“The Best America Has to Offer at the Summit of the Americas:
Mending Relations and Building Partnerships
Through Citizen Diplomacy”
December 19th, 2008
Washington, DC
I – Welcome Remarks and Introduction of Program Moderator
- Ramon Daubon, Esquel Group President
II – Introduction of Panelists
- Jane Thery, Head of OAS-USA Relations, Organization of American States
III – Speaker Remarks
- Amb. Hector Morales, United States Permanent Representative, Organization of American States
Implementation is the element that makes the Summit of the Americas successful. The member states are key to the negotiation of the now over 812 mandates. However, many times it is the NGO community and civil society that makes sure that mandates get implemented.
We are seeing more and more a collective approach to challenges and issues, one clear example is sub-regional organizations such as CARICOM, MERCOSUR, Rio Group, UNASUR, NAFTA, Central American System, etc. OAS is the only one that unites all 34 democratic countries in the Hemisphere, and it is the one that has the most robust legal foundation. Sub-regional and Hemispheric organizations are complementary.
Collective approach and building partnerships will be one of the central aspects of the upcoming 5th Summit of the Americas. The theme of this summit will be “Securing our Citizen’s future by Promoting Human Prosperity, Energy Security and Environmental Sustainability”.
Summit will take place 89 days after President Obama takes office, so it will come along very quickly in the begging of his administration and presents an excellent opportunity for him to show interest in the region, listen to regional leaders, and set the tone for his foreign policy engagement with this Hemisphere by putting forward any initiatives he may seek to develop.
Although the financial crisis was not included in the original agenda, it will also be introduced into negotiation sessions. A particular focus will be given to the inclusion of emerging countries into the discussions and actions of groups like the G-20 with regards to the financial crisis going forward.
Hemispheric partnerships include private sector and civil society. The US has assisted the Summit Secretariat in Trinidad and Tobago put together a Civil Society Forum. There will be more meetings going forward and it is not too late to have your point of view heard. You can do this by going to the Summit of the Americas website. You can share it with the US Department of State and with the OAS. The process seeks to foment a dialogue on important issues like health, education, energy security, environment, etc.
The success of the implementation of the Summit mandates on these and other topics will require the participation and collaboration of many actors including some from civil society. However, trade will not be one of the main pillars of the Summit because the host country of Trinidad and Tobago wanted to focus more on other issues including regional integration.
The Western Hemisphere has 34 democracies and while some are stronger than others we still need to work on institution building because true democracies provide avenues for economic, social, political and cultural development. So the selection these topics, along with that of energy security and the environment, are very timely. Therefore, there is a strong desire from all of the countries of the region to participate in the Summit, and there is a significant need for civil society to participate and help to implement the Summit mandates.
IV – Speaker Remarks
- David Morris, Director of the Summits of the Americas Secretariat, Organization of American States
There is an ongoing process of civil society consultation at the Hemispheric, and Sub-Regional levels, which has engaged civil society participants in meetings that were recently held in Miami, Trinidad and Tobago and El Salvador. This includes forums held for the Meeting of the Summit Implementation Review Group. This has become a rich and diverse process of engagement that is ongoing now for 15 years since the Summits of the Americas began in 1994 in Miami, Florida.
There have been 1023 paragraphs negotiated so far during this time. The fact that OAS member states have sat together for these many years to try to build a Hemispheric agenda is both an acknowledgement by the member states that there are trans-boundary issues and that collective effort is the only appropriate way to address them. Although each Summit has had a central theme all of them have dealt with a diversity of issues which have developed a sense of partnership not only among the 34 member states but also among networks of civil society actors.
The Summit Secretariat gathers civil society recommendations at the various forums, which are held and bring them to the national coordinators. The national coordinators then meet in the Summit Implementation Review Group. The importance of the Summits is not only the Declarations that emerge from them but the Summit process itself with its continuous engagement and the recognition that despite the differences we can find common ground on what are the issues and what are the building blocks for democracy and governing democratically.
One of the key notions of the upcoming Summit is a drive to strengthen the democratic process of the Summits themselves. This can be achieved by strengthening the institutionalization of the Summit architecture. It is necessary to achieve this because Summits are the pinnacle of the Inter-American system as a whole.
When leaders make commitments at the Summits they say that as member states they will undertake actions and draw on the resources at their disposal to implement the mandates. The challenge is that with a document that may have 1023 paragraphs it is not possible to give equal attention to all of the items. The implementation group therefore deals with over 30 themes.
The Summit process is evolving and challenging not only the member states and their partner institutions but also the citizens of the Hemisphere to mobilize the resources to get the job done. What we have seen with the maturing of the Summit process is that civil society actors are forming their own networks to follow up on the implementation of the mandates, and challenging their own governments to execute the necessary initiatives. Civil society meetings at the Sub-Regional level are then prompting actors to go back and hold meetings at the national level, and have dialogues with their national coordinators.
