Interview with Fergus Watt, Coordinator for the Coalition for the UN We Need
Interview Transcript
Transcribed by Otter AI
Kimberly White
Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we’re joined by Fergus Watt, Coordinator for the Coalition for the UN We Need. Thank you so much for joining us!
Fergus Watt
Thanks for inviting me, Kimberly.
Kimberly White
Can you tell us about your work with the Coalition for the UN We Need?
Fergus Watt
Sure. The Coalition for the UN We Need began in 2017. It was called something different; it was called the UN 2020 campaign. That name was selected because the year 2020 is the 75th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations. Not wanting to let an anniversary go to waste, we had the idea that rather than just a birthday party for the UN, the anniversary should entail a process of taking stock of the organization and considering ways to strengthen the UN system and global governance generally. So those were our goals. At the time, this was also the beginning of the first term for Secretary-General Guterres and the first year of a US administration that was keen on withdrawing from so many UN bodies, as it did over the next few years. That had an impact at the UN. And the second thing that had an impact in the intervening years between 2017 and 2020 was the pandemic which came along later, of course. Both of these developments had the effect of generating a recognition among many small and medium governments that multilateralism needs to be strengthened. For our campaign, it was a bit of a silver lining and we found that there were a number of governments receptive to our message of using the 75th anniversary as a means for generating a broader dialogue on strengthening the UN. So it was in 2020, at the summit on the 21st of September in New York, governments adopted a declaration that included a requirement that the Secretary-General produce a report on the future of the UN. So this wasn’t just a declaration that recalled all the work that the UN does, but it mandated a report, and that report was released in 2021 on the 10th of September, and it’s called Our Common Agenda. That outlines nearly 90 proposals for strengthening the UN. So, it’s through a bit of luck and successful campaigning we’ve got this far. Now, that report, the Our Common Agenda report- or the OCA report we can call it- is generating a lot of conversation at the UN. Governments are now discussing processes for how they break down the various negotiations and consider those proposals, those among nearly 90 proposals, where they might find consensus. So it is an exciting time for the campaign.
Kimberly White
That’s fantastic! We need more organizations pushing for stronger multilateralism and increased climate action. So it’s great what you’re doing at the Coalition for the UN We Need. Previously, you served as the Executive Director of the World Federalist Movement – Canada for more than three decades. Can you elaborate on the world federalism movement and share more about this experience?
Fergus Watt
Sure. The UN 2020 campaign, now called Coalition for the UN We Need, or C4UN, began as a small project of the Canadian section of the World Federalist Movement. Just to explain what that’s about, it’s a long-standing NGO that was established really when the UN was established. World Federalists seek to apply the principles of federalism to world affairs. So strengthening institutions at levels above the nation-state is very generally what the World Federalists seek to do. Examples of the kinds of things that are of interest to World Federalists, I mean, the EU, the European Union is an example of institution-building above the level of the nation-state that has had a dramatic impact on politics in that part of the world and helped to keep a group of nations that went to war twice in the 20th century working peaceably in a common market and trading environment. But also at the global level, federalists are keen on strengthening the rule of law. We’ve had an impact on Law of the Sea, strengthening the rule of law and global governance for the oceans, where the common heritage principle was a cornerstone of the Law of the Sea Convention. More recently, World Federalists served as the home agency for a global coalition of NGOs that helped bring about the creation of the International Criminal Court, a court that holds individuals accountable for some of the worst human rights and humanitarian offenses, genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, that sort of thing. We had a fairly prominent role in that. So it’s a huge goal, strengthening global governance and the key is to find the pressure points for change and where you can have an impact in getting from the nation-state system of today to a better-governed world of tomorrow.
Kimberly White
I didn’t know about the World Federalists’ role with the International Criminal Court. That’s interesting. Now, when you look at your work at the WFM and the C4UN, a common theme emerges, a call for stronger multilateralism, which is something you touched on just a few minutes ago. Given the converging crises facing our global community, climate change, biodiversity loss, and a pandemic, why is strengthening multilateralism essential?
