Press Release 3

A FUND TO STRENGTHEN GLOBAL PARTICIPATION

UNDP-supported study suggests the creation of a "Global Participation Fund" to expand the ability of developing countries to represent their interests in international negotiations.

Study argues that in today's era of globalization, world stability and human security critically depend on international cooperation that is viewed as fair and legitimate.

The study:

 Global Public Goods; International Cooperation in the 21^st Century

 Edited by Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg and Marc A. Stern

New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

New York. – One of the central arguments of Global Public Goods is that the major challenges – from climate change to excessive financial volatility, the emergence of new disease strains, and the growing disparity between rich and poor – reflect an under-provision of global public goods. Public goods are those that the market by itself cannot provide. Previously, public goods could be ensured through national-level action alone. But as a result of openness and interdependence, they increasingly depend on the cooperation among states.

International relations theory has repeatedly demonstrated that cooperation works when the parties involved perceive it as fair. But as J. Mohan Rao and Ethan B. Kapstein argue in their respective contributions to this volume, equity - especially equitable participation by all parties - is all too often absent from the present structures of international governance. Their recommendation: ensure a fuller representation of all concerned parties – all countries and populations groups, in the North and South, including key non-governmental actors as well as women, the poor, labour, churches, children and future generations (to be represented by proxy).

But fair representation is not just one of numbers, or quantity. It is primarily one of capability, or quality. Hence, equity – and greater equality – is a precondition for enhanced fairness and greater participation and cooperation. As Rao underscores, equity itself is a global public good.

As a start, in order to foster meaningful participation by developing countries in international negotiations, one suggestion by the editors is to create a Global Participation Fund, administered by the nations of the South. The Fund would serve as a resource pool that the developing world could use to coordinate their policy stance and strengthen their negotiating skills in international negotiations with the industrialised world on global public goods. One proposal that emerges from the book is to set aside an additional 0.1 percent of donor countries' gross national products, provided on a short-term, time-bound basis, to set up an initial endowment for the Fund . A 5-year commitment to such a fund would produce roughly $100 billion.

The Global Participation Fund would also serve to coordinate and empower regional groupings. In the book, Lisa D. Cook and Jeffrey Sachs argue that aid resources should best be allocated on a regional basis, in the same way that the United States provided assistance to the war-torn nations of Europe after the Second World War with the Marshall Plan -- with recipients self-administering their funds, reviewing each other's assistance requests and monitoring the utilisation of funds. They suggest that such funds could be integrated into existing regional bodies like the Andean Pact, Association for South-East Asian Nations, Economic Community of West African States, Mercosur or Southern African Development Community.

These proposals are part of a broader argument advanced in Global Public Goods: that we have to re-think the logic of globalization. Globalization should develop from the bottom up, rather than proceed top down. As Eimi Watanabe, director of the UNDP Bureau for Development Policy adds, "Experience shows that national capacity building is a critical component of a full and equitable participation in global markets."