Redefining the Agenda for Social Justice: Voices from Europe and Asia 9813365706, 9789813365704

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Redefining the Agenda for Social Justice Voices from Europe and Asia Francine Mestrum · Meena Menon

Redefining the Agenda for Social Justice

Francine Mestrum · Meena Menon

Redefining the Agenda for Social Justice Voices from Europe and Asia

Francine Mestrum Brussels, Belgium

Meena Menon Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

ISBN 978-981-33-6570-4 ISBN 978-981-33-6571-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6571-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Brain light/Alamy Stock Photo Cover design by eStudio Calamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without all the enabling and facilitating work of the Asia-Europe People’s Forum. Coordinating the work of different thematic clusters and organising the People’s Forums themselves, Andy Rutherford, Kris Vanslambrouck, Kathy Bernaerts, Tina Ebro allowed us to focus on our specific topic of social justice. We also thank the European Commission and its Directorate General for Development Cooperation for the funds made available for this work. More particularly we want to thank all speakers and organisations who participated in our conferences and contributed to a better understanding of what social justice can mean and how, in spite of diverging histories and development levels, concerns and ambitions are very similar in Europe and Asia. A special word of thanks goes to Professor Anuradha Chenoy and Bishnu Singh for their editing work and to Jen Derillo for the beautiful posters.

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Contents

1

Introduction

2

Why Social Justice? The Recent History of Welfare States Neoliberal Globalisation and Its Setbacks Political Backlash Social Justice, Income and Redistribution Universalism Our Objectives

3

Global Charter for Universal Social Protection Rights: For All and by All Global Charter for Universal Social Protection Rights by All, for All

1 11 12 16 21 22 24 24 29 34

4

From Social Protection to Social Commons Rethinking Social Protection The Social Commons: What? Walking Along New Paths The Sun of the Future

39 40 44 51 53

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Assuring Affordable, Accessible and Quality Public Services for All: Health, Education, Water, Transport and Energy From Health to Transport to Energy

57 61

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CONTENTS

Water Transport Energy Education Alternatives Conclusion

62 64 65 66 68 72

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Labour Asia, Europe and … China Productive Transformation What About Reproduction? How the Global Charter Can Help

75 79 82 84 87

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The Right to the City and the Right to Housing Housing Is Part of Social Protection Informality for Profit Universal Health Care and Social Protection Housing Is Integral to Social Protection Housing as Asset Public, Social and Affordable Housing Housing-Related Services The Question of Land for Housing Goals of the SDGs Conclusion

89 89 90 90 92 93 94 95 96 96 97

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Global Voices: The Way Forward

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Annexes

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About the authors

Francine Mestrum has a PhD in social sciences and worked at the European institutions and several Belgian universities. Her research concerns the social dimension of globalisation, poverty, inequality, social protection, public services and gender. She is an active member of the International Council of the World Social Forum and co-coordinating the social justice cluster in the Asia Europe People’s Forum. She is the author of several books (in Dutch, French and English) on development, poverty, inequality and social commons. She is the founder of the global network of Global Social Justice and currently works on a project for social commons (www.socialcommons.eu). Meena Menon is an activist, a researcher and a writer. Meena worked as a full-time organizer with a left party for 20 years. She was a Vice President at GKSS union (Mill Workers Action Committee), then the India country coordinator with Asian policy think tank Focus on the Global South. She did a brief stint as a consultant with UNDP. She was part of the core organizing team of the World Social Forum process in India. Until recently she worked as a Senior Consultant with Action Aid in India. She is now an independent consultant working on issues of labour, urbanization, housing, and new politics. She is a co-author of the book, One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices – The Mill Workers of Girangaon – An Oral History.

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List of Boxes

Box 1.1 Box 2.1 Box 3.1 Box 4.1 Box 4.2 Box Box Box Box Box Box Box

4.3 4.4 4.5 5.1 6.1 6.2 6.3

Box 8.1 Box 8.2

Social Policies Are Crucial for Bringing About Change Social Protection Rhetorics Versus Exclusionary Socio-Economic Policies Working with the Charter Social Commons Are International Totalising Metanarratives Occlude the Economic Alternatives Commons Mean Conflict The Commons Are Part of a New Politics Let Us Talk Politics The Illusion of PPPs Why Social Justice and Peace are Interlinked A Rights-Based Social Protection Floor for India? What Are the Transformative Elements in a Rights-Based Social Protection? Democracy as the Foundation for the Protection of Rights Social Justice and Democracy

9 19 32 41 44 46 50 51 59 76 80 87 99 103

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

This book is meant to give hope. It relates three years of history of social movements from Asia and Europe who work on social justice. Obviously, it can only give a rough overview, because this work mainly is done on the ground, day after day, working in villages and cities, with people and their movements, organising resistance and shaping alternatives. Much has been done these past years to counter neoliberal globalisation, from the Battle of Seattle in 1999 to the World Social Forums, the European and South Asia Social Forums, the Arab Spring, the many short-lived movements in Europe (Indignado’s, Occupy’s, Nuits Debout and Gilets Jaunes) and the many less well-known movements in India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia and others. In the autumn of 2019, it seemed as if people from all over the world finally made their voice heard: from Santiago de Chile to Quito, from Algiers to Baghdad, from Paris to Barcelona, from Hong Kong to Manila. Their demands: stop neoliberal austerity and make social justice possible. It sometimes looks as if it is all in vain. The world has not changed, neoliberalism still prevails, now worsened with the emergence of elected right-wing authoritarian regimes, in Europe as well as in Asia. Today, many movements are looking inwards, working at the local level, and forget they can and should cooperate with others and across borders. The local work is tremendously important, but it is not enough. Because we share the same problems, we are interdependent and jointly we are © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 F. Mestrum and M. Menon, Redefining the Agenda for Social Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6571-1_1

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stronger. Our opponents are very well organised transnationally, social movements are not. Even if the level of development in Asia and Europe is very different and the consequences of colonialism have not disappeared, people’s concerns are similar and social movements can only win by meeting and talking and learning from each other. In times of the coronavirus it is crystal clear that solid and public health systems should be at the core of the social protection systems that we need and want, linked to democracy and environmental preservation, guaranteeing food sovereignty in a context of just trade. The endeavour of the social justice cluster goes beyond a claim for health. Our plea is for a totally new approach, linking health and social protection to all other elements social movements are fighting for and linking also to the new thinking on commons and on participatory approaches. We not only repeat, then, the old claims for protection and solidarity, we also renew the arguments in favour of them. In this way, we believe this is a truly innovative approach. It is precisely what the social justice cluster of the Asia Europe People’s Forum has been doing. We claim to have some first successes. We adopted a global charter for social protection rights, we clarified our thinking on commons, public services, labour and housing. We met and we talked and found agreements. Each time, these were wonderful moments of mobilisation and motivation, they gave the courage to go on. We talked to members of parliaments and we submitted our demands to the formal ASEM (Asia Europe Meetings) summit of ministers. One may think this is all far away from the daily struggles on the ground, from the work of grassroots movements. It is not. We, at the social justice cluster of AEPF, believe that struggles are necessary at all levels, from the grassroots to the national level, from there to the continental and the global level. Not one level can be ignored or neglected. As we also need action at the level of words and the level of things. From discourses to strikes and vice versa. The major challenge is to find the right articulation between all levels and all practices. No, indeed, there is no system change yet. But we are getting ready, and the crisis of the coronavirus has highlighted the urgent need for solid healthcare systems. We can build on this and we are making progress. We stated what we wanted, in common agreement, and we pointed to the links with the other sectors of AEPF, such as peace, democracy, environment, trade and food sovereignty. This narrative is only the beginning of a new story for system change.

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INTRODUCTION

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Before explaining what exactly we did and how we did it, a brief presentation of ourselves might be useful. The Asia Europe Peoples’ Forum (AEPF) is a broad and dynamic network of progressive and major civil society organisations and trade unions, including people’s movements, non-government organisations and issue-based campaign networks across Asia and Europe. For the past 20 years, the AEPF has remained the only continuing civil society inter-regional network connecting people’s movements and advancing their voices in ASEM (Asia Europe Meeting). It has facilitated the immediate and future collaborations among civil society groups in Asia and with Europe-based organisations to promote people-centred alternatives being built from below. Since its formation in 1996, it has organised people’s forums parallel to the Asia Europe Meeting (ASEM) summits. The AEPF has made a substantive contribution to putting the imperatives of a people-centred regional integration on the agenda of civil society in Asia and in Europe—addressing issues of regional democratisation, especially on the centrality of citizens’ participation. People’s Forums are organised every two years, in Europe and Asia alternately. The last gathering was in September 2019 in Ghent, Belgium. The one before was in Ulaan Baator, Mongolia in 2016. This is the place where our story begins. In-between the People’s Forums, AEPF has Thematic Circles that hold events and campaigns on several critical issues: Just Trade and Corporate Accountability, Social Justice, Climate Justice, Food and Resource Justice, Peace and Security and Democratisation and Human Rights. Through the Thematic Circles, AEPF develops peoplecentred alternatives and promotes collaborative advocacies among its networks comprised of workers (formal, informal and migrant), fisherfolk, peasants, women, elderly, researchers and academics, campaigners and parliamentarians across Asia and Europe. These circles and networks engage in research, capacity-building and advocacy/campaigns activities at the national, regional and inter-regional levels, and also carry out learning/advocacy visits to European and Asian ASEM member countries.

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Our overall objective is the deepening, broadening and strengthening of citizens’ organisations’ capacity to dialogue and engage with local and national level decision-makers in ASEM member countries and appropriate regional and sub-regional bodies on just, equal and inclusive social and economic initiatives/policies/alternatives. Our Key Objectives are 1. Promoting, consolidating and strengthening the AEPF’s engagement with ASEM governments/leaders and related regional bodies and enabling people’s voices to be shared and heard. 2. Enabling strengthened links with/between movements/networks/forums across Asia and Europe reinforcing the EU CSOs participation and representativeness in the AEPF, and the participation of a growing number of movements, networks, forums and organisations in different AEPF activities. 3. Strengthening the permanent activities of the AEPF, as a continuous network supporting the important role of civil society in Asia and Europe in contributing to more just, equal, inclusive and people-centred initiatives and, in particular strengthening the relations and exchange of good and alternative practices between EU CSOs and Asian CSOs As part of the overall programme we have commitments·to develop and share a wide range of materials which highlight and communicate to a wide audience our visions and alternatives for a more Just, Equal and Inclusive Asia and Europe. We are bringing these together under the ‘People’s Visions’ • to present our visions and alternatives to elected representatives at local, national and regional levels • to progressively bring the visions and alternatives together as part of the Agenda for ASEM Parliamentarians.

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INTRODUCTION

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As for AEPF’s Social Justice Cluster, we work on an extensive and comprehensive concept of social justice with, at its core, an emancipatory and transformative perspective on social protection. The aim is to identify and clarify the many links from social justice to other topics AEPF is working on, such as peace and security, democracy and human rights, climate and environmental policies, trade and economics, etc. In our view, social protection is not a corrective mechanism of a failed economic system, but a crucial element contributing to systemic change. At the last AEPF in Ghent, October 2018, a Global Charter for Social Protection Rights was adopted. It serves as a guideline for social movements developing their own social agenda with their own priorities. The Social Justice cluster has organised in 2018 a conference on public services in Manila, a conference on social commons in Barcelona, and one on labour in Kathmandu. We also participated in the World Democracy and Human Rights Forum in Gwanju, South Korea, with debates on the right to the city and housing. These are the ideas that are developed in this book. What we have achieved is basically a common understanding of our problems, an awareness of our interdependence and of course strong personal bonds that will allow us to go on, to further examine the many remaining topics, such as the links with the environment, gender or democracy. We are convinced this is the road we have to follow: theorising and clarifying our concepts and ideas, propose alternatives, exchange our experiences, campaigning and advocacies, combining the local and the intercontinental levels. We do not need an identical common programme, but we do have common objectives. Social justice is at the core of all concerns of progressive social movements. We do not want to save the planet for the sake of the planet, but because we, humankind, want to live in it with peace and dignity, free from threats and from want. We do not fight for peace for the sake of peace, but because peace is a condition for living and working together. We do not fight for democracy for the sake of democracy, but because it is a condition for equal participation of all, contributing to social justice. Within these common objectives, each organisation has its own priorities and agendas. Our current story starts in July 2016 in Ulaan Baator, Mongolia, at the 11th Asia Europa People’s Forum. More than 750 people from 42 countries gathered there with the motto ‘Building New Solidarities: Working for Inclusive, Just, and Equal Alternatives in Asia and Europe’. The final Declaration included an action point saying:

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Work with social movements and workers’ organisations to develop a peoplecentred Global Social Protection Charter that will guarantee decent work, sustainable livelihoods and universal and comprehensive social protection systems that include food, essential services and social security.

From there we started to work and organise and our Global Charter was adopted at the 12th AEPF in Ghent in 2018. It received support from hundreds of organisations and personalities. This was a very emotional and motivating event that gave us the courage to go on with our work. What we did is described in this book, the conferences we organised, the people we mobilised and the ideas we developed. We strongly hope this will be of interest to a large group of people concerned about social justice. Our first chapter briefly describes the current situation in Europe and Asia in terms of social protection, poverty and inequality. As has been said and repeated before, the current paradoxical situation is that never before has social protection been so high on the international agenda, and at the same time, never before has it been so threatened. This has everything to do with the new social paradigm of neoliberalism, with a focus on poverty and minimal social protection. Chapter 2 explains how the meaning of social protection has changed, how levels of development are different but our concerns very similar, since we are faced with the same negative developments. This is why we have to define our own objectives, our vision and hopes for social protection. We want to go beyond poverty reduction and we explain why. Our final aim is to contribute to system change which may sound very ambitious but is, we think, within our reach. Chapter 3 presents our Global Charter, its aims and its potential and the major arguments to defend it. This is not a binding text, but rather an aspirational vision that allows for working in the direction of system change and makes room for the priorities of all progressive social movements. We do support the current international initiatives on social protection, such as the ILO’s Social Protection Floors and the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. But we also want to go beyond, because we want to avoid social protection or poverty reduction to be privatised, as we do prefer public to private services and we do not want to exclude anyone from the basic protection all human beings need. Our social protection is rights and solidarity based.

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INTRODUCTION

7

Chapter 4 explains why we see social protection as a commons and what we mean by this. It may sound a trendy concept, but we use it in a very political sense, going beyond the local level and involving the state. What we mean, basically, is that social protection is ours. Hence the title of the book. What social commons are about is a fundamental democratisation of the implementation of all economic, social and environmental rights. Chapter 5 describes the achievements of our first conference in Manila on public services. Again, concerns in Europe and Asia are similar. While Asian countries are struggling to build public services, in Europe the existing services are being privatised or abandoned. A strong voice was heard against the so-called PPP’s: public–private partnerships that in most cases only have negative consequences for States and citizens. The solutions that were proposed were, on the one hand, re-municipalisation and on the other, a conceptual rethinking in terms of social commons. In both cases however, financial resources will have to be made available through a reform of national and international tax systems. Chapter 6 gives the results of our conference in Kathmandu on labour. Un- and sub-employment, informal and precarious work: these are the characteristics of labour markets in Europe as well as in Asia. Even in the most successful economies, like those of China, many problems remain and many rights are not respected. The platform economy very often is exclusively geared towards the creation of shareholder value. That is why rights-based social protection is extremely important and the Global Charter can help to make them a reality. Chapter 7 explains our starting work on the right to housing and the right to the city. Housing is an integral part of basic services for all. The reactive struggles against eviction, the ones demanding basic services at affordable cost, for participatory planning and policy-making, are all part of the right to the urban commons and the right to the city. In this sector, we have a strategic concern to strengthen the Asian movements that are now relatively weak. Chapter 8 sketches our conclusions and the way forward. The major achievement of the Asia Europe People’s Forum is its capacity to listen and talk with grassroots movements and to listen and talk to academics. It is in the interaction between these two worlds, too often separated from each other, that the most interesting ideas and campaigns can emerge. Our task is to give voice to those who cannot have their voice heard beyond the borders of their community, be it local or academic. Our

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major achievement is to have combined these voices and to make them heard by members of the political world, parliaments and governments. They are the ones who have to make decisions in a democratic way. And democracy, as we know, does not fall out of the sky. We have to claim it and make it happen. All chapters of this book have one major objective: to promote social justice with, at its core, a concept of social protection that goes beyond the limited neoliberal approach of poverty reduction. We see social protection evolving into social commons, based on rights and solidarity, tackling inequality, with a major potential for links with democracy and peace, environmental sustainability, food sovereignty, just trade and just taxes, etc. This is a totally new and overarching vision that will be further explained in the following chapters. It is not a short-time agenda but a long-term vision allowing for diverging strategical approaches, according to local political, economic and social circumstances. The social protection we envisage is transformative, which means it contributes to the changes we want to happen. It can be the foothold for ‘another world’, the one many social movements worldwide have been dreaming of. This book was finalized during the worldwide lockdown due to COVID-19. Never before has our interdependence been made so crystal clear, never before has the lack of solid and decent healthcare systems been made so lethally important. Today, human lives are lost because of the austerity policies of the past decades, because of privatisations, because of the negligence of neoliberal governments. Never before have the links with other policies been made so crucially clear: the importance of water and soap, of decent housing, of food sovereignty… all this, evidently, in a context of democracy and solidarity, of commons, where all are coresponsible for all. Many voices now claim that after this crisis, the world will not be the same anymore. Let us hope changes will be for the better. May this book, with its ideas on how to promote social justice be a contribution to the other world we want to shape. In the annexes, we publish our different declarations and a complete list of speakers at four different events. All chapters have different boxes with the main messages of our major speakers. Many of the documents, reports and writers cited in this work can be found on the website of AEPF: www.aepf.info. We are happy and proud to be able to present this work to a large audience.

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INTRODUCTION

Box 1.1 Social Policies Are Crucial for Bringing About Change Charles Santiago, MP Malaysia, at the Social Commons Conference of AEPF in Barcelona, 8–10 June 2018. ASEAN consists of ten different countries of the region. We are the fastestgrowing region in the world. At the same time, we are the most unequal societies in the world. In Vietnam, according to Oxfam, the richest person earns more in one day than the poorest peasant can earn in his life time. (South Asian inequality has similar truths) That tells you something. And this you can see all over the region. In Indonesia the four richest men have more wealth than the 100 million of people in the country. These are the levels of inequality you can find in the rest of the region as well. (…) I want to share with you one of the major elements that made this happen, more particularly in the state where I come from: the social policies that were put into place these last 8 to 10 years. The cost of living in Malaysia was extremely high, as a result of wage stagnation, there were people unable to put food on the table. Now Malaysia is a very rich country, but many people were not able to eat more than some rice. It was revealed in a UNICEF study, that workers were not able to put nutritious food on the table. This became a major issue, also because a goods and services tax of 6% had been put into place, so all prices went up. The state where I come from issued a whole variety of social policies. One concerned health care, poor families receive an amount of money—it will rise this year—for health care. Another element is that we introduced a KISS programme: poor families receive grants for food stuff on a monthly basis; we also provide free water, all households receive it, as well as grants for education; the state also provides money for the poorest schools in order to make sure that children will get the best possible education, above the federal state’s funding. We also have specific healthcare programmes, for instance for cancer therapies. The point I want to make is this: social programmes are crucial for bringing about change. Social policies are crucial for health, education, food and a better quality of life.

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CHAPTER 2

Why Social Justice?

Today, it has become somewhat easier to talk about social protection and, in a way, it is the silver lining of coronavirus crisis. Just imagine the almost worldwide imposed confinement measures when you do not even have a house, you do not have access to water or soap and you cannot buy anti-bacterial gel. When you are ill, you lose your income and you have no access to any hospital without paying the heavy fees. When you lose your job, you lose your livelihood and the possibility to sustain your family. People in so-called ‘essential’ jobs continue to work, very often without sufficient protection. Almost all measures taken to protect people from the virus are for those who can afford them. Never before has there been any pandemic so clearly disastrous for working and vulnerable people. Ten years ago, it was a daunting task to promote social protection. Coming from Western Europe, the criticism from the South very often was that our welfare states had been paid with the profits of colonialism and that, consequently, we had no right to it. Colonialism is indeed a fact of history and it is difficult to deny the enormous profits it has procured to a number of states and most of all wealthy individuals and

This chapter is partially based on Social Commons. Re-thinking Social Justice in Post-Neoliberal Societies, www.socialcommons.eu, 2015. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 F. Mestrum and M. Menon, Redefining the Agenda for Social Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6571-1_2

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large corporations. The link to welfare states however is just too short. Welfare states in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, Latin America and Canada were the result first of all of hard social struggles. Moreover, most of them are not paid by state budgets, but by contributions of workers and employers. From the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, many workers have given their lives for this major social conquest. After the Second World War, it is a fact that the fear of the influential communist movement did play a role in the further development of welfare states, especially in Western Europe. There have been many strikes and the social struggles were important, but thanks to the ‘trente glorieuses’, the decades of economic development and growth, economic and social rights were easier to achieve. There are other arguments against welfare states. Ignoring the difference between poverty reduction and transformative social protection, many progressives fear any counter-revolutionary policy. They fear their mobilisation efforts will be more difficult when people do get handouts and manage to survive with some help from governments. Today, however, social protection is one of the major demands of social movements all over the world. But what kind of social protection? Do we have to (re-)build the damaged or incomplete welfare states? Do we agree with the new international agenda? Or do we want to develop our own vision and programmes? We claim it is not enough to just ask to have access to health care, we also want people to have a possibility to live healthy lives throughout and to participate in the decision-making. This means we broaden the concept of social protection, we link it to democracy, the environment and trade and we integrate it into the thinking on commons. What we propose is a truly innovative approach, a long-term agenda for contributing to system change. As said in the introduction, we now live in the paradoxical situation that social protection never before has been so high on the international agenda, but never before has it been so threatened. To understand this paradox, we need to take a brief look at its history.

The Recent History of Welfare States In the post-war period, and even more during the Cold War, welfare states were developed in most industrialised countries. It was a period of economic growth and development with most governments—as well

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as the emerging European Economic Community (EEC)—adhering to Keynesian policies. Economic and social development were considered to go hand in hand in a dialectic and mutually strengthening reciprocity. Even if all models of social protection were different, according to national, social and political circumstances, there were also common characteristics. Welfare states gave rise to social citizenship, they were intended to be universal, based on taxes or social contributions, and including a series of public services such as health care, education, public transport, etc. After the accession to independence of most of the colonies in the South, welfare states were also emerging in Africa and Asia, though in many countries they remained limited to the military, civil servants and the small minority of workers in the formal sector. But at the level of the United Nations, where African, Asian and Latin American nations had a majority, amazing texts on ‘social progress’, a ‘unified approach’ and a ‘new international economic order’ were adopted.1 Starting at the end of the 1970s one sees the focus slowly shifting to concerns over the financial sustainability of social security systems in the EEC.2 Given the global concerns over the growing inequalities between Northern and Southern countries, the World Bank introduced poverty reduction proposals. However, due to the crisis which started after the abandonment of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1971 and the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, these proposals were quickly forgotten and the first neoliberal measures came on the agenda. The 1980s were the decade of structural adjustment in the South and a growing awareness in the North of a need to ‘modernise’ the welfare states. In 1990, when neoliberal globalisation had become a reality, the World Bank introduced once again its poverty reduction proposals, while, at the same time, UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) published its first report on ‘human development’. What this meant, in both cases, was a new definition of states, markets, development and the role of civil society. It was a shift from a development conceptualised as a collective endeavour for nations, economies and societies, to an individual focus on poverty, health and education. It should be emphasised however, that this did not mean any change of the Washington Consensus policies of the World Bank and the IMF (International Monetary Fund). They remained untouched—till today—but are now imposed in the name of poverty reduction. The World Bank stressed that public authorities do

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not have to organise social protection for the non-poor—insurances can be bought on the market—but only to help extremely poor people get fit for participation in the labour market. The overall solution, in all cases, is the promotion of growth. Nevertheless, ten years later, the World Bank published its first ‘theoretical framework’ for social protection, in which the concept is broadened to include all steps people, markets and states can take to ´protect’ livelihoods: from pensions and health insurance to child labour and migration. Social protection became ‘risk management’ and risks were economic shocks as well as natural catastrophes, epidemics and social setbacks. This new vision broadened as well as hollowed out the concept of social protection. The meaning was changed. At the level of the United Nations, as well as at ECLAC (UN Economic Commission of Latin America and the Caribbean) the exclusive focus on extreme poverty had never been fully integrated and more and more studies were being published on the importance of social protection—in a more traditional meaning—and inequality. At the ILO (International Labour Organisation) interesting declarations and recommendations were being adopted: on decent work, on Core Labour Standards, on Social Justice and finally on national ‘social protection floors’.3 In the European Union (EU), welfare states were slowly changing in a neoliberal sense, even if the European Union institutions have almost no social competences outside the health and safety of workers. But first through internal market and competition policies, secondly the ‘economic governance’ measures, and finally free trade agreements, the influence of the EU on social welfare has become real and important.4 It should be emphasised that most neoliberal governments do not wait for European recommendations to privatise public services, to ‘modernise’ labour laws and to cut public social expenditures. Most of the fundamental changes were mentioned—indirectly—in the Lisbon strategy,5 which talks of the liberalisation of public services and the ‘employability’ of workers. The Commission proposals for the ‘modernisation of social protection’ progressively introduced other major changes. Social protection becomes a tool at the service of growth and employment, benefits should go in the first place to people excluded from the labour market, people should be ‘activated’ and encouraged to participate in the labour market, health care and pensions reformed.

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In its proposal of 1999 four new objectives of social protection are mentioned: to make work pay, to guarantee pensions, to promote social integration and to guarantee sustainable health care. Social policies are now subordinated to the economy. Notions such as ‘solidarity’, ‘redistribution’ and ‘inequality’ still have their place in some documents, but they are no longer at the heart of social policies and the protection of incomes. People are no longer protected against markets but are now stimulated to participate in markets. The renewed European social agenda of 2008 redefines ‘solidarity’: it is no longer a mechanism of redistribution in order to have the whole society benefiting from progress, but only in favour of those who are ‘excluded’. Instead of strengthened cooperation and integration, there is more competition between countries as well as between workers. The beginning of the twenty-first century thus introduced a new social paradigm which subordinates the social to the economy and tries to generalise competitiveness at all levels. Welfare states now have three functions, according to the European Commission. Today, they are defined as social investment, social protection and the stability of the economy. Which means that social protection is only one of the objectives and that the economy is directly integrated into ‘welfare states’. The social protection dimension even gets a semieconomic colour: it should help to preserve human capital. This is a major change compared to the past, when, up till the 1990s ‘guaranteeing incomes’ was the first objective, after which it became ‘making work pay’. Even if the European Commission states that the three functions have to be combined, this is a serious weakening of the protection element of welfare states. In 2018, the European Union adopted a ‘European Pillar of Social Rights’. However, this is not a binding instrument and all efforts are now geared towards integrating these rights into the economic governance and fiscal mechanisms of the European semester. In other words, it seeks to strengthen the subordination of social rights to economic and fiscal considerations. As for Asia, major changes were introduced after the financial and economic crisis of 1997. Many countries had a developmental model of social protection in the past, meaning that social expenditures were part of the economic development model and were meant to support it. However, the crisis had severe social consequences and revealed the vulnerabilities of the populations. Since then, social expenditures have

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been rising in most countries, though with serious differences among them. The Asia Pacific region still counts more than one billion poor people, that is, living below the poverty line of 3.10 US$ a day, while one in ten workers live with less than 1.90 US$ a day. Inequalities within and across countries are widening. The informal sector remains very important, with more than half of workers in South-East Asia and up to three in four in South Asia. In the Asia-Pacific region, 38.9% of the total population has effective access to at least one area of social protection, with huge differences between countries such as Australia and Japan (82 and 75%, respectively) and India with only 19% or Bangladesh with 28%.6 Consequently, the same kind of differences are noted for the levels of social expenditures, with 15.2% of GDP in 2015 for Japan, but only 0.1% for Bhutan. The mean social expenditure for the Asia-Pacific region is 7.4%, though there is a positive trend to be noted.7 The ASEAN countries adopted in 2013 a Declaration on strengthening their social protection systems, and in 2015 a Regional Framework and Plan of Action for further cooperation between them.