Fergus Watt
It’s pretty clear now that global cooperation is going to be essential to solving global problems like climate change, biodiversity loss, and the pandemic. When World Federalists were initially organizing, around the time of the founding of the UN, the main problem that brought them together was war and peace. And that in a nuclear age, unlimited recourse to war was a threat to our existence as a species. So it’s interesting that over the decades, since the founding of the UN, there have just been so many other issues that have come along, particularly environmental issues. But also pandemics make it more obvious to so many people now that we need a level of global cooperation and the social solidarity that the pandemic has brought about. The recognition that we’re not going to beat this pandemic until we tackle it globally. We’re just going to have more and more variants emerge unless something is done to address what’s called the vaccine apartheid. Wealthy governments have most of the vaccines, and the smaller, weaker governments are slower to vaccinate their populations. In terms of adequate planning and how you would address a global problem, it’s not a shining example of cooperation, but it leads to awareness of our interdependence. And I think that we’re at a moment now, and we saw it last year at COP26 in Glasgow, the widespread recognition of the need for improved multilateralism is growing. So, one hopes that’s the precursor to the following on political changes that we all know are necessary.
Kimberly White
Absolutely. Now, we’ve also seen an upward trend in nationalism. What challenges do you think this poses to multilateralism and discussions surrounding these crises?
Fergus Watt
We need to find ways for nationalism and internationalism to coexist. There’s nothing inherently wrong with pride in one’s country and community. It’s national chauvinism that is the problem. Sometimes this can even result in armed conflict. So I think that there are many causes; it’s a complex analysis to get into the causes of the rise in nationalism. But, certainly, many scholars have linked it to globalization and the inequalities that exist in our world today. I think people are gravitating to national populists. But I also think that there is a kind of a pendulum swing back away. If nationalism, is an inhibitor to international cooperation- and that is certainly true- then I think that the worst is behind us, and I think the pendulum is swinging back more towards improving global governance and international cooperation.
Kimberly White
I hope so because it has been frustrating. We all live on the same planet, and actions on one side of the world can impact communities on the other side of the world. So it just goes to show that even beyond our borders, we’re all connected. So stronger multilateralism that is inclusive is essential.
Fergus Watt
Yeah, and I think at a popular level that just notions of, whether you call it cosmopolitanism, global citizenship, or world citizens, it’s kind of creeping into our consciousness and hopefully is a precursor to some of the political changes that are so necessary.
Kimberly White
At the end of the day, we have to remember that we’re all Earthlings.
Fergus Watt
And earth consciousness is where we want to be.
Kimberly White
Absolutely. So the ongoing health crisis we’re facing has brought into focus the inequity in our global health system. COVID-19 vaccines were developed quickly, but most have been dispensed in high and upper-middle-income countries. Failure to share vaccines equitably is taking its toll on some of the world’s most vulnerable people, preventing much of the Global South access until later this year or next. The first commitment of the UN75 Declaration is that we will leave no one behind. How can we address the global challenge of inequities like this going forward and ensure that no one is left behind?
Fergus Watt
Well, I would point to the language that the UN Secretary-General António Guterres uses. I mean, he picked up on the UN75 Declaration, which, as I mentioned, was adopted in 2020 and mandated his Our Common Agenda report. And in that report, he makes a strong call for global vaccine equity. He’s repeated that call many times and in many contexts, whether it’s at the UN Security Council or in the General Assembly, his most recent 2022 State of the Organization remarks. It’s a central theme. I think beyond what international leaders like the Secretary-General are saying, I think it’s widely recognized that we’re not safe from this pandemic until we get a level of vaccination around the world that helps us overcome the pandemic. But we have powerful forces arrayed against the kind of vaccine equity that is necessary. The problem we’re facing is trade rules and the need for exceptions to the patent protection that large pharmaceutical companies have. There are precedents for making an exception. For example, in the development of drugs that were used to combat the HIV crisis years ago, there were allowances made that enabled governments, particularly in Africa, to produce vaccines at a much lower cost. And so, what needs to be done is pretty clear to people. It’s called the TRIPS rules at the World Trade Organization. These are trade regulations that apply to intellectual property and the protections that corporations have for their intellectual property, and that’s what needs to change so that we can allow greater production of vaccines and greater distribution of vaccines globally. So those proposals have made the ideas, you know, it’s no secret. It’s just a problem of political will. Hopefully, those political forces out there who are working on this will be successful, and it’s good that the UN Secretary-General and the World Health Organization are leading the charge on this.
