During the 2024 Global People’s Assembly, the NGO Committee for Social Development co-organized a “Strategy Meeting Towards the Second World Social Summit.” The session offered civil society and other stakeholders the opportunity to come together and create a collective work plan to address challenges, identify opportunities, and develop advocacy strategies as we work towards the Second World Social Summit. The following are remarks made by Cecilia Schirmeister, Chair of the NGO CSocD World Social Summit Subcommittee, on the Opening Panel of the session.
“Good morning everyone, it’s a pleasure to be here with you today. I want to start by saying that I think it is significant that we are able to build off the momentum of the Summit of the Future, which is taking place just around the corner as we speak. The Summit of the Future and the World Social Summit, which we are preparing for now, are both intimately connected and need to reinforce one another.
Much like the future-oriented spirit of the proceedings taking shape at the moment, let’s use this space as an opportunity to zoom out from our current reality and imagine what outcome we wish to secure from the World Social Summit in Qatar next year.
In Our Common Agenda, the Secretary-General stated: “now is the time to renew the social contract between Governments and their societies, so as to rebuild trust and embrace a comprehensive vision of human rights…”.
To me, this indicates that we need to be thinking—as a central element of our strategy—about how to establish the right relationships between people and the State. These questions were very much present during the first World Social Summit, and found expression in the 1995 Copenhagen Declaration, which drew attention to a key reality of the contemporary world: that the roots of numerous global challenges lie in how human beings view, value, respond to, and relate to one another.
How then, can these ideas, and the assumptions that inform them, be captured in a new social contract? How can the relationships underlying the social fabric be strengthened, and how can such transformation assist a community to measurably improve its material and economic circumstance?
If we are thinking about transforming the relationships between people and the State—specifically with the goal of addressing the Copenhagen Declaration’s ten Commitments on poverty eradication, reducing inequality, promoting full employment, and social inclusion—I think we also need to be contemplate more deeply the ways that we currently see this relationship play out in society.
Take democracy for example – maybe we could benefit from a deeper exploration of how we conceive of democratic processes, and what we really mean when we talk about it. Nowadays, the term “democracy” is often defined by or associated with the presence of an election. The assumption is simple: if an election is taking place, then the voices of the people have been heard. A “fair election,” becomes a box to be checked when we are assessing whether democracy exists. While free and fair elections are essential components to a healthy functioning society and in ensuring that the perspectives of citizens are fully considered, framing a society as democratic simply based on the presence of an election risks diminishing other elements integral to what might be envisioned to be a ‘healthy relationship’ between the state and its people. What about ‘democratic principles’? Values and principles that we want to animate our future society? We have to ensure that social values, including gender equality, human rights, and solidarity enter into our conversations and animate the relationships we have between people and the state. Meaningful social development will ultimately require the cultivation of qualities like trustworthiness and honesty, generosity and camaraderie, cooperation and a sense of responsibility for the collective well-being. Otherwise we can fall prey to majoritarian claims that are devoid of humanity’s transcendent values, or to the models built on the status quo set by the past.
So I think we have to go deeper, and ensure that justice—which incorporates within it a concern for the well-being of humankind in its entirety—is central within our discussions around a new social contract.
The Second World Summit for Social Development allows us the grounds for imagination, and offers us the opportunity to think deeply about the assumptions upon which development models have been built, to ultimately reconstruct these models and to redefine the norms we otherwise have relied on, on the basis of humanity’s collective interdependence.
Civil society can play a significant role in ensuring that these normative dimensions inform the creation of our new social contract. As for other strategies, we know that civil society organizations play an indispensable role in ensuring health, education, employment, social protection, inclusion, and countless other aspects of social development. Their work is critical in ensuring that global agendas reflect local aspirations—which must be at the heart of a social contract.
NGO CSocD put out a position paper on the World Social Summit, in which it states that “the elevation of human capacity… lies at the heart of social development” and we know that a lot of the ‘meat’ of community-building work, intergenerational collaboration, the changing of hearts and minds, the decisions relating to the functioning of institutions, the soil in which the seeds of change are planted – a lot of this happens at the grassroots. It happens within families, among neighbors, at school and at the workplace. Civil society organizations have the insight into such experiences of local communities engaging in conversation around principles contained within development goals. Otherwise, our goals will remain as aspirations.
All of this highlights the absolutely critical role that civil society can play in “bridging vision to action”—which I am sure you are all very familiar with, as it is the title of the NGO Committee for Social Development’s report: From the Copenhagen Declaration of 1995 to the Sustainable Development Goals, which I am sure others will touch on today.
These opportunities for engagement enable us at the WSS to, of course, review the progress that has been made, explore the gaps and limitations in implementation so far, but also move forward galvanized by with an informed sense of optimism and hope, attitudes vital to the accomplishment of any objective, no matter the destructive conditions of the world which we see today.
As we are thinking about ways to strengthen a new social contract, and to redefine the relationships between people and the state, perhaps we can find ways to remember, that whether as members of governing institutions, persons serving in agencies of international coordination, social thinkers, leaders of nongovernmental organizations—we are all protagonists who inhabit this planet, and we all have a role to play in bringing about the future described at Copenhagen in 1995.”