Neoliberal Globalisation and Its Setbacks The new social paradigm was confirmed in two major decisions at the global level. In 2013 the World Bank defined its new strategy, which has been integrated in the Sustainable Development Goals two years later: to end extreme poverty by 2030 and to promote shared prosperity by fostering the income growth of the bottom 40% in all countries.8 In September 2015 the ‘Sustainable Development Goals’, for North and South, containing ‘social protection (including floors)’ (Goal 1.3) and ‘fighting inequality’ (goal 10)9 were adopted. According to the World Bank global extreme poverty has seriously diminished in the past decades. It was estimated at around 900 million in 2012 (12.8% of the global population) with a projection of 700 million or around 10% for 2015 living with less than 1.9 US$ per day. This extreme poverty is highly concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Even if this is considered serious progress compared to the 1958 million extremely poor in 1990 (37.1%) it should be noticed that this progress is very uneven with Sub-Saharan Africa still at 42.6% and South

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Asia at 18.8%. Moreover, many of the people who managed to escape extreme poverty are still very vulnerable to falling back into poverty.10 The most populous countries in South Asia (India and Bangladesh) and Sub-Saharan Africa (Nigeria, Ethiopia and Democratic Republic of Congo) have the greatest number of extreme poor. India, with over 170 million poor people in 2015, has the highest number of poor people and accounts for nearly a quarter of global poverty. In the South Asia region, 4 in 5 extreme poor reside in India. With a poverty rate of 13.4%, India’s large population of 1.3 billion results in a high absolute number of poor.11 Those who moved out of poverty continue to live with very limited access to essential services and social protection. There is anxiety among middle class families about the ability to sustain their income position.12 Global real wages dropped sharply during the last crisis and are still decelerating, especially in emerging and developing countries. In several developed countries, the average real wages were lower in 2013 than they were in 2007. From 1999 to 2013 labour productivity growth in developed countries outstripped real wage growth and labour’s share of national income fell in the largest developed countries.13 Working poverty dropped drastically over a decade but progress stalled in 2013. There were then an estimated 375 million workers living on less than 1.25 US$ a day, compared to 600 million in the early 2000s. The number of people in vulnerable employment expanded.14 The rapid growth of non-standard forms of employment is a major problem. It takes many forms: temporary work, temporary agency work, part-time work, including zero-hour contracts or on-call work, multiparty employment arrangements, dependent self-employed work. The reasons are also multiple, from the growing share of women in labour markets to regulatory changes and the decline of collective bargaining. But the consequences for workers are serious: insecurity, wage penalties, lack of occupational safety and health, lack of social protection and of respect for fundamental rights at work.15 The economic and social situation in the EU has not improved either. In March 2016, almost every fourth person in the EU was at risk of poverty or social exclusion, this is around 125 million people. More than 30% of young people aged 18–24 and 27.8% of children aged less than 18 were at risk of poverty in 2014. Of all groups examined, the unemployed faced the greatest risk of poverty of social exclusion, at 66.7% in 2014. Almost 50% of all single parents were also at risk.16

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The EU employment rate has returned to pre-crisis levels. Unemployment continues to gradually decrease. Unemployment is a fact for 6.8% of people in 2018 in the EU. The situation is very different from country to country. Unemployment is only 2% in the Czech Republic and 3% in Germany, but 19% in Greece and 15% in Spain. Almost half of the unemployed have been so for more than one year. Youth unemployment is particularly high in Greece (slightly below 40%) and in Spain (34.3%).17 In terms of social protection, the latest report of the ILO indicates that only 29% of the global population enjoy access to comprehensive social security systems, whereas 71% are covered partially or not at all.18 Again the situation is very uneven: the beginning of the twenty-first century, the EU realised 24% of world GDP, but it had 40% of public social expenditure. In the EU public social expenditure amounts to 25% of GDP, while it amounts to only 19% in OECD countries and 15% worldwide.19 As for inequality, the numbers are staggering. From 1990 to 2008 the Gini coefficient or index trends20 have witnessed the largest increases in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and Asia, according to Unicef.21 The global Gini coefficient stood at 0.43 in 1820, rose to 0.56 in 1850, to 0.61 in 1913, to 0.64 in 1950, to 0.657 in 1980 and up to 0.707 in 2002.22 Asia is the continent with the highest growth figures, but it is not growth ‘with equity’. Income inequality widened in 11 of the 28 economies with comparable data, including China, India and Indonesia. In China, the Gini coefficient worsened from 0.32 in the early 1990s to 0.43 in the late 2000s. In the whole of Asia, the Gini coefficient went from 0.39 to 0.46 in the same period.23 However shocking these figures may be, in terms of wealth, inequality is even worse. The Gini coefficient of global wealth is estimated between 55 and 80% in a sample of 26 countries in 2000, and global wealth has more or less doubled since then.24 1% of the population owns half of the world’s wealth.25 Massive quantities of assets are held offshore and in opaque and anonymous structures. This is not factored properly into any calculations, which means that statistics underestimate the scale of the inequality problem.26 A conservative estimate of the missing wealth shows that between $21 trillion and $32 trillion remain unrecorded.27 All these numbers and statistics have to be taken with a lot of caution. Not only is it very difficult to measure poverty lines and headcount numbers, the methodologies are rarely free of ideological bias and World

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Bank statistics have been severely criticised in the past. Nevertheless, it is the best we have and they do give us an indication of the seriousness of the situation. Box 2.1 Social Protection Rhetorics Versus Exclusionary SocioEconomic Policies Rene E. Ofreneo, President, Freedom from Debt Coalition at AEPF Conference on labour in Kathmandu, Nepal, April 2019: It was against [the backdrop of the financial crisis of 1997] that some serious re-thinking about social protection took place within the official policy circles in Southeast Asia. In the 1980s-1990s, the World Bank and its neoliberal cohorts actively promoted the privatisation of government-managed pension and social security programs, as part of the broader program of privatising, deregulating and liberalising economies of the world. This privatisation proposal was meaningless to all those who lost their jobs and incomes. In Thailand, the government of the populist Thaksin Shinawatra pushed for the 40-baht universal health care despite the earlier austerity program pushed by the IMF -World Bank group. In Malaysia, Mahathir defied the IMF by imposing capital controls to stop the haemorrhage of capital and jobs out of the country. But the beleaguered Suharto completely succumbed to the IMF diktat. (…) The foregoing narrative on IMF -World Bank policy somersaults on austerity and capital controls shows that there are social and economic realities on the ground that cannot be ignored. These realities are forcing these institutions to adjust their neoliberal lenses somewhat somehow. One important adjustment is the way these lenders and their neoliberal supporters are treating social protection. (…) In Southeast Asia in the meantime, the Thaksin universal health initiative has also gained wider acceptance in some countries, in Indonesia and the Philippines in particular. Social protection has also become a major ASEAN theme since 2007, when the ASEAN Charter was adopted. Thus, there has been a proliferation of social protection programmes being bandied around or being proposed, with the World Bank and ADB coming in now as the social protection champions and supporters. (…) At the level of the individual ASEAN countries, political leaders also talk endlessly on the need for social protection—universal health care, education, pension for the retirees, social assistance to the disabled, etc.—for the poor and those in the margin of society. The only limit is the budget that can be allotted for this purpose, or money that can be borrowed from the World Bank, ADB and other aid givers, again for this purpose.

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And this is precisely the problem. The issue of social protection, now accepted and articulated by government officials, has become a question of budgetary allocation. The deeper problem on why there are so many poor and so many are on the margins is not being addressed fully. More importantly, neoliberal policies that are in place and the neoliberal thinking that still dominates general economic policy formulation are not being questioned. For example, the privatisation of public services such as water and electricity, instead of being kept in the hands of government to ensure universal access for all, is still a priority program in many countries. These are usually bundled under what the technocrats call as the Public–Private Partnership (PPP), a scheme pioneered in London under Margaret Thatcher. Under the PPPs or their hybrid forms in Southeast Asia, the big private service providers are able to transform natural monopolies into private sector monopolies. As a result, inequality is deepening and the exclusion of the many is being exacerbated. Worse, programmes or policies that are anti-poor deepen poverty and the lack of social protection for them. Example: many peasants, indigenous people and rural poor are being displaced due to the rapacious land accumulation programmes of the big land developers, the big agribusiness investors and the members of the national elite who want to get the best lands. In this process, the displaced become the ‘floating population’ of poor circulating within countries. They join the huge army of the informals, who constitute two-thirds of the labour force in most countries. They include the home-based workers, the street vendors, the informal transport workers/operators and the coastal fisher folks. Most of the informals do not get adequate social protection, only paltry social assistance programmes that are dependent on limited budgetary allocations of government. (…) And yet, the reality is that universal and adequate social protection is not possible if there are no meaningful social and economic reforms to ensure that economic growth is inclusive, balanced and sustainable. The point is that a programme of social protection should be part of a bigger transformation programme. It means discarding the neoliberal assumption that growth automatically trickles down to the benefit of the poor. There should be a needed rethinking and transformation too of the overall design of regional and global integration. (…) Socio-economic transformation programmes should be synchronised too with programs dealing with transitions —just transition in addressing problems of the environment and climate change risks and just transition to prepare the people on the impact of rapid technological change under the ongoing Fourth Industrial Revolution.

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Political Backlash The global worsening economic and social situation led to many new movements of resistance, from the ‘neo-zapatistas’ in Chiapas, Mexico, against the free-trade agreement for North-America (NAFTA), the ‘Battle of Seattle’ against the WTO in 1999, the World Social Fora which started in Porto Alegre in 2001 to the more recent Arab springs, the ‘Occupy’ movements, Nuits Debout, Yellow Jackets and others. In autumn 2019 it looked as if almost all major cities were overwhelmed with social protests. While all these movements may have or have had some success at the ideological level, by enhancing awareness of the unjust distribution of incomes and wealth, politically, the current situation is all but rosy. The election of President Trump in the USA, promising to ‘make America Great Again’ by suggesting the imposition of protectionist policies, the result of the Brexit-referendum in the United Kingdom, predominantly influenced by anti-migration sentiments among white workers, the rise of authoritarian populism in several European countries as well as in Asia, the electoral losses of left-wing parties in Latin America, the wars in the Middle East … but also the security policies in West-European democracies as a consequence of terrorist attacks are all very worrying. In terms of social justice, two developments should be looked at: The first one concerns jobs. Jobs continue to be the main source of incomes for people all over the world, but the lack of decent jobs for all, the growing informality and the worsening conditions on the labour market justify the doubts of many that more employment can be the solution to the problem. Particular concerns arise around the future of the digital economy and robotisation. Many fear that the fight for full employment becomes an illusion. The second development to be considered from a political point of view is inequality. Global inequality today is not driven by gaps among countries anymore, since it is slowly receding. We might go back to a situation such as it existed in the nineteenth century, says Branco Milanovic, with huge differences between poor and rich Britons, poor and wealthy Americans, poor and rich Germans.28 It surely still matters where you are born, but globalisation has seriously changed the overall situation. Winners of globalisation have been the people from Asia, predominantly from China, but also from India, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. The losers have been all

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the people from rich OECD countries who saw no rise in their real incomes, especially the lower middle classes. The graphic in which these developments have been designed is called the ‘elephant curve´ since it clearly shows where the losers are and where the winning top global 1% is (at the top of the elephant’s trump).29

Social Justice, Income and Redistribution Social justice is a very vast concept, but its major component inevitably is social protection. As this chapter has spelt out, two major international initiatives are now on the agenda: the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN and the Social Protection Floors of the ILO. AEPF strongly supports both initiatives since their achievement would mean a tremendous progress for all people. Nevertheless, with the ideological changes in mind, we also want to go beyond. SDGs and SPFs are very important but they will not stop privatisations, land grabbing and corporate greed. Income for the poorest and redistribution of incomes certainly are necessary, but they are not enough. We should remember that traditional welfare states were not meant to just give people a basic income for survival, but to allow them to compensate for the loss of labour income. Unemployment and sickness benefits, e.g. were close to the (temporarily) lost wage. The objective was to allow people to preserve a decent standard of living. The ILO as well refers in its recommendation of 2012 to the International Convention on minimum standards of social security and thus also considers the importance of going beyond the current SPFs. If we really want all human beings to have a life in dignity, it will be necessary, then, to go beyond these minimum levels and strive for a more holistic approach. Income is indeed a basic condition for getting out of poverty and live a life of dignity. However, recognising the income dimension of poverty cannot be enough. In the case of children, it is mentioned that the basic income should give access to nutrition, education and care, etc. (art. 5b). However, public services are not mentioned. Health care and education might as well come from private as from public sources. And, as is already the case in many countries today, the ‘basic income’ might come down to a cash transfer that is just enough to pay for privatised services which, in the past were provided by public authorities and then

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were given to the market and only available for high user fees. In other words, though this was certainly not the objective of the ILO, the basic income/cash transfer can be an indirect way to subsidise the corporations offering these services. Giving a guaranteed income to poor people is absolutely necessary but it should help to live a decent life and not replace the necessary universal public services. We will come back to this point in Chapter 4. As for redistribution, many dramatic data on global income inequality have been published these past years and the moral arguments for the redistribution of income cannot be laughed away anymore. This certainly is positive and the various research papers from the IMF (International Monetary Fund) on taxes and inequality show that the topic is finally making its way to the international agenda. However, social protection is about so much more than the redistribution of income. First of all, it should be remembered that the traditional welfare states of Western Europe and some other countries were not about redistribution—that is where tax systems are made for—but about collective insurance and solidarity systems. The specific characteristic of these systems was that they covered the whole of society, all workers contributing to a centralised fund which was spent according to the needs of the population for health, pensions, disability, etc. This was, to a certain extent, what constituted society, the structural solidarity that linked all people to all other people within national borders. It included universal public services such as health and education but also public transport, postal services, water and electricity, etc. There is a great diversity in public services and different welfare benefits but it should be noted that they were never about redistribution even if, in some cases, that might have been a consequence. Redistribution is basically a matter for income taxes. Welfare states—social protection—are about ensuring structural and horizontal social solidarity, based on collective insurances. In a neoliberal philosophy, however, benefits to be paid by public authorities are minimal and are indeed a matter of redistribution of incomes. Insurances are for markets and those who want more than the minimum on offer, can buy what they want or need on the market. Income taxes should be kept as low as possible. This point is very important, now that many services are being privatised or benefits are targeted to the poor. What is lost is not only the benefits of universal services and benefits themselves, but the structural solidarity as a foundation for society, the collective effort of all at the

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service of all. If we want to definitely get rid of politicised ethnic identity or faith-based communities, this structural solidarity is crucial for the flourishing of inclusive and diverse societies.

Universalism This brings us to the delicate point of universalism. The SPFs do mention social protection should be universal (point 3), but is somewhat contradictory in also saying it is for those ‘in need’ (point 4). The World Bank from its side continues to promote targeted interventions in favour of the poor. Both organisations have published in 2015 a joint statement in favour of universal social protection, though it does not seem the World Bank has changed its practices yet. Universalism may be on its way to also undergo a major semantic change, referring to ‘universal’ policies for specific groups of people, such as the elderly, or children … What should be clear however is that policies in favour of the poor are not enough. If well implemented they might indeed help people to be lifted out of poverty, but they do not stop the creation of poverty. That, again, is the big advantage of welfare states with labour rights and public services: they stop the impoverishment processes and prevent poverty. This is the main argument in favour of universal policies, next to the generally admitted point that policies for the poor rapidly become poor policies. It is difficult indeed to convince middle classes and the rich to pay for policies they themselves do not benefit from.

Our Objectives As was mentioned already, basic social protection mechanisms, such as those promoted by the World Bank, do not exclude privatisations or austerity policies. On the contrary, they even might facilitate them. Compared to a situation in which there are austerity and no social protection—unfortunately the case in too many countries—the current international initiatives offer some help and do constitute to a certain extent a correction mechanism to a brutal economic system. But they totally remain within that system and do not have the ambition to change it. This is one of the reasons so many progressive people reject them since they fear they mainly help poor people to survive and prevent them from rebelling and overthrowing the system.

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Many voices have been raised these past years in favour of ‘transformative social protection’ and even if, again, many different meanings are attributed to the concept, it might mean that social protection mechanisms contribute to system change, that is help to fight climate change as well as transforming the social, political and economic setup of the world. In whatever way one looks at it, the objective of social protection should be what it says: to protect people. Against what? Against the vagaries of markets, of the climate and life. Saying this already indicates the programme should be very extensive. Social protection certainly should not be a ‘productive factor’, a mechanism in favour of growth and markets. That is what too often one reads in documents of the World Bank and the European Commission. The ILO also states in several preparatory documents to the SPFs, that social protection can favour the economy. While this is certainly true, it can and should never be its major objective. As Claus Offe rightly said, capitalism does not want any social protection, while at the same time it knows that it cannot survive without it.30 The social protection that is on the international agenda today is precisely the part that capitalism wants to survive. It is the new paradigm that has been silently introduced, in North and South. Our answer should be to reclaim the part that we want in order to protect individuals and societies. Welfare states emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and fully developed after the Second World War. It was about building a counter-power, it was a resource, first to give workers collective property and hence citizenship, and secondly to use these citizen’s rights to empower themselves and act as a counter-hegemonic power against capitalism. The first mechanisms of workers’ solidarity were managed by themselves, later, in Western Europe, employers joined the game. This is the basic philosophy of co-management, democracy and participation we should get back to. For us, social protection means social security (insurances, unemployment benefits, sickness insurance and health care, care for young mothers and children …) but also social assistance (help for poor people so as to prevent and eradicate poverty), labour rights and also public services. All this is closely linked to other sectors we are concerned about: climate change in the first place, but also trade and democracy and in the end, obviously, peace. What happened these past decades is that many reforms were introduced to take into account the changes in societies and the economy

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in the twenty-first century, but each time, in every country, the basic protection of people was hollowed out instead of strengthened. Social protection had to be made compatible with neoliberalism and thus received a new meaning. It is time to reclaim what has been taken away, full economic and social rights, universal public services and labour rights. In that way, if we consistently and coherently pursue our objectives, social protection can be transformative, that is, directly contribute to economic and environmental system change. Therefore, our aim cannot be to just restore the old welfare states of industrialised countries, though its principles of rights and solidarity certainly remain valid. But they were too closely related to the Fordist economic model that will never come back again. Today, we have to dare and think of something new, a better protection for people, based on human rights and solidarity and geared towards sustainability, of people, societies and of nature. It should be conceptualised in a democratic way, therefore we call it a commons (see Chapter 4). Social protection still has an enormous potential for contributing to social, economic and political change, though it depends on many conditions and implies a careful and consistent strategy, democracy and participation. The international initiatives can indeed be a good starting point, but we must go beyond. Social protection is a human right, as articles 22 and 25 of the Universal Declaration on Human rights explain, and as has been confirmed by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. It is an individual right but also a collective right, and social protection systems can not only protect individuals but also societies. Today, the global agenda of social protection is mainly in the hands of conservative forces. Therefore, we need our own agenda and our own priorities. We should not limit our struggles to the things that have already been given to us. That is why we drafted our Global Charter for Social Protection Rights. It will be explained in the next chapter.

Notes 1. United Nations, Declaration on Social Progress and Development, GA 2542 (XXIV), December 1969; Report on a Unified Approach on Development, Doc. E/CN. 5/490, 17 January 1973; Declaration on a New International Economic Order, GA 3201 (S-VI), May 1974.

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2. Mestrum, F., Unsocializing the European Union. A History with Some Ups and Many Downs, http://socialcommons.eu/2016/10/06/un-soc ializing-the-european-union-a-history-of-some-ups-and-many-downs/# more-238. 3. ILO, Social Protection Floors Recommendation, R202, 2012, http:// www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12 100_ILO_CODE:R202. 4. Theodoropoulou, S., Has the EU Become More Intrusive in Shaping National Welfare State Reforms? Evidence from Greece and Portugal, ETUI, WP 2014.04, 2014. 5. European Council, Conclusions of the Presidency, Lisbon, 23–24 March 2000. 6. ILO, World Social Protection Report 2017 -19, Geneva, ILO, 2017. 7. Ibid. 8. World Bank, Development Committee, World Bank Group Strategy, DC2013-0009, 18 September 2013. 9. United Nations, Changing Our World, res. GA A/69/L.85, 18 August 2015. 10. World Bank, Ending Extreme Poverty and Sharing Prosperity: Progress and Policies, October 2015, PRN/15/03. 11. World Bank, Piecing Together the Poverty Puzzle, Washington, World Bank, 2018. 12. ILO, World Employment Social Outlook, Geneva, ILO, 2016, p. xiii. 13. ILO, Global Wage Report 2014/15. Wages and Income Inequality, Geneva, ILO, 2015, pp. xv–xvi. 14. ILO, Global Employment Trends 2014, http://www.ilo.org/global/aboutthe-ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_234030/lang–en/index.htm. 15. ILO, Non-standard Employment Around the World, Geneva, ILO, 2016. 16. Eurostat, Europe 2020 Indicators – Poverty and Social Inclusion, 2016. 17. European Commission, Employment and Social Developments in Europe. Annual Review, Brussels, European Commission, 2019. 18. ILO, 2017, op. cit. 19. European Commission, Social Protection Budgets in the Crisis in the EU , Working Paper 1/2013, 2013. 20. The Gini coefficient or index is one of the most common indicators for measuring income inequality. It ranges from 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (perfect inequality). 21. Ortiz, Isabel and Cummins, Matthew, ‘Global Inequality: Beyond the Bottom Billion – A Rapid Review of Income Distribution in 141 Countries’, Social and Economic Policy Working Paper, New York, United Nations Children’s Fund, April 2011. 22. Ibid.

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23. Asian Development Bank, Asian Development Outlook 2012: Confronting Rising Inequality, Mandaluyong City, Asian Development Bank, 2012, p. xix. 24. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Inequality Matters: Report on World Social Situation 2013, New York, United Nations, 2013, p. 33. 25. Oxfam, Working for the few, https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam. org/files/file_attachments/bp-working-for-few-political-capture-eco nomic-inequality-200114-summ-en_1.pdf. 26. Shaxson, Nicholas, Christensen, John and Mathiason, Nick, ‘Inequality: You Don’t Know the Half of It’, Tax Justice Network, 19 July 2012, p. 1, available at: http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/upload/pdf/Inequa lity_120722_You_dont_know_the_half_of_it.pdf. 27. Ibid. 28. Milanovic, B., Global Inequality, Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2016. 29. Ibid. 30. Offe, C., Contradictions of the Welfare State, ed. John Keane, London, Hutchinson, 1984.

CHAPTER 3

Global Charter for Universal Social Protection Rights: For All and by All

The final Declaration of the Asia Europe People’s Forum, adopted in Ulaan Baatar in 2016, included an action point for the social justice cluster, saying: Work with social movements and workers’ organisations to develop a peoplecentred Global Social Protection Charter that will guarantee decent work, sustainable livelihoods and universal and comprehensive social protection systems that include food, essential services and social security.

