Global Dialogue Report - Sustainability and Growth: Sao Paulo

The Global Dialogue on Sustainability, Climate Change and Economic Growth was held in São Paulo in October 2011. It was co-organised by the Brazilian Centre for Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP) and the Institute of Development Studies (IDS). The idea was to bring together practitioners and thinkers to explore through dialogue the key issues relating to sustainability, climate change and economic growth both now and over the next 20 or 30 years. It was a diverse and broad-based gathering that not only included entrepreneurs, directors of philanthropic organisations and researchers but also made a particular effort to include spokespeople from marginalised communities -- indigenous and riverine small-holder representatives from the Amazon and Atlantic rainforest regions and a pastoralist representative from Ethiopia -- who have often been excluded from conventional debates about sustainability, climate change and economic growth. These conventional debates focus on the biological and scientific aspects of environmental resilience, climate change and conservation, and often overlook indigenous people whose knowledge is key to meeting these challenges but whose livelihoods and wellbeing are threatened by unrestrained economic growth and technological expansion. The key issues for philanthropists identified during the Dialogue were: Recognising diversity and respecting plural perspectives on challenges and opportunities;Facilitating autonomy through hands-on engagement with grassroots initiatives, going beyond short-term project cycles and allowing for local-level learning;Supporting relationships, helping to build networks and broker connections between different levels, sectors and interests; andAddressing power and politics in both forms of knowledge (integrating the social and the biological) and governance and decision-making processes, recognising that democratisation plays a critical role in relation to sustainability, climate change and economic growth

Reimagining Development with Indigenous People: Reflections from the São Gabriel da Cachoeira Workshop

Across the world, development is either failing or threatening indigenous peoples. The Brazil Reimagining Development event was held in the small Amazonian town of São Gabriel da Cachoeira, an important centre of indigenous political organisation which has recently elected an indigenous?led municipal administration. The discussions that took place there ranged across the themes of climate change, democratic governance and health system reform, and emphasised the profound ambivalence of the concept of ‘development’ for indigenous peoples. Indigenous participants highlighted the socially and environmentally destructive consequences of dominant development models, and called for greater access to opportunities and services to be combined with greater respect for their knowledges and greater responsiveness to their realities. In the process, they highlighted some of the key challenges that face efforts to reimagine development strategies for a world in which poverty is increasingly to be found among marginalised minorities in large and unequal middle?income countries

Country Ownership, Stakeholder Participation and the Political Economy of Priority-Setting in the Mozambique Pilot Program for Climate Resilience

DFI

Taking a seat on Brazil's health councils

In Brazil, it is common to find citizens jammed together into municipal halls on neat, narrow rows of white plastic chairs, each a personal podium for the citizens cum policy-makers participating in the country’s vaunted experiments in participatory democracy. The most internationally recognised of these experiments has been in participatory budgeting, but just as significant in Brazil has been the advent of health councils, now found in nearly all of the country’s 5,000-plus municipalities. These councils are empowered by law to inspect public accounts and demand accountability, and some strongly influence how resources for health services are spent

Innovation, solidarity and South-South Learning: the role of civil society from middle-income countries in effective development cooperation

Civil society organisations (CSOs) from middle-income countries can play multiple strategically important roles in effective development cooperation. Beyond demanding transparency and accountability around the aid that their own countries still receive, they can add signifi cant value to development cooperation provided to other countries. They have been key actors – alongside government and businesses – in developing innovative practices which have immense potential to contribute to the global struggle against poverty. In some cases, they have considerable experience of sharing these practices and influencing their integration into policies internationally as well as at home

Making the Right to Health a Reality for Brazil’s Indigenous Peoples: Innovation, Decentralization and Equity

This article provides an overview of governance arrangements and changes in the Brazilian public health system since 1988, when the “Citizen’s Constitution” declared health to be a universal right. Since then, population coverage has grown substantially and health indicators have improved. Despite these achievements, inequities in access remain an important barrier to universal coverage, in particular for marginalized groups such as indigenous peoples. This article discusses the innovation cycle that produced the gains and recent efforts to guarantee more equitable access to health services for the indigenous population in a continent-sized country historically plagued by great inequalities.UKai

Sustainability and growth: São Paulo

The Global Dialogue on Sustainability, Climate Change and Economic Growth was held in São Paulo in October 2011. It was co-organised by the Brazilian Centre for Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP) and the Institute of Development Studies (IDS). The idea was to bring together practitioners and thinkers to explore through dialogue the key issues relating to sustainability, climate change and economic growth both now and over the next 20 or 30 years. It was a diverse and broad-based gathering that not only included entrepreneurs, directors of philanthropic organisations and researchers but also made a particular effort to include spokespeople from marginalised communities – indigenous and riverine smallholder representatives from the Amazon and Atlantic rainforest regions and a pastoralist representative from Ethiopia – who have often been excluded from conventional debates about sustainability, climate change and economic growth. These conventional debates focus on the biological and scientific aspects of environmental resilience, climate change and conservation, and often overlook indigenous people whose knowledge is key to meeting these challenges but whose livelihoods and wellbeing are threatened by unrestrained economic growth and technological expansion. The key issues for philanthropists identified during the Dialogue were: Recognising diversity and respecting plural perspectives on challenges and opportunities; Facilitating autonomy through hands-on engagement with grassroots initiatives, going beyond short-term project cycles and allowing for local-level learning; Supporting relationships, helping to build networks and broker connections between different levels, sectors and interests; and Addressing power and politics in both forms of knowledge (integrating the social and the biological) and governance and decision-making processes, recognising that democratisation plays a critical role in relation to sustainability, climate change and economic growth.The Rockerfeller Foundatio

Civil Society from the BRICS: Emerging Roles in the New International Development Landscape

There is a burgeoning literature on the (re)emergence of the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – as significant actors in international development. To date, however, most attention has focused on the government-to-government relations established through state-led South–South Development Cooperation (SSDC) and the BRICS’ engagements in multilateral processes. Much has also been written about the growing presence of businesses from the BRICS (especially China) in poorer countries, particularly in Africa, and the somewhat tendentious and superficial slant that initially characterised much of this work is now starting to give way to a more nuanced analysis of the multiple roles played by such businesses in different places and sectors (Brautigam 2009; Mohan 2013; Navas-Alemán 2015). By comparison with this growing literature on governments and businesses, remarkably little attention has been paid to the roles played by civil society actors from the BRICS countries by researchers from outside those countries themselves. In this report we will argue that this has led to a neglect of both their existing and their potential contributions to the ongoing transformation of the field of international development, amid the broad geopolitical shifts symbolised by the rise of the BRICS. This report focuses on ‘civil society’ in just one of the many senses in which the term is used: the sense summarised by Edwards (2009) as referring to ‘the world of associational life’ (rather than alternative conceptualisations of civil society as ‘the good society’ or ‘the public sphere’). We are particularly interested in a fairly limited subset of the collective actors who populate this ‘world of associational life’ in the BRICS countries: that is, formally structured civil society organisations (CSOs) with a history of engagement in project implementation, policy dialogue and/or public debate in relation to issues of social and economic development at home and abroad.UK Department for International Developmen