Multistakeholder dialogues and partnerships?

Katarina Sehm Patomäki

Also NIGD received a message from the United Nations Non-Governmental Liaison Service in New York with the "advance un-edited version of the UN Secretary General's Report in Respons to the Cardoso Report", see down below for the message and a link to the report. One of the initiatives of the Report that the UN Secretary General supports is the "establishment of a Partnerships Office to bring the UN Fund for International Partnerships and the Global Compact Office under the same umbrella".

This, however, reminds me of recent discussions on the Cardoso Report. These discussions have been summarized by the New York based Global Policy Forum (www.globalpolicy.org) regarding both the "Partnership"-concept and the Global Compact, and in case some of you have not seen these texts I summarize a few of them below:

Firstly, the Global Policy Forum recently posted its own and several other NGO statements on the Cardoso report. These other NGOs are for instance the Lutheran Office for World Community, the Third World Network, CONGO, World Federalist Movement, Amnesty International, and the Human Rights Watch. The GPF statement in particular discusses the serious problems with the "multi-constituency" and "dialogue" process proposed for the UN of the future. Most of the statements strongly disagree with the fact that business is been seen as a "partner", equal to civil society, and the Lutheran Office for World Community specifically "warn against confusion between NGOs and other groups such as business and parliamentarians if these entities are collected under a single Secretariat's Office". The conclusion of the GPF statement is that the Cardoso Report "poses a danger to the NGO community and to the UN itself". To see the NGO statements, click here:
www.globalpolicy.org/reform/initiatives/panelindex.htm#gpfcomments

Secondly, on 23 June 2004, on the day before the Global Compact Summit took place, some organisations organised a Global Compact Counter Summit, also in New York. The main message of the summit was that the Global Compact is merely a PR and self-promoting event for companies. "This counter-summit was organized to question the expansion of corporate influence at the UN". The organisations that co-sponsored the Counter Summit were the Berne Declaration, Corporate Europe Observatory, Friends of the Earth International, Greenpeace International, Groundwork, Infact, International Center for Law in Development, Institute for Policy Studies, Tebtebba Foundation, Third World Network, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and the World Federalist Movement. GPF has posted the minutes from the meeting outlining the "pros and cons of the Global Compact, ultimately highlighting its inefficacy and calling for its cancellation", see
www.globalpolicy.org/reform/business/2004/0623countersummit.htm

Thirdly, at a session organised at the UBUNTU congress in Barcelona, Spain, in late September, former Swedish Minister of Education Birgitta Dahl presented the Cardoso report (short for the UN Secretary General's Panel of Eminent Persons on United Nations-Civil Society Relations 2002). In his passionate response to the presentation, Candido Grzybowski of the Brazilian research institute Ibase in Rio de Janeiro explained that since the terms of reference for the Panel chaired by former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso (focus on local governments and business) had little to do with the topic of the panel (UN and civil society relations), many organisations had decided to distance themselves from the report already at an early stage of the work. Following the publication of the report, a number of respected civil society organisations such as Greenpeace International, Third World Network and Amnesty International have issued statements on the report condemning the concepts of multistake holder dialogue and partnership. In my question from the audience addressed to Birgitta Dahl I asked for procedures and mechanisms in hearing civil society in the preparation phase of the report and noted that the flood of concerned statements could not have come as a surprise to the panel. To this Birgitta Dahl replied that at one point during the preparations the panel had decided not to discuss the report with civil society, because the panel decided that the writing of the report had been entrusted to them, and not to civil society organisations. This awoke a very lively debate between the panelists and the floor.

FOOTNOTE: The Cardoso report is the "Panel of Eminent Persons on United Nations-Civil Society Relations 2002". The Report offers recommendations and improvements on UN reform, and was originally proposed as part of a broad set of reform measures announced by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in his report on September 30, 2002. The Cardoso report was released in June 2004 and can be downloaded from the GPF site at www.globalpolicy.org/reform/initiatives/panelindex.htm#docs2