Such a Global Charter has been written and has been presented and discussed throughout 2017 and 2018 with major trade unions and social organisations and at different major global and regional conferences and social forums. A website (in three languages) has been set up leading to many comments and support (www.globalsocialprotectioncharter.eu). The final text has been adopted at the 12th Asia Europe People’s Forum in Ghent, in October 2018. It has now been supported by hundreds of organisations and personalities. The aim is to use the Charter in all our campaigns, in order to strengthen the already existing initiatives of the ILO’s Social Protection Floors and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We very much hope this Charter can become an important guiding principle for all movements working and campaigning on social justice. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 F. Mestrum and M. Menon, Redefining the Agenda for Social Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6571-1_3

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One may wonder, why a new text and why a new initiative? Social protection is a human right, we should never forget it. We already have an International Covenant on economic and social rights, adopted by the UN in 1966 and ratified by a majority of countries. There are also several regional treaties or conventions. However, we do not have a specific text about rights to a universal, transformative social protection. We want to emphasise that we welcome and support the ILO Recommendation on Social Protection Floors, as well as the Sustainable Development Goals, although we do think these initiatives will be difficult to implement within the current policy frameworks. We fully support the Global Coalition on Social Protection Rights set up by a number of major NGOs. Our main objective therefore is to promote a different philosophy on social protection, one that goes beyond the traditional rights, that encompasses environmental needs and bridges the unacceptable gap between production and reproduction. In our perspective, social protection is a commons (see next chapter), emerging from the democratic and participatory actions of citizens with demands for public authorities. Social protection is not a correction mechanism for the economic system but should be transformative, that is, contribute to a better productive system and to the sustainability of life, strengthening other actions that work for system change. We see social protection as a collective and democratic endeavour for achieving a life in dignity for all. This is not a text with demands, but with principles. Demands can differ from country to country, depending on the priorities of local groups. We hope these principles can serve as a reference for all movements concerned about social justice. The charter is therefore conceived as an aspirational text, not as a binding charter with all of its detailed points to be adopted or agreed with. It is meant as a source of inspiration for movements working towards social justice. Social protection is a major element of social justice—if you have no pensions, no health care, no labour rights etc., it is difficult to lead a decent life in dignity. That is why all these basic rights are repeated in our charter. We also believe social justice is the overarching objective of all efforts to achieve a just and sustainable economy with fair trade, just finances and binding rules for governments and corporations. Our charter is meant to

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contribute to all the efforts made for having binding rules for transnational corporations and for a just transition, combining respect for the environment with social justice. In our vision, social protection consists of social security (pensions, sickness benefits, benefits for young mothers and children, benefits for disabled people, health care, unemployment benefits), social assistance (help for poor people), labour rights and a whole series of public services, to be defined according to local needs and priorities. For us, social protection is universal, not only for the poor but for all. Consequently, all have to contribute to it, through social contributions or through taxes—the strongest shoulders bearing the heaviest burden. We define social protection as a common, emerging from the democratic and participatory actions of citizens with demands for public authorities. It basically means that social protection is ours, and that we should decide on the conceptualisation, the implementation and the monitoring of it. States have to guarantee it, as it should guarantee our human rights. It means, further and basically, we have to democratise it so as to involve all citizens. The main characteristics of our vision on solidarity are that it is based on human rights and on structural and horizontal relationships between all members of society. If our Charter often refers to the role of the state, it is not because we think the state is the only legal institution responsible for organising social protection. Social protection is a matter for local communities who have to democratically define their needs and priorities, but also for regional entities, for states and for international organisations that have to define the general framework of human rights within which local systems find a place. Within this legal system and this articulation of rights, it is states who are the guarantors of human rights and who are, today, the most important agents responsible for fiscal rules and redistribution. If the different principles of our Charter are respected, it is not possible to privatise public services or social protection and assistance itself, neither is it acceptable to deregulate labour markets, nor will it be possible to exclude informal workers or migrants from basic protection such as health care. These are the elements that can make social protection really transformative and contribute to system change. We claim social protection is closely linked to all other sectors social movements are working for, such as climate change, trade, democracy and

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in the end, peace. Social protection can be a positive contribution to the environment, such as e.g. in the housing sector. The most important argument in favour of our charter probably is that we have to define our own agenda and not limit ourselves to fighting for the things that have already been given to us (SDGs and SPFs). We need to define our own priorities and fight for them. This means that we do not only have to fight against neoliberalism, targeting only the poor, but also against authoritarian populism that very often does promote social policies, but only in the framework of so-called ‘traditional values’, that is measures that are not emancipatory and not transformative. With this Charter, we make a plea for coherent policies since social justice is not a single issue but the result of coherent just policies at the economic, environmental and social level. When focusing on one or other point, be it pensions or social services or anything else, demands should not be seen as context-free single demands. On the contrary, the Charter helps to translate principles into detailed demands and gives meaning to them within an emancipatory and transformative context. Box 3.1 Working with the Charter Rayyan Hassan and Jen Derillo, NGO Forum on ADB on work with the Global Charter: The Global Charter for Universal Social Protection was circulated to the Forum network and has gathered endorsements and sign-ons (over 600 organisations have endorsed the charter till now). The Global Charter was taken to the Asian Development Bank (ADB) Annual Meeting in Nadi, Fiji, where it was highlighted during the following events: – Presented and given to ADB President Takehiko Nakao during the CSO Dialogue with the President. Rayyan Hassan, executive director of the Forum, explained the need for the ADB to fully support and adapt the charter and the principles. – During the discussion on ADB’s Strategy 2030, NGO Forum on ADB also pushed for the adaptation of the Global Charter for Universal Social Protection especially in the area of ‘Addressing remaining poverty and reducing inequalities’ (Operational Priority

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1). The charter and the principle was also endorsed and given to Ms. Wendy Walker, the lead person of operational priority 1. – The charter and principle was also a major part of the panel ‘Unpacking the Delivery of ADB’s Safeguard Policy Statement’ where the Forum expressed its belief that there is no clear policy framework in ensuring safeguards in ADB-supported projects. Specially, those that are co-financed with other multilateral development banks. Emphasis was given by the speakers on the issue of social justice and protection. Two individuals from the Indian National Rural Labor Federation (INRLF), Tamil Nadu State, India Sitaram Saini, President of All Himachal PWD & IPH Contractual Workers Union (AHPWDIPHCWU), Himachal Pradesh State, India with the assistance of Building and Wood Workers’ International (BWI) was able to speak in the panel session and share their experiences – Copies of the Global Charter for Universal Social Protection (and principles) were given out to the attendees of the NGO Forum sessions, and inquiries about the charter and principles were discussed by the Forum members, including why the Forum network is endorsing it. There were dialogues around the charter and the principles among other NGO’s attending the event, most significant is the interest of Pacific groups who share similar sentiments. A lobby meeting was conducted with ADB Alternative Executive Director for Austria, Germany, Luxembourg, Turkey and the United Kingdom, Mr. Helmut Fischer, where he expressed his ‘deep connection’ with the charter citing his professional history as part of the German Development Cooperation. He mentioned that his previous organisation has ‘sustainability standards’ and points of contact for his ministry’s cooperation with the International Labor Organization (ILO) where he dealt with core labour standards, child labour, equal pay for equal work, decent work, liveable wages for those involved in global supply chains, etc. on a daily basis. The meeting was very fruitful as future cooperation between the Forum and the office of the AED has been plotted. During the Strategy 2030 Operational Plans comments round, the Forum was able to solicit comments from the Social Protection cluster and incorporate/submit these comments to the ADB Strategy 2030. A public information video was produced by NGO Forum on ADB with a total reach of 1,784, 119 shares, and 614 complete views.

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Global Charter for Universal Social Protection Rights by All, for All We, progressive social movements, concerned with the growing social distress of people all over the world and faced with multiple problems of war, environmental degradation and climate change, rising inequalities and persistent poverty, economic crises, austerity policies and growing authoritarianism, erosion of all human rights, discrimination and intolerance, hereby plead for universal social protection to be taken as a tool for peace and social justice: Recalling the old truth that peace is not possible without social justice, as was stated already in the Constitution of the ILO in 1919. Recalling that the community of nations has developed a major set of rights, more particularly a Universal Declaration on Human Rights, two international Covenants on political and civil rights, on the one hand, and economic, social and cultural rights on the other hand, including a right to an adequate standard of living. Other legal instruments include more specific rights of children, women and indigenous people, as well as a right to development. These rights are universal, indivisible and inalienable. Recalling, furthermore, that many of these rights have been adopted by regional charters, conventions and declarations and that the ILO has adopted a series of conventions, recommendations and declarations on specific economic and social rights, more particularly a Convention on the minimum standards for social security in 1952, a programme on decent work, a set of Core Labour Standards, a Declaration on Social Justice and a recommendation on national social protection floors in 2012. Recalling, finally, that the United Nations, in its many global conferences and more recently in its 2015 programme for Sustainable Development Goals has recognised the need for social protection and the reduction of inequalities, people’s social rights as well as their link with environmental policies and rights. Considering that social protection is justified by a social justice imperative, by aiming at sustainable human development and security, providing all people with an opportunity for a life in dignity. Considering that social protection consists of measures aimed at reconciling civil and political citizenship, based on equality, with economic and social citizenship rights and the equal worth of all individuals. Considering that social protection is intrinsically linked to a social process of structural social solidarity and is not a concept of charity.

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Considering that social protection is a very broad concept, going beyond poverty reduction, social security and social assistance, and is aimed at eradicating and preventing poverty, reducing inequalities and ensuring decent livelihoods for all. Considering that social protection is part of a reproduction process that cannot be delinked from a production process while both should be aimed at the sustainability of life. This means that the components of social protection cannot be conceived of separately from the economic activities in their broadest sense. Considering, therefore, that social protection must consist of material and immaterial elements, monetary allowances and additional in-kind support where appropriate, social services, environmental resources and factors of production. Considering that major parts of social protection can and are to be realised immediately, though other parts will necessarily be realised in a progressive way, depending on available resources. Considering that social protection is a primary responsibility of states, with important responsibilities to be taken by subnational authorities and social organisations, a substantial contribution is to be provided by international solidarity. International financial organisations must therefore duly take into account the need for resources for social policies and be accountable to all borrowing governments. Considering that social protection can only fulfil the needs of people if it comes about in a participatory and democratic way, involving citizens and reflecting the diversity of their means and needs as a precondition for human development. Deploring that as of today, globally, only 29% of people have access to comprehensive social security systems. Deploring that the neoliberal globalisation has pushed countries into a race to the bottom, displacing people and causing environmental damage, diminishing fiscal means, deregulating labour markets, reducing taxes and cutting social expenditures. Deploring that the current economic and debt crisis, followed and deepened by austerity policies and growing authoritarianism have seriously eroded economic and social rights the world over, whereas populist regimes undermine social protection’s emancipatory dimension. Deploring that labour markets are faced with negative developments of growing informalisation, precariousness and vulnerability.

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Deploring that the welfare states in a certain number of countries have not adapted to the fundamental changes of economies and societies of the past decades, more particularly to past and future technological changes. Stating that the current and future technological developments will have major consequences for labour markets that need to be tackled, among others, with measures of social protection, so as to turn them into positive assets, more particularly for access to social protection. Welcoming the most recent international initiatives on social protection, such as the ILO Recommendation on social protection floors and the Sustainable Development Goals, stressing the need for their effective implementation. We therefore agree to state that the right of all people, all over the world, to universal and comprehensive social protection systems must be based on the following principles: 1. Social protection systems should be rights- and solidarity-based, embedded in national laws, and defined as a primary responsibility of public authorities. 2. Social protection mechanisms should be organised on a non-profit basis. 3. States are to guarantee comprehensive social protection systems through sustainable and solidarity-based financing, fair social contribution systems, fair and progressive tax policies and international solidarity mechanisms. 4. Social protection mechanisms, as homogeneous as possible, should be made available for all citizens and residents, throughout the life cycle, independent of labour market status, even if benefits, rights and obligations can differ according to national contexts, agreements and sectors. 5. Social protection mechanisms should at least respect the norms of ILO convention 102 of 1952, that is including health insurance, medical care and sickness benefits, unemployment benefits, labour accident insurance and benefits, pensions, family and maternity benefits, invalidity allowances, survivor’s benefits. 6. Social protection mechanisms should also consist of a series of social services, to be agreed on at the national level, but at least comprehend a right to water, to education (up to tertiary level), public transport, energy and communication, housing and vocational training.

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7. States should adopt the decent work programme of the ILO, as well as the core labour standards comprising more particularly the right to organise and the right to collective bargaining, social dialogue, banning of the worst forms of child labour, forced and bonded labour. 8. States should ensure the implementation of existing minimum wages and, if lacking, adopt, with the involvement of social partners, living minimum wages that guarantee decent livelihoods for, all workers. 9. States should adopt adequate social assistance mechanisms so as to avoid that people fall into poverty. 10. States should take the necessary measures so as to eliminate the gender gap in labour participation, status and pay. 11. States are to ensure non-contributory pensions and other allowances for people who are unable to participate in the labour market. 12. States should take the necessary measures so as to eliminate all discrimination based on gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion or sexual orientation. 13. States should take the necessary measures so as to avoid social dumping and reduce informality and precariousness, in line with ILO Recommendation 204, adopting clear rules for the emerging ‘collaborative’ economy and the dependent self-employed, redefining and appropriately measuring ‘labour’, ‘employment’, ‘self-employment’ and domestic work, and introduce adequate systems of labour inspection. Emerging new technologies should duly be taken into account. 14. States should take the necessary measures as to guarantee everyone’s livelihood, including the protection of the common goods and a right to land for peasants. 15. States should take the necessary measures to provide social protection and guarantee labour rights for all migrants. During humanitarian crises, states should assist displaced people, internally and refugees, as well as to provide safe ways to travel for both refugees and labour migrants, guaranteeing basic human rights at all times. 16. In the development of their social protection mechanisms states are to fully involve representative social partners and civil society, so that the agreed arrangements can be considered their own; social partners and citizens should be fully, structurally and effectively

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involved in the design, implementation and monitoring of the systems. Social protection mechanisms established by social organisations should be supported and as much as possible be integrated into universal systems and not be undermined by a formalisation process. 17. So as to make democratic citizen’s participation possible, states and social movements should organise political education and training sessions at the national and the local level, so as to make people aware of their rights, the mechanisms to demand the full realisation of their rights and the way social protection is organised and financed. 18. States should organise the financing of their social protection systems in such a way that all income categories contribute in a fair and equitable way, the strongest shoulders bearing the largest burden. 19. In their international trade, investment and other agreements, states should include binding rules concerning human rights, environmental and labour rights, as well as fair and progressive tax systems. A binding treaty at the global level should ensure that IFI’s and TNCs respect human rights. 20. States should organise their social protection mechanisms in such a way that they lead to social and economic transformation, leading to just, fair and sustainable societies, preserving human and natural life. We call on civil society organisations to refer to these principles when campaigning for universal social protection systems, by all and for all. We call on parliamentarians globally to advocate for and legislate universal, comprehensive and effective social protection systems. We also call on them to monitor states’ implementation of their social protection programmes and systems, in particular, effective oversight on resources and budgets. We call on governments to take this Charter as a guideline for social policies and to support all initiatives, politically and financially, aimed at achieving the principles of this Charter.

CHAPTER 4

From Social Protection to Social Commons

The current austerity policies in Europe and Asia do not bode well for the future of social protection. We can draft and promote a Global Charter for Universal Social Protection Rights, but if we have to row up against the stream of neoliberalism, it will be very difficult. We need good and innovative strategies. As was noted in the introduction, progressive movements are often reluctant to support social protection programmes. Moreover, young people often think it is something old-fashioned, paternalistic and bureaucratic. Add to this the new societal developments with more women on the labour market, more single-parent families, more migration, more robotisation and precarious work and yes, more globalisation, and it becomes abundantly clear that we should also start to rethink social protection. In the social justice cluster of AEPF we thought the whole new thinking on ‘commons’ may help us out. As we will explain in this chapter, it can allow us to preserve some basic and important principles of social protection, while taking into account the needs and priorities of local communities. Furthermore, it helps to better articulate several territorial

This chapter is partially based on The Social Commons. Re-thinking Social Justice in Post-neoliberal Societies, www.socialcommons.eu, 2015. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 F. Mestrum and M. Menon, Redefining the Agenda for Social Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6571-1_4

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levels—from local to national to continental to global—since at every level democratic procedures can be put into place to say: ‘social protection is ours’. Before explaining how this might work, we obviously have to see what ‘commons’ mean and how we interpret them. And we have to examine more in detail the reasons why we need to rethink social protection.

Rethinking Social Protection Social protection strategies for the North and the South cannot be the same, but we should be aware that policy orientations in North and South are similar, and we may find each other in the broad philosophical lines of what we have to defend. Neoliberalism is a global ideology that tries to fight poverty in order to legitimate itself, fighting inequality to preserve social peace, promoting social protection when it helps markets to function better. Its starting positions in the North and the South are different, but its objectives are identical. Because of these different starting positions, it should be clear for social movements that there is no blueprint for an alternative. This is the first golden rule. Each society will have to define its own priorities and find its own solutions, in a context of cooperation with others. The second golden rule will be that no country can solve its problems all on its own. In a globalised world, countries compete in terms of taxes, wages and social protection. If one country lowers its standards, this has consequences in neighbouring countries. This is the tragedy of the European Union today, where integration and cooperation have been replaced by competition. Not only economic actors take note of changes and come or go in function of what has been decided; people also come and go in function of what there is available in terms of labour or social benefits. Some degree of coordination is thus necessary. This also means that social policies will have to be multilevel. They cannot be limited to the local or national level—even if national states remain the major actors, but globalisation demands that common rules are defined at continental or at the global level, even if, at the practical level, social models will differ from country to country. It would be positive if ASEAN could decide on a set of basic rules to be respected by all countries, in the same way as the European Union started with its (non-binding) European Pillar of Social Rights. Also, local authorities can

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play an important role in implementing and often improving social policies. This multilevel approach can also be important for the organisation of solidarity, whether it be North-South and rich countries helping poor ones with the introduction of social protection systems, or at a continental level, be it ASEAN or the European Union. Box 4.1 Social Commons Are International Alex Scrivener, Global Justice Movement, UK, at the AEPF Barcelona Conference on Social Commons: The commons is not an intrinsically progressive concept. A ‘commons’ based on the exclusion of others is a system of privilege. Indeed, it is perfectly possible to have a racist or fascist commons-based society. The idea of commons limited to people in the rich world is nationalistic and would perpetuate the unjust North-South economic divide. It is not something worth fighting for. Indeed, it is something we should fight against. Even Steve Bannon talks about destroying capitalism and defending the welfare state (for white Americans). So the parts of the left that are flirting with nationalism are straying dangerously close to quasi-fascists like Bannon. If we want to define the commons as something progressive, then it has to be international and inclusive. The commons become totally meaningless unless they are geared towards broader social and economic equality. We cannot support a commons system at the national level which comes at the expense of the global south, at the expense of the climate, of migrants or of gender equality.

The third golden rule will be that effective social protection systems that are able to really satisfy the needs of people will be built bottomup. They will start from the real demands of people and translate these into rights and priorities. Obviously, at this level, power relations will be influential, and therefore it is indeed important to have strong social movements that are able to raise the voice of poor and vulnerable people. Social protection should be at the heart of a political and democratic project, able to create and strengthen social relationships. Fourth, we have to be aware of the fact that, however positive the European welfare states have been in the past, a return to this past is impossible and undesirable. Economies and societies have changed, globalisation leaves its marks, migration has fundamentally changed the way we look at social rights, families have changed and ‘breadwinner’s

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models’ have become irrelevant today; more flexibility in careers and jobs, in favour of workers, has to be taken into account. Rights certainly have to be confirmed, but will have to be strengthened and implemented in different ways. They should be more than an individual defence mechanism and should find their place in a strategy in favour of social change. This is a supplementary reason for rethinking social protection. The South cannot wait till countries industrialise—if ever they will—in order to protect its people. Moreover, labour markets do now evolve in such a way that full employment with shorter working time seems possible in the near future, yet people rightly refuse to receive alms. Today, people ask to participate in decision-making that affects their lives, and this will also influence the way we conceive of social protection. Finally, if we say the world has changed, we should also be aware of the threats of the climate change crisis. Not the planet is in danger, but humankind. This means it has to be protected and environmental rights, such as water and clean air and land, have to be integrated into social protection. The Western development model, based on the exploitation of nature and on consumption, is exhausted. Redistribution of incomes, however necessary, will not be enough. It is easy to see that these five basic points, the lack of a global blueprint, the need for coordination and multilevel approaches, for taking into account the real needs of people, for real change and for adding environmental concerns, will have important consequences at the political and at the economic level. Furthermore, the current corona crisis will hopefully lead to major changes in the way we conceive of globalisation and state responsibilities, taking into account the complementary needs of humankind and nature. As Lidy Nacpil pointed out at the Barcelona conference, climate change is a game-changer for how social protection, equitable and sustainable development, the fulfilment of human rights can be realised. We need to radically reimagine and reconceptualise our visions of another world. Politically, rethinking social protection will involve rethinking the role of the state and democracy. States will continue to play a major role in guaranteeing rights, in determining the rules of the game and as the fundamental actor for solidarity and the redistribution of resources. But for putting into practice social protection mechanisms, local authorities can be important as well. And for defining a common set of basic rules, possibly also for organising solidarity mechanisms, the supranational level becomes ever more important. This also means democratic rules will have

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to be introduced at every level, in order for people to participate in such decision-making, and to then monitor the implementation of policies acting as watchdogs. But states will have to reclaim their responsibility for the welfare of their people becoming themselves a kind of public service helping citizens. In the same way, markets will be different. If economic and social rights as well as public services are seen as commons, the consequence is not that there is nothing to be paid anymore. People who work in the health sector, for example, obviously will have to be paid. However, prices will not respond to a liberal market logic but to human needs and the use value of what is produced.

Economically, rethinking social protection will necessarily influence the economic game. First, because the environmental limits do not allow to pursue endless growth. The development of productive forces will have to be reconsidered beyond what capitalism and socialism preach. Our development models, shaped in the Western mould of modernity, are more and more controversial. Whether it concerns genetically modified organisms, infrastructure works like dams, extractive industries and the like, people more and more take to the streets to reject them. But what is the alternative? In order to find solutions, in order to make room for other knowledge, our minds have indeed to be decolonised, we have to learn to think in different ways to protect life, all life on Earth, its production and its reproduction. Therefore, street protests ‘against’ are not enough if an alternative pathway is not presented. This is where progressive forces have failed up till now and what we urgently have to work at. So, if we say social commons go beyond states and markets, we do not say they go without states and markets. It is a different logic that applies. The economic and social crisis we are currently living in, is in the first place a crisis of social reproduction, in a world where employment increasingly fails to support subsistence. The livelihoods of people are taken out of their hands and are turned into profit-making mechanisms. That is why people are now trying to take back control.

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Box 4.2 Totalising Metanarratives Occlude the Economic Alternatives Peter North, University of Liverpool, UK, at the AEPF Barcelona Conference in June 2018 on social commons The way we think of ‘capitalism’ makes it difficult to think of its supersession. We have created a monster while there are other ontologies. The totalising metanarratives of ‘capitalism’ occlude a diversity of non-capitalist economic relations in market economies. Assuming all market actors have a capitalist ethic is like assuming all women have a maternal ethic. Alternatives are not pre-capitalist hangovers of minority activities in the interstices of the ‘real’ economy. They are as real as any other economic forms. We need to help grow them.

This will have consequences for the way we have organised solidarity in the past, redistributing incomes. To redistribute the product of growth is relatively easy, but what if growth dwindles or disappears? Give something to one then means taking away from the other. This is a recipe for conflicts, the consequences of which should not be ignored.

The Social Commons: What? This is the context in which we have to look for solutions and in which we have to redefine social protection. We propose to look at ‘social commons’. The way we see it, it is a rapidly evolving new concept based on existing human rights covenants though strongly focusing on the collective dimension, adding environmental rights and trying to conceptualise a social protection that speaks to young people, that includes the wealthy, based on solidarity, able to answer to the new challenges. It should allow to radically ‘rethink social protection’, also going beyond the human rights approach. The starting point is that all people, wherever they live, in whatever country or economic system, in whatever political regime, have the same needs: food, shelter, resources to live, clothing, health care, education,… and from these needs follows that all people need protection. We can speak of ‘commons’, precisely because all share the same needs, even if the answers to fulfilling these needs can be different.

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Protection can be given in two fundamentally different ways: in a competition model, which will lead to protection from other people, taking the form of a police or military state; in a cooperation model which will lead to social protection, it will take the form of economic and social rights. ‘Social commons’, then, are based on our common needs leading to common rights. They confirm the basic equality of all people and contribute to our collective and individual welfare. One of the differences between commons and rights is that commons emerge from collective and participatory action and are evidence of our existence as a ‘political community’ or ‘society’, a ‘we’, at whatever level we want to work. Common needs, then, may lead to divergent ways to satisfy these needs. ‘Social commons’ are more than human rights in that they are based on them but also go beyond, taking into account our diversity, sustaining our being in community, strengthening our coexistence. This first basic principle leads to an important consequence. If the ‘social commons’ are based on our common humanity, social protection will necessarily have to be universal, that is for all people and not only for the poor and vulnerable. This is particularly important in a world with less or no growth. Speaking of ‘social commons’ implies we consider ourselves as being a society, or a political community, again, at different levels, from local to regional to national to continental and global. We are all part of this community and the protection we organise will be valid for all within the relevant community. This not only means all are beneficiaries, it also means all have to contribute. There will be a redistribution of resources, but there should be more than that. All have a responsibility in his/her political community by paying taxes or by doing socially useful and necessary work. Universalism does not mean uniformity, on the contrary. We all have the same rights precisely because we are all different. Social commons are based on this diversity within global equality of rights and will seek for the best methods to satisfy everyone’s needs. This does not mean the social commons ignore class conflict, conflicts between social groups are there and will not disappear, but the objective should not be to eliminate a class, it should be to put minority classes in the minority, respecting their rights. After all, we are the 99%, though this image of course is not very precise. In fact, classes have become very diverse, most countries have middle classes, even if the left has never known how to treat them. But middle classes exist, in divergent ways,

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even if, in Marxist terms, they are not considered a class. Social commons address the rights of all classes and put into place universal but divergent social policies. Box 4.3 Commons Mean Conflict Dario Azzellini, academic, author and activist, USA, at the AEPF Barcelona conference in June 2018 on social commons I think we have to be very clear about what the commons are. Or at least what they are structurally. It does not mean that we can define in every detail what the commons are or what they will be. The commons and the activity of commoning are nowadays brought forward by many social, political and even economic actors. Mainstream research suggests that commons and capitalism can peacefully coexist. It speaks about the absence of conflict and that the rights of the commoners to decide and manage their own commons are neither questioned nor challenged by external authorities, are at the centre of successful commoning. But if we look at history it is important to remember one thing: The commons are not a gift. And even if many researchers tend to describe the commons as working best if there is harmony, there is this big desire for harmony in many alternative circles mentioning the commons, this is not the case. Commons are most likely to be achieved and/or to be preserved in time if we organise and are ready for constant conflict because the history of capitalism is a history of enclosure of the commons. The commons preceded private property and capitalism. Capital needs the commons for the ongoing accumulation by dispossession. A capitalist system will therefore always prey on the commons and at the same time destroy the fundaments for sustainable social practices and ultimately the fundamentals of life itself. (…) We can see that neither are the commons a result of any harmony between the state, the private and the people, nor can they be preserved any better if there is this supposed harmony. The commons, like everything else people have won over the course of the past hundreds of years, are a result of struggles of the people. Moreover, there is an important change over the past decades to take into account. Many got to believe that liberal democracy is granting rights. This is a big misunderstanding. Over a few decades liberal democracy was the frame in which rights could be expanded, always through struggles, there were no rights given for free… they were all won in struggles by huge movements, women’s movements, workers’ movements etc. They were a result of struggles. But this worked only as long as liberal democracy was the frame for modern industrial capitalism to develop.

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We have seen over the past 2-3 decades that liberal democracy is not any more the political model corresponding to capital’s development today. That is why we experience the authoritarian tendencies all over. That is why in so many struggles we have been barely able to preserve the status quo, but not anymore to achieve any progress. The liberal democratic frame is not any more a frame for expanding rights. It turned into a frame of reducing rights, of making them invisible, of creating structures in which people don’t have a say anymore even if people are told that they have. And we can see very well that people are not satisfied. All the ‘anti-representative’ revolts of the past decade were a result of people feeling —in representative democracies as well as in authoritarian regimes t that the proposed model of representation is not democratic. It does not represent them, they do not have a say, they cannot decide on their future. In an interview during my research on the 15-M movement a few years ago, an interview partner said: ‘It’s like a big storm is coming over you and you don’t have any means to influence the situation’. See https://aepf.info/single-post/2018/12/14/Commons-and-Con flict.

