The project on Including the Excluded in Global Policymaking will be launched in late 2009 as one of five main endeavours in the Building Global Democracy programme.

 

The Including the Excluded in the Global Policymaking (IEGP) project starts from the observation that citizen involvement in global governance – to the extent that it exists at all – is generally skewed on lines of structural social hierarchies. In other words, many people are marginalised due to the historical accident of where they were born, geographically and socially. These arbitrary inequalities run against the democratic principle that all affected persons should have equivalent opportunities of participation and control in public affairs.

 

For example, people in the global north tend to have greater access to global policy processes than people in the global south. In addition, urban dwellers (especially in national capitals and other global cities) usually have more opportunities to engage global regulatory institutions than rural people. Other arbitrary marginalisations in global governance often work against disabled persons, indigenous peoples, informal workers, outcastes, people of colour, sexual minorities, women, and youth.

 

 

To explore creative ways that unjust exclusions can be countered, the Including the Excluded in Global Policymaking project will bring together leading researchers, social movement activists and officials who have documented and pursued struggles for inclusion in the governance of global affairs. As ever in the Building Global Democracy programme, participants in the IEGP project will be drawn from diverse regions, cultures, disciplines and political visions.

 

Case studies could examine, for example, the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the International Dalit Solidarity Network, the involvement in the Global Fund of communities living with the diseases, and voice achieved by peasants in the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development. The research will seek to identify any common elements, as well as distinctive steps, in successful efforts to gain hearings for those who normally go unheard in policy processes on global affairs.

 

It is provisionally intended that the workshop for the IEGP project will be held in Rio de Janeiro in April 2011. Various presentations and publications will follow. It is hoped to launch the eventual book in the Pacific.