Kimberly White
I like what the World Health Organization has said, if the vaccine isn’t everywhere, this global pandemic isn’t going anywhere. So essentially, we have the tools we need to handle this pandemic; they already exist. So it’s ensuring equity in the vaccine distribution that is essential to putting an end to this ongoing health crisis. No one is safe until we are all safe.
Fergus Watt
Yes, exactly.
Kimberly White
So discussions surrounding the Declaration on our Common Future, also known as the Civil Society 2022 Draft Declaration, began at Stockholm+49 in October. How can having a short, concise declaration be beneficial in attracting the support of states?
Fergus Watt
Well, I guess the short answer to that question is that most busy politicians, diplomats, and officials generally prefer short issue briefs that they can respond to either with a yes or no, as long as the underlying research and the logic are well developed and the technical issues are resolved. But I think your question gets at something a little deeper than that, and that is the content of Our Common Future Declaration, which, although it’s just one page, contains four very big powerful ideas.
Kimberly White
The Civil Society Draft Declaration, as you mentioned, encompasses four main pillars: the right to a healthy environment, the global commons and the delivery of global public goods, a regenerative economy, and governance and institutional solutions. Can you provide some insight on the process of building this declaration and how these four points were chosen?
Fergus Watt
In terms of process, one of the wonderful things about the way that the UN system has evolved is that it has, over the years, allowed civil society organizations to be a part of intergovernmental deliberations. So while it’s only member states that have a vote, civil society impacts on the UN have made a considerable difference. And indeed, they have been the drivers of progressive change on so many issues, and one of the characteristics of civil society is its diversity. But also there’s a set of norms that NGOs just follow and learn to live by, and there’s a consensus-building process in all successful civil society deliberations where dialogue and debate eventually lead to consensus around what’s the right thing to do and the right thing to say at any given moment. So the Stockholm+49 was an international meeting that discussed what was within the realm of the possible in terms of improvements to the legal and institutional frameworks for sustainable development governance and that was a consensus from those meetings and the preparatory meetings prior to them that that led to these recommendations.
The first one is to implement the right to a healthy environment; this is a newly established norm. There was a resolution adopted at the Human Rights Council. If people want to look it up, it’s resolution 48/13, and it spells out what this right entails. Interestingly, it goes into a discussion of a regenerative agenda for environmental law. So it’s a piece of the puzzle, let’s say. Rights that are developed at the UN Human Rights Council, some of them have been around so long and are now widely accepted as a sort of jus cogens, or universal law, and others are sort of on that road to having full acceptance. The Human Rights Council is a body that discusses and adopts resolutions, but it’s not like the UN Security Council; it doesn’t enforce these declarations. It’s up to the actions of member states to adopt these new human rights standards. That’s why there’s a call here. This is a success story that we need to build upon. The fact that this right was enshrined in law. It’s now international law. So what we need to do is push governments to implement it. That’s point one of the Common Home Declaration.
