ISLAMABAD, April 21: Dr Tariq Banuri, senior fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute, USA, on Monday underlined the need for collective efforts to resolve the worsening situation of global ecological problems together with the crisis of democracy and work for the unfinished development agenda.

Delivering a lecture on “From decolonisation to globalisation: the view from the South” jointly organized by Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) and Pakistan Academy of Sciences (PAS), he said the North and South have to identify themselves as a single global community responsible for each other and for planet Earth while justice and sustainable development only could protect the natural resources, establish equity, democracy, freedom, growth and achieve reconciliation between the politics of hope and hopelessness.

Dr Banuri lamented that Earth was the ever forgiving mother but now it had become an unforgiving child. The global community must be held together on the basis of justice, social movements, human rights, a healthy and sustainable environment in which the South was allowed to play its due role. He said that mankind had arrived at a crucial point in history when it was confronted with so many global crises and unfinished agendas. Referring to the statement of South Commission 1990 which stated that “Were all humanity a single nation-state, the present North- South divide would make it an unviable, semi-feudal entity, split by internal conflicts. Its small part is advanced, prosperous; powerful; its much bigger part is underdeveloped, poor, and powerless. A nation so divided within itself would be recognized as unstable.

“A world so divided should likewise be recognised as unstable. And the position is worsening, not improving”, he cautioned that we were killing ourselves and our planet as Climate was the urgent problem of our times, but this was only a manifestation of the bigger problem while the whole biosphere was shrinking, and the world had exhausted its natural resources. He said that the development narrative described the past as an illusion because tomorrow would bring change but the narrative of reality was in contradiction with the narrative of development today.

Discussing globalization, he said that one could think about globalization in two different ways: one as a process of flows and the other, as a responsibility. We should think of ourselves as citizens of this planet while the solution was global policy and international diplomacy he said. “There is only one struggle in the world, and that is Justice”, he declared.

Talking of Southern perceptions, he said that the relationship between the North and South had undergone several critical phases in history adding that the era of 1900-1950 was of anti-colonial struggles in the South, 1950s was of search for respect, equal treatment, sovereignty and control over natural resources after decolonisation, then the thrust for developmentalism and fair trade during 1960s-1970s; the era of 1980s-1990s was of structural adjustment and conditionalities and during 2000 of high growth and heated debates over globalization.