No LAC of leadership
How Latin American and Caribbean countries could shape the multilateral system in the next two years.
By Jonathan Glennie.
This week I have been in Santiago de Chile, carrying out meetings with government ministers and experts on a range of issues, from the importance of global public investment and circular cooperation, to building capacity in vaccine research and manufacture, to the role of AI in health.
It seems an appropriate moment to reflect on the critical role Latin America and the Caribbean will play in renewing multilateralism in 2024 and 2025. A range of coincidences and moments mean that this region is going to be pivotal this year and next.
Coming up later this year we have the G20 hosted by Brazil (or G21 now with the African Union included). And next year Brazil will be hosting the 30th COP on Climate Change. And there is the replenishment of the Pandemic Fund also in Brazil later this year in October. Colombia meanwhile is hosting the 16th Biodiversity COP in October, followed by the fifth World Data Forum in November.
The biggest impact in the world of Climate Finance and Global development finance in the last year or so has been led by the Caribbean Island of Barbados, with its Bridgetown Initiative calling for a new way of managing loans for the climate crisis. The fourth International Conference on Small Island Developing States (SIDS4) will be held this year in Antigua and Barbuda.
Barbados, Jamaica, Saint Lucia, and Panama are co-facilitators of ongoing intergovernmental consultations as part of the preparatory process of the Summit of the Future which will take place in September 2024. All the while Chile is currently president of the UN’s ECOSOC, while Trinidad & Tobago is president of the General Assembly (and incidentally made global solidarity the theme of its presidency, coinciding with the launch of Global Nation’s first Global Solidarity Scorecard & Report).
Next year is the fourth installation of the UN conference on Financing for Development. The first was held in Mexico – Monterrey – in 2002 and Mexico will again be co-hosting this crucial meeting along with Spain in 2025.
Crucially, these are not just any governments – they are some of the most progressive in the world at the moment. Just as the fear of authoritarianism takes hold in the “year of elections”, some of the Latin American and Caribbean governments are fearlessly setting out a bold post-neoliberal agenda combining human freedom with economic policies to benefit the majority, including a new generation of green industrial policies.
Mia Mottley of Barbados has brilliantly woven a radical call for decolonization and reparations with savvy and politically achievable demands. The presidents of Guatemala, Chile, Colombia and Brazil are emblematic social leaders that have risen to power promising economic equality and backing democratic principles.
It’s not all rosy. The Argentines have just elected the Trumpian Milei, while Venezuela and Nicaragua are still stuck with the authoritarian leftists, and Peru remains a political mess. But even on the major foreign policy issues of the day, Latin America is fast becoming the conscience of the world with Brazil, Chile and Colombia setting forth some of the clearest condemnations of the massacre currently underway in Gaza.
In the past, the LAC region has sometimes seemed less than fully convinced of the importance of multilateral negotiations, and there are maybe two reasons for that:
Firstly, Latin America and the Caribbean is a middle-income region. Despite large pockets of continuing poverty, most countries have long been non-dependent on international aid flows, which has tended to be a main driver for setting global development agendas. Nor is the region at the heart of many of the world’s toughest geopolitical issues.
Secondly, the region has failed to coalesce around common agendas in the way Europe, Africa and the ASEAN countries have succeeded in doing. The LAC region has allowed political ideologies to feed fragmentation and the energy required to establish a joint regional approach, albeit with different perspectives. Many platforms function in the region on issues of cooperation, financing, and development, but they seem to have separate agenda. A lack of proactive leadership in some of these regional organizations has made inspiring LAC countries to engage strongly in multilateral processes that much harder.
To the first of these problems, one has to say that this no longer applies. As we have shifted from a kind of “aid” mentality to more of a global solidarity approach, this region feels central to solving our common challenges. Not least because the emblematic Amazon forest is here at its centre.
This new narrative has itself been led by Latin America, because of the role it played played in the development of the SDGs, perhaps the greatest articulation of human responsibility to other humans since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. It was the Colombian government that conceived of the SDGs and steered their adoption, of course working with many many others. It was a Latin American vision of sustainability – emanating from the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 – and of mutuality that underpin the SDGs.
The leadership of the LAC region in the build up to the SDGs is needed again. We have agreed on the problems, but now we need a transformational global agenda to actually achieve change, to fund the goals we have set ourselves, and of course, it is crucially important to the countries in this region that progress is made globally. They won’t be engaging only out of solidarity, but because it is in their interests to lead the debate and solidify the solutions.
Latin America and the Caribbean face a critical situation after being hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has exposed yet again its structural barriers to implementing sustainable development. There are just six more years remaining to achieve the global goals.
The question now is whether Latin American and Caribbean countries can come together as active and constructive partners to influence global development decision-making through their leadership at the Summit of the Future, at the COPs on climate and on biodiversity, in the Financing for Development Process, and at the G20 in November.
While in Chile, I met with colleagues from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, ECLAC, or CEPAL in Spanish, which is based here in Santiago, and that of course is a link to one of the most important reference points in the past century for when this region was central to the debate about global development.
Interestingly it was Raul Prebisch, an Executive Director of CEPAL in the 1950s, an Argentine economist who popularized Dependency Theory, the idea that the countries of the periphery – we might call them developing countries – export primary goods to the countries of the centre – developed countries – which then add value and export secondary goods back to the developing countries, exacerbating inequality. This articulation was hugely influential for two or three decades until neoliberalism came along.
Latin America has been at the heart of global development thinking and we need that kind of bold narrative again from the progressive leaders in this region. I really don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that the world could really do with them using the next two years to help get the multilateral system back on track.