Point two is to safeguard the global commons. The oceans are defined in international law through the Law of the Sea Convention as our common heritage. The Outer Space Treaty recognizes space as the global commons, and Antarctica is a global commons. Each of these three has corresponding treaties that enjoined nations in the process of cooperation to safeguard these common heritage areas. One thing that’s interesting, and I would say quite bold of the UN Secretary-General, in his Our Common Agenda report, is that he identifies the atmosphere as part of our common heritage. What this does is, it may sound very abstract, but if we take, for example, the Law of the Sea, the evolution of the Law of the Sea, there were a number of unsuccessful efforts to create a treaty through the 1950s and ‘60s. There was a landmark speech in 1967 by a delegate from Malta that suggested that the oceans should be part of our common heritage, and various piecemeal treaty efforts were combined in a Law of the Sea package deal. And because it was this common heritage designation, it means that the corresponding legal instruments were more binding. The Law of the Sea Convention has, for example, a dispute settlement mechanism, and it’s more comprehensive. So, in legal terms, to international lawyers, common heritage is a big deal. So recognizing where we’re at with climate change and the additional progress that we need to make, it was quite bold for the Secretary-General to suggest that the atmosphere could, and perhaps should be, recognized as a common heritage as well as the oceans, outer space, and Antarctica. So that’s a significant development and, right now, the problem with the present treaty framework on climate change is that the language is different. The Paris Agreement recognizes global warming as a common concern, but just that different language would communicate to lawyers that a more binding set of rules and a more comprehensive governance framework is required, and this might kick-start strengthening some of the agreements under the Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The third point in the Declaration speaks to the need to establish a regenerative economy. What we want to do is to really, and I think there’s a growing literature around the idea that how we measure progress as a society, how we measure human development is flawed in the sense that we rely too much on economic progress. And we measure progress with indicators like the gross domestic product, the GDP. If you have an entity that’s cutting down a bunch of forests and selling trees, is that progress? Or is it not? The costs to the environment become just sort of externalities in an economic model that is reliant on GDP. So, building a regenerative economy and a more holistic view of sustainable development and human progress is what’s meant by the third point in the Declaration. Hopefully, there will be some progress on this in terms of normative frameworks around common heritage and different concepts of wealth creation when governments and civil society gather in Stockholm in June.
The last point speaks to the need to prioritize governance and institutional solutions. I think the Secretary-General is invested in the Stockholm process. He’s hoping that we will use the Stockholm meeting as a way to signal some of the political changes that can then be brought from Stockholm to New York to the intergovernmental deliberations that are more tied to the OCA report. That OCA report calls for something called a Summit of the Future, which is suggested for September 2023. So here we are. We’re speaking now in February of 2022, this Stockholm meeting takes place in June 2022, and hopefully, we can establish some benchmarks that can influence the negotiations for the Summit of the Future. Summits, in a UN context, often have outcome documents that include new institutional and governance solutions. For example, the last major summit that influenced global governance took place in 2005. There were some major changes. That’s when the Human Rights Council was upgraded institutionally; there used to be just a smaller Human Rights Commission. The new Peacebuilding Commission was created as a whole new entity in the UN, ideas like the Responsibility to Protect, and improvements to the UN Development system. All of these were agreed on in the summit that took place in 2005. And so, I think the hope is that the Summit of the Future in 2023 can also be a significant point where a lot of these ideas come together for adoption by governments that will bring about some of the governance and institutional solutions. So that’s the fourth point in the Declaration, and as you can see by my long-winded explanation of these four points, Kimberly, sometimes a one-page declaration with four points packs in a lot of big ideas. So that’s what the team that’s been led by Common Home of Humanity is working on to bring to Stockholm. And there will be background documents that support these four points. But I think it’s an important and powerful declaration with some big ideas that hold promise for progress in the next few years.
Kimberly White
Very promising! I am certainly looking forward to seeing how everything progresses later this year in Stockholm. Now I know you might have touched on this a little bit in your last answer, but how do these four points complement what the UN Secretary-General outlines in the Our Common Agenda report?
