Justice and social equity for all

It’s election season in India. Political parties of all hues are out to impress the voters, tom-tomming their achievements, promises and presenting their vision of what challenges confront India today. As a civil society campaign that has been advocating for a more socially-just, equitable and rightsbased development frame since 2004, Wada Na Todo Abhiyan has been engaged in scrutinising the election manifestos and has recently launched a nation-wide campaign to develop a People’s Manifesto, for political formations to take note of.

In this regard, a related advocacy initiative of the Abhiyan has been to influence the global development agenda that would succeed the existing eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) with effect from 2015. The Abhiyan has anchored an advocacy campaign globally to ensure non-state actors, such as Central Statistics Offices (CSOs), parliamentarians, media, and academia from developing countries to shape the contours of the new global development agenda.

To recap, the United Nations (UN) Millennium Declaration in 2000 united heads of states in promising to adopt human development as the key premise grounded on principles of freedom, equality, solidarity, tolerance, respect for nature and shared responsibility. It also gave birth to the MDGs – a set of eight international goals applicable globally – that were adopted in 2000 by 193 countries with a promise to attain these goals by 2015. While the MDGs succeeded in unifying the measurement of human development, it had its own set of limitations.

With less than two years to the deadline and it becoming clear that many countries have not made significant progress towards attainment of MDGs, a global process of consultations (national, global, thematic and online) was initiated by the UN in 2012 seeking inputs to articulate the new global development agenda, commonly known as the post-2015 agenda.

This exercise has been motivated by the understanding that the existing MDGs frame was largely guided by the developing North and most of the goals, targets and indicators were set for the developing South with little attention to fixing responsibilities on the North. Of the eight goals, only one goal (Goal 8 on global partnerships) mentions and was directed towards the role of developed countries in attaining the MDGs.

The Abhiyan anchored a nation-wide civil society consensus-building process through a series of consultations and arrived at key, non-negotiable principles and recommendations for the new global development agenda. Following 15 recommendations provide a summary of our recommendations; the first six are more in the nature of principles while 7 to 15 are specific recommendations around key thematic areas for the post-2015 agenda.

• Grounded on a human rights frame:Monitorable targets to assess progress in human ‘well-being’ and dignity as opposed to mere human survival. The Constitutional tenets are the most fundamental and need to be referred to. Other references include UN Conventions on rights of child, persons with disabilities, women and elimination of discrimination based work and descent.
• Ensuring social inclusion of all: Non-discriminatory monitorable targets focusing on advancing the rights of the most-excluded and the disadvantaged groups such as Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Denotified Nomadic Tribes, religious minorities such as Muslims, children, aged, persons with disabilities and youth.
• Safeguarding gender justice: Establish gender equality through policy instruments designed to shift away from patriarchal social order, institutions and mindsets. Address and eliminate all forms of violence with a zero-tolerance approach to violence against anyone, be it women, children, aged, person with disability, person discriminated based on caste, class or descent.
• Addressing poverty and inequality: Greater investment in irrigation, power, agricultural research and development, and roads in the poorer regions, where the concentration of poverty is increasing. Progressive and redistributive taxation, public spending, especially for foundational investment in human capital, along with reforms in land and forest policies are key to reduce inequalities.
• Ensuring environmental justice: More investments in renewable technologies and innovative measures to help poor people adapt to climate change impacts in agriculture-related sectors and disaster management, and building sustainable cities focusing on accessible public transport policies.
• Guaranteeing just governance:Strong accountability mechanisms for better implementation and monitoring of basic services to all including access to speedy justice. For this, greater government spending on critical entitlements such as healthcare and education, decentralising decision making, people-centred planning, citizen-led monitoring and transparent policing institutions are key. Greater transparency and accountability in government spending as also citizen involvement in determining budget priorities and participation in budget monitoring is vital. Ensuring justice-based governance extends to the corporate and multilateral agencies also.
• Universal quality healthcare: Equitable access to basic quality public healthcare linking it with access to safe and sustainable water supply and sanitation. Benchmarks for financing health through domestic resources and through ensuring compliance with existing donor targets for aid must be laid down.
• Universal quality education: Equitable opportunities for all to participate in transformative quality learning at all levels aiming to provide the knowledge, skills, competencies and values vital to achieve inclusive and sustainable development. Delivery on this would entail adequate financing through a global benchmark for public spending and aid commitments.
• Ensuring food security to all: Universal food security focusing on children (including children with disabilities) and other marginalised groups such as migrants, aged, single women and persons with disabilities, including a fair and just procurement and distribution system and with a special focus on the threats of climate change impacts.
• Livelihood security for all: Autonomy and sustainability of livelihood in the new economy wherein every person is enabled to avail their full capacity. Consensus on a social protection ‘floor of dignity’ below which no one should be allowed to fall.
• Safeguarding peace and conflict resolution: Measurable targets for creation of gainful employment along with reduction in arms and armed militia in conflict-affected areas with special attention to women and the minorities.
• Financing for development: Developing countries to step up domestic resource mobilisation through increased tax-GDP ratios. Both developed and developing countries plug loopholes in tax policies to check illicit financial flows that lead to significant tax loss and tax evasion. Innovative financial mechanisms to be explored as alternative funding options. Transparency in public spending and greater participation in determining spending priorities is called for.
• Greater role of developed countries: The role of developed countries in shaping the post-2015 development agenda must not be limited to making prescriptive policy changes but bringing about substantive course correction in prevalent economic and environmental policy paradigm.
• Partnership for development: Clearly monitorable targets for the corporate sector in ensuring accountable, transparent, inclusive and socially and environmentally just practices and processes. The increasing role of private actors in providing entitlements to all needs to be curtailed.
• Global cooperation: Increased policy spaces to foster South cooperation in participating and influencing the post-2015 development agenda.

While the above 15 recommendations might seem more directed to the global development policy setting, it remains relevant for us nationally too. One of the reasons for the inadequate progress towards MDGs in many countries has been the inadequate linkages between the global development agenda and national policymaking. Clearly, there needs to be far greater integration of the national policies to the global commitments that India signs on to.

The way forward

In terms of global processes to influence the new development agenda, soon the stage will shift to the national capitals where member states (to the UN) will decide to accept or reject key development goals for the next round of MDGs. This will be crucial in determining the national policy agenda as well.

Most of the civil society recommendations mentioned earlier, with the exception of the last three, are relevant for India’s national policy agenda as well. Be it the need to address violence against women, universal healthcare, quality education, food security or concerns of peace and conflict resolution, these have figured prominently in many of the political parties’ election manifestos as policy commitments.

To conclude, be it the national policies and plans or the global development agenda, critical to both is the need to bring in a more central rights-based frame with the guarantees of justice and social equity for all.

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Pooja Parvati

The writer is leading the Wada Na Todo Abhiyan (WNTA) campaign on post- 2015 development agenda since January 2013. She has over 11 years of experience working on issues of public policy, governance and concerns pertaining to gender and social exclusion.[/column]