Three, talking about universalism obviously brings us to universal human rights. Here, it is important to state that human rights are not natural rights and that they are more than moral rights. They are the consequence of a political decision of humankind to give every human being a basic set of political, civil, economic, social and cultural rights. We should add to this the third generation of rights or solidarity rights, like the right to development, and environmental rights such as water, land, biodiversity and clean air. A problem here is that human rights have been worded as being individual rights. Surely, social and economic rights can be considered as collective rights, whereas solidarity rights clearly go beyond the individual, in the same way as environmental rights. You cannot have development for one individual, as you cannot guarantee a clean environment, water and clean air to one individual, excluding others. However, seeing rights as collective rights is not the same as guaranteeing protection of the collectivity, of the group as such. Individuals emerge from society and societies also do need protection, threatened as they are by neoliberalism that only recognises individuals. Societies also are more than contractual arrangements for satisfying material needs;

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in fact, they are constitutive of the individual and also serve immaterial needs. This is why we need ‘commons’, as a collective arrangement for protecting societies while preserving individual freedom. The political nature of human rights is, therefore, very important because it allows us to go beyond, in order to reflect on commons without delinking from human rights and to protect the society or community, or let us simply say the group of human beings at different levels. The challenge then is to combine the promotion of individual liberty, collective rights and the protection of the collective being. This is at the heart of the social commons project. Four, speaking of universal social protection, based on human rights, as social ‘commons’ obviously implies solidarity. Being universal and multilevel, it implies solidarity also with people we do not know, based on their being humans and part of at least one political community we share, the global one. This organic solidarity—as Durkheim would call it—will be weaker or stronger depending on the level at which it is exercised, from global to local. Local arrangements can be more detailed and specific than global rights can. This implies a political role for public authorities, at the global level, the national level—the state—and the local level. Five, universal rights and organic solidarity imply that we will have to find solutions for all people that are now in the grey zones between social security and social assistance (in the North) or nothing (in the South). This concerns migrant and precarious workers, the self-employed, small and often landless farmers, the majority of women, in short, all victims of the informalisation of labour markets. These solutions, obviously, will differ from country to country. The important thing to note here is that social protection should be built bottom-up, but geared towards convergence and in accordance with what happens in neighbouring countries and elsewhere, in order to avoid social dumping. Chantal Delmas relates this point to the dichotomy in all Western societies, the difference that is made between the private and the public, cutting society in two, with a private life without monetary value and an economic life that gives all its value to work by and for capital. The fact of speaking of social commons is a way to break with this dichotomy, it is to consider that the human is a whole person with certain functions of production and reproduction. The fact of separating the two, leads society to take decisions that go against the needs of a society that lives in the interest of all of humanity and its ecological environment.

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Six and finally, these ‘social commons’ will be transformative. Going beyond assistance, attacking the roots of poverty and inequality, they will have to call to change the economic system and the democratic functioning of society. Social commons cannot be subordinated to an economic system, but will eventually contribute to its shaping. As a cooperative model, it will necessarily need to reconsider economic competition, nationally and internationally. It will also allow for introducing economic practice into the protection system. Social protection, or social commons, should not be limited to social and economic rights, but can also directly tackle the economy as such. Regulation of agricultural prices, accessibility and affordability of land, social services like sanitation and communication, now falling outside the scope of social protection, can be brought within the scope of social commons. Social commons can contribute to preserve society, the ‘we’, by introducing the practices of social innovation, citizens’ participation and decision-making. As was said repeatedly at the Barcelona conference, social commons and economic justice go hand in hand. Of course, this will not be done in one single day, it will be a long-term process in which different steps will follow, learning from the previous steps. In this way, the project for ‘social commons’ also links up with other movements promoting a social and solidary economy, global governance, improving democracy, preserving the environment, etc. It can help to overcome the fragmentation of rights movements, though social commons are a goal in their own right. ‘Social commons’ is a broader concept than ‘public goods’ or even ‘common goods’, which remain ‘goods’ and can thus be commoditised. ‘Public goods’ is an economic concept and is trapped in the dichotomy of state versus market. ‘Social commons’ emphasise the collective dimension of social protection. It refers to that which is common to all people as members of society and to our common life on this planet. In that way, ideally, social commons contribute to social cohesion, by going beyond all divisive elements such as gender, ethnicity, age and religion. Social commons are linked to the common good, as a political and philosophical concept which refers to the community of people and to its well-being. ‘We are what we share’. Our economic and social rights, social protection, is ours! To sum up, social protection systems, broadly speaking, can be considered to be commons as soon as a local community, or a national organisation or a global movement decides to consider them as such, within a local, national or global regulatory framework. If they organise

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direct citizens’ participation in order to find out what these social protection systems should consist of and how they can be implemented, they can shape them in such a way that they fully respond to people’s needs. Considering economic and social rights as commons, then, basically means to democratise them, to state they belong to the people and to decide on their implementation and on their monitoring. This clearly will involve a social struggle. What happened in the past decades was a kind of ‘enclosure’, depriving people from their livelihoods. That is why today, more and more people reclaim their rights and the services they need. Citizens then do not wait for initiatives to be taken by public authorities but take matters into their own hands and organise themselves. Box 4.4 The Commons Are Part of a New Politics Anna Coote, New Economics Foundation, UK, at the AEPF Barcelona conference in June 2018 on social commons The case for claiming and building a social commons has never been more urgent. Far too many people feel dispossessed and betrayed by the established political order. That generates anger and desperation for change. Public institutions no longer inspire much confidence. The collective ideal —which for 60 years has been expressed in terms of public services, funded through taxation, ‘for each according to need’ —is so closely associated with the old order that it is in danger of being swept up in the general opprobrium. If people want to throw out the bathwater of established institutions, we must rescue the baby of shared risks, pooled resources, collective action and mutual aid. And we must make sure that ‘the baby’ can survive and thrive today and in future. This calls for a transformation of the ways in which social resources are defined, controlled, supported and secured. (…) The commons are part of a new politics, which is based not on competition, consumerism and choice, but on caring for each other, pooling resources and sharing risks. Our new politics reasserts the collective ideal, seeks to shift control from markets and state towards people at local level, and values unpaid activities on which the formal economy depends. Our goals are best summed up as: social justice, environmental sustainability, more equal distribution of power. For full paper see https://aepf.info/single-post/2019/01/17/Bui lding-a-new-social-commons.

As was explained by Shalmali Guttal from Focus on the Global South, commons are not only the resources/wealth/spaces/terrains themselves.

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Equally important are the relationships between those involved in the commons. These relationships are expressed as rules, social conventions, norms, customs and customary or vernacular laws, and behavioural patterns. Commons evolve in practice. Peter Linebaugh, the eminent historian and commons scholar talks about ‘commoning’, i.e. dynamic processes and actions that allow commons to be created, adapted and strengthened to last over generations and serve varying needs. These could be indigenous peoples’ ancestral lands, women’s health collectives, urban community gardens, workers’ cooperatives, online knowledge platforms, watershed protection areas, etc. The commons demand conscious, deliberate participation and involve rights as well as responsibilities/obligations. People agree to be part of a commons, to enter into the system of rules (however informal or customary) of a commons. Commons governance entail a delicate balance of rules of access and use, boundaries, limits, inclusions and exclusions that are developed by commons users, and recognised/respected by broader society.

Walking Along New Paths Many questions have not been answered yet, and cannot be answered at the theoretical level. They will have to be looked at in the specific circumstances in which people will work. We necessarily have to look at commons as a political power, as was sustained by Vedran Horvath in Barcelona. Commons are constitutive of the counter power of people, citizens, workers and movements. It is the struggle for the commons, at all possible levels that will shape the movements and generate political power. They are not only an institutional innovation but also a mode of participation. Box 4.5 Let Us Talk Politics Birgit Daiber, former member of the European Parliament, Germany, at the AEPF Barcelona conference in June 2018 on social commons: Different from some of the commons networks in Europe which try to stay outside direct political debates, claiming commons as a fundamental new way of economic and social practice that is not assignable to one or the other political direction, I think commons are potentially an essentially left issue.

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Why? Very simple: The question of property is basic for all left politics from its (organised) beginning in the nineteenth century—until today. In his theory of value, Karl Marx revealed the contradiction between exchange value and use value. And this too is still relevant today. Within these two dimensions of left thinking we find the global movements of the commons. François Houtart pointed out that ‘Concretely, it means to transform the four ‘fundamentals’ of any society: relations with nature; production of the material base of all life, physical, cultural, spiritual; collective social and political organisation and culture. For the first one, the transformation means to pass from the exploitation of nature as a natural resource merchandise to the respect of nature as the source of life. For the second one: to privilege use value rather than exchange value, with all the consequences with regard to the concept of property. The third one implies the generalisation of democratic practices in all social relations and all institutions and finally inter-culturality means to put an end to the hegemony of Western culture in the reading of the reality and the construction of social ethics. Elements of this new paradigm, postcapitalist, are already present all over the world, in many social movements and popular initiatives. Theoretical developments are also produced. So, it is not a ‘utopian vision’ in the pejorative sense of the word. But a clear aim and definition is necessary to organise the convergences of action. It is a long-term process which will demand the adoption of transitions, facing the strength of an economic system ready to destroy the world before disappearing. It means also that the structural concept of class struggle is not antiquated (tax havens and bank secrecy are some of its instruments). Social protests, resistances, building of new experiences are sources of real hope’.

This is the background against which different sectors can be looked at. Two of them need particular attention: the economy and gender relations. Discussions on commons cannot be dissociated from discussions on economic justice, as Alex Scrivener emphasised. We cannot have one without the other. That is why commons also have to be developed at the factory floor and new ways of building enterprises with social and environmental objectives have to be promoted, such as cooperatives and companies in the social and solidarity economy. Ghulam Mustafa Talpur from Pakistan explained how deep the income and wealth inequalities have divided Asian societies. Labour rights are not respected and social commons are badly needed if we want to build economies for the 99%.

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Therefore, we also need tax justice, added Ah Maftuchan from Indonesia. The current international fiscal landscape is unjust, old-school and corrupt. Trade regimes are biased and allow for massive illicit financial flows, mainly from South to North. Large corporations hardly pay any taxes. The global tax system needs to change fundamentally as a global commons. Elisabetta Cangelosi, Alessandra Mecozzi and Nuria Lozano all emphasised the importance of gender relations when talking of social commons. They will play a basic role as the only tools available to erase the thin line between social exclusion and a life with dignity and equality. Work itself can be seen as a social common. Up till now, women’s work has not been recognised and is supposed to produce no value. This point has urgently to be taken up by trade unions. They should invest in care policies as a tool to expand democracies. The gender dimension of commoning is still underexplored while it is worth focusing on this aspect in order to identify the implication of commoning for women’s rights claims. They can challenge the existing power dynamics, they can contribute to the fight against patriarchy and can, in the end, ensure social, economic and gender justice.

The Sun of the Future The ‘social commons’ is a concept and a methodology to envisage a better future for all people and to rethink and repoliticise social protection. It is not a blueprint, it is not a defined project with a clear end result. It is an innovative concept allowing for thinking of other solutions than the one we already have and the ones that are now proposed. Most of all it is an attempt for including all people in a protective environment, making room for diverse interests and alternative lifestyles, taking care of material and immaterial needs, individually and collectively, in a cooperative instead of a competitive way. The concept has no boundaries, it remains open to include more dimensions. It is a long-term objective and a conceptual framework within which we can work at global social convergence as well as at economic and political transformation. It is clear however that, being built bottom-up, the protection system will be different from country to country, from region to region. Respecting a couple of common basic rules and standards, which can be agreed upon at the global or continental level, social commons can take different forms according to the needs and priorities of people.

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Finally, developing social commons will require a long-term educational effort. People should be aware of the interdependence of everyone’s interests. Social commons require another way of looking at the world and at society, of looking at generations and at nature, of looking at life and at the reproduction of life. This means we all have to abandon the economic framework in which our thinking has been moulded for several decades. Social commons is a political and societal long-term project, at the heart of democracy, not of the economy. Our debates on social protection should be de-technologised and repoliticised. The concept of social commons implies much more than the rewording of social protection. It has a new content in that it broadens social protection and introduces new rights and new dimensions. It is based on human rights but also goes beyond them in strengthening their collective dimension and adding the protection of society itself. It implies a multilevel approach and focuses on participation and the existence of political communities at different scales. The ‘social commons’ can become a tool for systemic change, for another economy, based on solidarity, possibly with cooperatives and/or self-management, an economy for life. Many possibilities are there, to be decided on by people. The systemic change should also lead to building another type of state, with responsibility for the welfare of people. At this moment, the ‘social commons’ is nothing more than a conceptual proposal that allows to rethink our social protection systems, to broaden the scope of social, economic and environmental rights, to experiment with new practices, to develop new knowledge and finally to allow for the emergence of new theories and new social protection systems. The outcome is unsure. There are many constraints, mainly at the ideological and political level. Whether social commons will ever be a reality depends on our openness to reflect on innovative solutions, our awareness of our common interests, our potential for making alliances, our strategies for our struggles and our ability to change the power relations. Today, there is only one certainty: our current world of development, industrialisation and consumption has come to a dead end. We are living a civilisational crisis, with serious problems at the political, the economic, the social, the environmental and the cultural levels. We need new directions for the economy and for development. Growth and profits cannot remain the overarching objectives, because they lead to the destruction of life on Earth. With social commons we can work at the extension of our

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freedoms and rights in order to guarantee life and the reproduction of life. We need a new logic, because the old recipes will not help to solve this systemic crisis. We have to come up with something new and we know there is not much time left. It may sound utopian, but a new utopia is indeed what we need. With this contribution, we hope to have given a bit of hope so as to motivate and mobilise for a better world. Because another world is necessary, a world of cooperation instead of competition. A world of emancipation. As Roberto Morea of Transform! Europe so brilliantly said in Barcelona, the commons strategy is a way to rebuild what is our own, what in Italy is called ‘the sun of the future’.

CHAPTER 5

Assuring Affordable, Accessible and Quality Public Services for All: Health, Education, Water, Transport and Energy

While economies are growing, all over the world, societies are not necessarily flourishing. Previous chapters have shown the huge extent of poverty, the growing inequalities and the perverse precariousness of livelihoods. While the world has all the necessary resources for a life of dignity for all, our common world, the air we breathe, the water we drink, our forests and seas, and hence also our human rights to life, food, shelter and freedom are violated. This has to stop. Progress should be for all. Essential for a dignified life are social services: health care, education, water, public transport, housing, communication and so much more, all the things people need for being free of want. One might think that at this level, there are huge differences between Europe and Asia, industrialised countries having developed most of the services people need. This is certainly true, though again, the challenges all countries are faced with are very similar. Today, even in rich countries, neoliberalism hits all sectors, services are privatised, underfunded or simply abandoned. In poorer countries, this same neoliberalism stops governments to develop health care, build schools, provide clean water or organise collective transport. Once more, social movements in both regions have many reasons to work together, exchange experiences and learn from each other. Neoliberal ideology is indeed the root cause of all major difficulties with universal social services at this point in time. Neoliberalism only believes in market solutions, and has redefined the role of states. These © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 F. Mestrum and M. Menon, Redefining the Agenda for Social Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6571-1_5

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are now responsible for promoting and ‘enabling’ markets, for helping people living in poverty—but not all the others—for fair competition, for protecting property rights and consumer rights. As one can see, universalism is not part of it and all societal functions have been abandoned. States are not responsible anymore for social integration, but only for ‘order’ and ‘cohesion’ that is the avoidance of social conflicts. Essential basic services will be very basic indeed and can also be offered by private corporations. Strict budgetary rules are also part of this philosophy and are indeed imposed by almost all international organisations, such as the IMF, World Bank and the EU. While many countries still have not overcome the consequences of the latest economic and financial crisis, they have to restrict their investments and social expenses in order to repay their external debt and respect the internationally agreed rules for budgetary discipline. If you add to this the enormous amounts of illicit financial flows and of tax avoidance which is made easy for transnational corporations, one can see that states have indeed enormous problems to offer their citizens the goods and services they are entitled to. Many governments seek solutions through ‘Private Public Partnerships’ that is agreements with private companies who make the investment and then have governments pay for the facilities they built. Research has indicated this rarely is in favour of public entities, let alone of workers and citizens, and offers very profitable opportunities to corporations. International trade agreements do the rest. As Barry Coates from New Zealand explained at our Manila Conference, international treaties have become a powerful structure for embedding preferences for private sector delivery. They are no longer primarily about tariffs and quotas, but they act as a type of ‘Trojan horse’ to carry provisions that facilitate privatisation, deregulation, and new rights for multinational investors. These treaties aim to increase the profits of foreign corporations, but they strip power away from communities and civil society, restrict governments’ right to regulate and undermine public services, human rights, cultural integrity and the environment. In many cases, governments open up their markets to multinational service providers, such as in the insurance sector, water services, pensions, universities, and so on. Their national entities and services are then, suddenly, faced with international competition. Various services, such as the carefully and patiently built up not-for-profit institutions, sickness

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insurance, for example, will suffer and may have to also switch to a corporate logic in order to survive. The major victims are citizens’ rights. Box 5.1 The Illusion of PPPs David Hall, University of Greenwich, London at the AEPF Manila Conference on Public Services, February 2018 Public–private partnerships are used as a way of raising money for expensive infrastructure projects through the private sector, to avoid any apparent increase in public borrowing. The private partner in the PPP raises money, so the government does not have to—and the bridge, or tunnel, or motorway, or railway, or school or hospital —still gets built. PPPs are actively promoted by a range of international institutions and governments, including the World Bank, G20, EU and donor countries. The first fundamental problem is the illusion that PPPs bring in private money to pay for the infrastructure, so the state can spend its money on something else. But, the opposite is true. The great majority of PPPs rely on a stream of income from payments by the government (for the hospital, school, railway, etc.) i.e. public spending (with the exception of true concessions, where the private company makes all the investment ‘at its own risk’, expecting to get the necessary income from payments made by consumers (e.g. water charges or road tolls). PPPs do not supplement public spending —they absorb it. The second problem is that governments can always borrow more cheaply than companies, so raising money through PPPs is always the worse option. This has been stated very clearly by the IMF: ‘… private sector borrowing generally costs more than government borrowing … This being the case, when PPPs result in private borrowing being substituted for government borrowing, financing costs will in most cases rise…’ In 2011 a representative of the UK private companies involved in PPPs estimated that the average extra cost of private sector capital over conventional borrowing had been 2.2 per cent a year. The Financial Times calculated that this means that the UK taxpayer: ‘is paying well over 20bn£ in extra borrowing costs – the equivalent of more than 40 sizeable new hospitals – for the 700 projects that successive governments have acquired under the private finance initiative…’. Finally, when PPPs are used to finance public investment, the private investors naturally seek to protect themselves against risks and uncertainty. Governments therefore usually provide some form of guarantee, or agreement to carry risks, to provide greater security for the private investor. But, as the IMF again notes: ‘… resort[ing] to guarantees to secure private financing

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can expose the government to hidden and often higher costs than traditional public financing’. The further irony is that, since the financial crisis, state banks and institutions are actually lending money to PPPs, in order to borrow it back from them. Despite the massive promotion effort, PPPs struggle to provide more than a tiny portion of the infrastructure investment in the world. Public finance remains the overwhelmingly predominant model worldwide, providing for well over 90% of infrastructure investment. And many PPPs have been expensive failures. In the UK, the world leader in using PPPs, all the transport PPPs in London have been terminated— representing over 25% of the value of all the PPPs in the UK. The result has been a considerable saving in the cost of borrowing and in efficiency. For full paper see: https://aepf.info/single-post/2018/04/22/Publicservice-economics-and-the-growing-rejection-of-privatisation-in-the-UK.

The main problem with PPPs, privatisations and deregulations is that public objectives, such as citizenship, full employment, the protection of the environment, gender equality and even poverty reduction cannot be pursued anymore. Market rules have to be followed and respected and they are in favour of profit-making, not of the public interest. That is what explains the many negative social consequences, mostly for the most vulnerable people in society. Higher income classes can indeed find what they need on the market, but if they stop to contribute to universal services, these are underfunded, the quality dwindles and finally only a very poor service remains. Basic human rights then are not respected anymore. PPPs investors cherry-pick projects that can be profitable, as Barry Coates explained. They usually cater for urban and middle-class users. Investors create mechanisms that reduce their risks, transferring it to the government. Often, governments agree to confidential guarantees for the exchange rate, level of demand or pricing that create contingent liabilities. These are generally ‘off-balance sheet’ so they are not subject to the debt or spending controls. Trade unions have a specific and important task in this whole sector. David Boys from PSI (Public Services International) was in Manila to explain that their members are currently learning to work with the communities that belong to the public services sector. Universal access to quality public services is the cornerstone of the labour union. At PSI, the

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specific focus is on labour rights and justice. A majority of the members are women who receive very low pay. On the PPPs, many of the labour unions were initially not opposed to privatisation. In the first wave, it promised good management techniques, new tools and good working conditions. But after five years, this was no longer the case. Labour started to be outsourced and made increasingly informal, paid low wages and subjected to poor working conditions. PSI also needs to address the immediate concerns of union members and communities on what to do with climate change in relation to public services. There is a rising number of climate refugees desperate for protection. Who is going to provide protection to the members in the public sector?

From Health to Transport to Energy Different sectors were discussed at our conference in Manila. Vittorio Agnoletto from Italy and Sharad Onta from Nepal looked at the health sector. The neoliberal wave that was generated by Reagan’s and Thatcher’s policies at the beginning of the 80s of the last century did not spare healthcare systems, making them a privileged area for the interests of the market. Privatisation had devastating effects in Greece. In Spain in 2012 the universal system was replaced by an insurance company; in England, with a law that came into force in 2013, the National Health Service was tackled and the production of services was privatised; in Italy, Lombardy, the richest region, a recent right-wing government project is trying to privatise health care to more than three million citizens. The commercialisation of health enhanced by the financial system damages all human beings. The consequences are very clear in the business of drugs. Big pharmaceuticals compete with the military industry for the best dividends to be distributed to its shareholders! It is now a marketoriented approach that is imposed by multinational corporations, while the aims and the needs of public health do not count anymore. Today, all possible means are used to limit access to economically affordable drugs for millions of patients. International commercial agreements worsen the situation, such as the TRIPS agreement on intellectual property. This allows companies to make

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profits that are far higher than the fines they sometimes receive for bribery and bogus advertising. Yet, the TRIPS agreement contains two articles that could make life easier for poor countries: they can allow a country to directly produce drugs without respecting patents if this is the only way to care for its citizens, or they can allow parallel importing. Unfortunately, in their current version, these are only formal statements and they are not really useful. Governments should urgently change and improve these rules. The challenge in fact is to build a long-lasting alliance between a part of the scientific world and social movements because health can have neither master nor borders. Still, for really poor countries, such as Nepal, the problems can be enormous. Even so-called free services can be myths since the cost of services is paid by citizens in different forms of taxes. It is therefore vital to replace the direct payment for services to the private market or to the public service facilities at the time of service consumption. Markets, do not care about equity or justice. Deprivation is the ultimate fate of people who cannot purchase their services. Nepal abolished therefore the user’s fee in essential health services, and the basic health service is now guaranteed by the Constitution. Financial contributions do not come through general taxes anymore, but are based on a family’s income status. The state needs to be able to control the market. Heath is a right of everyone, not the business of a few. As Charles Santiago so eloquently said, today more people die because of the price of medicines than because of their illness! Never before has this become so painfully clear as during the corona crisis.

Water Miriam Planas explained the heroic fight of people in several Spanish cities for the remunicipalisation of water services. In 2018, the first Catalan Association of Cities and Entities for Public Water Management was formed. This initiative originated from a conference in Madrid in November 2016 that for the first time brought together cities, water operators and social movements to work for remunicipalisation in Catalonia. A signature campaign was launched in Barcelona in December 2017. In less than two months, more than 15,000 signatures were collected. The citizens’ initiative also held an assembly of more than 100 people,

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media campaigns, exhibitions, conferences and a solidarity concert. Fifty associations came on board the citizens’ initiative. The resistance of the private sector is strong, so alliances must be strengthened among and between cities, civil societies and water operators. Remunicipalisation must be used as an opportunity to build a new model that secures social control. In the case of water, this should take into account the limits of the ecosystem. In reappropriating the limits to water, the human right to water must be applied. Remunicipalisation is not only about reclaiming public water but also about reappropriating democracy. Alghifarri Aqsa talked about the experience in Jakarta, Indonesia. It was a strategic litigation, used by the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute in the legal fight to reverse water privatisation. In fact, it was a type of lawsuit that aims to bring about change in the substance, structure and culture of the law. This requires several elements: conducting in-depth research, involving affected grassroots communities; and creating a social movement that brings together civil society, undertakes strong campaigning and mobilises the people. Jakarta’s water privatisation was clinched by the World Bank in 1992 when it loaned USD92 million to the state water facility, PAM Jaya, with the condition for the privatisation of the city’s water infrastructure. The succeeding years would see foreign, local private corporations and politically influential, wealthy Indonesians joining forces to invest into the privatisation undertaking. These included Thames Water Overseas, Ltd. (UK), Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux (France), the Salim Group and President Soeharto’s own son. In 1997, Suez and Thames Water signed a 25-year contract with PAM JAYA for the management of Jakarta’s water under the new privatised set-up. A new contract was signed in 2001 between the city-owned PAM Jaya and the concessionaires Suez and Thames; this was done without the approval of the Jakarta governor. Building on many years of struggle, the Peoples Coalition Against Water Privatization in Jakarta (KMMSAJ) through The Right to Water Advocacy Team, filed a Citizens Lawsuit before the Central Jakarta District Court, against President and Vice President of Indonesia, ministry and local government officials, among others. The lawsuit charged them with several offences that included violating the Indonesian Constitution and other laws; nepotism and corruption; constraining the state water facility’s authority to manage water; adversely affecting citizens’ access to water especially the poor who could not afford rising

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water tariffs, and their health because of the poor water quality and losses in state revenues. The first legal battle was won in 2015 at the Central Jakarta District Court, which found merit in the lawsuit, saying that the defendants failed to fulfil the residents’ right to water and also violated the law by handing over the city’s water operation to private companies. As stated in the Indonesian Constitution and the Water Resource Law: ‘Water shall be under the power of the state and be used to the greatest benefit of the people’. However, the defendants appealed and the decision was overturned by a higher court, stating that the plaintiffs did not have legal standing and that the complaint did not fulfil the criteria of a Citizens Lawsuit. The fight is not yet over. The contract is still valid since there is no explicit verdict to annul the contract. This case reveals how citizens are making efforts to save essential natural resources as common goods.

Transport The transport sector was presented by Mladen Domazet, with examples from Croatia. The framing is political ecology—an approach that combines the instruments of ecology and political economy, in order to explain relations between humans and nature. Specific focus is placed on the different outcomes of social and cultural norms that determine how different communities can access nature (resources and services). Transport and other infrastructure are still publicly held in Croatia. However, problems of corruption, inefficiency, poor quality of service, high indebtedness, etc., exist and serve to embolden proponents of privatising governance and public infrastructure through various ways such as through divestment, concessions and public–private partnerships. Transport is one of the targeted sectors. In 2013, the national highways infrastructure was turned over to a private concession. The state guarantees the number of cars on the highways or pays financial compensation. This concession would lock Croatian inter-city transport strategy into road transport for the next 40 years, at the expense of railways, despite environmental, social and financial advantages. A civic coalition of trade unions and CSOs is opposed to this. It managed to collect more than the minimum number of signatures required for a referendum, the constitutional court ruled against holding

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the referendum. Nonetheless, the government was forced to step down in the face of public opposition to the concession plan. It then announced the restructuring of the public company. There are also several cases of democratised railway companies: multistakeholder cooperatives and not-for-profit railway companies. Recommendations put forward for the Croatian railways included developing a long-term transport strategy which includes a railway sector; uniting the three public railway companies into one holding company; creating common benchmarks for the annual assessment of public railway companies: quality of service (speed, comfort, punctuality, safety), physical and social access to railway services, ecological and financial sustainability, gender equality, workers rights, transparency of procurement, participation of citizens and clients; enabling unification of all the railway unions; establishing association of railway users; and changing the composition of the Supervisory Board of the three public railway companies to include additional representatives of workers, users (citizens and industry), external experts, NGOs, etc. Commons-based proposals are needed to fight back the economism logic. There are various alternatives that include various forms of public and civic partnership in action.

