Workshop:

  • Preparatory summary
  • Participants
  • Minutes of the workshop

The curtain has risen on the third millennium against the backdrop of a major crisis in world governance. Institutions responsible for regulating international relations, which were set up in the specific context of the end of the second world war, find themselves unable to assume their missions fully as a result of insufficient resources—or the fact that the world’s major powers force them to accept strategies that serve these powers’ own interests. Humanitarian needs often take precedence over security and peoples’ right to development, while rhetoric prevails over action when it comes to the rise in poverty, attacks on the environment and lack of respect for social norms.

Ways of thinking and acting engendered by globalisation are no longer useful in confronting new global challenges (security, climate, pandemics, etc.), which call for responses that are less solitary, and more concerted and caring. Clearly, regulatory modes based on non-economic criteria (social norms, environmental standards, etc.) are not compensating for the adverse effects of upheaval in economic, technological and financial domains. This crisis in governance has terrible consequences for Africa because the continent is so extremely vulnerable to outside shocks. Significant development for African countries is a wager that can be won only by eliminating obstacles to development created by globalisation and the current system of international relations.

In the current context, structural reforms begun in Africa—at the price of great sacrifice—will remain without effect, just like the structural adjustment policies of the 1980’s. This is why the interests of Africa must be better taken into account in major international negotiations on climate, trade, debt and sustainable development. What we need is a renewed world governance based on more equitable international regulations, that takes into account the worries and interests of Africa, a continent that legitimately aspires to become a major actor in the construction and foundations of an equitable, responsible and democratic world governance.