The Pact for the Future: A Renewed Social Contract?
By Lauren Banham
Anna, Kirk and I were, and continue to be, personally involved in the preparation and conduct of the People's Pact, which constitutes the civil society input for the Pact for the Future (the interim version of which can be found here). The initial recommendations for the People’s Pact were devised among civil society participants over several weeks online and thereafter physically at the Global Futures Forum in New York. The explicit aim of the forum was to provide a diverse civil society perspective on the Summit of the Future and to produce representative recommendations in the form of the People’s Pact.
I was involved in co-chairing the environmental governance track of the Global Futures Forum, in which we collectively developed a number of recommendations we felt to be important starting points for environmental governance conversations and suggested solutions surrounding the Summit of the Future. (The People’s Pact contains seven thematic tracks: human rights and participation, development, environmental governance, global economic and financial architecture, global governance and innovation, global digital governance, and peace and security.)
The carefully crafted recommendations must, we have discovered, now be filtered into the recommendations for the UN’s Pact for the Future, narrowing the scope from seven tracks to five chapters. These five chapters surprisingly feature no explicit mention of the environment.
They are:
Sustainable development and financing for development (FfD)
International peace and security
Science, technology and innovation and digital cooperation
Youth and future generations
Transforming global governance
During these processes, it became clear to me and a number of other participants in the consultations that the essential role of judicial enforcement was not being adequately addressed.
The Legal Pact for the Future was therefore set up to promote a conversation on judicially enforced environmental and human rights at the Summit of the Future. Central to these recommendations are:
ecocide law;
an inclusive, people-based focus; and
the expansion of courts to accommodate and adjudicate unprecedented global changes.
Human and environmental rights should be central to any conversation surrounding ‘the future’.
The Legal Pact aims to run in parallel to the agendas and pacts surrounding the Summit of the Future itself. By doing this, we feel it will be possible to create an increased understanding of how UN processes will affect people in practice. When people are not directly involved in these processes it is easy to lose track of the purpose of such summits and whose futures are being impacted. The traditional barrier between people and international governance must be broken to ensure a range of views are genuinely represented and, therefore, the interests of all our futures are represented. If the Summit of the Future intends to renew our social contract for the coming years, it is essential that this exercise reflects what the social contract stands for, i.e. the right to law, both substantive and procedural, to provide the framework for a functioning international society.
We believe any and all legislative efforts should reflect the concerns of the ‘we the peoples’ that the UN was set up to serve. Environmental degradation and climate change are increasingly recognised as the biggest concerns facing all of humanity. For this reason, we feel that each chapter of the Pact for the Future must incorporate and centre environmental perspectives. Despite the current lack of attention to the environment in the recently named chapters of the draft Pact for the Future, there is still time to use our voices to call for a focus on enforceable environmental and human rights. There can be no discussion of the future of humanity without a recognition of the fact that it depends upon preservation of the natural environment.
In recent years, calls and arguments for civil society as the ‘Third UN’ have emerged. The voices of civil society have never been as loud in the space of global governance as they are now. As a result, we are well-placed to have our say in the Summit of the Future. The Legal Pact team wants to connect these voices in a united call for enforceable rights.
Our next steps in this process are firstly continuing to contribute to developing the People’s Pact and its corresponding opportunities to submit recommendations for the Pact for the Future;
secondly contributing written inputs (as called for by the co-facilitators for the Summit of the Future) for the preparation of the zero draft of the Pact for the Future.
We plan to make these contributions based on our current scope as an organisation covering environmental law, the expansion of regional courts and the broader call for a renewed social contract.
If you or your organisation operate in this area or are simply interested in learning more about how to participate in this important process, please join us by signing up through this link or email lauren@legalpact.org.
