Introduction: Subjectivity, domination, and emancipation

Foundations for a new civilization

The education we want and the complexity of the present

Scientific knowledge should be a common good

Asserting the ancestral knowledge of indigenous peoples

Introduction to: Rights, Peoples, Territories, and Defense of Mother Earth

The rights of Mother Earth pave the way toward a new civilization

Reinforcing the struggle for collective rights

Recovering the right to water and to its fair and sustainable use

Challenges and Strategies

Health Is a Universal Right, Not a Source of Profit

Turning cities into organized actors from the local to the global level

Migrants should be citizens of the 21st century

Introduction: the crisis of capitalism is a crisis of civilization

The Green Economy constitutes an attempt to relaunch a new phase in capitalist expansion

The extractive industry is a new form of colonization and dependency

Energy Transition Is Urgent and Possible

Changing Energy Sources

Decentralised energy and efficiency

To promote sustainable, social and cooperative agriculture and fishing

For responsible, just and sustainable consumption

Transition to a fair, sustainable, and solidarity economy

Beyond a growth-based economy

Reversing capitalist globalization in favor of international cooperation

The Commons: toward another economic, social, and cultural logic

Resistance and Construction: Commons, Commoning

Contradictions, concerns and challenges

Knowledge Commons

Civil society organizations and networks

For a new World Governance and a fair and democratic Architecture of Power

The need for a paradigm shift

Self-determination and the Sovereignty of peoples

The new principles of governance

A new world governance will only be possible if the people build it

Overcoming the historical limits of the structure of dominant power

Changing the systems of participation and representation

Asserting the role of territories

For new regional and continental spaces

Rethinking and changing the international security system

For a new democracy

Navigation menu