From paper to practice: DAWN participates in a meeting on implementation of the Montevideo Consensus on Population and Development

Nicole Bidegain Ponte, a member of the Executive Committee of Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) participated at the first meeting of the Presiding Officers of the Regional Conference on Population and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean, which took place from 12 to 14 November at the ECLAC headquarters in Santiago de Chile.

The Presiding Officers of the Regional Conference assessed the progress in implementing the Montevideo consensus on population and development in the countries of the region and discussing specific monitoring systems that will eventually be adopted at the Second meeting of the Regional Conference, scheduled for October 2015 in Mexico city.

Along with other feminist and women’s organizations in the region, DAWN expressed the need for governments to redouble their efforts in implementing the Montevideo Consensus and establish a monitoring mechanism that includes the participation of feminist, women, youth and indigenous organizations that oversee the implementation of priority measures of the Consensus such as:

• Promote policies that enable persons to exercise their sexual rights, which embrace the right to a safe and full sex life, as well as the right to take free, informed, voluntary and responsible decisions on their sexuality, sexual orientation and gender identity, without coercion, discrimination or violence, and that guarantee the right to information and the means necessary for their sexual health and reproductive health; (Paragraph 34)
• Implement comprehensive, timely, good-quality sexual health and reproductive health programmes for adolescents and young people, including youth-friendly sexual health and reproductive health services with a gender, human rights, intergenerational and intercultural perspective, which guarantee access to safe and effective modern contraceptive methods, respecting the principles of confidentiality and privacy, to enable adolescents and young people to exercise their sexual rights and reproductive rights; (Paragraph 12)
• Ensure, in those cases where abortion is legal or decriminalized under the relevant national legislation, the availability of safe, good-quality abortion services for women with unwanted and unaccepted pregnancies, and urge all other States to consider amending their laws, regulations, strategies and public policies relating to the voluntary termination of pregnancy in order to protect the lives and health of women and adolescent girls, improve their quality of life, and reduce the number of abortions; (Paragraph 42)
• Ensure sufficient financial resources and the mobilization of international cooperation resources for Latin America and the Caribbean, in order to expedite the implementation of the Montevideo Consensus on Population and Development of the Cairo Programme of Action beyond 2014 and the measures agreed upon herein, putting in place at the same time clear and effective transparency and accountability mechanisms; (Paragraph 105).

At the session on the operative guidelines to implement the Montevideo Consensus on Population and Development, Nicole Bidegain Ponte pointed out the importance of advancing the implementation of the Montevideo Consensus within the framework of the negotiations of the Post-2015 Development Agenda.

Nicole Biedgain’s Statement on behalf of DAWN

Dear Presiding Officers of the Regional Conference on Population and Development, United Nations and civil society organisations’ representatives. My name is Nicole Bidegain and I am a member of Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN). DAWN is a feminist organization that has participated and contributed with other organisations and networks in the region in the review process 20 years after the Cairo Platform for Action, both at regional and global level (Cairo + 20).

On this occasion I would like to highlight some reasons why, from our perspective, it is essential to substantially advance in the full implementation of the Montevideo Consensus and in the realisation of a mechanism for monitoring and accountability at the regional level.

Through our work in the follow-up of the negotiations and discussions in processes linked to the post-2015 agenda, we have identified three major political challenges that, as feminists, we have tried to question at the global and regional level.

First, we found that the proposals being discussed at the United Nations in relation to the Post-2015 development agenda are not ambitious enough as regards the structural challenges Latin America and the Caribbean face. The debates show the predominance of a regressive speech in which “development” is mainly associated with economic growth, in which the agenda of social justice and the obligations of states to ensure human rights are reduced to “anti-poverty” actions, and market-based or technology-based solutions are mainly promoted to address climate change. Not only the contents that are being promoted are disturbing, but also how the agenda is being formulated. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) had already been criticized in the region for attacking the consequences and not the structural causes that explain the violation of rights and inequality. In turn, several studies have shown how the prioritization of MDGs hindered the implementation of more comprehensive agreements such as the Cairo Platform for Action, thus distorting the priorities of cooperation and those of governments to reduced, partial and vertically implemented objectives (DAWN 2012). The momentum of a global framework based on objectives generates the same risk of reducing development agendas to a list of goals, targets and indicators that perpetuate “development silos”.

Second, the “human rights versus development” historical tensions continue to set the debates and had their clearest expression in the Commission on Population and Development this year (CPD47), where government representatives make statements such as “we cannot eat rights. We need economic growth and investment to lift people out of poverty”, while other countries, particularly from the north, promote the human rights agenda without making any reference to some of the global structural obstacles (such as financial, trade and investment rules) that limit the actual capacity of the countries and, in particular, developing countries, to ensure human rights and move towards sustainable development.

Third, the promotion of a discourse on the participation of “multi-stakeholders”, the promotion of the private sector as an “development actors” able to mobilize resources in a context of global economic crisis and decline on ODA figures has also been noted.

Given these problematic discourses, we affirm that the Post-2015 development agenda cannot be reduced to a list of objectives guided by interests of donor governments or corporations. The new agenda cannot be a setback but, on the contrary, it must be based on existing commitments made by governments at the Cairo Platform for Action and its advances at the regional level such as the Montevideo Consensus while, at the same time, converging with other action programs such as those of the Women’s Conference, the Sustainable Development and Financing for Development Conferences.

Therefore, this agenda cannot subsume or replace the commitments made by the governments of the region in the Montevideo Consensus. On the contrary, the Montevideo Consensus should drive the ambition of the objectives and indicators of health and gender equality to be adopted in September 2015 worldwide. In turn, the monitoring mechanism of the Post-2015 agenda in terms of health and gender for the region must be aligned with the follow-up mechanism of the Montevideo Consensus to be approved at the next Regional Conference on Population and Development in October 2015 and not the other way round.

Besides, to address the tension “human rights versus development”, we affirm that “we cannot have development without human rights, and we cannot have human rights without development”. In this sense, Latin America is the region that can prove that this is a false debate and it is possible to combine development, redistribution and equity. This is the great contribution of the Montevideo Consensus and therefore should be the framework to implement and monitor.

Additionally, on the narrative of the multi-stakeholders partnerships, it is essential to make some clarifications. Under the discourse of participation and diversity it is possible to legitimize the involvement of advocacy organizations or groups that through their actions and ideology are hindering, in practice, the implementation of the Montevideo Consensus and the Cairo agenda or are using that space as a business opportunity under the promotion of public-private partnerships in sectors like health and education. On the contrary, it is necessary to characterize civil society by promoting the participation of feminist, women, youth and indigenous organizations who have promoted and advanced the Cairo agenda and the Montevideo Consensus, for which it is also necessary to mobilize resources for their effective participation.

Finally, a reflection on the debate on the indicators. There is another risk at the global level: to reduce the agenda to what is quantitatively measurable with the resources available today. For us, this is not an option. The Montevideo Consensus promotes measures aimed at subverting structural inequalities and multiple discriminations based on gender, age, race-ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, territory and immigration status, at promoting empowerment and autonomy of women and girls. Therefore, the monitoring indicators should respond to these policy objectives. In this sense, specialized agencies such as ECLAC should give their support just like feminists organizations in the region are also willing to contribute.

Thank you very much.