Global Economic Governance

Global Economic Governance
Marcos Arruda
Global Citizens' Assembly, France, 10 December 2001

Text presented in the Final Plenary of the Global Citizens' Assembly, Lille, France on December 10, summarizing the discussions of the thematic group on Global Economic Governance, Transnational Corporations and Regulations. The Assembly gathered nearly 400 members of the Alliance for a Responsible, Plural and United World, and was organized by the Foundation Charles Léopold Meyer for Human Progress.

One of the breakthroughs of the Alliance has been the insistence on the urgency to setting up a democratic system of global governance, geared to serve a different type of globalization; one based on the values of cooperation, ethics, solidarity and a spirit of collaboration with Nature.

We assert that another way of living is possible worldwide, one that respects bio and human diversity, combining local actions with national and global policies and regulations.

We reject the political ideology that transforms human beings, human work and Nature into commodities. We reject competition as the only, or the main, form of socioeconomic and human relationship.

We propose three crucial strategies to guide the work of the Alliance towards a global governance organized around the values of co-responsibility, plurality and solidarity:

1. Pressure for the introduction of regulations and reforms of the International Financial Institutions, the World Trade Organization, the United Nations and its chart, the transnational corporations and banks, and the international financial and monetary systems. This includes a global fiscal policy, the definitive desindebtedness of the impoverished countries and peoples, the establishment of codes of conduct and indicators of socioeconomic and environmental performance of corporations, governments and civil society organizations. It also includes the democratization of the State and the empowerment of working people, especially women, for full citizen participation.
2. Creation and reinforcement of new practices, institutions and relationships, such as local, national and multilateral Participatory Budget Councils, locally, nationally and globally integrated cooperative networks and chains of production, a democratically elected global Parliament, a democratically constituted and independent global Judicial system, etc. This implies the democratizations of acess to markets and resources, including capital, knowledge, technology and information; and the democratization of property, control and management of productive goods. We firmly believe that economic democracy is a basic constituent of political democracy.
3. Education for personal and interpersonal transformation, so that each and every citizen, regardless of age, gender and social position, gradually empowers her-himself to become the subject of one's own development, both as an individual and as a social being.

Finally, we suggest that the vision of an economy geared to basic human nedds and guided by the values of cooperation, complementarity, respect for diversity and solidarity is an innovative way of reorganizing global society and generating peace on the basis of socioeconomic justice and the blooming of the multitude of emancipated nations, cultures and individuals.