Energy Lidy Nacpil from the Philippines explained the struggle for the just and swift transition out of fossil fuels and harmful energy systems into renewable and clean, democratic and efficient systems. There is currently a process of building a peoples’ platform for renewable energy (RE). There are a lot of parameters around RE, one of which is taking into account the impacts of RE on people and communities. In shifting towards RE, it must also be ensured that their interests are not compromised. Development and adoption of RE should be conducted in a manner that does not threaten our other rights. RE should never be corporate-driven. Companies of fossil fuels are beginning to realise that renewable energy could be their source of revenue in the future, therefore they are investing in this today. It also requires changes in infrastructure since RE systems work best when control, management and distribution are decentralised and redistributed under a combination of state and other forms of ownership.

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Soren Becker from Germany explained the European situation. The backbone of industrial capitalism and ‘energopolitics’, the European energy market has traditionally pursued certain energy pathways, such as nuclear (France), coal (Poland), a mix in Germany of nuclear and coal, and early renewables in Denmark. While several changes have been unfolding, which include the intermingling of public and private interests in the field, these have not been enough to overcome privatisation, commercialisation and concentration of the sector in the 80s and the 90s. Energy consumers felt no positive effects on pricing and delivery, and vulnerable groups continued to experience energy poverty. However, from around 2005 onwards, the energy oligopoly began to be perforated partly, by new local municipal or cooperative entities decentrally generating energy or running grids on a local or regional level. Their efforts are around renewable energy projects and can be characterised as collective and political, often small and creative. Specifically, they show collective ownership and political aspirations beyond energy transition, involving cooperatives and communities in the peripheries, North-South exchanges, etc. In this context, the interesting point was the comparison between a cooperative model built around the principle of membership, and the participatory utility, where citizens have more control over the benefits and, most of all, linked to objectives of climate compatibility, social justice and democracy.

Education The colonisation of Southern countries brought with it colonisation of our minds. In India, the ‘oriental plan’ of education was to produce ‘a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’, explained Peter Ronald de Souza from India. Today, there is another wave of colonisation sweeping, that is, a recolonisation of minds by the neoliberal orthodoxy and their proxies. On the new vocabulary of the policy discourse on education, what used to be referred to by the World Bank as ‘democratic citizens’ is now ‘human capital’ (World Bank); development of ‘capabilities’ is now the creation of ‘skill sets’ required by the market. What are the problems of education in India? At the school level, there are many issues such as lack of resources, absenteeism, dropouts, textbooks, safety, public and private schools, etc. These can be generally

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categorised into three—differentiation, discrimination and disempowerment. Issues at the university level involve curricula, technical education, privatisation, etc., but we will mention just one—‘cultural nationalism’ School differentiation is geared towards the production of elites. There are nine types of schools in India from government schools especially for the rural poor to international schools for the elite. Differentiated schools act as filters separating, segregating and marking children. This leads to the loss of generating a democratic culture. It is also responsible for the persistence of inequities and the widespread and complex problems of denying equality. The children in each of these schools occupy different and graded positions as citizens. Discrimination persists against marginal groups such as minorities, women, tribal communities, migrants, etc. Dalit children, for one, experience this in various ways. We in the DIGNIDAD Coalition and SPELL call for ‘Universal, free, quality education for all up to the tertiary level!’ in our eightpoint demands, explained Raquel Castillo, knowing the reality that basic education is not enough for decent work and a life of dignity in the Philippines. This right is far from assured. Republic Act 10931 on Universal Access to Quality Tertiary Education Law passed in 2017 is not universal at all, and therefore not rights-based. Provisions in the draft Implementing Rules and Regulations (IRR) are bound to favour private universities and colleges, as priority will be given to students in cities and municipalities without state universities and colleges. Moreover, the IRR provides for a Tertiary Education Subsidy to be granted to students in private higher education institutions. The purpose of education is to build people’s capacity, and not their human capital, which is the neoliberal paradigm. Developing skills for work as against maximising the potential for decent work is meaningless if this is not embedded in community development plans and ecological industrial policy and plans. Such a transition requires that the principles of solidarity and cooperation overcome the principle of competition; new financing and technology transfer mechanisms be implemented adapted to the needs and trajectories of the different countries; procedures be developed that take into account the needs, uses and specific knowledge of populations; inequalities be reduced.

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Alternatives Two major alternatives to the ‘enclosure’ of public services were discussed: remunicipalisation and social commons. Satoko Kishimoto is the co-author of a major study on the (re)municipalisation of public services. She argues that thousands of politicians, public officials, workers and unions and social movements are indeed working to reclaim or create effective public services. They do this most often at the local level. The research shows that there have been at least 835 examples of (re)municipalisation of public services worldwide in recent years, involving more than 1,600 cities in 45 countries. Remunicipalisation is taking place in small towns and in capital cities across the planet, following different models of public ownership and with various levels of involvement by citizens and workers. Out of this diversity a coherent picture is nevertheless emerging: it is possible to reclaim or build effective, democratic and affordable public services. Ever-declining service quality and ever-increasing prices are not inevitable. More and more people and cities are closing the chapter on privatisation, and putting essential services back into public hands. Contradicting the prevailing narrative that public services are too expensive, local authorities and citizen groups are demonstrating that (re)municipalisation addresses people’s basic needs and our wider social and environmental challenges is possible. Remunicipalisation is rarely just about the change of ownership structure from private to public. It is fundamentally about (re)creating better public services that work for all. This includes restoring a public ethos, universal access, affordability and ensuring transparency and accountability towards elected officials and citizens as opposed to focusing only on the most lucrative parts of the service. Remunicipalisation is a local response to austerity. Energy (311 cases) and water (267 cases) are the sectors providing the most recent examples of (re)municipalisation. Roughly 90% of (re)municipalisations in the energy sector took place in Germany (284 cases), the country famous for its ambitious Energiewende policy. Water remunicipalisation has occurred most in France (106 cases), the country with the longest history of water privatisation and home to leading water multinationals Suez and Veolia. Remunicipalised public services often involve new forms of participation for workers and citizens. For example, the new water operators in Paris, Grenoble and Montpellier are making decisions together with

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citizens about the reform and operation of water services. In Norway, tripartite cooperation in which trade unions, the municipality and local politicians dialogue to solve workplace issues have a proven track record in improving public services. The democratisation of public services is also at the centre of the remunicipalisation movement in Spain, which was born in the aftermath of the global financial crisis from the resistance against evictions and water and electricity cuts. Finally, remunicipalisation is often a first step towards creating the public services of the future: sustainable and grounded in the local economy. Inspiration can be found in the European towns and villages aiming for ‘zero waste’ with their remunicipalised waste service, or providing 100% local, organic food in their remunicipalised school restaurants. The diverse forms of public–public partnerships are flourishing. We see it in the way that municipalities and citizens have joined forces in Germany and beyond to push genuine energy transitions. The new Nottingham municipal energy company catalysed similar experiences in other cities, and eventually resulted in a common partnership. The French and Catalonian networks of public water operators pool their resources and expertise, and work together in dealing with the challenges of remunicipalisation. The resurgence of (re)municipalisation provides an important window of opportunity for citizens and workers to regain the democratic control that has been eroded by privatisation over the past decades. Evidence is building that people are able to reclaim public services and usher in a new generation of public ownership. Fortunately, the momentum is building, as diverse movements and actors join forces to bring positive change in our communities. In total agreement with this alternative, Francine Mestrum from Brussels takes this one step further. This is, again, where the commons come in. Because what is happening is that all the things that once were considered to be our collective ownership, our natural resources, the planet itself, but also our economic and social rights with our public services, everything that people need to survive, is taken away. In the Middle Ages, we called this ‘enclosures’, to take away people’s livelihoods, the current logic remains the same. And so, naturally, people react and say: stop! This is ours! This is our collective ownership. We want to decide on it. We want land and schools

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and doctors and trains and buses, because we are citizens and we pay taxes. The crisis we are living today, in Asia as well as in Europe is in fact a crisis of reproduction. Employment increasingly fails to sustain livelihoods. Wages are far too low, people are not allowed to regain strength for working another day or week, people cannot count anymore on affordable schools and health services. Just think of some examples: fisheries are now in the hands of corporations so that poor fisherfolk have no food anymore; farmers lose their land and have to work on bio-factories which produce food or flowers for the North; doctors prefer to work in privatised hospitals that are unaffordable for poor people; some poor people now receive a small grant in cash in order to pay for the privatised schools of their children… That is why, again, people reclaim all these goods and all these public services. They are indispensable for production as well as for reproduction. They are our commons and we should not allow these new enclosures. These goods should not be taken away from people, since they are essential for survival. Social commons are basically about collective ownership and about democratisation. We know that states are not necessarily democratic and they have a very negative role in the current neoliberal policies of privatisation. Municipalities are not necessarily more democratic, though the opportunities for citizens to play their role is somewhat easier. What social commons do is going beyond state and market, and going beyond private and public. That does not mean without states and markets, or without public or private property. That is not central for social commons. What is central is that we will always need states, for guaranteeing our human rights, for organising redistribution, for enforcing security or anti-discrimination rules. But that state will be different from what it is now and will be at the service of its citizens. Markets should not be banned, we have to exchange goods after all, but they should not follow a liberal market logic of exchange value. In a system of social commons use value comes first. Commons cannot be commodities, though they can have a price. Private ownership can be excluded as far as possible, though we may not be able to make it disappear. What is important here, is that this ownership does not give absolute rights to its owner, decisions will have to be shared with others.

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What is central for social commons in general and public services as commons in particular is the role of citizens and their organisations like trade unions. Commons always are the result of a process of shared decision-making, at whatever level you want to work—local, regional, national or global. Decisions concern the responsibility citizens want to take for the use of a good—water, health care, public transport, education … whatever—how to regulate that use and how to monitor it. Commons then are part of the solution for inequality, and they are part of the mechanisms we need for reproduction, an essential element of production. This democratic, participatory and emancipatory way of organising the public services we all need allows protecting individuals as well as society itself. Neoliberalism is destroying societies by solely focusing on individuals and interpersonal competition. Shifting the focus to the collective dimension of our societies, beyond communities and families, is a highly political task Therefore, commons can be a strategic tool to resist neoliberalism, privatisation and commodification. With public services as commons, we can fight inequality. Applying the principles coherently and consequently, this will change the power relations, it will lead to changing the economic system, which is far more difficult to do from without. Social commons are indeed transformative, because you cannot have a preventive healthcare system if people have no right to water, if corporations are allowed to use toxic substances, if car companies are allowed to pollute the air we breathe. Pursuing on these points, it is easy to see there is a direct link between social justice and environmental justice. Both make it possible to preserve the sustainability of life, of humans, of society and of nature. But obviously, from whatever way you look at it, funds will be needed. That is why this whole discourse on public services cannot be delinked from the one on fair taxes. Mae Buenaventura from Manila drew the picture for Asia, but the one on Europe is not different. It has grown urgent to effectively plug the loopholes through which revenues, both actual and potential, are being siphoned out of developing countries and into the private coffers of corporations and ultra-wealthy, politically influential elites through legal and illegal means. The first problem that needs to be tackled is the one concerning illicit financial flows (IFFs)—negative flows of financial resources that are largely legal but highly iniquitous. They resulted in US$620 billion–970 billion bleeding out of the developing world as of 2014. Similarly damaging

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are illicit inflows (technical smuggling) estimated at $1.4–$2.5 trillion in 2014 (Global Financial Integrity). Combined, illicit outflows and inflows accounted for 14.1–24.0% of total developing country trade over 2005– 2014. An average of 87% of illicit financial outflows over the 2005–2014 period was traced primarily to fraudulent mis-invoicing of trade. The second major problem is corporate tax abuse. Profit shifting and tax dodging (evasion and avoidance) by corporations is said to cost all countries an estimated total of $600 billion in annual revenue losses. But the impacts are differentially heavier for developing countries. As a share of GDP and total tax revenues, the most intense losses were suffered by low- and lower middle-income countries, and across sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean and South Asia. Finally, there are the tax havens/financial secrecy jurisdictions, many of which belong to the OECD (e.g. Luxemburg, Liechtenstein, etc.). Almost 70% of world trade occurs via MNCs, and many of them use subsidiaries in tax havens where corporate income tax is nil or very low and where offshore accounts are assured an almost impenetrable cloak of financial secrecy beyond public scrutiny, national regulation and law enforcement. Governments enter without the benefit of public debate and consultation into Bilateral Tax Treaties (BTTs), of which the most damaging to the sovereign authority of taxation are BTTs with developed countries. Developing countries (investment-receiving) give up more of their sovereign taxing authority than developed countries (investmentsending).

Conclusion As is stated in the Manila Declaration, one very clear message came out of this conference: public services should be in the hands of public authorities and citizens and be fully and exclusively committed to serving the society as a whole. Citizens’ demands for public partnerships can now be heard very clearly all over the world. The privatisation efforts of the past decades have failed. Many essential services are not affordable for the majority of poor people, quality is substandard, employment and wages are undermined. Movements of citizens and residents are getting stronger to reclaim what is theirs: universal quality of fundamental infrastructures and services in the public interest. To make this possible, governments will have

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to seriously question, in a participatory process, their macro-economic framework and their tax and public spending policies, as well as their unjust laws, so as to make financial resources available. Whether these services are provided by states, municipalities or people’s organisations, the way they are conceptualised, regulated and monitored is crucial for their success. Real participatory democracy is therefore essential. Destroying public services is destroying the very society that makes us what we are. Preserving and promoting public services is promoting citizenship and the sovereignty of the people.

CHAPTER 6

Labour

There were very good reasons for the Social Justice Cluster of AEPF to organise a conference on labour rights in Nepal in April 2019. First of all, Nepal is a young democracy, having known a long civil war and a revolution, with currently a progressive government of two merged radical left-wing parties. This government is now struggling to introduce the most urgent measures to achieve a certain degree of social justice. Secondly, 2019 is the Centenary of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the only tripartite international organisation whose Constitution starts with a Preamble saying that ‘lasting peace is not possible without social justice’. For AEPF this was an excellent opportunity to meet simultaneously with the Peace and Security Cluster and confirm our agreement with this crucial statement. The opening statements and keynote addresses were given by Ms Dagmar Walter, regional Director of ILO and by the former Prime Minister of Nepal, Mr Pushpa Kamal Dahal or ‘Prachanda’, a national hero.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 F. Mestrum and M. Menon, Redefining the Agenda for Social Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6571-1_6

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Box 6.1 Why Social Justice and Peace are Interlinked Anuradha Chenoy, India, at the AEPF Nepal conference on labour, April 2019. There are good reasons to recall words from the constitution of the ILO a hundred years after its formation: Social justice and peace are interlinked. The ILO’s preamble in the post-World War I said this because of the understanding of the war as collective human tragedy, material and ecological waste. Post-war peace could be sustained only with social justice as opposed to retribution and new identity nationalisms. There was an awareness that cohesive societies are based on rights of labour. Later on, there was a need to isolate and politically defeat the growing fascist right wing, and its support by the masses in the coming 1920s and 30s. Despite its inherent flaws, there was also a need to strengthen the League of Nations. Contrary to the vision of the ILO, the 1920s witnessed a rise of identity nationalisms, especially in Central East Europe, there was an increasing oligarchic control of industrial production, a dispersed and disorganised labour force, destruction of nascent multilateralism and ultimate disintegration of the League of Nations, collective security was undermined. A xenophobic right and militarisms were on the rise, liberal ideas were shrinking. The coalition of centre, liberals and conservatives fractured. The liberals and centrists did not take the right extremists seriously, they used appeasement and thought they could be used strategically against the Left (statist, organised and unorganised) and to further their own interests. As Gramsci wrote in the 1930s, the political centre lost its capacity of organising and guiding the proletariat. In these circumstances the fascists were able to conduct coups and rule even with ‘extra-legal organisations’. The defeat of fascist forces in the Second World War laid the foundation for liberal politics and state welfarism that re-adjusted the dominant forms of finance capital. Liberal democratic states formed a hegemonic bloc/collaboration between the conservatives and liberals, based on a market economy, hawkish foreign policy and nuclear militarism. Welfare policies with social justice and civil rights provided both legitimacy and material base to this social entente. Despite limitations this entente provided the base for freedoms and strengthened the capitalist order. The post-war years saw peace in the West with Cold War, rise of US militarism, de-colonisation, proxy and civil wars in the emerging Global South. Internationally, despite the dominantly bipolar world and Cold war, multilateralism, in the form of UN and Bretton Wood institutions, provided international institutions that could be used for the expansion of capitalism, the decade of de-colonisation,

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a north-south dialogue, and later the peaceful disintegration of the Soviet Union. Back to the 1930s? There are similarities between the 1930s and the current right-wing populisms or populists authoritarianisms: oligarchic control of finance capital on economic and political relations, economic crises of unemployment, austerity, informalisation of labour in neoliberal practice, the break in the consensus between the liberals and conservative hegemonic block. Conservatives are accommodating and normalising this populism. About the 1920s, one argument is that the liberals and mainstream conservatives accommodated and normalised populism. There was an appeasement in both domestic and foreign policy, until German aggression. Also, we now see the strongest attack on liberal values, universal rights and social protection since the 1930s. There also is a return of the strong charismatic leader that directly represents ‘the will’ of the people. The new authoritarians spin a narrative that national culture is in decline and geopolitics is defined in terms of religion/racial civilisational wars, building on Islamophobia. Multilateral institutions are delegitimised, there is decreased faith in collective and common security and important treaties are coming apart. Regional alliances are stagnating, polarising, declining for example SAARC, AAU, EU. In Africa the ‘new nationalism’ is without Pan-African dimension. Right-wing populism in Europe wants to withdraw from both EU and Nato. COVID-19 has deepened these dark discourses in states with right-wing leaders. There are also differences: despite electoral victories there is a sizeable opposition to right-wing populism within each state. Liberal, autonomous institutions have had a longer, more resilient and broader base with greater capacity to fight back. But this depends on each political culture, and collective resistance. In some states, conservatives accept it and make alliances. In others liberals and left have resisted and engaged in a fight back, for example in the US, West Europe and even India. In yet others centre liberals become more authoritarian as in France. There are threats from non-state actors and threats without borders, think of climate change, ecological decline and global warming. New wars are regional conflicts, internal security and conflicts; militarism and militarisation have taken on new directions. Global policies to address global issues from climate to people’s welfare, are questioned and blocked. But multilateralism has had longer life, more experience, and benefitted many regions. New geopolitics are developing regional hegemons, with client and rogue actions. Most of right-wing populist leadership is opposed to social justice measures: Trump cut into the medicare put in by Obama. What is the outcome of these policies?

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Right-wing populisms are based on inequality, use that anxiety to mobilise but have no capacity to address it, they are creating a new poor. These are the migrants, minorities and people who are different. There is increased militarism, surveillance, austerity to be borne by all but impoverishment in borne by the new poor. The outcome is not a world war, but reducing democracy, increasing social conflict, poisoned civil life, continuous anxiety about difference, false majoritarianism, fewer rights, new inequality and churning of elites. There is also resistance: Why is the connection between social justice and peace necessary and what alternative? In this opposition are social movements, women’s groups, ecological movements, civil society, minorities, excluded and liberals. The point is to collaborate with liberals on civil and political rights, on deepening democracy, saving institutions, understanding dissent. It is necessary to critique liberals on their alliance with neoliberals, and on their willingness to live with ethnic-based demographic change for the sake of more reform. What we need is people-led multilateralism, social justice based on a democratically approved global social charter. See https://aepf.info/Why-Peace-Social-Justice-InterLinked.

Labour rights are part and parcel of social protection and social and economic rights are part and parcel of universal, indivisible and inalienable human rights. We do not have to look for arguments, then, to strongly defend these rights which are now threatened. This chapter can be started in the same way as the previous ones i.e. to state that the initial position of Europe and Asia is very different, but that the challenges faced today are very similar: un- and sub-employment, a growing informal sector, more and more precariousness. Labour rules are much stronger in Europe, but the new developments on the labour market have huge consequences, especially for young people. What is slightly different in 2019 compared to previous years is the worsening of the climate crisis, with severe consequences all over the world, and also the re-emergence of authoritarian populist movements and even governments. Even if some of them do promote ‘social’ measures, these are mostly of the ‘traditional value’ kind and far from being emancipatory. Both developments mean that the space for progressive social movements is shrinking and that democracy will have to be a hard fight for achievement.

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What is similar in Asia and Europe is the growing informalisation of labour markets, starting from a much higher level in Asia than in Europe, the growing precariousness of livelihoods, in Europe especially in the services sector, in Asia mostly in the agricultural sector. In both continents, trade unions are weakened and lose members because of threats and fear. The COVID-19 Pandemic has revealed the weakness of this model of growth. A new element that has to be looked at is the future of work, because of rapidly developing robotisation and the development of digitalised services.

Asia, Europe and … China Christophe Aguiton from France gave an overview of the situation in Europe. Social spending is high in Europe, up to around 30% of GDP (without education) in the West and around 15% in Central Europe. This does not mean there is no poverty, precariousness or inequality. The benefits of globalisation largely went to the rich. We also see industry to be dwindling (less than 20% of the labour force) and agriculture with less than 3%. Services on the other hand take up more than 70% of the labour force, though it is a dual labour market with lots of vulnerable jobs at the lower side. Unemployment remains high, especially in countries of Southern Europe. As for Asia, as René Ofreneo from the Philippines explained, after the crisis of 1997–1998 and after the global crisis of 2008 and the World Bank’s privatisation efforts, a strong demand for social protection was heard. Thailand introduced some exemplary policies, though in most countries and because of budgetary problems, governments adopted Private–Public Partnerships. In many cases, however, this led to private monopolies with dire social consequences. Due to high urban unemployment and the displacement of landless rural poor people, migration remains very high. Special attention went to the two most important Asian countries: India and China. Ravi Srivastava was our speaker for India. Structurally, India is leapfrogging the manufacturing stage, which is, stagnant at around 15%, while services are now about 60% of GDP. The informal economy is very important and rising, with about 85% of employment in agriculture or

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in enterprises with less than 10 workers. There is also a rising share of circular/seasonal and cross-border migrants. The value of the labour share in the economy is falling, while the concentration of capital is rising. The Supreme Court has implied a whole bundle of human rights out of Article 21 of the Constitution and given an interesting interpretation of ‘The right to life’: ‘We think that the Right to Life includes the right to live with human dignity and all that goes along with it…. The magnitude and content the components of this right would depend upon the extent of development of the country, but it must, in any view of the matter, include the right to the basic necessities of life. This now includes the right to clean and hygienic environment and above all, the right to live with basic dignity’. Nevertheless, nearly 93% of the workforce is informally employed and formal social security measures cover only about 7% of the workforce. Box 6.2 A Rights-Based Social Protection Floor for India? Ravi Srivastava, India at the AEPF Nepal Conference on labour, April 2019 The SPF takes a life cycle approach to social protection, paying special attention to vulnerable groups. It should comprise at least four basic social security guarantees: Access to a nationally defined set of goods and services , constituting essential health care, including maternity care, that meets the criteria of availability, accessibility, acceptability and quality; Basic income security for children, at least at a nationally defined minimum level, providing access to nutrition, education, care and any other necessary goods and services; Basic income security, at least at a nationally defined minimum level, for persons in active age who are unable to earn sufficient income, in particular in cases of sickness, unemployment, maternity and disability; and Basic income security, at least at a nationally defined minimum level, for older persons.

Chris King Chi Chan and Loong Yu AU from Hong Kong gave more insight in the situation in China and the role of new initiatives on labour rights and social protection. Xi Jinping’s ‘Chinese dream’ is to become by 2021 a ‘moderately prosperous society’, by 2021–2035 ‘a global leader in

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innovation’ and by 2035–2049 ‘a global leader in national strength and international influence’. Today, China is the world’s second largest economy, the world’s largest trader in merchandise, the world’s largest manufacturer, the second largest recipient of FDI and fifth largest contributor of FDI. China possesses the largest foreign exchange reserves, it is the largest foreign holder of US government bonds, the largest total energy consumer and more than half of its domestic consumption of oil relies on imports. China has the world’s largest number of millionaires and billionaires. China’s spectacular growth enabled it to evolve into a global power which brings it into conflict with US. It is still much weaker than US but it is already big enough to challenge the unipolar world we have since 1989. How this conflict will evolve is still unknown. To some extent it may give smaller countries more leverage in its relation with US and EU, but it may also work otherwise. When two elephants fight it is the grass below which suffers first. We have to provide a concrete analysis on each case. There is little unemployment, but social protection policies have been frozen and wage rises have slowed down. With the emergence of a platform economy, labour is tertiarising and informalising rapidly. Workers have all rights on paper, but in practice there is no freedom of association. There has been a sharp rise in labour protests and peasants’ protests against land grabbing. There has also been a major decline in the labour share of incomes, major income gains going to the 10% richest part of the population. The control over civil society has been strengthened. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is mainly due to a crisis of overproduction and half of overseas investments are not profitable. China wants to become a global leader by 2050 but its combination of neoliberalism and state capitalism is now leading a race to the bottom with a repressive labour regime. The BRI has to be judged case by case as it spans over 60 countries. It is worrying though as there is little transparency and hence it is difficult to ascertain the official claims. Despite its rhetoric, the Chinese government’s agenda is obviously commercial and geopolitical. Smaller countries have to first satisfy China’s interest even if they may benefit from Chinese investments. Today, the climate crisis and the new technological revolution could make an end to ‘Factory Asia’. What is needed is a transition programme with the fiscal space needed for it, so that the neoliberal straitjacket can be abandoned. The region needs a new paradigm for regional and global integration.