Fergus Watt
Well, I think that the Secretary-General, one of the important roles is that he can lead. Just as in 2005, Kofi Annan led with the initial documents that preceded the Declaration. The Secretary-General has the power to initiate, and that’s what he’s done. The Our Common Agenda document is packed full of proposals for a stronger UN. Some of the greatest points of emphasis for Mr. Guterres are things like social solidarity and building trust, and the means to rebuild confidence in our governance institutions’ reliance on data- so it’s a social agenda, it’s a social development agenda. There’s a proposed summit on social development in 2025, another summit that would occur 30 years after the first UN Summit on Social Development. And so I think he’s captured the moment and the mood of the times, but it’s ultimately going to be up to member states and the bargaining and negotiations that are going to occur in the next few years, and we’re really at the early stages of that process. But I’m reasonably optimistic. It’s a General Assembly-led process. Those are often the most successful in bringing about changes in governance. We can think of the Sustainable Development Goals and treaty processes like the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons or the Landmines Treaty, which began as General Assembly-led processes, and civil society is essential to these processes in helping shape consensus and build public support and support in Parliaments for these progressive ideas. So I think that the Secretary-General has set out an agenda. We’re at a stage now when governments are still expressing their views on the OCA report. There’s not yet a decision on the procedures, the modalities for the negotiations to come, and those will be important discussions to determine those procedures and processes and how the various proposals will be grouped, packaged, and discussed. So there’s a lot that could still go wrong, but I think the team at the Secretary-General’s Office and the Secretary-General himself deserves our support.
Kimberly White
Absolutely. Now, as we approach the 50th anniversary of the Stockholm Conference, how can we build on the foundation of this landmark conference to shape a future that is both environmentally and socially sustainable?
Fergus Watt
Well, environmentally and socially sustainable- those are big ideas. I think we all have our ways of working on these ideas, whether it’s at a community level, workplace, or being active politically in national or international contexts. So Stockholm is going to be a landmark, and hopefully, there will be ideas that come out of there that resonate. But for big ideas like environmentally and socially sustainable futures, ideas don’t work unless people do. We all have our ways of working for progressive change. It’s just a matter of people doing what they’re good at and what they’re best at. The Stockholm conference is a conference that is going to really sort of be like a lighthouse, that kind of a beacon that shines a light to a destination that we’re all hopefully working towards, but it’s up to us to do our part to get there. I think we all just do what we can, where we can, when we can. If you look across history and sort of decades of progress, then one does see that although the problems are increasing, there’s also a great deal of progress that has been made. Rights-based mechanisms are a key to progress, and ideas like common heritage, which implicitly bring humanity together. So there is a tendency towards a unity and an earth perspective that I think is increasing. Hopefully, it will be given a bit of a push with Stockholm, but it’s something that everybody can do their parts and work towards. The good news is that what gets discussed in Stockholm and agreed upon in Stockholm doesn’t end in Stockholm. There is an expectation, an internationally accepted expectation, and that the Secretary-General has usefully called for, so we can connect the dots between Stockholm in June 2022 and New York at the Summit of the Future in September 2023. Hopefully, governments will be willing to incorporate some of the ideas from Stockholm in the Summit of the Future outcome document.
Kimberly White
Thank you, Fergus. Before we go, is there anything else you’d like to share with our audience? Are there any ways for them to get involved?
Fergus Watt
We’re not going to change global governance in a day or a week or a month, but there is a process of change that has begun. The Coalition for the UN We Need, we do our best to keep our supporters and members up to date through periodic publications, mailers, and update calls generally every month, and so it’s worth signing up for updates at the Coalition for the UN We Need website: c4unwn.org/.
Kimberly White
All right, and there you have it. The world’s critical ecological situation and the challenges faced by present and future generations are increasingly apparent. We need a new way of thinking about the Earth that puts our global commons at the center of a regenerative economy and as the foundation for global governance and new institutional solutions. The Declaration for Stockholm+50 proposes a four-step pathway to achieve this needed paradigm shift- 1.) Implement the Right to a Healthy Environment; 2.) Recognize, Restore and Safeguard the Global Commons; 3.) Establish a Regenerative Economy, and 4.) Prioritize Governance and Institutional Solutions. Set to take place this June, the Stockholm+50 meeting is an important opportunity to build this pathway of hope for Humanity. You can join us on this pathway by endorsing the Declaration for Stockholm+50. That is all for today, and thank you for joining us for this episode of Common Home Conversations Pathway to 2022. Please subscribe, share, and be sure to tune in next time to continue the conversation. And visit us at www.ThePlanetaryPress.com for more episodes and the latest news in sustainability, climate change, and the environment.
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