At this week’s Millennium Development Goals summit at United Nations headquarters, one civil society group will capture the attention of curious New Yorkers and ambassadors alike with its loud, musical campaigns to eradicate poverty and life-size charters calling for lasting change and accountability.
The Global Call to Action Against Poverty, founded in 2004, is backed by several well-established advocacy and aid groups – like Oxfam International, U.N. Millennium Campaign and ActionAid – but recently, the eight organizers of this 162-partner strong initiative, which operate in 130 countries, have begun to pave their own way through the streets and into world leaders’ private offices.
Last year the ever-growing coalition was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for mobilizing more than 173 million people around the world for “Stand Up, Take Action, End Poverty Now!” events.
GCAP plans to keep the pressure on world leaders by holding governments accountable for their commitments toward fighting poverty and achieving the MDGs, during and after this year’s high-level U.N. event, starting with GCAP’s Global Assembly, a civil society summit that kicks off immediately after the MDG summit closes on Sept. 23 in Newark, New Jersey.
But without a flashy website and strong financial backing, GCAP’s mystery remains: What makes its growl so loud, impossible for even U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to ignore? Devex sat down with Global Director Lysa John, 34, just before the summit to understand the forces driving this increasingly influential advocacy group.
You work on a very tight budget. How have you been able to expand your network so dramatically within the past few years and months, in particular, especially without relying heavily on the Internet for communicating and getting the word out?
It has a lot to do with the way that GCAP originated because it kind of came together as a network of voluntary action and energy across civil society groups. If it were like a normal global organization, where you set up an office in each country and hire staff, it would have been impossible. But because it came together as a spontaneous movement, as part of the World Social Forum in 2004, you had a lot of organizations in each country committing to do something because they saw value in linking with this kind of global movement.
We have partners in 130 countries and we have only eight global staff responsible for coordinating all that global action. In each country you have people volunteering their paid staff from their organizations, or collecting money so they can run some kind of programs or cross-country coordination there. It really depends a lot on the willingness of different organizations and networks to say that we are part of GCAP and we want to contribute to its efforts without expecting any kind of a direct payment for it.
What led to so many individuals and organizations willing to volunteer their time and coordinate?
In 2004, you saw countries begin to come out with individual MDG plans and reports and the energy levels were very high then. It was like civil society organizations were saying, “Now we need to come together to see how we can make civil society voices very strong across the world.” It was from that sense of solidarity and connection. The World Social Forum democratized the globalization of activism. But the context now is really different. Now you do need this kind of network, but more from the sense of the urgency to meet the MDGs, rather than the sense of the euphoria and optimism that there was when the Millennium Declaration was signed.
You’ve had a lot of success in the past year in gaining a high level of visibility and getting noticed by some top leaders and diplomats. At the U.N. level alone, you met with the co-facilitators of the MDG declaration’s draft outcome document, the U.N. envoys from Senegal and Denmark this past spring, and Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon later invited you for a private meeting. What techniques are most effective to get that kind of recognition?
Really we’ve found that the whole concept of advocacy itself has changed. When the G-8 was in place all you had to do was focus on Europe and North America and every other country was really quite insignificant to the global political space. But after the G-20, suddenly you have the dispersal of global power. So I think the whole geometry of how things work on the global advocacy scene changed completely. It has forced a lot of us to see that it is no longer enough to be at global events around the U.N. or at this summit because that alone doesn’t work. You need to create a base much earlier at the national levels.
In our experiences, we’ve found there are two aspects to what makes effective advocacy. In a lot of the modern countries where the media is really the channel to reach leaders, you need to be creative in terms of getting attention of the media in the first place. In Europe and in America, you need to be able to catch public imagination in order to get the head of state to engage. But in India, we didn’t focus on the media a lot. It was just by the sheer weight of the campaign that we were able to mobilize across states and we were able to meet the prime minister twice in the last year. In the southern countries it works a lot more to keep to the serious, traditional kinds of advocacy work.
What has emerged as the most cohesive piece, or theme, of advocacy that is uniting civil society organizations leading up to this summit?
It’s really all about accountability. Countries have made commitments and everybody signed up to the MDGs, but there have been no mechanisms to ensure that we have a system of delivery at the global and national level. So we were kind of saying that at the global level, what are you going to do to ensure that countries are delivering 0.7 percent of their gross national incomes to development assistance and there is no backtracking? A lot of the traditional donors are already doing this and that has been a big issue. And for southern governments, people don’t know that the government is coming here or making certain commitments. GCAP has tried to make a noise about that.
The whole idea is that from now until 2015, country accountability to these goals really has to be measurable in terms of legislation and budgetary commitments. It can’t be more kind of white papers or policy collectives. It really has to be very concrete action. I think it is really about each country going back and saying, “OK, is there an act that protects the rights to education for children?” for example.
We need real safeguards protecting these goals. My concerns are that governments are just walking away from the tables without a feeling of pressure or urgency to meet the MDGs. The outcome document was discussed for so many months, and accountability clauses have been watered down and it doesn’t seem like there will be any new substantial commitments made.
Where does that leave organizations like GCAP that advocated for a strong outcome document throughout the whole process? How much else can you do to hold governments accountable?
There is a lot that we can do, especially now that the core of the action is no longer on a global scale. I think what we need to do from here is focus on the urgency for national action and that is the only thing that is going to solve this. In the last one year all the signals we have got is that people come here to the U.N. and go back scot free on the MDG agenda because it is not binding and there is no legal compulsion to do anything. We have to ensure that our global dialogue is backed up with national action.
And I think the next five years are really calling for a strategy shift for a lot of global networks like GCAP or ActionAid or Oxfam or others, to see that right now you can’t have global advocacy at one level and national advocacy working on a different stream. It will really have to be the intelligence collected at the national levels that should inform now what we want to do here.
The final draft of the MDG outcome document, which countries will sign this week, re-affirming their commitments to the goals, is now being circulated. Were you disappointed with the declaration’s overall lack of focus on human rights, an issue GCAP has been pushing? What impact on the fulfillment of the goals do you think this will have?
Especially in the context of post-Copenhagen it was aimed to be a consensus document that doesn’t create the kind of tensions we saw there here in New York. So in that sense it is not going to come up with anything new or radical. I think it is really for us to read beyond the lines of the outcome document and say what we are taking back from here is not what the document says – it is what civil society organizations feel and what people feel needs to be done better.
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That is why we are talking about a CSO breakthrough plan we want to go back from New York with, not the outcome document, because leaders are playing it safe right now. Obviously you are not going to meet your targets if you are not endorsing each of the human rights principles behind them.
And what do you hope to accomplish at GCAP’s Global Assembly, your follow-up civil society summit that kicks off immediately after the MDG summit closes on Sept. 23 in Newark, New Jersey?
It’s very important because of the experience we had in Copenhagen. You kind of go back and get a sense of feeling completely despondent and disillusioned with the role that governments have played. We wanted to avoid that and see that as our moment of reflection for what comes next in the future. So when you end the week you are not just focusing on the failures of governments to do anything; we are looking at the potential of what we need to do to hold them accountable.
We’re going to map out our strategy for the next three years, with a collected agenda, and then work from there.
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