Towards better international cooperation

The world has changed. The Trento Charter is an attempt to reinterpret contemporary times in order to rethink together the meaning of "international cooperation", in its essential and unique characteristics. The promoters of the Charter wished to outline some features that were considered fundamental for a new vision and a new practice of cooperation. Other traits may be added to these and we hope all of them in the future will be transformed into explicit indications for new regulations.

The text of the Charter results from the work of various players that operate in the field of international cooperation. It has been developed in parallel with the World Social Agenda (WSA): a programme of events, appointments, workshops and initiatives organised for the civil society, schools and local authorities in the Italian regions of Veneto and Trentino-South Tyrol.

The WSA is promoted by Fondazione Fontana Onlus (a non-profit making organisation for community work). This initiative encourages thoughts and actions capable of contributing to the achievement of the UN Millennium Development Goals indicated by the United Nations in 2000. Every year, from 2008 to 2015, will be dedicated to one of the Goals.

The UN Millennium Declaration solicits governments to pursue political, economic and social goals that ensure a fair and global human development. The civil society, on the one hand, has to perform constant pressure so that nations respect their promises and, on the other hand, should acquire the priorities and implement the practices suggested by the United Nations.

The year 2008 was dedicated to the Eighth Goal: develop a global partnership for development. The Trento Charter has elaborated ten pivotal points to make system, premise for a better international cooperation:

• reading the present: cooperation that thinks and acts;
• regaining the world: dialogic and not self-referential cooperation;
• investments: in human and social capital;
• focus on the community: quality cooperation released from economism;
• rights in responsibility: beyond the logic of need;
• establishing long-lasting relations: cooperation beyond emergencies;
• cooperation in the plural: recognising  the pluriverse of the players and of the forms;
• beyond the network: building overall schemes in creating cooperation;
• looking ahead: sustainable and responsible cooperation; and
• knowing one’s limits: experimental, fallible, participated cooperation.

In 2009 the Trento Charter is focused on the Seventh Goal: ensuring environmental sustainability. It is a sustainable development that does not buy up natural resources, that reverses the process of reduction of biodiversity, preserves the reproductive capacity of natural ecosystems and halves the number of people without access to clean water. It also means supporting the economic and social costs arising from the use of common environmental resources.

The international cooperation that we would like, promotes the environmental sustainability, recognises the mutual relationship between living beings in space (attention to and responsibility for the world) and time (attention to and responsibility for future generations), and shifts from a logic of exploitation to one of conservation and regeneration of resources.

To “take care of the world” requires a presupposition: the environmental issue, when practicing international cooperation, is not an issue for specialists but rather a transversal topic that regards everyone and all “international relationships”.

From the document: “Cooperation requires planetary thought that needs to replace single thought, therefore capable of re-imagining the man-environmental relationship in this era of inter-dependence.

• To work on the cooperation/ environment relationship means to generate varied representations and visions of the relationship between human beings, the natural environment and inhabited spaces.
• The re-thinking of international cooperation in terms of environmental sustainability implies a theoretical transition from the ethics of aid to the ethics of care.
• Environmental protection touches upon economic and power interests between the North and the South of the world. The solution is to revise and practice everywhere the complex relations between environment, production and development, with a view to safeguarding the local systems focused on specificity and on local natural sources.
• The cooperation we strive towards inhabits conflicts and open doors of dialogue with the international community and rejects the attempts to criminalise indigenous populations and works toward guaranteeing for the various subjects inhabiting the territory the power to govern it.
• The Charter proposes some “Green Themes”, some issues that must be faced in international cooperation programmes, if we want to guarantee environmental sustainability.

For example:

• the use of natural resources: soil, subsoil, hydrosphere, forests, biodiversity;
• the protection of ecosystem-related services at global and at local levels;
• energy and environmental impact;
• the deterioration of natural systems;
• eco-refugees.

In conclusion, the Charter proposes some “Green trends” in order to make cooperation contributing to guarantee environmental sustainability. Among these:

• the dissemination of knowledge and of awareness, throughout the non-governmental world;
• the strengthening of a systemic and multi-disciplinary approach in the international cooperation programmes;
• the territories’ re-appropriation of the theme of development and of environmental management via participatory processes;
• the introduction of environmental sustainability criteria among the requirements for the selection of international cooperation projects;
• the promotion of environmental education and of good practices.

The document, available at www.unimondo.org, was presented in Trento on the 15 October, during a press conference held in a garden center, a place that joins nature and business, showing that these two worlds can conjugate themselves and not necessarily be in opposition.

During the conference, some important remarks came to light: thanks to the Trento Charter the environment is considered, for the first time, a transversal theme, both at a local and at a global level. Moreover, the promoters of the Charter underlined the importance of its educational dimension, for this reason they auspicate a translation of the document from a programme of intent to a modus operandi.

The press conference took place the day after the upsetting declaration of FAO, according to which, due to the economical and climatic crisis, there are more than one billion people starving in the world, 100 millions more than last year.

The Millennium Goals are moving away at two months to the United Nations Climate Change Conference of Copenhagen: the occasion to write a post-Kyoto agreement aimed at stabilising the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere in obedience to three values: precaution, common responsibility and equity.

At the heart of the negotiations there will be two main issues: on the one side, the commitments which emerging countries (China, India, Brazil, etc.) are willing to take in order to slow their growing emissions, and on the other side, the measures that industrialised countries are willing to adopt in order to support developing nations in the process of reducing emissions and adapting to new climatic conditions.

As a means to remember to all the governments their assurance and the importance of the Copenhagen Conference, has been called a Stand Up Campaign: a global mobilisation with which the civil society asks governments to work for the Millennium Goals, and that involves hundreds of millions of people. The Millennium Campaign works by the side of citizens, local institutions, civil society, mass media and Southern countries to fight the extreme poverty.

The role of the Campaign is:

• To inform through awareness campaign delivered by mass media and to organise events and meetings;
• To garner citizens’ voices against poverty;
• To take these voices to institutional places and to widen the requests of civil society.

Given that, everyone has to apply to achieve the Millennium Goals. For this reason Unimondo.org is carrying on an on-line campaign which involves over hundred web profit sites and over five hundreds web non-profit sites, and aims at spreading the issues of the Millennium Campaign.