Moving Beyond Rio

Me and Sofia just arrived home yesterday, Philip and Annika will remain a couple of days more in Rio. A little well deserved vacation after a number of hectic days that saw very little sleep and constant running around, listening and talking to people at the conference. Bus trips of one to two hours to and from the conference every day also took its toll – we happened to live on the wrong side of town – and Rio is a big “town”.

There is so much to tell all the time that most of the effort goes toward collecting information rather than passing it on. We will be trying to share some of the intricacies over the coming days however.

The outcome document is very weak, but there is no point in burying ourselves in frustration over the non-inclusive process that saw nation states compromise away most of civil society’s proposals. The weak outcome rather mean that we must pursue implementation of the few things that are in there, such as Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that will succeed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a process of a new welfare indicator beyond GDP (GDP+?) and the 10 year Framework on Sustainable Development,  with even greater vigour.

The plenary hall at RioCentro

Most of civil society are realising that governments can no longer be counted on to provide us with the leadership needed to preserve our world, and that we must act ourselves. I was at a meeting on moving forward after the Rio-conference with the other youth organisations, the day after the conference was over. There was talk of national summits, working at the grassroots and changing the world as civil society: working towards realising the democratic will of the world. In the UN process at these conferences, as everything is agreed on by consensus, it takes only one country or one contentious issue to ruin the process. This is of course the consequence of an international system that lacks enforcement. And attempts at enforcement so far made, such as the legally binding Kyoto-protocol, have fallen short of actually being legally enforced.

Meeting with other youth on how to move forward.

The YMCA is also moving forward on the implementation process and looking at what we have learned from this conference and how we can use this input to strengthen our movement and future international advocacy work in a broad range of forums. This conference was very much the stepping stone for trying to harness and bring together the huge potential of our fifty million member movement! We will update the blog accordingly as this work progresses, and more Rio updates and reflections are also to come!