by Noelene Nabulivou, DAWN Executive Committee Member

Article originally published online on Islands Business, April 2012 edition

Pacific governments and NGOs are increasingly asked to demonstrate effectiveness, uptake and ‘additionality’ in their climate change responses and the climate finance gurus develop new and more complicated methodologies every year.

Governments, development technical assistance and NGOs in the economic south find ourselves on a glorious merry-go-round of increasingly compartmentalised, professionalised and complex processes.

We are encouraged to use increasingly marketised models. We focus on endless growth as our main development goal rather than challenging fundamentally unsound production and consumption patterns; and all this in the midst of extraterritorial pressure from economic-military-industrial-development-aid complexes that endlessly distort and sometimes capture local and regional political, economic and social processes.

The heavy pressure to invest state resources and use external technical assistance to feed these insatiable and politically charged climate finance tracks is immense, and the consequences dire—especially for Small Islands and Micro-states.  However, the problem is not only one of resource over-use and diversion from other sustainable development and human rights challenges, the suspect underlying conceptual frameworks of these globalised climate response systems also remain largely unchallenged.

There is, for example, a presumption that it is even possible and useful to separate climate change adaptation from mitigation approaches.
Also more broadly to distinguish climate change issues from wider long-term issues of ecological sustainability, gender equality and universal human rights.

But why do projects need to differentiate between ‘new effects’ and ‘usual development objectives’? Is it even possible? States and NGOs will come up with ways to satisfy donor M&E needs because they must. Whether this approach is helpful to sustainable development effectiveness is entirely another matter.
These dysfunctional globalised climate response systems also ignore and downplay universal human rights as a pre-requisite for sustainable development and climate justice. So we need to continually investigate, disrupt and transform our Pacific work on climate change by asking, for instance:

Are we supporting marketised development and climate adaptation approaches where individual and community well-being and basic rights (personal, political, social, economic & cultural) are incidental rather than central?

Do we legitimise government responses/strategies that view the planet primarily as a resource base for human wants and accumulation, and trampling on natural ecosystems and the biosphere?

Are governments using an integrated and comprehensive human rights and gender equality framework to design their responses/strategies, or do they pick and choose which indicators to use?

When advancing climate change and sustainable development theories, can we explicitly include attention to intersectional identity to better understand inclusion and exclusion dynamics? Precisely who is affected, why and how?

How do governments and civil society co-design strong participatory processes from local to global, recognising the fundamental right of everyone to participate in decisions over their lives?

Just as Pacific societies develop strategies to address long-term and emergent sustainable development and human rights problems, other communities around the world are doing the same.

Strategies are endlessly shifting over time and space because of variables including community understanding of issues, NGO uptake, perceived urgency, local and regional political conditions, available entry points into regional and global advocacy tracks, donor engagement, etc.

Support and resourcing of these local and national strategies needs to scale upwards and outwards, not the reverse.

This is why DAWN GEEJ[i] work by young women advocates from the economic south includes public statements towards the Rio+20 Earth Summit that clearly state their rights and needs.

It is also why many of these activists will be present at the Rio+20 Earth Summit in June, others engage in UNFCCC, and more work on highly localised mining and extractive industry resistance.

Our government and civil society delegations should listen closely, as a consistent theme through GEEJ consultations are strong connections between bodily integrity and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR); women’s economic, social and cultural rights; ecological rights and political decision-making and leadership:

Women negotiating through limited access to voice, participation and decision-making power across multiple constituencies inevitably have concerns across a continuum of ‘adaptive gaps and capacities’. Where the power over one’s body and actions is difficult to negotiate, and where there are fears for one’s physical safety in squatter settlements, rural villages, towns and cities, it is understandably hard to participate in local, national, regional and global processes.

Women may be leading community campaigns and advocating on climate change issues while simultaneously facing violence against themselves and their children.

They may also be fighting for access to land, better marketplaces, water and sanitation, or asserting rights related to their maternal mortality, and facing discrimination because of their sexual orientation, gender identity and expression.

Women continue to organise, negotiate and challenge. But where large gaps and challenges appear, we often ask, ‘Why is ‘she’ not participating? ‘Where are the women?’ Women are there, dealing with double and triple political, economic, social care and reproductive burdens. And now for women in the economic south including Africa, Asia, Middle East and North Africa, Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, the situation is exacerbated by climate change and ecological disasters and demands—and development dynamics that ask for ever more demonstration of not just work, but ‘effectiveness’, ‘additionality’, ‘value-added’ and ‘multiplier factors’.

And if we are not alert and assertive, we also risk becoming neutralised ‘faces of climate change’ at the global level, with all the racist and condescending accompaniments.

It would seem reasonable to assert therefore, that if we continue to discuss climate justice and sustainable development as if all Pacific social citizens experience our states, societies, work, families and intimate relationships with equal power and in the same way, we will never come up with adequate strategies to address these multiple and linked social justice and human rights issues here at home, and globally.

It is also clear that we need to urgently address gender and sexual equality as a core social justice and human rights question, and as integral to development and climate change work.

After all, the question is not really about demonstrating ‘additionality’. It is about ensuring effectiveness in addressing these deep, complex and interlinked crises of human rights, finance, fuel, food and ecology in what DAWN calls this ‘fierce new world’. We can resist the silos, even as we engage and work to transform them.