On the 8th of March 2012 participants at
the Commission on the Status of Women session in New York were taken by
surprise by the UN Secretary General’s announcement that a fifth World Conference
on Women should be held in 2015. No prior consultations were held on this. It
is currently up to individual governments to respond whether they wish to go
ahead or not. (Read earlier blogposts on the CSW by WO=MEN on womeninnewyork.blogpost.com in Dutch and English.)
Participants at the AWID Forum deliberated about the
pro's and con's of such an event.
The majority expressed serious concerns about a
conference process that will inevitably require an outcome document in the
current context with no agreed conclusions at the 2012 CSW and persistent
backtracking on language and documents agreed upon in the past.
If a conference was to be held, the emphasis should be on the need to implement the Beijing Platform for Action and adequate resourcing of this agenda. A comparison was made with the Cairo + 20 process, that focuses on an implementation document and has already agreed that the Cairo Agenda remains valid beyond 2014.
Another
concern relates to the issue of resources, in a resource scarce context, that a
process of national, regional and continental consultations along the lines of
the preparations for Beijing in 1995 would require. It is unlikely that the
generous funding that was provided at the time of the Beijing Conference can be
raised again, taking the example of UN Women that at present has not yet been
able to secure the level of funding aspired when it finally got established.
By
and large it was felt that the way the UN tends to organize these processes is
an outdated, costly model and not appealing to younger generations of women
across the globe.
Participants however did question whether there is a way to
turn the process of a fifth World Conference on Women around into an energizing
and demand setting process at levels where change and progress towards equality
is most urgent and relevant. This will require strategic and creative thinking
on modes and models, including possible roles for a 2015 AWID Forum, a 2015
Latin American Feminist Encuentro and other feminist/women’s gatherings
elsewhere.
The year 2015 will also mark the likely establishment of a new
development framework as the successor to the Millennium Development Goals.
Inclusion of the agenda of women’s rights and gender justice has far from been
secured into the process for this new framework. At the AWID Forum the younger
generations did not turn up for the caucus sessions on 2015, a sign in itself?
Ireen Dubel
Hivos
