The UN basement, Friday May 13, 2005

Based on a UN University Panel on “COMPETITION AND COMPLEMENTARITY
BETWEEN
GLOBAL AND REGIONAL PUBLIC GOODS”.

The concept of public goods was introduced to the UN via the UNDP
Office of
Development Studies (ODS) in 2001. Inge Kaul was talking of Public
Goods
like poverty reduction, old-age security, a sustainable environment and
the
like. I wrote about this in 2002 in my “Promptbook on Sustainable
Development For the World Summit in Johannesburg” (please see on
SustainabiliTank.info the P-book button). I linked then my
interpretation
of the concept of the Global Commons and tried to help find this way
funds
for the public goods in order to prop up sustainable development.

The May 13, 2005 event was organized in order to discuss two papers
that
were commissioned by the UNU;

(1) “Regional Cooperation and the Provision of Regional and
Global
Public Goods”.
and

(2) “Global and Regional Mechanisms of Disaster Risk Reduction
and
Relief: Review, Evaluation, Future Directions of
Integration”.

The first paper picks six issue areas as its target for discussing
public
goods. These are: trade; knowledge; peace and security; financial
stability; and communicable diseases. Then the paper tries to discuss
if
there is conflict between the Global and regional aspects of these
“goods”.
I felt that this exercise is out of place from start, as its assumption
that
trade is a public good confuses between entitlements and process.
The idea of the public goods came about from our belief that humans are
entitled to a certain amount of decency from the fact that we have an
obligation to behave humanly and take in consideration some minimum
rights
of the other. Under this assumption only five of the six mentioned
examples
can be defined as public goods. Trade is no public good by any stretch
of
the imagination. I know that it is being suggested now that developing
countries should be rather interested in the relaxation of trade
barriers
then in receiving ODA. These are arguments that may sound right on the
surface, but they are also very dangerous because trade is a process
that
enriches the rich, but where does that leave those who are most in need
of
the protection that a public goods approach may make available to them?
One commentator suggested that democracy would be a rather better
choice for
a public goods example. I suggested to call it rather human rights,
and to
replace trade with human rights. Then, I do not see the clear need to
further delve into public goods by having a perhaps artificial
comparison
between global and regional - my idea is let us rather look at these
topics
as universal.

The second paper failed by not recognizing that many of the so called
natural disasters are in effect human caused disasters, that find their
roots in the global warming and climate change phenomena imposed on us
by
those that insist we continue to use oil and other fossil fuels that
foul up
the planet and will eventually shorten life on planet earth.

Whose interests is UNU serving by commissioning these papers, and
perhaps
other papers, that are mere distractions from what should concern us
most -
that is the need to understand the requirements for sustainable
development,
rather then encouraging an haphazard exercise in hair splitting.

Sorry for the nice people involved, I hope they took the criticism in
order
to be more careful in what they allow themselves to be commissioned for
writing. In the present case they can at least rewrite some of the
material
they presented before that audience.