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Productive Transformation In Europe as well as in Asia the productive transformation of the economy and the future of work needs to be followed closely. An industrial sector is necessary, also from the perspective of state power since, along with trade policies, they determine the sovereignty each country and people has. As for the digital revolution, there are two major trends: planetary boundaries, which go beyond simple CO2 emissions and the end of privatised Keynesianism. That was the essence of Roland Kulke’s message. The digital revolution concerns the merger of the internet and manufacturing systems. Its goals are: Higher workers exploitation—since Europe has strict rules, many companies move to China, controlling workers in three dimensions (with wristbands monitoring your movements); control of each single produced good along the value chain: chipping each item to connect it to workers; and autonomous production, with Artificial Intelligence (AI). Hence, strikes would be neutralised. What would the labour movement then do? All this leads to further pressure on extractivism in the Global South, plus rising energy demands and longer value chains with more transport. In the first World, it means an enhanced concentration of productive assets in the Centre (Germany vs Italy), while in the third world it leads to premature deindustrialisation—garment sector and AI. Anita Gurumurthi brilliantly explained the developments in Asia. In the IT sector, we witness a platformisation of the economy. Amazon is a good example since it didn’t start as the selling of books, but as a tool to replace retailers, creating the market, not occupying a single marketplace. It created a monopoly, which is the end game, creating shareholder value. As its first strategy, it is involved in multiple, unrelated businesses, like making movies, fashion, selling books, etc. Each part of the business strengthens another section. It gathers information which it can use to sell its own goods. As a second strategy, with Alexa, it becomes omnipresent. All this negatively impacts on jobs. Other businesses shut down, and also hawkers in India express concerns whether they will be pushed out of business. This also happens in the tourism sector, with Trip Advisor. It leads to increasing economic concentration and unequal distribution of value. It primarily benefits the US and Chinese platform corporations who enclose and capture these value networks and are engaged in a brutal and sophisticated regime of value extraction that squeezes the livelihoods

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of the most marginalised. What is often sidestepped in mainstream discussions on the future of labour is that in fact, we are facing a crisis of value. A new model of production and circulation of value is emerging in which platforms are a post-market phenomenon defining market exchange. What is the role of civil society? We can’t continue as before. How to hold transnational digital corporations accountable? New labour standards have to be updated, as well as labour laws. We need to stop the free flow of data and protect. People can claim their data as theirs, like New Zeeland farmers saying they ‘own’ their data, which is a new perspective. Three practical things to do. First, to lobby politicians to stay out of any form of e-commerce in trade negotiations; secondly, do mass education; and thirdly, dedicate budgets for alternative platforms, either from public sector or cooperatives. Reflecting on the future of work, Thomas Coutrot from France asked if a good idea would not be to think of liberating work to heal the world and develop a politics for living labour. Living labour is the big strength of the left. They bring death, we have to bring life. There is a polarisation of jobs, with increasing informalisation and precarious types of work. The routinisation of labour implies lean production, standardisation and control, as well as ‘bullshit’ jobs doing useless things while being well-paid or invisible work. From the left, we present parallel resistances: against inequality (like Indignados, Occupy, gilets jaunes…), against the ecological demise, against the degradation of work. Could we find a common cause between the parallel resistance movements? Themes like living wage, decent work, or living labour? What is work and how to define it? Work should be to disobey, when workers are confronted with an unpredictable world. These unforeseen aspects are what dead labour cannot deal with. It requires commitment, creativity, etc. The social power of living labour is necessary for profit, not controllable by capital and vital for workers. It is empowered by our aspiration for autonomy and our need to defend life. What could these politics of living labour contain? What matters for us in work? As workers, but also as citizens, humans, inhabitants of the earth? For our health, for democracy, for nature?

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If we manage to position these questions at the centre, we could build a natural convergence of these struggles, based on common interests. This would lead to liberating work in defence of life. For instance, the movement of youth for climate is a major opportunity for workers and unions to create a new common agenda around living labour. Looking more particularly to the Dalit people in Nepal, Bk Ganesh noted that the new Constitution provides a lot more rights for Dalits. Still, many problems remain. Dalits are underrepresented in politics, with no Dalits occupying major posts inside political parties or commissions, nor in parliamentarian bodies and administrative bodies or the judiciary. 44% of Terai Dalits are landless and 15% of Hill Dalits. The traditional skills discriminate against the Dalits. In the social and cultural sector, data show that Dalit literacy rate is only 33%, compared to the national average of 54%. Even though there is democracy and formal human rights, these problems still prevail. How can digital democracy serve and include Dalits, how to provide positive discrimination? Their movement sees three solutions: strengthening organisations of Dalits, promote grassroots education and promote mutual understanding among Dalits, because many differences exist among Dalits.

What About Reproduction? Reproduction is seen as the entire cycle of activity generating and regenerating the human for the market and the social world, explains Federica Giardini. Reproduction takes place in post-patriarchal times. It is the blind spot of the economic and political tradition of western modernity. It is on this blind spot that the conquest of capitalism that is inequality, exploitation and injustice reconstitutes itself. The reproductive paradigm stresses how debates in the global North and West about care do not confront the economic effects neoliberalism produces on a grand scale, nor do they confront the criteria of valorisation and depreciation of such activity. ‘Taking care of the world’ must be taken literally. It means taking on the harsh materiality of the maintenance of living, positioning oneself on the grand scale in which we live; reappropriating measures against self-commodification or commodification of the other, ‘the cleaning lady and the caregiver’. It means therefore generating and orienting the conflictual practices aimed at reappropriating the means

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of the quality of living. ‘Is the appreciation enough for me – an eventual gratitude, the recognition and the fantasy of a promise for the near future in return for what I have done – when nobody cares how I pay the rent?’ In welcoming the disappearance of the partition between domestic activity and productive activity, the reproductive paradigm redefines everything that went under the title ‘labour’. Measure, value, salary, lifetime, productive time, needs and consumers, public and private virtue— these were arranged in a precise social organisation which no longer exists. We consider the critical paradigm of ‘commodification’, the extension of value to all social relations, understood as the monetary value attributed to an exchange, insufficient for describing the present transformations. The application of value and non-value is not limited to monetary measure, prices or wages, but implies a wide array of techniques of communication and techniques of the self that shape our perceptions of what a thing is worth. The reproductive paradigm interrogates citizenship and its institutions in the European welfare state tradition, as they are no longer founded on the constitutional pact and the sexual and national division of labour. In this sense we read the theories of governmentality: the generation and regeneration of relations and the necessary resources for it, in a framework that is not in the hands of the agents of reproductive activities. The transition from the citizen/worker model to the citizen/consumer/customer one means the transition from a welfare regime, based on the enforcement of social and fundamental rights, to social policies intended as the ‘management’ of social problems. As subaltern ‘customers’ and/or ‘needy’, we are deprived of full subjectivity and self-determination. Not the relations that provide for the beauty and use of the place in which we live together, but the criteria of security and the stipulations of an insurance contract in case of an accident. In assuming the disappearance of the partition between public and private, the reproductive paradigm analyses the expansion of the administrative system in which our lives are inscribed, and to which they are subjected. The progressive reforms of public administration are to be understood as the extension of reproductive activities to everyone. In the administrative-reproductive paradigm, social rights are transformed into services, characteristics, and products of activity that should be constantly repeated, individually and beyond public-state institutions: from social services and support to instruction, to primary social resources: the choice

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of rates for water, gas, communication, as well as for research, analysis, and access to home, school… Taking the word feminist in this context means therefore rethinking the economic, cultural, natural-material, social, juridical, political. These are not separate fields but are interwoven inside a comprehensive and complex valorisation process for which responsibility must be taken. Thinking about liberation from the measures that institute oppression is not enough; we need to identify new measures, new regulative forms capable of returning value to our lives, here and now. Reproduction, then, must be seen as a paradigm. Coming back to the practical level of gender relations in a poor country, Prabha Pokhrel of Nepal explains how the position of women has been markedly improved since 2015. Political access increased to 33% in all state machinery including parliament; there is a national women commission, equal rights to lineage and property, fundamental rights, punishment for gender violence and guaranteed presence of one woman among two at the highest level of political positions in Nepal. Seventy percent of the active labour force are home-based workers, of which three quarters are women. They have real problems in accessing the existing social security schemes because they work on their own account. Emigration is very high, and so are remittances, which contribute to more than 30% of Nepal’s GDP. Caste also remains something with deep influence on the status of women. As for Vietnam, many problems remain for migrant women, whether they work in the formal or the informal sector. Migrants account for 13.6% of Vietnam’s population, 17.3% of whom are in the age range 15– 59 years old. Many workers are unaware that they have the rights and the power to practice human and labour rights as well as collective bargaining rights. There are no specific laws and policies on social protection for migrant workers in general and women migrant workers in particular. The current social protection policies of Vietnam government are still deployed in accordance with the permanent residence, regardless of the increasing number of migrants. Moreover, women migrant workers in the informal sector do not have either any representative organisations to participate in or chances to stand up to protect their rights, they do not have labour contracts and so cannot apply for compulsory social insurance.

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For women migrant workers formal sector work is relatively stable, they have an average income and enjoy social insurance policies with health insurance. It will therefore be necessary to raise awareness on social security rights and establish women’s groups for migrant workers working in the informal sector, living in boarding houses, so that they can set up migrant workers union or union for this group of female workers to protect and enjoy benefits when having a representative organisation. Also, statistical work on migrant workers has to be strengthened to obtain data to identify and manage migrant workers in Vietnam. These stories reveal the similarities in problems and objectives in both the South and North.

How the Global Charter Can Help Social protection systems, then, are extremely important as explained by Bismo Sanyoto of the Asian Network on the Rights to Social Protection. ANRSP works with similar principles as the one mentioned in the Global Charter (see Chapter 3), actively participates in the Yearly International Labour Conference in Geneva, in AEPF People’s Forum and ASEAN’s People’s Forum. It organises every year a regional workshop on social protection. Box 6.3 What Are the Transformative Elements in a Rights-Based Social Protection? Ravi Srivastava, India at the AEPF Nepal Conference on labour, April 2019 The broader issue—whether a rights approach is transformative or how can a transformative agenda of social protection be conceptualised and advanced in a neoliberal regime pushing the other way—remains an open one. The extension of rights-based social protection programmes as well as nonrights-based programmes in India shows an interesting interplay between a neoliberal economic order, seeking democratic legitimacy through populism, and civil society pressure. The United Progressive Alliance in India (UPA I) government accommodated civil society pressure through a series of protracted negotiations.

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The National Democratic Alliance (NDA II, with Prime Minister N. Modi) sought to delegitimise civil society but ultimately accommodated democratic pressure to some extent. The overall impact has been positive on human poverty and mildly redistributive (although masked by increasing inequality). However, governments have tried to undermine legitimate rights in several ways, and the NDA government has been more aggressive on this front. Although rights-based social protection programmes like NREGA did give some fillip to grassroots organising, on the whole, the relationship between rights and organising is not clear.

CHAPTER 7

The Right to the City and the Right to Housing

Housing Is Part of Social Protection The basic call of the COVID-19 lockdown was: stay home, stay safe. This assumes that one must have a home to be safe in. Millions of people do not have the luxury of a safe and secure home. For them, the lockdown was nothing short of a disaster. In India, for instance, with its vast population of poor and marginalised, millions of people working as daily wage earners, found themselves on the streets, unable to pay the meagre rents for their meagre rooms. Millions walked hundreds of kilometres to their villages, carrying their children, elderly and belongings. Many were confined to overcrowded accommodations which were liveable only if they could use the outside as common spaces, which they could no longer do. For those who lived in the sprawling slums, physical distancing is a laughable notion. In all those countries with little or no social protection, or access to food and health care, it became painfully evident that health care should be accessible for all, and that safety for one depended on safety for all. In Singapore, the country shut down, lockdown measures were in place, they thought they had controlled the spread. But they forgot about migrant workers housed in overcrowded accommodation. The government had never bothered much with them, and they paid. The virus was resurrected, and they had to lock down again and start the health protocols again. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 F. Mestrum and M. Menon, Redefining the Agenda for Social Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6571-1_7

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Informality for Profit In urbanised societies, there have always been a large migrant population, people coming to work in the cities, consisting of rich, middle class and poor. Most are poor, coming into cities because of a host of reasons, but mainly poverty, agrarian distress, or projects that have displaced them for their homes. In the early days of urbanisation and city building, these migrants put down roots and stayed. Today in most of the developing world, changing economies have created the most disparate and unequal society we have ever seen. The destruction of agrarian economies, impoverishment and separation from land and livelihood, have driven huge numbers of poor migrants to not just nearby towns but to faraway cities in search of livelihood. They live a precarious existence. Being deprived of an income for a few days would be difficult. If it extends to months, starvation and desperation set in. The urban industrial economy is in crisis, with globalisation and neoliberal economic policies and the ‘race to the bottom’ in terms of wages, in order to survive and compete in a globalised market. Most enterprises have reduced the number of formal workers, and contracted out large areas of their operations, in order to reduce the cost of labour. This has meant job losses for urban ‘formal’ workers and a huge informal sector has come into existence, living and working on meagre incomes and lack of access to the basic conditions of life. The most profitable industries depend most on informal ill-paid workers, who are provided not even basic social security. Informal labour includes a huge number of business activities: Here, workers are most often non-unionised, undocumented and do not have job-related protection. This includes a large number of farmworkers, construction workers, domestic help, entertainment industry workers, street vendors, taxi drivers, those working in the food & hospitality sector, restaurant workers, gig economy workers like delivery boys, etc. To get a sense of the numbers, 1.3 billion people, or 68.2% of the employed population in Asia-Pacific are engaged in the informal economy. In India, it is over 81%.1

Universal Health Care and Social Protection During the COVID-19 crisis, people desperately needed food and emergency relief. They need to have free food and cash transfers because the loss of livelihood is tied to a health emergency and support is needed

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when there is an exodus of the poor from the cities where they work back to the source areas that they come from. But there is also a requirement that there be a plan for ‘after COVID lockdown’ as well, one that guarantees basic conditions of life for their families. National social protection floors as set out by the UN consist of 4 aspects of basic social security: -access to essential health care, including maternity care; basic income security for children, providing access to nutrition, education, care and any other necessary goods and services; basic income security for persons in active age who are unable to earn sufficient income, in particular in cases of sickness, unemployment, maternity and disability; and basic income security for older persons.

In 2012 the ILO issued a set of recommendation to extend these provisions and expand the scope. In many developing and Least Developed Countries, even basic social security is an unfinished agenda. Or it exists on paper, and a majority of the poor have no access. As a result, this is often seen, not as the minimum programme that is meant to be, but as the ultimate agenda. The agenda of Universal and Comprehensive Social Protection however goes far beyond these. The reason is that without a broader imagination, with a bar set far too low, people cannot influence policy and bring in legislation on a host of other issues which are integral to a decent life. Secondly, the context is important. If social protection is not delinked from profit and the market, if there is no guarantees ensured by the state, if it is seen as a business, social protection will never be available to the poor, to informal workers, except as crumbs, and as charity. With more and more workers falling out of the purview of formal employment, job-related benefits, unionisation, it is crystal clear that universal social protection, which includes health care, should be available to all, irrespective of their employment. If this does not happen, it is not just the workers, but all of society, and the entire economic structure, is in danger of collapsing. If this is true of the developing world, in many developed countries too, health care and social protection is beyond the reach of at least the bottom half of the population, either because it a business that has profit as its focus, or that state-supported welfare measures are so poorly funded.

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But clearly it is a non-negotiable requirement, that everyone must have access to food, a home to live in, access to basic civic services—water, electricity, transport and sanitation—and also access to health and education, clean air and environment. This is the minimum needed to lead a decent life in the urbanised world of today. These constitute the conditions for life and have to be guaranteed for everyone, whether they can afford to pay for it or not. And the agency that has to guarantee this is government. It cannot be left to the market, to profit-based companies, to charity organisations, to decide who, what, how much, for whom and at what price. How to make these available to people at a reasonable price, how to make it universally accessible, how to ensure the quality of the services, how to create the funds for it, what kind of partnerships need to be set up: these are the things that the state needs to do. This cannot be done on the basis of making a profit. These must be regarded as services, not as business. As stated in the ‘Global Charter for Universal Social Protection Rights by all, for all’ initiated by the Social Justice Cluster of the AEPF, ‘Social protection systems should be rights and solidaritybased, embedded in national laws, and defined as a primary responsibility of public authorities’. Social protections of various kinds are linked together, and a universal access and approach is essential in order to build social order based on justice, equality and peace.

Housing Is Integral to Social Protection In a large part of the developing world, the urban poor live in huge sprawls in overcrowded quarters without basic amenities. According to UN statistics, a quarter of the world’s population lives in slums.2 The first level of housing-based struggle has been the one to fight against eviction from these meagre dwellings, because the people who lived there were in constant danger of being bulldozed and evicted to face a worse homeless fate. To legalise these colonies to make sure that people are not house-less, eviction campaigns have seen quite a few remarkable successes all over the world in the last decade or two. In many countries, there is legislation to protect poor settlements, to provide them with water, sanitation and electricity, to disallow eviction without alternative housing, to legalise illegal settlements and to arrange in situ building of tenements in the slums. Despite this, evictions continue, and the struggle continues. The poor continue to face the insecurity of never knowing when they will

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find themselves out in the open at the mercy of the elements. However, we have to push for more, not only in the realm of imagination but in policy and reality too. The two major reasons why migrant workers in India were forced to leave the cities where they were working to trudge homewards, covering hundreds of kilometres, is (a) they had no way of earning an income and quickly became penniless, (b) they were unable to pay the rent, and (c) there was no space in the already overcrowded rooms they lived, leading to panic regarding possible infection and insecure livelihood. The crisis created by the COVID-19 virus has made it obvious that housing has to mean decent housing which means primarily that there should be a minimum availability of space per person. Urban planning has to take this factor into consideration. Smaller cities, locality-based planning is important to ensure that there is the provision of services, and open spaces. The right to space, to land, is an important arena of the struggle for rights in the urban context.

Housing as Asset The global real estate market is expected to generate a revenue of USD 4,263.7 billion by 2025 according to one industry research.3 Real estate experts say that Asia-Pacific and Middle East are the fastest growing real estate markets, mainly because of lax regulatory norms.4 In a capitalist system where every human need is commodified and tied to the market, housing which is a basic need became part of ‘real estate’ and in course of time has become one of the biggest profit-making ventures globally. It is the largest ‘asset class’ one that has almost continuously been appreciating rather than decreasing in value, and unless there is a serious economic crisis, is likely to continue doing so. Given this, the chances of prioritising housing as a social need are close to zero unless there is enough pressure from those who have no access, and or those who campaign for social protection of all kinds. Since housing prices are decided by the markets (by speculation, not by demand), it is outside the reach of most people, even middle-class people in most parts of the world, to buy a house. They spend half of their earnings on rent; a higher percentage if it as loan repayment on housing loans. If one is a migrant then you would rent, and in most metros the rents are high near places of work which would be closer to commercial or industrial areas. Insofar as the poor are concerned, the maximum they can hope for is protection from eviction out of hovels they have built or rented in slums.

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Public, Social and Affordable Housing The welfare state undertook to provide housing for people at rents they could afford. Governments in Asia theoretically accepted the idea of welfare after the successes of the popular anti-colonial struggles and the creation of new nation states in its aftermath. That the state should take the responsibility of housing its people was not considered a wild and wasteful idea at the time. With the reforms of the neoliberal era, this idea was slowly squashed. The idea of the welfare state was termed unsustainable, expensive and one that ‘disincentivises’ the hard work needed to build the economy. In fact, the welfare states have proved to be far more stable than the neoliberal systems, but this realisation took time to percolate. With the global financial crash of 2007–2008, it seemed that the bells were tolling for neoliberal capitalism. However, capitalism proved to be more resilient. With a slew of measures which were in fact those normally associated with welfare states, it clawed its way back. One of the major factors in this was investment in the construction and real estate industry. This is now so big and so powerful that they draft the policy for governments rather than the other way around. However capital needs labour. And labour cannot work if their basic wants are not available to them. We will have to move away from the ‘housing as asset’ to ‘housing as need’. We should look at mixed housing solutions—more rental housing, decent housing, special needs housing like homeless shelters, women’s shelters, shared accommodation, etc. These could be built by the state, or by collectives, or by parastatal bodies set up for the purpose. Solutions must include the needs of artisans, hawkers and small entrepreneurs, women and children subjected to domestic violence and abuse, people with disability and all kinds of people who suffer the violence of discrimination in our societies. Besides prioritising of the protection of the poor and the vulnerable, the definitions of affordability need to be addressed to make housing accessible also for the middle class too, a large part of whom are unable to afford high rents and high cost of buying property. So sensitive is the real estate industry to political and social trends that the buzzword is alternative real estate, where sharing (co-living and working), rentals, and affordability have already been built into project plans. If those who stand to make a profit are in charge, and there is no ‘public’ or social’ factor, the likelihood of the bottom 50% at least are not likely to be addressed.

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Housing-Related Services Provision of a tenement in an underdeveloped area, without access to public transport, proper maintenance in terms of waste management and sanitation, clean water, public spaces, lighting, and proximity to schools, hospitals, markets, police outposts, not to mention access to livelihood options, is not decent housing. It is not sustainable. Housing has to be linked to all these services, with the stamp of quality, and at a price that is affordable. This can happen when these services are not being run by services which are profit-based, and on whom there is no pressure to deliver quality at low cost. This means that the state has to be involved, not only to regulate, but to guarantee universal and quality provision. In many parts of the world, there is an understanding that services which are common to all, which are essential to life in the city, must make a profit. Which means all those who use it must pay, and pay well. What happens to those who cannot pay, those who cannot afford to pay? Public services have to be accessible to all. They must be considered as part of the urban commons, which means that capacity to pay must be considered when pricing. The solution lies in taxation, or differentiated charges based on usage, rationing, etc., solutions which may differ according to local conditions. The concept of the Urban Commons is useful to understand the rights of people to essential public services and land in the city. The Commons includes public goods, accessible to all, owned by the community or open to all. It is the antithesis of privately owned and exclusive. The notion of the commons in the urban context would include the obvious things like open public spaces and common ownership of land. All public services mentioned above should logically be commonly owned, commonly managed, including housing. It should be as accessible as the air we breathe. Urban movements around water bodies—wells, lakes are designing new ways of managing what should be common resources. The antithesis of this idea is the elite concept of ‘gated communities’, exclusive public services, public services for paying consumers, and also the idea that housing is necessary for individual ownership. The conflict between these two ways of thinking is at the core of the discourse on social protection and the right to the city. Participatory urban planning, governance, cultural expression—these are areas where urban movements are creating a whole new concept of commons or ‘commoning’.

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The Question of Land for Housing Neoliberalism and the commodification of land have been the biggest hurdles to the creation of public, social, or affordable housing. Real estate speculation has created immense pressure on land. Freeing land for public purpose, especially for housing cannot be done without a class-biased land acquisition and reservation on government lands. It is possible to build enough social housing for all those who need it, and provide all public services provided there is comprehensive planning of the urban spaces to prevent centralising of land use, which is part of land speculation and the market approach. What is needed is a strategy and a political will to implement it. Solutions could include creative, people-oriented public– private partnerships, building on best practices in different parts of the developing world, even various PPP models, regulated, initiated or led by the state or parastatal bodies to deal with homelessness and to build and maintain rental housing for migrant workers. Land must be a facilitator, not an obstacle in planning for housing needs of the society. Ownership and buy- and -sell cannot be the main point of residential construction. Acquisition, land pooling/banking, collective ownership through cooperatives. A cloak of collective amnesia has only been thrown over these options by the powerful construction and real estate industries.

Goals of the SDGs An area that has not been taken very seriously by policy practitioners, perhaps with reason, given most national governments’ response to advice from United Nations bodies, is the discourse around the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). But this could well provide a framework for policy discussions with governments. When 193 member countries of the United Nations signed on to these goals, it meant that they have to provide indicators for achieving the goals. Governments are not officially bound by SDG commitments but does it create a space for people to demand action based on these parameters? Member countries are expected to establish a national framework for achieving the 168 targets under 17 Goals. Taken together, a major portion of social protection is covered by the Goals. Goal 11 of the SDGs is to ‘Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’. Ten targets under Goal 11 form a

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comprehensive set of demands including basic amenities, housing, environment, participatory planning, etc. This is a commitment that we can call governments to account on.

Conclusion All aspects of social protection have to be seen as intrinsic rights, not charity. Sustainable futures will need to ensure that all the basic conditions of life are taken for granted in society. We will need participatory, people-oriented, multi-stakeholder planning mechanisms, catering to all the basic needs of all sections of the people, a comprehensive planning of both the rural as well as the urban. We envisage a society where no one should have to scramble to fulfil basic wants. Universal health care and universal comprehensive social protection can revolutionise social structures and relationships in a transformative way. Housing is just one part of this bigger picture, but it is intrinsically linked with the rest. To quote from the Global Charter, ‘…social protection is justified by a social justice imperative, by aiming at sustainable human development and security, providing all people with an opportunity for a life in dignity’.

Notes 1. Women and Men in the Informal Economy – A Statistical Picture (Third edition), International Labour Organisation publication, May 2018. 2. https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2019/goal-11/. 3. https://internationalservices.hsbc.com/content/dam/hsbcis/pdf/ HSBC_Global_Real_Estate_Report_July2017.pdf. 4. https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/industries/financial-services/assets/pwcetre-global-outlook-2019.pdf.

CHAPTER 8

Global Voices: The Way Forward

Box 8.1 Democracy as the Foundation for the Protection of Rights Erik Edman, Diem 25, at AEPF12 in Ghent, autumn 2019 We live in an era politically defined by the ‘demand for change’. From Occupy Wall Street and the Indignados to Extinction Rebellion, we have developed a strong penchant towards demanding that those in power respect our rights and wishes. This tells us as much about our satisfaction with the world we live in as it does about our perception vis-à-vis our own power to change the world. Even though we perceive ourselves as citizens of democracies, we also relegate ourselves to petitioners when it comes to change. Neoliberalism has caused our democracies to regress to a power relation that hundreds of past generations have fought to liberate us from. The sense of powerlessness, of inadequacy in the face of experts and a ruling class that is deeply embedded in the fabric of power that neoliberalism has so well integrated into our culture and social awareness means that our relationship with our right to self-determination and to democratic control of power has dwindled to that of a beggar. If we are to live in a world that respects the environment and the rights of all beings that live within it (human or otherwise) it is this beggar-mentality, before anything else, that has to change. In order for us to construct the conditions in which our rights are respected and our demands are met, we must first claim—in practice—our place as

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 F. Mestrum and M. Menon, Redefining the Agenda for Social Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6571-1_8

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powerful democratic agents. We cannot depend on the disposition of those in power: instead, we must construct powerful political networks of our own which can engage and win political power for our demands. The phobia exhibited by civil society when it comes to engaging with political power (especially electorally) plays directly into the hands of an establishment that considers electoral politics its natural habitat. The division between those in power and those who demand is problematic: we must be both.