As a compliment to the Summits of the Americas there are now a series of Inter-American sectoral ministerial meetings. These meetings deal with a wide range of topics including labor, sustainable development, science and technology, culture, and education. The ministers engaged in these sectoral ministerial meetings can then suggest actions that they want to take and receive mandates from the Summits. The participatory process involves member states engaging with their civil society, and matching up the efforts of the region’s civil society with the institutions of the Inter-American system in shaping an agenda for our future.
This year the OAS launched the Summit Virtual Platform, which is an online consultation mechanism. It functions like a moderated blog to focus on issues related to energy security, gender equality, environmental sustainability, etc. This helps generate feedback that can be discussed during the policy dialogue periods. Additionally the OAS had an essay competition open to students from all member states. These are both ways in which the OAS is taking steps to engage the Hemisphere’s civil society and to help them participate in the Summit process.
V – Speaker Remarks
- Stephen Vetter, President and CEO, Partners of the Americas
The dream of civic participation, civic diplomacy is very important in the Americas today. There is a palpable interest in many citizens who are in the network of the Partners of the Americas to find out how we can learn from each other, how we can support each other in creating a true democracy based on civic participation.
In a recent trip to Cartagena, Colombia some network members were discussing the recent US elections. They were asking about what it was that President Elect Obama understood about organizing volunteers that no one else did? What informed their question was a desire to develop their voluntary sector.
Through that question we can begin to see the importance of bringing this voice together in the Summit of the Americas. Partners of the Americas has been working for over 40 years to build a partnership of exchanges which has generated a rare phenomenon of very long term volunteers. These long-term volunteers focus on their role as citizens in creating education centers, drug prevention programs, eco sustainable programs, etc. The reason why they do this work is because when one is in a situation of poverty and one tries government programs, works in trade unions, or belongs to political parties, there is always a backdrop of some other larger agenda where things are being manipulated that bring into question the genuine honesty of that which you are trying to do. Therefore many of them have discovered that the most powerful model for change is simply to volunteer, without the background of reward and serve their community.
The ability to create learning networks is the essence of citizen diplomacy. We need to come back to informal community to community exchanges, around activities like sports, culture or education, which provide opportunities for citizen to citizen engagement. The Brookings institution has recently called for new partnerships with the Americas. However, in the past hemispheric partnerships have been elusive because if we look at the types of partnerships that we have had in the past between the Americas there has been a lack of fundamental respect, a lack of willingness to really hear others say what it is that they need, and a lack of effort to genuinely work together to solve these problems.
If the Summit of the Americas can bring together that underlying tone of fundamental respect and help member states and civil society actors really listen to each other then it can be a vehicle to take this Hemisphere to another level of cooperation. Cooperation not just between government actors, or civil society actors working to get attention from Hemispheric institutions, but cooperation between communities and citizens in different countries that can learn from and support each other.
Partners of the Americas has a Youth Ambassadors exchange program that brings young leaders from around the Hemisphere to the US and provides them with opportunities to learn from and interact with the rich civic life of many communities in the US. Many of these young leaders then seek to go back to their impoverished countries and build volunteer service programs. The Summits of the Americas can be an avenue to provide the Hemisphere with initiatives to develop the legal, programmatic and promotional support so that community leaders and others can generate their own resources to push forward volunteer initiatives. Summits can therefore play a very powerful role by looking at the power of citizens to underscore many of these important issues.
The Partners of the Americas and the Esquel Group are working on a concept paper on a “Hemispheric Initiative for Citizen Diplomacy by the US at the Summit of the Americas”.
VI – Moderator Comments and Overview
- Jane Thery, Head of OAS-USA Relations, Organization of American States
The Summit process has survived through many changes and the ideas that we have are that entire nations should agree to cooperate, not just Presidents agree to cooperate. One change which could assist member states in better carrying out the Summit mandates is to have one group that works exclusively on implementation of past mandates, while another group works on developing the agendas for the next summit.
There is a need to engage young people more effectively in the Summit process, because the current format of long drawn out discussions and lengthy procedures and protocol tend to loose the interest of young people. There is a clear need to improve the online presence of the Summits.
VII – Public Question and Answer Period
There were discussions about possible reforms to the Summits of the Americas and other international institutions that would increase their representational capacity as well as their responsiveness to the needs and goals of the hemisphere’s citizens.
Another discussion centered on identifying the concrete actions and achievements of the OAS and the other hemispheric multilateral institutions with relation to the mandates established at the past Summits of the Americas.
Finally, a brief discussion was conducted about the extent to which the needs, opportunities and challenges facing civil society organizations themselves have been addressed within the Summits of the Americas. The discussion suggested that the Summits could become an avenue to highlight these issues and possibly set a mandate to help address them.