Will you come to my party?

 

Photo: at St James Palace early 1996

Often when I am invited  to speak or give interviews in international spaces I am painfully conscious of my undeniable privilege and coloniality. People like me from the global south are invited to the slick platforms that are dominated by the voices from the global north because of our fluency in the language, and because despite our brown/black skins we literally and metaphorically speak the same lingo 

The phenomenon is not recent.  Way back in the early 1980s as the Project Coordinator at the Lanka Mahila Samiti (a Sri Lankan association of rural women's societies) of a USAID funded programme that supported small enterprise development for rural women, I represented the USAID mission in Colombo at many conferences in the region – a young woman, skin burnished browner by days spent with women in rural Sri Lanka, but with near flawless English and the panache to navigate the seminar worlds of the Bangkok Hilton or the resort hotels in Paranaque, Manila. Admittedly I was young and the exposure taught me a great deal. 

Fast forward to ten plus years later and I am invited to talk at St James’ Palace in London at a fundraising event of the British Charity I was working for, in the presence of  their patron, HRH Prince Charles. It was 1996.  We had just had the most horrendous bombing by the LTTE of the Central Bank building killing over 80 people and maiming many others.  My father (thankfully retired by that time) had been a Central Banker all his life and the building was the place of employment for one of my closest friends, yet the fundraising manager was not keen that I mention the bombing or any of serious life threatening tensions that many Sri Lankans were facing then because of the civil war.  I refused to sanitise the development discourse and eventually the marketing potential of a saree-clad, articulate global south female representative won the day, and I made the speech I had prepared. 

I justified my presence in these and other spaces on the basis that I was speaking on behalf of those women and men who were not invited to these events, and whose perspectives needed to be listened to by those rubbing shoulders with the powerful, if not the power lords themselves. I tried to be the spokesperson of those absent in those spaces.    But over three decades or more after my Lanka Mahila Samiti days, I am much less comfortable with this rationalisation of my role.  I believe we cannot ignore the voices of those who we are trying not to leave behind. There should be nothing about them without them.

IWRAW Asia Pacific organised our 2021 Global South Women's Forum (#GSWF2021) in September this year.  It was on the theme  Global South Women's Visions for Environmental Justice and you can listen to some of the sessions on our youtube playlist.   Listening especially to the voices of women on the ground, especially young women, two things struck me  - one, that despite all the good practices we have advocated for in the last thirty years, and despite the glib 'leave no one behind' agenda, there are so many communities who are at the receiving end of environmental injustices by corporations in collusion with governments or by initiatives funded by the International Finance Institutions in contravention of their own safeguard policies.   The pandemic and the looming climate crisis may have surfaced many injustices, but for the longest time communities and human rights defenders have had their lives endangered by the lack of corporate accountability and by governments ignoring their obligations to everyone within their jurisdiction. And it irks that many global north organisations, especially those focused on ‘sustainability’ and with aims to accelerate the transformation toward a just and regenerative future, ignore this truth and make no effort to listen to global south voices, especially those  grounded global south voices of communities and marginalised groups. 

So this was my second disquiet from the GSWF2021 - that there were few participants from the powerful or even less powerful countries of the global north that were listening in on the sessions and hearing what these women had to say.  IWRAW AP made a great effort to bring community voices into this online digital space - and that was appreciated.  But those who have access to the corridors of power in our unequal  and unjust world were barely present.  It's the same when I get invited to World Bank/IMF meetings. We regularly attend IMF Directors Meetings with civil society thanks to the efforts of the NGO liaison officers in the IMF communications department, but few if any World Bank/IMF directors or staffers attend the World Bank/IMF Civil Society Policy Forum sessions (unless they are given a speaking spot) and even fewer come to independent civil society events (e.g. our GSWF 2020 on Disrupting Macro-Economics) - so thank you for inviting me to your party, but why is it that you never come to mine?

Of course, the responsibility for the planet hurtling towards a climate crisis must rest largely with the global north countries, and with transnational corporations, {not all of whom are dominated by global north - we have several guilty ones here in Malaysia)  But if you listen to the voices of many of the women on the ground, in SIDS, in the Mekong area, in parts of rural Africa, in Brazil or Botswana or Nepal, you will hear them call out many of the interventions that are being lauded in international spaces as nothing more than 'green washing' and 'blue washing' - the egregious harms to lives and livelihoods of communities continue to happen. Corporations harness the potential of new technologies to profit from transitioning into caring for the planet, while people continue to be expendable.  Lauren McDonald expressed the anguish of this scenario at the recent TED Countdown session where she called out the CEO of Dutch Shell - and there are many people like her, who are unable even to have their distress made visible, or who are still likely to be incarcerated, disappeared or killed if they dare resist. 

My party analogy reminded me of a poem that I learned as a child – the Flattered Flying Fish by EV Rieu –  which highlights the dangers of going to parties with sharks.  Lauren McDonald walked away from the TED podium creating quite a furore, but invitations to talk on global north platforms could very well lead to being coopted by the powerful players in the climate and sustainable development spaces. 

I personally do not know how a transformation to a just and regenerative future can happen without a total overhaul of the system, and without reparation for the damage that colonialist extractivism and corporate exploitation  have caused communities in the global south. However, I do think it’s time for global north organisations if they are serious about transformation, to embrace a different way of doing things.  A sensitive and empathetic dialogue with women and men in the global south who have lived experience and face multiple forms of discrimination and letting them set the agenda for the organisation’s strategies and programmes will be so much more powerful than having me or people like me speak on their platforms.  It would mean participating in events organised by global south organisations (like GSWF) and listening rather than speaking.  It would mean over turning knowledge hierarchies and learning, or unlearning, as the case maybe.