In spite of all the very negative consequences of the coronavirus, one positive sequel has to be highlighted. Many people today are convinced of the urgent need to have public and solid healthcare systems. And many more people today realise that our health is linked to so many other elements social movements are fighting for, the environment to begin with. This has always been the starting point of the social justice cluster of AEPF. It is when putting the many diverse contributions to different events and conferences of AEPF next to one another that a clear common view starts to emerge. Whether we speak of labour rights, public services, housing or commons, or even democracy or the environment, there was a consensus throughout to recognise the importance of social justice and social protection in particular. Whatever our initial doubts or even reluctance, it is when listening to people on the ground, working with Dalits or with poor people in European cities, that the discourse of the academics acquires its significance and its meaning. This is the enormous advantage of AEPF: we listen to scholars and we listen to the grassroots, we talk to politicians and we reclaim the streets, in Europe as well as in Asia. In this way, from one event to the other, we develop a common narrative, one that witnesses the sufferings and problems of all the vulnerable people and at the same time frames these stories into a discourse that can be understood by those who have the power, by those who make our policies. Resistance, then, is a common endeavour, it is not just the people in the streets or it is not just the academics, it is the joint effort of all in two continents that gives voice to those who have a message: of system change, of human rights, of democracy and of preservation of the environment. This is the message in favour of social justice that we tried to make heard through the publication of these many interesting stories of our conferences. We see it as a major achievement to have managed to adopt the Global Charter for Social Protection Rights, an inspiring guideline that

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accompanies the international initiatives of social protection floors and of sustainable development goals, but which adds a necessary push away from neoliberalism, away from privatised handouts and individualised insurances. The Charter helps to link our common narrative to the daily practices and struggles for economic and social rights. We attach the highest importance to all individual plus collective human rights, we want to protect the individual and we need to preserve our societies. Our efforts are not geared towards closed and local communities, we strive to build and shape open societies where people can flourish. We want to free people from fear and want, we want them to have economic and social security, we want them to emancipate themselves. Another positive surprise after more than two years of meeting and talking was to see that yes, indeed, our concerns are similar in Europe and Asia. We hope the readers of this book will have noticed that, obviously, Europe is so much richer and wealthier than Asia, but workers in Europe have to fight the dismantlement of their rights and of their unions, in the same way as workers in Asia are struggling to build unions and exercise the rights they theoretically have. Public services are privatised, in both continents. Homeless people, whether they stay in Paris or in Jakarta face the same problems and share the same misery. East and West, people realise they have to work together to reclaim what is theirs, to fight for their commons. In Asia and Europe, progressive people know the failed economic system we are living in will have to change considerably, in order to promote social justice, democracy and the environment. What we propose, and what is part of our common narrative is a demand for participation and a demand for sustainability, of people, of society and of nature. In spite of the consequences of colonialism many Asian countries are still suffering from, the social struggles of people on the ground are similar in both continents. The sustainability we work for cannot be achieved within the neoliberal and authoritarian systems we are living in. That is why we also have to emphasise the need to use our Global Charter and our ideas on social commons in an innovative and transformative way. As has been said repeatedly, this is a long-term project, but it is perfectly feasible. We cannot work for health if people are forced to breathe the polluted air of our cities or to eat fruit and vegetables with residues from toxic pesticides. We cannot work for commons, which are by definition participatory, if we do not have fully fledged democracies. Again, we do not have to try and go back to the welfare states of the past in Western Europe, our

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future is different, our economies and our societies are different. We have to preserve the basic principles of collective and structural solidarity and of human rights in order to find new formulas, new mechanisms, even new rights to build the security people need. It means we cannot limit ourselves to fighting for the existing economic and social rights. Our fight for social justice embraces the fight for democracy and for a healthy environment. The links are obvious and will have to be examined in a more detailed way in the future. One more similarity will have to be mentioned, and it is a global one. Social policies, democratic institutions and environmental measures require a lot of resources. We have them, collectively! But they are now concentrated in the hands of the 0.1 and 1% wealthy people of the world. This has to end. While we clearly also can work with credit systems, we also primarily need to reclaim the wealth that was stolen from the community of people, from the inhabitants of the earth, their labour, their resources and their land. Global taxes are urgently needed to pay for the needs of all. Each country and every city will have to raise taxes from their high revenue citizens to pay for the needs of all. Global and domestic revenues must be raised to build houses, to plant trees, to pay for pensions and doctors and schools. This is perfectly possible, if only there is a political will. Our social movements can and should help to enhance that will… And so we arrive at the most urgent and most compelling conclusion of this ongoing task: we need strong solidarity movements. We do not know what the post-corona future will bring. More authoritarian and economic nationalism or more cooperation and solidarity at national and international levels? More neoliberalism or more environmental care? Now that people are claiming their rights, all over the world, from Santiago de Chile to Quito, from Baghdad to Algiers, from Paris to Athens, from Jakarta to Hong Kong, we need to make the links, we need to show that our demands are similar. We want social justice going hand in hand with environmental justice. While all social struggles start at the local level, people should not be trapped in their national borders. Our struggle is a global struggle. We need movements to give voice to people and to transmit that voice to the political world, to those who have the power to decide and to change. We need solidarity because we have to help each other, vertically and horizontally, from people to people and from Asia to Europe. Solidarity is not a one-way exercise; it is a reciprocal mechanism that brings people together in time and space. This is the

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greatest achievement of AEPF, to bring people together, to learn about each other’s problems, desires and dreams, to help one another to realise them. This should remain the one and only common thread in AEPF’s social justice cluster’s story: the strengthening of our movements and the strengthening of our solidarity. A lot of research remains to be done; a lot of contacts remain to be taken. We need to learn a lot more on how exactly we can promote and clarify our actions and our discourse. One way will certainly be to reveal the many open and hidden links with other sectors, such as democracy and the environment, but also with trade and agriculture, to name but a few. We have to continue our research into the existing and developing social protection systems in order to improve them and make them stronger and more efficient. This is the richness of AEPF, an excellent framework for all progressive movements that want to work at economic, social and political alternatives. It is a framework for building a better world. Box 8.2 Social Justice and Democracy Bonn Juego, University of Jyväskylä, Finland at AEPF 12 in Ghent, autumn 2019 Authoritarian neoliberalism is best understood as a capitalist ‘social regime’ in which the relations between the political and the economic spheres in the society are organically connected to, rather than separate from, each other. In this sense, authoritarian neoliberalism is not merely an organisational entity such as the state but ‘a form of social relations’. The specific ‘state form’ governing this regime can be referred to as the ‘authoritarianneoliberal state’, which embodies a politico-economic institution where a neoliberal market economy operates within a political framework of authoritarianism. The concept of an authoritarian-neoliberal state is a particular articulation of a prevailing orientation of governments in favour of authoritarian politics and neoliberal economics. As such, this does not deny the fact that states are sites of contestation and coalition; in particular, they are arenas for social struggle and alliance formation among factions of the capitalist class themselves and between political-business elites and other social groups and actors who seek to advance their respective interests.

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The authoritarian-neoliberal state survives and thrives on the workings, logic, and relations of the capitalist regime of accumulation under conditions of globalisation in the twenty-first century. Its fundamental mission is twofold: to create an attractive business climate through market-oriented institutions and to ensure elite dominance through market-driven class relations. Thus, its governance objectives are to optimise conditions for capital accumulation and maintain the hegemony of elites by all means. Governance of authoritarian neoliberalism demands the state to promote capitalist hegemony by making key government resources oriented towards the protection of business interests through institutions, policies, tax breaks, concessions, and other guarantee provisions. This state does not espouse central planning; yet it is strong in enforcing the rule of law and maintaining the stability of social and economic institutions to provide a high degree of security for business. It is obsessed with growth and sees the private sector as the foremost engine of development. It is for the privatisation of assets to enlarge the space for capital accumulation. It is for deregulation or re-regulation not so much for the common good but to ensure market sovereignty. It is for liberalisation for the free mobility of capital that can easily enter and exit the country. It is for ‘flexibility’ in labour markets in which rules are flexible for the market but a source of insecurity for labour. It mainly regards competitiveness and productivity as a race to the bottom and would likely bank on competitive advantage based on low wages and poor labour conditions. It proclaims competition while tolerant of oligopoly and monopoly power. In times of crises, the facilitative role of the government is complemented with interventionist actions in mediating, if not absorbing the risk, of market failures through fiscal and monetary policies—including bailouts and subsidies—as well as social policies geared at maintaining socio-economic stability and the need for political legitimacy. At the same time, the authoritarian-neoliberal state is essentially anti-democratic as its governance system is more responsive to elites and market forces than to the popular-democratic multitude. If necessary, it resorts to elite compromise or cooptation, extending ‘democracy’ on elites through the provision of exclusive access to government rents and resources while enforcing repressive authoritarian discipline on the masses and workers. It is characterised by the dominance of the executive, whose preferred legislation is the issuance of executive orders that bypasses the democratic requirements for parliamentary decision-making and judicial oversight. It is the most potent coercive apparatus for the perpetuation of the capitalist strategy of ‘accumulation by dispossession’.

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(From: ‘Authoritarian Neoliberalism: Its Ideological Antecedents and Policy Manifestations from Carl Schmitt’s Political Economy of Governance’. Administrative Culture 19 (1), 105–136)

Annexes

Declaration of Ulaan Baatar, July 2016, AEPF Social Justice Cluster To pursue social justice with renewed and more meaningful roles for the State and social movements. Social justice is based on the concepts of human rights and equality. It seeks redistribution of income, wealth, opportunities, and privileges regardless of gender, race, ethnic origin, possessions, religion—that everyone must be treated equally without prejudice. Across the two continents, civil society groups and social movements urgently demand for social justice with the goals: To guarantee a life of dignity, to empower people and to transform societies in a just and sustainable manner based on the principles of equality, justice, solidarity and participatory democracy. A life of dignity also means providing political, economic and social opportunities for people to fully develop their potentials. Today, these tasks are particularly daunting as democracy is receding in some countries and an increasingly authoritarian form of neoliberalism is being imposed. Across Europe and much of Asia neoliberal development policies including de-regulation, eroding of workers’ rights, severe cuts to social spending and large-scale privatisation of essential goods and services have caused widespread joblessness and precarious work, profound social inequality and further social exclusion. These have put the lives of millions of women, men, children, persons with disability and survivors of natural and man-made calamities, more vulnerable. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 F. Mestrum and M. Menon, Redefining the Agenda for Social Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6571-1

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We urge ASEM member governments to stop the privatisation of essential services. Alternatively, we call on ASEM Member governments to implement policies and programmes that work for the fulfilment of the social and economic rights of people. To support this, comprehensive fiscal measures, including pursuing tax justice and other egalitarian alternatives to debt and austerity measures are essential. Appropriate tax regimes should effectively tax transnational corporations, rich individuals and large landowners rather than applying regressive taxation such as VAT. Our governments should close tax havens and secret banking and cancel odious debts. We urge ASEM member governments as a matter of urgency to meet their international obligations and fulfil their responsibility to guarantee decent work, sustainable livelihoods and comprehensive social protection for all that covers food, essential services and social security. Social Protection is economically productive, meets internationally negotiated obligations and is essential to sustainable development. Total transparency, full participation of civil society, workers and employers’ organisations must be ensured in the process of extending inclusive, universal Social Protection. Further, we urge ASEM member governments to develop adequate fiscal policies that generate sufficient domestic funds for universal and comprehensive social protection. There is also a fundamental need to work towards democratic ownership and control of the social commons which are vital to life.

Assuring Affordable, Accessible and Quality Public Services for All Manila Conference, 13–15 February 2018 Political Declaration One very clear message came out of this conference: public services should be in the hands of public authorities and citizens and be fully and exclusively committed to serve the society as a whole. Some speakers put emphasis on the role of the state, others on municipalities and still others on citizens and their self-organisations. But they all agree public services must not be made into profit-making mechanisms, such as international institutions and too many governments now tend to do.

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The privatisation efforts of the past decades have failed. Many essential services are not affordable for the majority of poor people, quality is substandard, employment and wages are undermined. Research shows that privatisation leads to excess profits for corporations and high costs for the public. Whether we speak of water, health care, education, public transport, energy, in each and every sector the same problems arise. Moreover, transnational corporations, the drivers of privatisations, do not hesitate to push for free-trade agreements with private arbitration clauses, so that they can sue governments whenever laws or regulations are proposed in the interest of citizens but possibly affecting their profits. As a consequence of failed privatisations, the conference shared many examples of reclaimed public services that resulted in significant public benefits, including lower costs. 835 examples of services taken back under municipal ownership and control have been documented, demonstrating that the title of the conference ‘Reclaiming public services’ is becoming an exciting reality. Movements of citizens and residents are getting stronger to reclaim what is theirs: universal quality of fundamental infrastructures and services in the public interest. To make this possible, governments will have to seriously question, in a participatory process, their macroeconomic framework and their tax and public spending policies, as well as their unjust laws, so as to make financial resources available. Public services will also have to contribute to the reduction of the disastrous inequalities and to the sustainability of the environment. Whether these services are provided by States, municipalities or people’s organisations, the way they are conceptualized, regulated and monitored is crucial for their success. Real participatory democracy is therefore an essential and common characteristic of the public services this conference wants to promote, based on the successful best practices. Public services go beyond public ownership to embrace dynamic forms of democratic participation and accountability. The conference gave examples of democratic planning of inclusive public services, such as for transport, renewable energy and housing. It means that in this new era with a new awareness of what is necessary for a life in dignity for all, and with a better understanding of the fundamental differences between progressive policies and a neoliberal and conservative ideology, we can overcome the simple divisions between state and market, private and public.

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This conference has been a major contribution to the alliance of all progressive forces, working in the framework of the commons, our collective ownership of our common nature and built infrastructure. We worked to redefine strategies, to renew its thinking on production, markets, nature and the State, to create a new narrative to better organize our resistance to neoliberal and conservative forces. New forms of cooperation are required, between public authorities at different levels, trade unions and other social movements, academics and legal experts. In the same way as this conference was built, progressive forces can make real progress once they understand their common interest. Victory is possible. Destroying public services is destroying the very society that makes us what we are, social relationships, solidarity and collective values. Preserving and promoting public services is promoting citizenship and the sovereignty of the people. Our common social future: Commoning and sharing for society, the environment and the economy. A programme for a democratic, participatory and transformative social protection.

Barcelona Declaration Social justice is at the center of all our concerns and of all our efforts to work for a better world. These are shared concerns in Europe and Asia. Levels of development differ widely between these global regions, but also within them. The super rich in Asia have now overtaken their counterparts in Europe. However, at the level of social justice and more particularly social protection, labour law and social services, developments in Europe and Asia are similar and are dictated by the same neoliberal philosophy, strengthened by conservative forces. Today, social protection is high on the international development agenda, for example through the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the ILO’s Social Protection Floors and the European Union’s Pillar of Social Rights. While these initiatives are interesting and important, daily political practice continues to widen inequalities, to make employment more precarious, and to roll out the privatisation of public services such as water and health care. Benefits of market-driven economic growth do not trickle down to the poor. That is why there is now a broad movement, all over the world,

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to reclaim rights, health care, water, pensions, land and schools: because people are being robbed of their livelihoods, including jobs and wages. Governments and international institutions often make socially viable solutions impossible. As a result, trust in public authorities is dwindling, sometimes deservedly but often as a result of political manipulation. More and more people are responding by taking initiatives to help themselves, creating small scale farms, providing care for the elderly or the very young, and organising to produce clean energy, local currencies and cooperatives. The commons are life’s necessities, we need them to meet basic human needs. Social commons are activities and relations co-designed and coproduced by people, with shared ownership and control, forging new relations between people and the public realm. Commons go beyond markets and states, but not without markets and states: both will have to adopt a different logic. Commons change the ways in which we understand and practice democracy, participation and governance. This conference further reflected on progressive definitions of social commons in the context of the self-organisation of people. It has explored the conceptual and practical implications of claiming social resources as commons. It contributed to clarifying the concept and begun to explore links with other sectors, such as the environment and culture, macroeconomics and fiscal policies. It examined the potential of the social and solidarity economy. Climate change broadens the requirements for social protection and social justice. Both will have to be redefined and scaled up with even more urgency. Climate change is a game changer for how social protection, equitable and sustainable development and the fulfilment of human rights can be realized. Feminists put the emphasis on social reproduction, helpful for thinking about the interdependence of human activities. Many of the commons initiatives are started by women because the expansion of commodification and privatisation in patriarchal and capitalist societies increases the workload for women by integrating them into global commodity chains while at the same time expanding their unpaid social reproduction work. It is important that commons do not become women’s responsibilities in a new gendered division of labour. This pursuit of social commons must be seen in the context of our ambition to shape a better world. This calls for a transformation of social, economic and political systems, and for resistance to the dismantling of

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economic and social rights, which are in effect a new form of enclosure. We are not searching for harmony through adaptation of the status quo. On the contrary, it should be clear that commons and neoliberal capitalism cannot peacefully coexist. Commons can only endure in the long term through struggle and conflict aimed at building a new political economy to support people’s control of essential resources. Therefore, the social protection we envisage will go beyond the currently existing initiatives; it will not be a corrective mechanism but will contribute to the radical changes we need. By focusing on the collective dimension of our social and economic rights and by directly involving people in shaping public policies, the commons approach can become a strategic tool to resist neoliberalism, privatization and commodification. It can help to build a new narrative to strengthen and broaden people’s movements as well as for political and legal action against the exploitative use of our resources. Commons are about power. Claiming and controlling social commons means building power together with others. It is a primary task of all progressive forces, at all political levels, from local communities to global institutions. Facing the challenges of all important recent changes, it is clear the labour movement has to play an important role, countering the fragmentation and precarisation of work, taking into account the role of women and creating alternatives based on their abilities and skills. Social protection alone will not be enough to achieve system change. But social justice can become an entry point for policies of social, economic and political transformation. Emphasizing our interdependence and the necessary collective dimension of all our efforts can be a vital step towards strengthening social movements and building citizens’ power. Many important questions remain to be further examined, such as the issues of scale, of class, the role of public institutions, ownership and the transformational potential of commons. What we are working for is the sustainability of life, for people and the planet. Our social protection, our economic and social rights are ours, so we decide on them. This is a call to join our efforts and fight for social justice in a comprehensive way and to create a message of hope for the future. This Declaration has been adopted by the conference on social commons, held in Barcelona from 8 to 10 June 2018, co-organised by the social justice cluster of the Asia-Europe People’s Forum and Transform! Europe. More

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information can be found at:www.aepf.info—www.transform-network.net and www.socialcommons.eu.

AEPF12 in Ghent, September 2018 Contribution to Final Declaration from the Social Justice Cluster Context The social justice cluster of the Asia Europe People’s Forum is concerned with the growing social distress of people all over the world, faced with multiple problems of war, environmental degradation and climate change, rising inequalities and persistent poverty, economic crises, austerity policies and growing authoritarianism, erosion of human rights, discrimination and intolerance. At this moment, we are not only faced with a severe social crisis caused by neoliberal policies, but also with the emergence, in Asia and even more in Europe, of illiberal right-wing populist forces, promoting a kind of social policy without any emancipatory or progressive transformative potential. We consider comprehensive and universal social protection rights to be a primary element to promote social justice, within a coherent and just political and economic context. While giving our full support to the existing global initiatives, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the ILO Social Protection Floors, our main objective is therefore to promote a stronger philosophy on social protection, one that goes beyond the traditional rights, that encompasses environmental needs and bridges the unacceptable gap between production and reproduction. In our perspective, social protection is a common, emerging from the democratic and participatory actions of citizens with demands for public authorities. Social protection is not a correction mechanism for the economic system, but should be transformative, that is, contribute to a better productive system and to the sustainability of life. We see social protection as a collective and democratic endeavour for achieving a life in dignity for all. Democracy and social dialogue are indeed at the heart of it.

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Demands We pursue the action plan adopted at AEPF11 in Ulaan Baatar (Mongolia) in 2016. We submit a Global Charter for Universal Social Protection Rights, mentioned therein, pointing to the interlinkages of the different sectors civil society organisations are working on, such as trade, the environment, gender equality, democracy and peace. Our Charter pleads for rights-based solidarity mechanisms, embedded in national laws and fully respecting all universal human rights, as well as for the specific demands of the Ulaan Baatar action plan. The social justice cluster of the Asia Europe People’s Forum puts people at the forefront of its concerns for building a better world, caring for the planet and for a sustainable use of all its resources. We believe social justice should be the overarching objective of all efforts to achieve a just and sustainable economy with fair trade, just finances and binding rules for governments and corporations. The Charter recalls the international instruments for promoting human rights, several UN Declarations and the ILO Constitution stating that peace is not possible without social justice. The Charter considers social protection as a condition for social citizenship, intrinsically linked to a social process of structural solidarity. The Charter considers that social protection goes beyond poverty reduction and is aimed at eradicating and preventing poverty as well as at reducing inequalities. It consists of social security, social assistance, labour rights and extensive social services. It is a primary responsibility of States and has to come about in a participatory and democratic way. In order to broaden support for the Charter, it is conceived as an aspirational text, not as a binding charter with all of its detailed points to be adopted or agreed with. It is not a text with demands but with principles. It is meant as a source of inspiration for movements, parliaments and governments working towards social justice. As for Asia and Europe, we more particularly want to focus on the strategic needs for a life of dignity for all: 1. Nation-wide and regional social protection principles and standards. 2. Decent work and sustainable livelihoods in terms of living wages, employment guarantee programs, an end to contractualisation, access to land and subsidies to small farmers. With half of the world’s

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population engaged in agriculture, land should be a common resource and accessible to all tillers. 3. Decent social services in terms of universal and quality health care, free education up to the tertiary level, public housing, living requirements for water and energy. 4. Decent social security in terms of living pensions for the elderly and PWD’s, income guarantees during unemployment and natural disasters. As for the detailed principles of our global Charter, based on the Ulaan Baatar action plan, we refer to our website www.globalsocialprotectionri ghts.eu in English, French and Spanish. 1. We make a plea for the promotion of political education and training sessions, so as to make people aware of their rights. Public authorities should make resources available for this. 2. We make a plea for the coherence of all policies, since social justice is not a single issue but the result of coherent just policies at the economic, environmental and social level. When focusing on one or other point, be it pensions or social services or anything else, demands should not be seen as context-free single demands. On the contrary, the Charter helps to translate principles into detailed demands and gives meaning to them within an emancipatory and transformative context. 3. We make a call on civil society to refer to these principles when campaigning for universal social protection systems, by all and for all. 4. We call on parliamentarians globally to advocate for and legislate universal, comprehensive and effective social protection systems. We also call on them to monitor States’ implementation of their social protection programs and systems in particular, effective oversight on resources and budgets. 5. We call on governments to take this Charter as a guideline for social policies and to support all initiatives, politically and financially, aimed at achieving the principles of this Charter. We plead for road maps with timelines and budgetary allocations for the immediate realisation of universal and comprehensive social protection systems. These should not lead to more borrowings or to burdensome taxes for the poor and low income groups.

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International Conference on Universal Social Protection and Labour Kathmandu, 4–6 April 2019 KATHMANDU DECLARATION We, the participants of International Conference on Universal Social Protection and Labour, held in Kathmandu from 04 to 06 April 2019 to review and reflect on the current situations prevalent in our societies and develop strategies for the future course reaffirmed our vision mission to establish society ensuring social protection, social justice, security and peace. Realizing that socio-political circumstances and the level of wealth accumulation and development in Europe and Asia are very different, as well between as within our respective sub-regions, Understanding the fact that it is one capitalist logic at work, free trade agreements, neoliberalism and austerity worsened by protectionism, right-wing populism and declining democratic principles, with similar consequences in both regions, Recognizing that despite that Asia being the most dynamic region in the world with two decades long strong economic growth, rising productivity and high employment ratios, deep rooted structural challenges remain, still, half a billion workers live in abject poverty, a billion are faced with vulnerable conditions of employment, two of every three workers are stuck in the informal sector and weekly hours worked are the world’s highest, Acknowledging the rising protest as well as populism in Europe as response to growing nationalism, slowing of economic growth, high unemployment, rising inequality and fear of robotization, rising non-standard employment and declining job quality, decoupling wages from productivity due to the pushback of trade unions and collective bargaining, deregulation of labour markets and liberalisation of capital markets, Realizing the challenges of the digital revolution which will fundamentally alter labour markets, threat to livelihood by the digital economy because of the platformisation of the whole economy, merger of manufacturing and the internet (industry 4.0) at the national level and growing attacks on trade unions,

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Acknowledging that without social justice and peace humanity can’t stay inside the planetary boundaries and the world will turn into a hothouse, without a truly sustainable and earth friendly metabolism of our societies there can’t be peace and social justice, Appreciating the efforts of people in Asia and Europe to make the society with equity, justice, peace and harmony, Re-enforcing our trust in Global Charter for Social Protection Rights, for all and by all, as a guideline to work on the implementation of all economic and social rights, including public services, as the gateway to environmental rights and requires democracy and popular participation making links to all important progressive social movements, We urge to, 1. Re-define labour and to ‘free’ it from capital, since the logics of accumulation and profit maximisation are not compatible with the transition towards a more sustainable way of life, 2. Generate a new economic thinking based on the priority of reproduction, a crucial issue in order to connect different struggles and movements, 3. Counter emergence of rentier class by democratisation of economic life, a condition of social justice, 4. Establish and promote regional and global learning centres for education and generation of new knowledge needed to enrich our social movements based on empirical evidences, 5. Establish and strengthen campaigns and networks among the people of the regions, engage in the political and social dialogue, based on strong trade unions, on discussion on how to create the changes we need and want, for greater solidarity for united struggles, movements, people to people cooperation and coordination, 6. Realise and materialise the global charter for social protection rights. We believe that any move towards social justice is social protection, to be understood in an emancipatory and transformative way.

