Global Citizenship Ethics for Effective Global Governance – the Rio 2012 Window of Opportunity!
Global governance solely based on national governments and their coordination mechanisms is not sufficient anymore to cope with the magnitude of global challenges of our time. Resources of global civil society have to be integrated into global governance in order to harness the full potentials of wo&menkind for safeguarding our common future (especially in terms of knowledge and financial means for collaborative action but also in terms of coherence of individual choices and actions of global citizens that summed up constitute significant drivers of global challenges). People all around the world are concerned about the global problems, they know that their wellbeing will strongly be influenced by these global dimensions and they are willing to contribute their fair share to effective responses to these challenges on all relevant levels – thus contributing to effective global governance.
The concept of philanthropy – meaning donating money, goods, time, or effort for pursuing the common good or/and to support a charitable cause– is an important corrective to the mainstream of self interest focused market economy and consumerism which are among the root causes of many global environmental problems of 21st century.
There is an important role for philanthropy and global civic engagement to play in addressing global challenges and in building capacity for global societal changetowards more sustainability. In order for positive systemic integration of philanthropy in global governance to function in a coherent way, a shared vision of a range ofstakeholders is needed as well as there are needed new structures and processes for global cross-sectoral coordination. New institutional and legal frameworks for mobilization of resources of global civil society for global (especially environmental and economic) governance are needed and the UN Conference on Sustainable Development www.uncsd2012.org/ in Rio 2012 might be the window of opportunity of wo&menkind to achieve this paradigm shift.
