Bolivia's Fight for Survival and Democracy
The people's summit to tackle climate change is a radical,
transformative response to the failure of the Copenhagen club
Naomi Klein,
Guardian UK : 22 April 2010
It was 11am and Evo Morales had turned a football stadium into a giant
classroom, marshalling an array of props: paper plates, plastic cups,
disposable raincoats, handcrafted gourds, wooden plates and multicoloured
ponchos. All came into play to make his main point: to fight climate change
"we need to recover the values of the indigenous people".
Yet wealthy countries have little interest in learning these lessons and are
instead pushing through a plan that, at its best, would raise average global
temperatures 2C. "That would mean the melting of the Andean and Himalayan
glaciers," Morales told the thousands gathered in the stadium, part of the
World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth.
What he didn't have to say is that the Bolivian people, no matter how
sustainably they choose to live, have no power to save their glaciers.
Bolivia's climate summit has had moments of joy, levity and absurdity. Yet
underneath it all you can feel the emotion that provoked this gathering:
rage against helplessness. It's little wonder. Bolivia is in the midst of a
dramatic political transformation, one that has nationalised key industries
and elevated the voices of indigenous peoples as never before. But when it
comes to Bolivia's most pressing, existential crisis - the fact that its
glaciers are melting at an alarming rate, threatening the water supply in
two major cities - Bolivians are powerless to do anything to change their
fate on their own.
That's because the actions causing the melting are taking place not in
Bolivia but on the highways and in the industrial zones of heavily
industrialised countries. In Copenhagen, leaders of endangered nations like
Bolivia and Tuvalu argued passionately for the kind of deep emissions cuts
that could avert catastrophe. They were politely told that the political
will in the north just wasn't there.
More than that, the United States made clear that it didn't need small
countries like Bolivia to be part of a climate solution. It would negotiate
a deal with other heavy emitters behind closed doors, and the rest of the
world would be informed of the results and invited to sign on, which is
precisely what happened with the Copenhagen accord.
When Bolivia and Ecuador refused to rubberstamp the accord, the US
government cut their climate aid by $3m and $2.5m respectively. "It's not a
freerider process," explained US climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing.
(Anyone wondering why activists from the global south reject the idea of
"climate aid" and are instead demanding repayment of "climate debts" has
their answer here.)
Pershing's message was chilling: if you are poor, you don't have the right
to prioritise your own survival. When Morales invited "social movements and
Mother Earth's defenders . scientists, academics, lawyers and governments"
to Cochabamba for a new kind of climate summit, it was a revolt against this
experience of helplessness, an attempt to build a base of power behind the
right to survive.
The Bolivian government got the ball rolling by proposing four big ideas:
that nature should be granted rights that protect ecosystems from
annihilation (a "universal declaration of Mother Earth rights"); that those
who violate those rights and other international environmental agreements
should face legal consequences (a "climate justice tribunal"); that poor
countries should receive various forms of compensation for a crisis they are
facing but had little role in creating ("climate debt"); and that there
should be a mechanism for people around the world to express their views on
these topics ("world people's referendum on climate change").
The next stage was to invite global civil society to hash out the details.
Seventeen working groups were struck and, after weeks of online discussion,
they met for a week in Cochabamba with the goal of presenting their final
recommendations at the summit's end. The process is fascinating but far from
perfect (for instance, as Jim Shultz of the Democracy Center pointed out,
the working group on the referendum apparently spent more time arguing about
adding a question on abolishing capitalism than on discussing how in the
world you run a global referendum). Yet Bolivia's enthusiastic commitment to
participatory democracy may well prove the summit's most important
contribution.
That's because, after the Copenhagen debacle, an exceedingly dangerous
talking point went viral: the real culprit of the breakdown was democracy
itself. The UN process, giving equal votes to 192 countries, was simply too
unwieldy - better to find the solutions in small groups.
Even trusted environmental voices like James Lovelock fell prey: "I have a
feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war," he told the
Guardian recently. "It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a
while." But in reality, it is such small groupings - like the
invitation-only club that rammed through the Copenhagen accord - that have
caused us to lose ground, weakening already inadequate existing agreements.
By contrast, the climate change policy brought to Copenhagen by Bolivia was
drafted by social movements through a participatory process, and the end
result was the most transformative and radical vision so far.
With the Cochabamba summit, Bolivia is trying to take what it has
accomplished at the national level and globalise it, inviting the world to
participate in drafting a joint climate agenda ahead of the next UN climate
gathering in Cancun. In the words of Bolivia's ambassador to the United
Nations, Pablo Solón: "The only thing that can save mankind from a tragedy
is the exercise of global democracy."
If he is right, the Bolivian process might save not just our warming planet,
but our failing democracies as well. Not a bad deal at all.
. A version of this column is published in the Nation.
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