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Contributors to the Different AEPF Conferences Organised by the Social Justice Cluster Vittorio Agnoletto, Italy, is an Occupational Health Medical Practitioner, professor in “Globalization and Health Policies” at the University of Milan. He’s a part of the International Council of the World Social Forum. In November 2017 he was spokesperson of the International Forum for the Right to Health against G7 Summit. He was Member of the European Parliament where he worked on human rights and free trade agreements especially the EU-ACP FTA. In 2001 he was spokesperson of the global movement against G8 in Genoa in 2001. He was founder of the Italian League Against HIV (LILA) and member of the HIV National and International Committees, he has managed a lot of research projects in Europe and in Africa on public health, access to medicines, drug addiction, HIV and compulsory license. Author of several scientific publications on national and international reviews. Alghiffari Aqsa, Indonesia is the Director of Jakarta Legal Aid Institute, one of the oldest and biggest legal aid organizations in Indonesia. He is also a fellow of The Global Network for Public Interest Lawyer (PILNet) and International Commission of Jurists Victoria (ICJ Victoria). He was appointed Overseas Counsel of the Victoria Bar Counsel. He was involved in the following strategic litigations: judicial review against privatization of higher education, against blasphemy law, against privatization of coastal and small islands; citizen law suit against torture, against forced eviction, and on the right to water. Au Loong Yu, Hong Kong, is a writer and activist. He is the main author of the book China Rise: Strength and Fragility, published in 2012 and is now translated into French, Japanese and Chinese. He is the editor of the Borderless Movement, and has contributed to local and foreign journals. Dario Azzellini, Italy, did his PhD in political science and in sociology. His work focuses on democracy, workers’ and local self-management and social movements. He co-authored They Can’t Represent Us. Reinventing Democracy From Greece to Occupy (Verso 2014). He is co-editor of The Class Strikes Back. Self-Organised Workers’ Struggles in the Twenty-First Century (Brill 2018) and Ours to Master and to Own: Worker Control from the Commune to the Present (Haymarket 2011) and the editor of

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An Alternative Labour History: Worker Control and Workplace Democracy (Zed Books 2015). Founding member of workerscontrol.net. Together with Oliver Ressler he is producing Occupy, Resist, Produce, a series of documentaries on recuperated factories under workers control in Europe. Sören Becker, Germany is a Geographer interested in alternative ways of organizing infrastructure and technology in cities. He has developed this general interest while studying the rise and impact of new forms of organisation in energy transitions in Germany and beyond that seek to promote aims around democratic participation, social justice and ecological sustainability. His work on energy re-municipalisation and community energy was published through various academic articles. He is working as a researcher at the University of Bonn and Humboldt University Berlin where he is involved in both teaching and research. His current research focus is conflicts in the realisation of “smart city strategies” in Berlin and other European cities. Xavier Benito Ziluaga, Spain, Born in Bilbao (Basque Country) in 1988. He did his degree in Social Work and Master Degree in intervention in drug addictions. After finished his studies he worked with some Basque NGOs as social educator in some projects with people in social exclusion and drug addicts. He is a pacifist and environmental activist. He was one of the founders of Podemos Party in Basque Country. In November 2015, he replaced to Pablo Iglesias as Member of the European Parliament. He is member of Energy and Industry Committee (ITRE) and Vicepresident in the Delegation for the relations EU-MERCOSUR, and substitute member in Budget Committee. As MEP, he has worked promoting a just energy and industrial transition based on democratic and decentralized model, focused on renewable energy. Benoît Borrits, France, is an activist, researcher and writer. Founder of economie.org site. Co-animator of Association Autogestion (Selfmanagement) and Cerises la coopérative. He is the author of Au-delà de la propriété, pour une économie des communs, La Découverte, 2018 (Beyond Property) and Virer les actionnaires, pourquoi et comment s’en passer?, Syllepse, 2020 (Dismiss Shareholders). David Boys, Australia, is the Deputy General Secretary of Public Services International (PSI) and assists the General Secretary in implementing the priorities from PSI Congress. David oversees PSI sectoral

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work and directly coordinates PSI’s international work on the utilities of water, waste and energy. This includes helping unions and allies fight privatisation and promote re-municipalisation; conducting policy and advocacy work on finance and governance of utilities as well as union and worker mobilisation and representation. David is a recognised authority in the water sector and was a member of the UN Secretary General’s Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation. David also coordinates corporate social responsibility and investment issues with worker-trusteed pension funds. Elisabetta Cangelosi, Italy, is a feminist and alterglobalist, researcher and activist, born and raised in Italy and currently based in Bruxelles. She holds an MA in Anthropology of Ancient Worlds, a Ph.D in Social Sciences and (almost) an LLM in Human Rights Law. Since ten years, working on the commons with extensive publications and participation in conferences and workshops on the topic, both from an activist and academic perspective. Collaboration with Universities in Italy and currently teaching in France. Also work as a consultant on access to resources, gender justice, social movements and water issues. Since 2012 participating in the creation of the European Water Movement. Collaboration with Transform Italia and Transform Europe since 2014, taking part in the working group on the commons. Her social and political engagement dates back to 2002 with the Rete di Lilliput, and continued over several campaigns in Italy and Belgium, including the participation in several World Social Fora and Alternative World Water Fora. Anuradha Chenoy, India, retired as professor and former dean, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has been a consultant to many national and international organisations. She has written many books and articles. She looks after the communications at the AEPF. Barry Coates, New Zealand, was recently a Green Party MP in the New Zealand Parliament. He was active in campaigns on climate change, corporate accountability and trade justice for the Pacific as Executive Director of Oxfam Aotearoa New Zealand for 2003–2014, and co-Chair of the Global Campaign for Climate Action before the Copenhagen Summit. Barry was previously Director of the World Development Movement (renamed as Global Justice Now!), and led campaigns on the

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Multilateral Agreement on Investment, the WTO (No New Issues), and GATS (General Agreement in Trade in Services), as well as campaigns for corporate accountability, indigenous rights and workers’ rights. He was Chair of the UK Trade Justice Movement and active in the fair trade movement in the UK and NZ. Barry has a degree in economics and a Masters from Yale University. Anna Coote, United Kingdom, Principal Fellow at the New Economics Foundation (NEF). A leading analyst, writer and advocate in the field of social policy, she has written widely on social justice, sustainable development, working time, public health policy, public involvement and democratic dialogue, gender and equality. She was Commissioner for Health with the UK Sustainable Development Commission (2000–2009). Her recent publications for NEF include Building a New Social Commons, (2017) Local Early Action: how to make it happen (2015), People, Planet Power: Towards a New Social Settlement (2015) and Time on our Side: why we all need a shorter working week (2013). Thomas Coutrot, France, is an economist, specialised on the issues of work, health and democracy. He published several books on these topics, the latest one being ’Libérer le travail’ (Le Seuil, 2018). He is an activist in the global justice movement and has been a spokesperson for Attac France from 2010 to 2017. Birgit Daiber, Germany, since the early sixties involved at various levels with building transnational social movements; active in various socioecological and feminist initiatives in European policy: as coordinator of transatlantic and international projects, as an expert for social urban development, as a Member of European Parliament, and as director of the Brussels Office of Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. She initiated and accompanied many transcontinental discussions. Her current particular interest is the development of the Common Good of Humanity. Bruno Deceukelier, Belgium, is based in Kathmandu for World Solidarity Movement (WSM), as Asia Coordinator in charge of following up the PME–cycle of the ten WSM partner organisations and national synergies in Bangladesh, India and Nepal. He also strengthens the capacities of the Asia Network on the Right to Social Protection and the national synergies, as well as keeping an eye on and developing the instruments for program management. Bruno takes care of the communication strategies

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of the ANRSP and will be developing/coordinating the representation strategy of WSM in Asia, among other towards national, regional and international organisations. He also takes the lead in fundraising for partners and activities in Asia. Chantal Delmas, France, is co-organiser of the permanent seminar about commons in Transform! Europe and Coordinator of a seminar in Espaces Marx, Paris, about economic democracy, social re-appropriation and commons. Active participant in the World Social Forum, organising seminars and assemblies of convergences about commons. Koen De Tavernier, Belgium, did his Master in Philosophy, formerly working at the Belgian Coalition of development NGO’s (11.11.11), with work on development cooperation and coordination of the advocacy for the joint Belgian Campaign ’Social Protection For All’ (2013–2016). Since March 2017 at World Solidarity as an advocacy officer, specialising in social protection and offering policy support to the multi-stakeholder ’Asia Network on the Right to Social Protection’. http://rightspasia.blo gspot.be/. World Solidarity is the Non-Governmental Organization of the Christian Workers Movement in Belgium. Therefore, World Solidarity works mainly with social movements that pursue decent work, social protection and job creation for all workers. www.wsm.be. Dinesh Devkota, Nepal, is Visiting Professor, Centre Department of Environmental Science (CDES), Tribhuvan University (TU), Nepal. Major area of specialization: Sustainable Development, Policy Development, Climate Change, and others. Chairman, of Centre for Green Economy Development—Nepal (CGED—NEPAL) and also involved in many institutions in an advisory capacity. Former Hon. Vice Chairman and former Member (January 2009–September 2011) of the National Planning Commission (NPC), Government of Nepal. Contributed in development planning, provided leadership on policy planning, programme development and monitoring of development tasks. Contributed in high level policy formulation mainly in the fields of social protection frameworks, infrastructure planning, technical education, livelihood promotion, entrepreneurship development, climate change policy (adaptation and mitigation), green economy planning, low carbon growth path, public–private partnerships and many more. Mladen Domazet, Croatia, is a Research Director at the Institute for Political Ecology, in Zagreb, Croatia. He graduated in Physics and

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Philosophy from the University of Oxford and completed a doctorate in Philosophy of Science at the University of Zagreb. His research interest currently focuses on theories of scientific explanation, degrowthcompatible explanatory frameworks of social metabolism and social attitudes relevant to sustainability. He will share insights that originate from his Institute’s research about democratisation of public services. The research argues for the introduction of principles that would ensure quality, accessibility, operational sustainability, accountability, user participation, environmental protection according to which we could assess whether state enterprises work for the public interest. Dong Huy Cuong, Vietnam, has done his Bachelor of Art in English, National University, Hanoi and Master of Art in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia. He is currently Secretary General of the Vietnam Peace and Development Foundation and Secretary General of the Vietnam Peace Committee, after having been Deputy Secretary General. He has been Vice Head, English section of VOV online Newspaper, Radio the Voice of Vietnam, Reporter, VOV online Newspaper, Radio the Voice of Vietnam and Assistant to Director, Vietnamese American Training College, Hanoi branch/English teacher, Hanoi University of Agriculture. Christine ‘Tina’ Ebro, Philippines, is Coordinator of the Focal Point of the Asia-Europe People’s Forum (AEPF) in Asia. For many years, seconded by Bread for the World to the Institute for Popular Democracy (IPD) in Manila as adviser for regional projects in the ASEAN. Actively supporting the IPD advocacy on ’securing decent housing and services for all’ with the National Movement of the Poor, and the Freedom from Debt Coalition’s campaign to reclaim public services in the Philippines. During the Marcos dictatorship, she helped establish human rights and democratisation platforms and was founding Coordinator of the following civil society networks: Citizen’s Alliance for Consumer Protection, Nuclear-Free Philippines Coalition, Labour Education and Assistance for Development, and a University of the Philippines student immersion program, ’Learning from the People Drive’. In Europe, in the nineties, she was executive director of an ecumenical center for the promotion of humane asylum policies, Participating Refugees in Europe. A former university lecturer, she graduated from the University

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of the Philippines and earned her Masters from the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University with a World Council of Churches Scholarship. Erik Edman, is a political scientist, Member of the Coordinating Collective of Diem25. He is Greek-Swedish Athenian who left Greece, like so many others, in 2010. He has a BA in History and Politics from the University of Exeter in the UK, and MSc in Political Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He worked for three years for various NGOs in Brussels, while remaining an activist for human rights and against climate catastrophe. In 2016, he became a member of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25); the paneuropean movement for the democratisation of the EU. He is a member of the movement’s Coordinating Collective. Since August 2019, he is the Head of the Central Office of DiEM25 in Brussels, and the EU liaison of MeRA25. Federica Giardini, Italy, teaches Political Philosophy at the University ’Roma Tre’. She is the director of the Master Program ’Gender Studies and Policies’ and has cofounded the Master Program in ’Environmental Humanities’. As the General Coordinator of the IAPh Italia Research Center she is supervising the EcoPol—Economics-Ecology Program. Among her publications: with G. Piccardi, Production and Reproduction. Genealogies and Issues (Italian ed. 2015); with A. Simone, Reproduction as Paradigm. Elements Toward a Feminist Political Economy. In M. Hlavajova-S. Sheikh (eds.), Former West. Art and the Contemporary after 1989. Cambridge, MA:The M.I.T. Press 2017-… available at: https://www.viewpointmag.com/2015/10/31/reproduction-as-par adigm-elements-for-a-feminist-political-economy/. Shalmali Guttal, India, is the Executive Director of Focus on the Global South (Focus). She lives in Bangkok, Thailand, where Focus’ head office is located. She has been researching and writing about economic development, trade-investment, food, land, ecological and social justice issues in Asia—especially the Mekong region and India—for over 25 years, with emphasis on community rights to resources, women’s rights and innovative forms of resource governance. An equally important aspect of her work is popular education, training and capacity building on issues related to the commons, trade, investment, finance, and human rights based governance of land and territory. She works with several grassroots movements on the creation and governance of natural, social and knowledge

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commons. Focus is a regional policy research organisation headquartered in the Chulalongkorn University Social Research Institute in Bangkok, Thailand. David Hall, United Kingdom is a Visiting Professor in the Business School, University of Greenwich, London. From 2000–2013 he was Director of the Public Services International Research Unit (PSIRU), which carries out empirical research into public services and privatisation, globally. He has published numerous reports for PSIRU, articles in academic journals, book chapters and two books. He has addressed meetings of many global institutions, including the World Bank infrastructure division, United Nations department of economic and social affairs (UNDESA), the OECD, UNCTAD, ILO, the European Parliament, the EU Economic and Social Committee, the constitutional court of Indonesia and the global congress of Consumers International. Rayyan Hassan, Bangladesh, is the current executive director of the NGO Forum on ADB. He has a background in environmental studies (NSU, Dhaka, Bangladesh), and a Masters in Social Change and Development (UOW, Australia). He is currently pursuing a doctorate in Political Science at the University of the Philippines in Diliman as he oversees the Forum network and its campaigns. As a civil society advocate he regularly engages policymakers at the ADB and AIIB constantly upholding community rights at the highest levels of these institutions. Through the support and guidance of the Forum International Committee, he continues to forge new alliances and implements campaigns with civil society groups at local, regional and global platforms. His work in the Forum remains steadfast in underscoring the importance of environmental and social justice and holding IFIs accountable. Vedran Horvat, Croatia, head of Zagreb based Institute for Political Ecology (IPE). From 2005 to 2015 he acted as director of Zagreb office of Heinrich Böll Stiftung, a German green political foundation. Apart from many other engagements, from 2012 to 2017 he was the managing board member of the National Foundation for Civil Society Development in Croatia. From 1998 to 2004 he worked as a journalist and web-editor in the daily political newspaper Vjesnik and contributor for domestic and international media. He is a sociologist specialised in human rights, regularly publishing on European politics, civil society development, environmental issues and migration. Recently he co-authored a publication on the Commons in South Eastern Europe which was published by IPE.

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German Jaraiz Arroyo, Spain, is Professor of Social Policy at the Pablo de Olavide University in Seville. Member of the Executive Committee of ESPA-net España and of the Scientific Committee of the FOESSA Foundation. Participation in different processes of implementation of inclusion policies in Spain and Latin America. He has also been General Secretary of Caritas Regional of Andalusia. His main lines of research are: social inclusion, social services and the third sector. Sian Jones, is a senior researcher at EAPN (European Anti-Poverty Network). Bonn Juego, is a researcher and teacher in international development studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Prior to joining the academe, he worked for the Manila-based coordinating secretariat of the Asia-Europe People’s Forum. Satoko Kishimoto, Netherlands, is an activist researcher at the Transnational Institute, (TNI) a research and advocacy NGO based in Amsterdam. She started the water justice project in TNI to seek Alternatives to Water Privatisation. She is the co-founder the Reclaiming Public Water (RPW) Network which was created as a result of the book ‘Reclaiming Public Water: Achievements, struggles and visions from around the world’ in 2005. Lately she engages with joint research and advocacy on re-municipalisation in water sector and other public services. She edited the book Our Public Water Future: The global experience with re-municipalisation (2015) and Reclaiming Public Services: How cities and citizens are turning back privatization (2017). Roland Kulke, Germany, is a political scientist and works for Transform! europe, the political foundation of the European Left Party. He is coordinating the working group on ’productive transformation’”, which focuses on the socio-ecological reconstruction of the European economies. Topics they deal with are environmental and energy policies, monetary policies of the Eurozone, industrial and regional policies and international trade policies. Chandan Kumar, India, is a trade unionist organising workers in the informal economy. He has been part of secretariat coordination of bringing diverse working class sections under one banner called ’Working Peoples’ Charter ’ which is a platform of 116 organisation of worker collectives. He has been closely associated with different policy processes with government, such as minimum wages, social security, etc.

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Bru Laín Escadell, Spain, holds a degree in Sociology, a Masters in Political Sciences, and a Postgraduate in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. He has been researcher at the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy at the Concordia University (Canada), at the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics at the University of Brighton (UK), and the Chair Hoover d’éthique économique et sociale of the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgique). He obtained his PhD on the American and the French Republican conception of property rights. He works on political economy, political philosophy, republicanism and on the historical, normative and institutional dimensions of property rights and of the commons, while teaching Sociology and Economics. He is member of the Observatori Metropolità of Barcelona conducing both applied and theoretical analysis of different equipment in Barcelona identified as urban common goods (www.bcncomuns.net). He is associate fellow of the Research group in Economic and Social Ethics and Epistemology of Social Sciences (UB). He is also the Secretary of the Basic Income Spanish Network. Nuria Lozano Montoya, Spain, works in the automotive sector, lawyer and professor in legal matters, auditor in prevention of labour accidents. Author of various studies and manuals on public labour contracts, discrimination at work, relationship between work and homophobia, health and security at work, among others. In the 1980s she participates in the leftwing student movement at university, and later as trade unionist and political activist on issues related to work, economy and health at work, from a national and European perspective, with different responsibilities at CCOO (trade union) and Esquerra Unida i Alternativa She is now member of its national council, responsible for the world of work. She is a member of the Social Political Assembly of Izquierda Unida and responsible for the Federal and Plurinational Model. She is a member of the Executive commission of Catalunya en Comù. She is, since its start, a member of the promotional group of popular legislative initiative for a guaranteed income of citizenship and actively participates with Marea Pensionista, March for Dignity, Marea Basica and Platform against free trade agreements, among others. She participates in European trade unionist networks, such as TUNE and is a founding member of the trade union network of the European Left Party. Ah Maftuchan, Indonesia, Executive director of Perkumpulan PRAKARSA, the NGO-based think tank in Jakarta—Indonesia.

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PRAKARSA works with global, national and local actors to nurture and enhance welfare ideas and initiatives through research and actors to create fiscal justice, social justice and prosperous society. Maftuchan is also the co-founder and coordinator of the Indonesian Tax Justice Forum and co-founder of the Indonesian Responsible-Bank Coalition and the commissioner of the Independent Commission of State Budget. With Ms. Hoang Phuong Thao (Country Director of ActionAid Vietnam), Maftuchan also co-chair of TAFJA (Tax and Fiscal Justice Asia) South-east Asia Sub-region. Alessandra Mecozzi, Italy, Trade unionist in Fiom-Cgil (metalworkers federation) since 1971 for 41 years, organisation, education and negotiation sectors (in Torino 15 years); since 1996 in the international relations sector. Since 1975 active also in “trade union feminism”, founding with others “Sindacato Donna”, an association within CGIL committed to struggling for women’s rights. Since 2001 promoting Fiom metalworkers attendance and participation in the Social Forum (Genoa 2001, European and World Social Forum). Now retired, but volunteering in feminist and migrants associations, president of "Cultura è Libertà, a campaign for Palestina. Kiran Moghe, India, is presently one of the national Secretaries of the All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), one of India’s largest left mass organisations of women. Her work involves organising women around the everyday issues of food, work and violence against women, building struggles to counter the neoliberal attack on the working people of India. Roberto Morea, Italy, activist and president of Transform! Italy, Italian node of the network Transform! Europe, of which he is a member of the board. Facilitator of its common goods working group.He was a councillor for social services in the 1st municipality of Rome, promoter and part of the City of the other economy in Rome. Lidy Nacpil, The Philippines, an activist for nearly 40 years, starting when she was a student at the university fighting the Marcos dictatorship. She has been a national, regional and international campaigner on human rights, economic and social justice, women and gender, environment and climate issues for all these years, working as part of various movements and networks. For the last several years until the present she is the

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Coordinator of the Asian Peoples Movement on Debt and Development, Co-Coordinator of Tax and Fiscal Justice Asia, and Co-Coordinator of the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice. She is also a Vice President of the Freedom from Debt Coalition of the Philippines, one of the founders of the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice, the Chairperson of Oriang, a women’s organisation, and serves on the Board of 350.org and Oxfam Great Britain. She represents APMDD in the International Organizing Committee of AEPF. Peter North, United Kingdom, Reader in Alternative Economies at the University of Liverpool, UK. He gained his BA in History and Politics in 1984. After a few years working for the Departments of Employment, Trade and Industry, and Environment, he gained his MA in Peace Studies from the University of Bradford (1993) and his PhD from the School for Advanced Urban Studies at the University of Bristol (1997). He was a post-doctoral Research Associate on a project on Local Business Representation in Local Economic Development at the University of Sheffield (1996–1997). Between 1997 and 2002 he was Senior Research Fellow at the Local Economy Policy Unit at South Bank University. He joined the University of Liverpool in 2002. His research focuses on: (1) Low carbon transitions at the city and community level, especially processes of policy formation and partnership working between the public, private and community sectors around strategies for local economic development within an overall framework of resource constraint, climate change and economic crisis; (2) the politics of climate change and ecologically focused social movements engaged in struggles about the implications of anthropogenic climate change and resource constraints for both humans and the wider ecosystems upon which we depend; and, (3) using micropolitical and ‘economic alterity’ frameworks, the social and solidarity economies as tools for constructing and rethinking alternative geographies of money, entrepreneurship and livelihoods. Rene E. Ofreneo, The Philippines, Professor Emeritus of the University of the Philippines and former Dean of the UP School of Labor and Industrial Relations. He served as DOLE Undersecretary for Labor Relations in 1997–1998, at the height of the Asian financial crisis. Dr. Ofreneo is one of the leading scholars on labour relations and labour market studies in the Philippines and in the Asia-Pacific. He sits in the editorial board of several international journals. Among his international publications are: Asia and the Pacific: Advancing Decent Work

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Amidst Deepening Inequalities (Singapore: ITUC-AP, 2013); A Toolkit for Labour Law Reform Advocacy (Singapore: ITUC-AP, 2011); and Green Jobs and Green Skills in a Brown Philippine Economy (Geneva: ILO, 2010). Dr. Ofreneo writes a weekly column, ’Laborem Exercens’, for Business Mirror. Dr. Ofreneo is President of three civil society organisations: Freedom from Debt Coalition, Integrated Rural Development Foundation and Philippine Movement for Climate Justice. Sharad Onta, Nepal, MD, MPH, PhD D, is a Professor of Community Medicine and Public Health at the Institute of Medicine, Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu Nepal; member of Faculty Board (highest academic authority of the Institute); member thesis committee for Master in Public Health (MPH) and PhD programmes; Coordinator Community Based Learning Programme of the Department. Member, Academic Council of University; involved in teaching International Health, supervising research projects and thesis of master and PhD students, scientific publications and academic policy decisions in public sector. He is the author of several scientific papers and chapters of books on public health and health policies. Míriam Planas, Spain is a member of Engineering without borders Catalonia, working for development cooperation to guarantee universal access to basic services. She is also actively involved in Aigua es Vida, the citizen platform in Catalonia, which consists of more than 50 organisations working towards public, democratic and non-commercial water management. She is also an active member of Spanish Public Water Network and European Water Movement. Pablo Sanchez Centellas, Spain, studied Political Science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the Sussex University and the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Living in Brussels since 2008. From August 2010 until September 2015 has been responsible for campaigns of the European Federation of Public Service Unions and was jointly responsible for the first successful European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) on the human right to water (www.right2water.eu). In September 2015 he was appointed Director of International Relations of the City Council in Barcelona until he returned to Brussels in 2017. He has been one of the founding member of the European Parliament working group on commons.

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Charles Santiago, Malaysia, MP, Chairperson of the ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR). Member of the Parliament of Malaysia for the Klang constituency in Selangor and from the Democratic Action Party (DAP). He is presently Chairperson of the National Water Services Commission. Prior to his election, he was an economist and worked for non-governmental organisations such as the Coalition Against Water Privatisation and Monitoring Sustainability of Globalisation Malaysia. He also served as Co-Coordinator of the Asia-Europe People’s Forum (AEPF). Ravi Srivastava, India, is Director, Centre for Employment Studies, Institute for Human Development, Delhi. He is a former Professor of Economics, Centre for the Study of Regional Development, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and a full-time member of the erstwhile National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector. He has published widely in the areas of agriculture, rural development and rural poverty, the informal sector, regional development, decentralization, human development, land reforms, social protection, labour and employment and migration Ghulam Mustafa Talpur, Pakistan, Currently working as an Asia regional leader of the inequality campaign with Oxfam international. Degree in international development from USA. Previously, work with Wateraid, Actionaid, WWF and International Water Management Institute for the past 20 years in Pakistan and Asia, leading many campaigns on the environment and human rights. Expertise including research, policy advocacy, campaigning with strong thematic focus on inequality, water resources and land governance, livelihood and food security, and water and sanitation. Since the last three years leading Oxfam’s inequality campaign in the Asia region. This Campaign is aimed at addressing the widening gap between the rich and the rest through shifting the terms of debate on income and wealth inequalities, suggesting alternate policy and practice options which include tax justice, labour rights, living wages and social protection and access to essential public services. He is instrumental in building national and regional alliances to engage the public in the campaign for a just and fairer Asia. Kris Vanslambrouck, Belgium, Asia Program Officer of 11.11.11, the coalition of NGOs, unions, movements and various solidarity groups in Flanders, Belgium. The 11.11.11-program in Southeast-Asia focusses on

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lobby and advocacy on strategic issues such as, Resources Justice, Ecological Justice and Trade Justice. It runs campaigns in Belgium, and are networking with and often supportive of strategic allies in Europe, Asia, Latin-America and Africa. Kris represents 11.11.11 (Triple11) at the IOC of the AEPF, and T11 is currently the Project Holder of the AEPFProgram. Kris is an expert on the political context in Southeast Asia, especially in Indonesia and Philippines. Dagmar Walter, Ms Dagmar Walter, a Swedish-Swiss national, was appointed Director of the ILO Decent Work Technical Support Team for South Asia and Country Office for India as of 22 February 2018. Ms Walter was Deputy Director of the ILO Decent Work Team and Office for the Caribbean from July 2014. In 2013, Ms Walter was responsible for organising the 19th International Conference of Labour Statisticians From 2002 to 2009, Ms Walter served in the Policy Integration Department and subsequently the Employment Policy Department. Ms Walter worked in inter-regional programmes and focus countries like Ghana, Kazakhstan, Madagascar and Tanzania in the context of UNDAFs and One UN exercises. Ms Walter started her ILO career in 1999 as Programme Officer in the ILO Pretoria office. Julie Ward, United Kingdom, Julie was a Labour and Co-operative Party Member of the European Parliament for the North West of England, covering Cumbria, Lancashire, Merseyside, Cheshire and Greater Manchester. As such she was a member of the European Parliamentary Labour Party and, in turn, part of the second largest group in the European Parliament, the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats. Julie served on the Parliament’s Culture & Education Committee, the Regional Development Committee and the Committee on Gender Equality and Women’s Rights. She is also a member of the Labour Party’s Policy Commission on Education and Children. First elected in May 2014, Julie previously had a long career in the cultural sector, working with marginalised communities using arts as a tool for wellbeing, empowerment and social change. Prior to being elected as an MEP, Julie had been working with partners in the EU and beyond for more than a decade. For instance, she was involved in an international delegation to Belfast to participate in an all-party discussion about the role of the arts in peace-building processes. Julie has extensive experience of front-line grassroots work, engaging with people from all walks of life as they try to do their best for their families and their communities often in very challenging circumstances.