Brazil: Peoples’ Alternative Summit to Boycott Gov’t “Dialogues” prior to Rio+20 Summit

Regarding the invitation made to the Brazilian Civil Society Facilitation Committee at Rio+20 (CSFC) to participate to the Dialogues for Sustainable Development (DSD), we inform that :

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During the last decades, networks and entities that compose the CSFC and organize the People’s Summit during Rio+20 for the Social and Environmental Justicehave fought – and keep on doing it – for the opening of participative and dialogue spaces aiming to conquest public policies improving the democratization of States, Social and Environmental Justice, and fair distribution of incomes and wealth.

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Thanks to the social participation and to the dialogue between State and society, we have won important victories, that can be found in certain programs and policies that answer, although still weakly, to the people historical demands to fight inequalities. That is why we believe and invest in dialogue as one of the fundamental methods to push forward our demands. We will keep on trying to set up dialogues aiming at pressuring the Brazilian government, in order to respond our demands, as we are conscious that the Brazilian society is penetrated by conflicts of interest and that the role of each sector is to express their interests, while the government’s is to take these pressures into account and to make choices in terms of investments and policies.

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According to us, the method set up by the DSD does not match this dialogue dynamic that we are trying to push forward. The DSD proposal was built up in a top-down approach, as the Brazilian government chose the themes, participants and facilitators, clearly showing that the Dialogues and their results would be controlled by the government itself. Conscious that the debated themes are objects of conflicts and heterogeneous visions, the method that consists in defining three recommendations per theme, chosen in a closed way, clearly means taking exclusive positions in a context in which we have no chance to influence the decision-making process. To take part to this dynamic means giving a free hand to the “civil society recommendations”, on whose results we wouldn’t have had the minimum impact.

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The People’s Summit in Rio+20 for the Social and Environmental Justice during Rio+20 is an autonomous space, critical of the Official Conference’s agenda, and of the big corporations.

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We have resistance positions and proposals regarding all the themes set up by the DSD, that express the accumulation of the organizations and Brazilian and international social movements fighting over rights, environmental justice, and against inequalities in Brazil and in the world. We will give our visions as much visibility as possible, for them to be seen and heard, using all sort of media. We hope that the proposals of the people who will be present at the Peoples’ Summit will be heard by society and the heads of state present at Rio+20.

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